True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 397: The Hunt for Frank Wisner
Aired: 2024-08-01
Duration: 02:07:34


=== John Wick in Urinals (03:14) ===

[00:00:00]  Have you seen the John Wick movies?
[00:00:02]  Yes.
[00:00:02]  Any of them?
[00:00:03]  Yes.
[00:00:04]  All of them?
[00:00:04]  Yes.
[00:00:06]  Check out this idea for John Wick 5.
[00:00:07]  This is going to be tough to do with the mic in its current thing because I'm going to have to act it out a little bit.
[00:00:12]  So I'm going to move the mic slightly to be a, I'm in the standing position now.
[00:00:17]  John Wick 5 opens up on like a wide shot of like 20 urinals.
[00:00:22]  Like, you know how they have like a bunch of urinals in the airport?
[00:00:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:25]  Wick with his classic suit and hair and all that standing there back to the camera in front of the uh one of the urinals in the center.
[00:00:35]  Right.
[00:00:35]  And there's an audible sound of his urine.
[00:00:38]  Okay.
[00:00:39]  Stream.
[00:00:40]  Strong.
[00:00:41]  Yeah, strong.
[00:00:44]  And like it's going on for kind of a while.
[00:00:46]  Like, and it's played for a little bit of comedic effect too, because it like lasts a couple beats too long.
[00:00:50]  You're like, all right, this is funny.
[00:00:52]  And then into the frame, same shot, into the frame comes two like classic Wickian goons.
[00:00:58]  Right.
[00:00:58]  Like knives out and they're like creeping and creeping up to him.
[00:01:02]  And they're like about to get him.
[00:01:03]  And as they're like getting closer to him, the stream is slowing.
[00:01:06]  Like he's about to, you can tell that he's about to finish his piss.
[00:01:11]  And he like, you know, like how you got to get that last little bit out.
[00:01:14]  Girls don't listen to this.
[00:01:14]  You got to get that last little bit out.
[00:01:16]  Or else it's going to ruin next 15 minutes.
[00:01:18]  Exactly.
[00:01:20]  And you're like, fucking finish, finish, finish.
[00:01:22]  Because like, you need to finish and zip up and see what's behind you.
[00:01:25]  And then as they're about to strike, he turns around and you think he's been holding his penis the entire time.
[00:01:31]  There's a fucking gun and it's above, but his dick is also out.
[00:01:36]  And he's just, you're seeing something you've never seen before, which is a penis flopping.
[00:01:40]  Because he's also using a prosthetic one that's like really big and floppy.
[00:01:43]  I mean, yeah.
[00:01:44]  Penis is flopping and he just smokes these guys, shot whatever the camera angle switches.
[00:01:50]  You're looking at the stalls now, which are facing the urinals.
[00:01:53]  They all open and like these guys jump out of them.
[00:01:55]  They're also goons.
[00:01:59]  Takes them all out.
[00:02:01]  Eventually some action movie stuff happens.
[00:02:03]  He goes into a stall in an homage to shitting.
[00:02:06]  Right.
[00:02:06]  He shoots from his butt position.
[00:02:09]  Okay.
[00:02:10]  And then flushes the toilet.
[00:02:13]  And then he goes and he takes one guy and he, he, the guy's about to get him.
[00:02:17]  John Wick pisses in the guy's face, then grabs him by the hair, but gets a little bit of pee in his hand and brings him down in the sink.
[00:02:25]  But the sensors on the sink, which they've replaced for hundreds of years, we've been using handles to turn faucets on and off, but they replaced it with sensors that don't work good.
[00:02:36]  Wick pushes the guy's head in and the sensor won't go until he takes the guy's head out and then like has to put his hand back and forth in front of a bunch of times.
[00:02:44]  And he washes his hands and you have a shot of his hands and it's got his like whatever Russian Orthodox shit in it.
[00:02:48]  And then John Wick five.
[00:02:50]  And his dick's out the entire scene.
[00:02:52]  Entire time.

=== A Grenade Idea (11:25) ===

[00:03:14]  Can I add one potential note that I would like to see?
[00:03:18]  Absolutely.
[00:03:19]  A small explosive, like a cherry bomb grenade thrown in the toilets so that when the men's heads are getting smashed into the sink, there's explosive water coming out at it.
[00:03:31]  That's a really good idea.
[00:03:32]  That's my only note.
[00:03:33]  A grenade.
[00:03:35]  A grenade.
[00:03:35]  Well, we drop a grenade in there.
[00:03:36]  A grenade.
[00:03:37]  Obviously, grenades function a little differently, but whatever.
[00:03:40]  We just drop a grenade in there.
[00:03:41]  It's fine.
[00:03:42]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Truinon.
[00:03:44]  Do you hear that?
[00:03:48]  No, you don't, because Liz, unfortunately, is out today.
[00:03:53]  She has joined the cast of Love Island USA.
[00:03:57]  She is going to be on there for the next seven months.
[00:04:01]  And, you know, I just, I wish her the best.
[00:04:04]  I wish she had given us more than one day's notice.
[00:04:06]  But today we have Matt Farwell.
[00:04:10]  She's going to do well.
[00:04:10]  She's going to do well.
[00:04:11]  By the way.
[00:04:12]  She's going to do well.
[00:04:12]  I'll be watching with Rhett.
[00:04:13]  She's going to be a like Island, actually.
[00:04:15]  It's sort of like a feeder team to Love Island.
[00:04:17]  Leno Leagues.
[00:04:18]  You got to catch the feels.
[00:04:19]  You got to catch the feels.
[00:04:20]  Okay.
[00:04:21]  Yeah.
[00:04:22]  Retired.
[00:04:22]  Sergeant.
[00:04:23]  Wait, how do you say this?
[00:04:24]  Sergeant, and then in parentheses, ret and then end parentheses.
[00:04:29]  Does that stand for retired?
[00:04:30]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  But I'm not actually, I'm not retired.
[00:04:33]  I'm just disabled.
[00:04:35]  You're disabled.
[00:04:36]  So I just say, Matt.
[00:04:37]  I don't think you're disabled.
[00:04:38]  That's why I was reading it.
[00:04:39]  It's nice that the government does.
[00:04:42]  And honestly, it helps my New Jersey.
[00:04:45]  I took the train in from New Jersey F Price.
[00:04:47]  Really?
[00:04:48]  Not because of the caution, because of the disability.
[00:04:51]  The French were really good about the veteran and disability thing, too.
[00:04:54]  I love the French.
[00:04:55]  I was over in Paris and they let me in all the national, like, I went up the Eiffel Tower for free, into all the museums for free.
[00:05:03]  Because you're an American veteran?
[00:05:04]  Because I'm an American veteran.
[00:05:05]  The French rule.
[00:05:06]  What are you talking about?
[00:05:07]  I love that.
[00:05:08]  No, they're the best.
[00:05:08]  They're the best.
[00:05:09]  You know, there's a contingent of French Marines that come down to Yorktown to celebrate the Americans and the French kicking the British's ass in 1781.
[00:05:19]  What do they do at the celebration?
[00:05:20]  They march in formation in uniforms and generally listen to the French ambassador.
[00:05:25]  And then they go presumably hook up with women in Yorktown, Virginia.
[00:05:29]  That's probably pretty easy.
[00:05:30]  You know, good for them.
[00:05:31]  What do you think of the kepi?
[00:05:33]  The like hat that the French Foreign Legion guys wear?
[00:05:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:37]  It's interesting.
[00:05:38]  I like, they have a weird way of marching and their hats are very particular.
[00:05:44]  I never liked like really having a, like, I had to wear a beret in the army in garrison.
[00:05:49]  It was like too much of a fancy hat, you know?
[00:05:52]  I like the ball cap.
[00:05:53]  I also feel ridiculous wearing any kind of hat but a baseball hat.
[00:05:57]  Yeah, like I like the patrol cap because it was kind of flat on the top, you know, and you could cut out the lining and it looked good.
[00:06:02]  I never liked the boonie or the um the like, you know, the one that's all round and like that one seems all right, though.
[00:06:09]  That's like the classic like Vietnam guy hat, right?
[00:06:12]  But it looks cool on them, it just always looked goofy on me, yeah.
[00:06:16]  You know, like it's I think this is one of the goofball hat with glasses with glasses.
[00:06:20]  It gets tough to get fancy with the hats.
[00:06:22]  It's true, yeah.
[00:06:23]  No, you have to have like a ball cap or yeah.
[00:06:27]  So, Matt is the author of American Cypher, the Bo Bergdahl book that you wrote.
[00:06:32]  Yep.
[00:06:34]  And the author of the Substack, which I quite like, the one for Tom Clancy.
[00:06:39]  Thank you.
[00:06:39]  Yeah.
[00:06:40]  Which started off, that was a book proposal that, weirdly enough, none of the major publishers in America wanted to read a book about or publish a book about how the most profitable novelist of like the last 25 years was working for the CIA and the Pentagon while doing that.
[00:06:58]  Why do you think that is?
[00:06:59]  I don't know.
[00:07:00]  You know, I think it's like I tried to go to like a magic show in Las Vegas and be like, hey, here's how all the tricks are done.
[00:07:06]  You know, and like people don't like that.
[00:07:08]  They don't like that.
[00:07:08]  You know, but it's it migrated over to Substack and it's been fun and it's evolved and gotten weird, um, weirder.
[00:07:15]  Yeah, I was gonna say, it's been weird.
[00:07:17]  I think you're probably one of the weirdest military writers that I can really think of.
[00:07:21]  That's a compliment.
[00:07:22]  I appreciate it.
[00:07:22]  Absolutely.
[00:07:23]  No, the uh, I don't know, some of them get really fucking tedious, you know?
[00:07:27]  Yeah, I believe me, I do.
[00:07:28]  There's like there's a brand of like ghostwriter that writes all the tedious books for those dudes, and you're just like, I'm not gonna say his name, but like you know, we all know.
[00:07:36]  Well, there's like a couple, yeah, and they're military ghostwriters.
[00:07:40]  Are they veterans?
[00:07:40]  Not necessarily.
[00:07:41]  Wow.
[00:07:42]  No, like the guy that wrote Marcus Luttrell's book is a Brit, you know?
[00:07:47]  That Navy SEAL that like, yeah, you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:07:50]  I have a story about that actually from so it's me.
[00:07:53]  Well, no, it's say who he is.
[00:07:54]  So Marcus Luttrell was a Navy SEAL with Operation Red Wings in like, what, 2004, 2005?
[00:07:59]  Sometime earlier.
[00:08:00]  Anyways, they were Navy SEALs that went out.
[00:08:03]  They didn't have good comms, surprisingly, because they didn't check their piece.
[00:08:07]  I don't like Navy SEALs.
[00:08:08]  I just want that to be clear.
[00:08:10]  Matt, you are in a safe space right now.
[00:08:12]  Okay.
[00:08:12]  I hate Navy SEALs.
[00:08:14]  It is the t-shirt wing of the United States.
[00:08:16]  I don't like the United States military to begin with.
[00:08:18]  The Navy SEALs.
[00:08:19]  Oh, my God.
[00:08:21]  All they do is sell t-shirts, shoot prisoners, and get in bar fights in Virginia Beach.
[00:08:28]  Lie.
[00:08:28]  Lie.
[00:08:29]  Steroids.
[00:08:30]  Steroids.
[00:08:31]  Actually, if you needed a good cocaine plug, a Navy SEAL was like, or a good heroin plug during the GWAT.
[00:08:40]  Really?
[00:08:40]  A Navy SEAL was probably your bet.
[00:08:42]  Best bet.
[00:08:42]  No, like you heard about all those murders down at Fort Bragg.
[00:08:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:08:46]  Seth Harp.
[00:08:47]  Yeah, he's a semi-frequent guest on this show.
[00:08:49]  It's bizarre how well that corresponded with like military flights from Afghanistan that were regular getting like shut down.
[00:08:56]  Yeah.
[00:08:56]  You know?
[00:08:57]  Wait, tell me about Marcus Luttrell.
[00:08:59]  Okay, so Marcus Luttrell, he wound up, he was the only SEAL team guy that lived through like this ambush in a real bad part of Afghanistan.
[00:09:08]  Yeah.
[00:09:09]  A dude named Ghoul, an Afghan dude, took him in.
[00:09:13]  And Afghans, like Pashtun Afghans, have what's called Pashtun Wali.
[00:09:19]  It's a cultural thing.
[00:09:19]  It's hospitality, like Muslim hospitality times like 10.
[00:09:23]  Yeah.
[00:09:24]  And so he basically told all the Taliban guys that wanted to take him prisoner, like, F off.
[00:09:30]  He was his guy.
[00:09:32]  And then he brought him back to the Americans.
[00:09:34]  Now, this is where the story gets interesting for me, was as I was like coming back from Afghanistan, one of the guys that was up near the area where Marcus Luttrell was, because I wasn't up there, but who was in my brigade, was like, oh yeah.
[00:09:49]  One of the things we noticed when we ran like all the chemical signatures on the on the IEDs that were going off is they were a specific brand of TNT that was RTNT, like i.e. American TNT.
[00:10:02]  Yeah.
[00:10:02]  Turns out the Americans were so grateful.
[00:10:06]  The Navy were so grateful that Ghoul had sheltered Marcus Luttrell.
[00:10:11]  They asked him what he wanted.
[00:10:13]  And what he wanted was to do a development project and build a road through the mountains, you know, and da And for that, he would need large quantities of explosives, which the Americans were happy to give him.
[00:10:25]  And though he was happy to shelter Marcus Luttrell, he was also happy to sell the TNT to the same Taliban guys at like probably a pretty good markup because you got to feed your kids, right?
[00:10:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:38]  And then he wasn't able to come over for the premiere of Lone Survivor, the Mark Wahlberg film, because he's on a CIA blacklist.
[00:10:48]  So you can't ever get a visa.
[00:10:51]  Of all of those like guys like that, because you're thinking of like funny as shit.
[00:10:55]  Chris Kyle, Marcus Luttrell.
[00:10:56]  Who's the guy who like the red-headed fuck?
[00:10:59]  I think he's red-headed, who killed Bin Laden?
[00:11:01]  Oh, the guy that was dating Jewel and got a DUI in Montana, which is like the hardest thing to do.
[00:11:07]  He was dating Jewel?
[00:11:08]  Or I think so, or hanging out with her?
[00:11:10]  Wow.
[00:11:10]  There was a DUI in Montana.
[00:11:12]  That's what I mean.
[00:11:13]  There's got to be 40 cops in the whole shop.
[00:11:15]  How do you get a DUI in Montana when you're the guy that shot bin Laden?
[00:11:19]  God.
[00:11:20]  Like, I've gotten, I got out of a, like, I had my license plate not in registration during COVID.
[00:11:26]  This is, my stepdaughter was with me.
[00:11:28]  And we were like driving.
[00:11:31]  I got pulled over.
[00:11:32]  And the guy saw like my 10th Mountain Division sticker on the back of my car.
[00:11:36]  And he's like, you're 10th Mountain Guy?
[00:11:38]  And I'm like, yeah.
[00:11:39]  And he's like, can you prove it?
[00:11:40]  And I'm like, okay, like pull up something on the internet.
[00:11:43]  He's like, no, no, no, just sing the 10th Mountain Division song.
[00:11:46]  So I started like, we are the 10th Mountain Infantry with a glorious history.
[00:11:51]  On our own two feet, all our foes will defeat.
[00:11:53]  Life fighters marching on to victory.
[00:11:55]  And he joins in at the, we go where others dare not go through the heater, darker snow.
[00:12:01]  We were proud to be in the Army of the Free, climbed to Glory Mountain Infantry.
[00:12:05]  And then he's like, get your license plate fixed and sent me on my way and we went over to grandma's.
[00:12:09]  Wow.
[00:12:09]  That's so sick.
[00:12:10]  And the kid was like, what?
[00:12:13]  And so if I can do that, like.
[00:12:15]  That guy shot Bin Laden.
[00:12:16]  Yeah.
[00:12:17]  You can just like show him the little picture of that.
[00:12:19]  Yeah.
[00:12:19]  And like, or like him on like 50 podcasts being like, I shot Bill Laden.
[00:12:23]  He must have gotten lippy and insulted Montana.
[00:12:25]  He doesn't have a song, though.
[00:12:26]  Yeah, he doesn't have British Lord.
[00:12:27]  He doesn't have a song.
[00:12:28]  He doesn't.
[00:12:28]  Well, they all have songs, kind of.
[00:12:30]  Pirate songs, probably.
[00:12:31]  The Navy SEALs?
[00:12:32]  Yeah, they all have that pirate iconography.
[00:12:35]  What I don't understand is in the military, it seems like they make these guys swim so often, but then they make them go to places on the land.
[00:12:43]  And what I don't really understand is why do they make them swim?
[00:12:49]  When I was in Afghanistan, actually, the Navy SEALs were banned for a brief period.
[00:12:55]  Task Force Blue was not allowed there because of things like the Marcus Luttrell and this and that.
[00:13:00]  But yeah, they have a weird tendency to be like, you go to Nairobi.
[00:13:06]  Yeah.
[00:13:06]  Like enjoy that.
[00:13:08]  Have fun there.
[00:13:08]  Put them in like, put them in like.
[00:13:10]  In the water.
[00:13:11]  In the sea.
[00:13:12]  They want to be in the water.
[00:13:13]  They want to be in the water.
[00:13:13]  In the water.
[00:13:14]  You can just fly their helicopters.
[00:13:16]  They really just crash in there.
[00:13:17]  It's like what they do to dolphins and killer whales at SeaWorld.
[00:13:21]  Yeah.
[00:13:22]  You know, they're like denying them their natural habitat.
[00:13:24]  The water.
[00:13:25]  Put them in there.
[00:13:25]  Free the SEALs.
[00:13:26]  Would you say that the SEALs are the most insane of the special forces?
[00:13:30]  Because, I mean, I think a lot of people kind of, in the past few years, there's been a lot of reporting about like the canoeing stuff, which is, I guess, taking a hatchet and putting it in someone's head.
[00:13:40]  Now that, I had my last boss in the army when I was at a headquarters and he was the sergeant major and I was his driver until I got a DUI and then I was his speechwriter because you can't drive.
[00:13:53]  I paid my price.
[00:13:55]  I no longer drink for anyone that's mad in the community.
[00:13:58]  I apologize.
[00:13:59]  In the drunk drive.
[00:14:00]  Yeah, I only hurt myself.
[00:14:02]  The yada yada.
[00:14:04]  But he had a desk that was like big, right?
[00:14:07]  About the size of this table.
[00:14:09]  So like four by eight, you know.
[00:14:11]  Now imagine half his desk covered in fucking hatchets, right?
[00:14:14]  Various hatchets that he had carried at various times.
[00:14:19]  In various conflicts.
[00:14:20]  On his deployment.
[00:14:21]  On his deployment to Somalia, because he was in Somalia back in the day.
[00:14:25]  He was like, we went to LA one time and he was like, I can't get in like a taxi because there's a bounty on my head in Somalia.
[00:14:34]  And I'm like, like some TC driver in downtown LA.
[00:14:37]  Yeah, like, it's him.
[00:14:38]  We're going to USC, boss.

=== Global War Games (15:27) ===

[00:14:40]  Like, it's not.
[00:14:42]  That's of a piece with a lot of like the the, the.
[00:14:45]  You see this for more from like people who are out of the army um, but like special forces guys who become kind of like preppers, like waiting for the collapse of America yeah, and it's like eagerly anticipating, eagerly anticipating, exactly.
[00:14:56]  They're like very excited to like shoot a Lib in the head yes, or hopefully precipitating yeah, like more cases, you know as many as they can um, but like there's this, there's this like kind of through line there, with all these people thinking like this stuff that like maybe happened in the military, that seems so big to them right, they get out and like nobody, like there's no time, the taxi drivers in La do not care, they don't give a shit, they don't know who you are yeah, they don't want to know.
[00:15:19]  Pay the thirty dollars and get out of the taco like yeah um, don't leave anything in the back.
[00:15:24]  And it seems like that's all of a piece with like all of the kind of like this mental change, well documented, that happens to a lot of people in the military where, where it becomes this totalizing thing that they have a difficulty stepping out of when they get out of it yeah, I mean it's like any cult right, like it's hard to like break free of the cult and the cult like programming and thinking yeah, I mean.
[00:15:44]  And the military like they transformed me from kind of a happy go-lucky, like you know, preppy college kid into like a killer in 14 weeks, like I thought it was a joke.
[00:15:54]  You know the first time we had to say like kill yeah, while our left foot struck the ground by the end of three weeks, like I was as enthusiastic as anybody.
[00:16:03]  You know um, like don't think it can't.
[00:16:05]  Like anyone can get like trained.
[00:16:08]  And you know, and that's one of the like, one of the things that has gotten interesting with me with the hunt for Tom Clancy is the way that video games are used as kind of a covert training mechanism for like.
[00:16:23]  Think about like and and alternate history like delivery mechanism for the youth.
[00:16:29]  So I can tell you're definitely talking at least a little bit there about call of duty.
[00:16:33]  Yeah, absolutely so.
[00:16:34]  Explain to some of our listeners maybe, or i'll.
[00:16:37]  I'll keep it on brand with the Tom Clancy books, but picture this, like before the Covid Pandemic, a video game called Tom Clancy's The Division comes out in which a bioweapon virus is released in America, causing mass chaos.
[00:16:55]  The government falls and this secret cell of like super commandos that like have daily lives as ups drivers.
[00:17:04]  And you know nurses Nurses, get the call, they get activated, and you're one of these, right?
[00:17:11]  Like, and you get that call, and you run through this scenario where, like, you're capping American civilians on national monuments, like in the Smithsonian, you got to take back the Smithsonian from like pissed off pandemic survivors and go through like the Vietnam War exhibit and like fight like, like, you know, just, I mean, and like, I'm a, I'm a, at that point, like a 39-year-old man who's been in combat playing that.
[00:17:35]  And I'm like, that's fucking weird, huh?
[00:17:37]  Like, it's a good game, though.
[00:17:39]  Like, it sucks you in.
[00:17:40]  Yeah.
[00:17:40]  Um, like they all do.
[00:17:42]  But also, what kind of lessons is that teaching me?
[00:17:46]  Well, you know, I think it's funny.
[00:17:47]  I think there's been like a long-term sort of pushback against that kind of like tipper gore style.
[00:17:54]  Right.
[00:17:54]  I mean, not tipper gore exactly, but you know, there was that, there was that.
[00:17:56]  She hated the rap, man.
[00:17:57]  Yeah.
[00:17:58]  She hated that.
[00:17:58]  That was more about music, but like.
[00:17:59]  She really hated Al, probably.
[00:18:01]  You know, she's probably.
[00:18:02]  Well, they got divorced.
[00:18:04]  And then Al had that trouble out in on the West Coast.
[00:18:08]  I didn't know they got divorced.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:10]  There was, there was a Taiwanese video made up about Al's shenanigans out west.
[00:18:16]  He was fucking in California?
[00:18:17]  Well, he was trying to solicit a hand job from a hotel masseuse.
[00:18:22]  What is he, John Travolta?
[00:18:24]  I mean, you know, who tells these guys to do this?
[00:18:29]  It's the hotel masseuse.
[00:18:31]  There's plenty of places that aren't.
[00:18:33]  It's easy to figure out that they'll jack you off after the massage.
[00:18:36]  The masseuse at the hotel seems like an ambiguity.
[00:18:39]  It's like, it's just the wrong thing to do.
[00:18:41]  Wrong thing to do.
[00:18:42]  That's what made it exciting, though.
[00:18:44]  Yeah, I guess.
[00:18:44]  That's through all the hunt for Al Gore.
[00:18:47]  No.
[00:18:48]  He's pretty wooden.
[00:18:49]  Like, after Columbine, all they talk about Doom, and then they talk about Grand Theft Auto.
[00:18:53]  And I think a lot of people were like, this is in a piece with this sort of satanic panic, like, oh, kiss Knights and Satan's.
[00:18:59]  Yeah, it's crazy.
[00:19:00]  Yeah.
[00:19:01]  But like, I do think it's kind of inarguable now with video games.
[00:19:06]  Like, there is a huge degree of realism there.
[00:19:09]  And, like, and I, you know, I and unconscious training.
[00:19:13]  I had, I went shooting with my, my dad likes to shoot shotguns in, you know, trap shoot and such.
[00:19:19]  And I do too.
[00:19:19]  It's fun, you know?
[00:19:21]  And it's like, it's like Ultimate Frisbee, but better.
[00:19:25]  And the, so we brought my friend Hannah along and she brought her brother.
[00:19:30]  And her brother's about my age.
[00:19:32]  And he was asking all these like super detailed, like gun-related questions that I was like, I don't know.
[00:19:37]  I know, like, I know three or four weapons that we used in the army very well.
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:42]  And I know a few that like, I grew up shooting very well.
[00:19:45]  And that's about it, right?
[00:19:47]  Like, it's a tool for me.
[00:19:48]  And it's fun.
[00:19:49]  Like, they're fun for me to use, but it's not like something I don't get like enthusiast magazines for them.
[00:19:54]  Right.
[00:19:55]  And so I'm like, how do you know so much about guns, dude?
[00:19:58]  And he's like, oh, yeah, I play Call of Duty.
[00:20:00]  You know?
[00:20:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:01]  I think it really, I mean, and beyond that, like, I think there is a pretty, I mean, yeah, like war is kind of, it's fun, man.
[00:20:08]  It's fun.
[00:20:08]  And it's fun.
[00:20:09]  It's kind of like a video game.
[00:20:10]  It's great.
[00:20:11]  Yeah.
[00:20:12]  I mean, that's what nobody really talks about is like, it kind of rules.
[00:20:16]  Like for a certain personality type, right?
[00:20:18]  Like, I, and unfortunately, I think I am that personality type where I was like, oh, can I just like live here and do this for like the rest of my life?
[00:20:28]  Well, I, my, my, my theory about a lot of veteran suicides is like, it's actually, okay, we're given this language of like therapy and depression and psychosis, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[00:20:41]  But I think for a lot of people, they just had so much fun and they can never have that much fun again.
[00:20:45]  You'll never be that cool again, you know?
[00:20:50]  And also, I mean, like, I walk through the world with a certain like confidence and like, you know, I don't feel like I've been like bullied or ridiculed or like had problems my whole life, right?
[00:21:01]  Like I don't have a chip on my shoulder.
[00:21:02]  I'm average height, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:21:06]  But for some people, like, dude, that's like the source of ultimate power.
[00:21:09]  Like, they were at one point behind the barrel of a gun scaring people.
[00:21:14]  And it was, and I never, I didn't like the like scaring people aspect of it.
[00:21:18]  Like, that actually depressed me.
[00:21:20]  But I liked the like, oh, that motherfucker shooting at me?
[00:21:23]  Fuck you.
[00:21:24]  Like, that was cool.
[00:21:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:27]  Which, like, it sounds bad to say, I suppose, but like, that's the way some people are built.
[00:21:32]  And like, you know, I'm built that way.
[00:21:34]  Well, I think, I think the problem is, is that like, and this isn't just a lot of people.
[00:21:39]  I said kids are hate Navy SEALs who most of them are also built that way.
[00:21:43]  But like, but I think what happens, though, is like you get, you get people who are like pretty alienated from society or their regular lives, which is like very common in America.
[00:21:52]  And easy to happen.
[00:21:53]  Easy to happen.
[00:21:54]  You're a paycheck away from being alienated as shit.
[00:21:57]  Exactly.
[00:21:58]  And you're given this like this enormous power because even if whatever your rank is or whatever you are, at the end of the day, you have a gun and can kill somebody.
[00:22:09]  And so like that is, even if there's, even if you don't actually have any like command over anybody or anything like that, you have this like authority that is given to you by this gun.
[00:22:20]  And I think that has this way.
[00:22:22]  And also, I think it should be said too that like, you know, you're, you're, you're taken to this country where the culture is incredibly foreign to you.
[00:22:30]  You're told some people.
[00:22:32]  To some people, yeah.
[00:22:33]  It was like way too close, like close in a lot of ways.
[00:22:36]  Really?
[00:22:36]  Because I grew up in Turkey in Izmir when I was little.
[00:22:40]  And like we went out to rural areas and, you know, this and that.
[00:22:43]  And so like, and my, my grandpa's farm in Idaho is like high desert.
[00:22:51]  The weird, like, the place I went to high school in New Mexico, like the boarding school founded by King Charles and Armand Hammer based on a Lord Mountbatten model, which we'll get into because it comes up in the Frank Wisner shit.
[00:23:04]  It does.
[00:23:05]  Weirdly and unexpectedly.
[00:23:07]  But that was all high desert.
[00:23:09]  The part of Afghanistan I fought in was high desert.
[00:23:13]  And like, so I didn't like realize I was like.
[00:23:16]  Shooting at, you know, sometimes like shooting at people or being mean to people that look like the kids I played with as a kid on land that looked like my grandpa's farm.
[00:23:25]  Yeah.
[00:23:25]  Like that fucked me up.
[00:23:27]  Yeah.
[00:23:27]  Until I kind of was able to untangle a little bit of that and be like, oh.
[00:23:32]  Like I was out at the farm last couple summers ago when I was getting a divorce and my buddy Tony came out and he was like my battle buddy in Ida in the war and my roommate at Fort Drum and he's like the best looking guy on the planet.
[00:23:46]  He was the worst wingman whenever we came down to New York City.
[00:23:50]  You know that like it's like going out with young Chomsky here.
[00:23:53]  Yeah.
[00:23:53]  You know, it's just bad.
[00:23:54]  Like, you know, and the we're going up to like this fishing spot with his little kid and he's driving and he's like, dude, you could have like told me.
[00:24:07]  I'm like, what are you talking about?
[00:24:08]  He's like, I'm getting like a little bit of like the flashies because this is like parts of Afghanistan we were in.
[00:24:14]  And I'm like, oh yeah, like, my bad.
[00:24:17]  I, you know, I've been up here for a while.
[00:24:19]  I've like resolved that in my mind.
[00:24:21]  I didn't think about it.
[00:24:23]  But, you know, so you have like, on one hand, all the fun that's had with it, but then you have like the bad shit.
[00:24:29]  You know, I've had a lot of bad shit go.
[00:24:32]  You can read my writing to like find that sad story.
[00:24:35]  But, you know, like, so it's, it's kind of both things at once, right?
[00:24:40]  It's, yeah.
[00:24:41]  I think too, like, there's this, this, this sort of like this power fantasy that, that, that people get to inhabit.
[00:24:48]  And then also like coming home and being so powerless.
[00:24:51]  Right.
[00:24:51]  And then there's this nihilistic.
[00:24:52]  And having people not give it.
[00:24:54]  No one gives a shit.
[00:24:54]  No one, man.
[00:24:55]  I wrote a book about Afghanistan.
[00:24:56]  You know how badly, like, how much my publisher lost on that?
[00:25:00]  Like, Bergdahl book?
[00:25:02]  Oh, no one cared.
[00:25:03]  No one gave a shit.
[00:25:04]  That's like a big story.
[00:25:05]  Yeah, I know, but like, that doesn't translate to book sales.
[00:25:08]  But I think Bergdahl is actually a pretty good.
[00:25:10]  He's fascinating.
[00:25:11]  Yeah.
[00:25:11]  And he's also like, I think pretty emblematic of like a certain kind of like mindset of the global war on terror can be, can be summed up in basically one word, which is just nihilistic, right?
[00:25:21]  Like beyond, people call it pointless.
[00:25:22]  It wasn't pointless, but there was a certain amount of nihilism, a huge amount of nihilism that was behind the thinking of it.
[00:25:30]  It's why I like the absurdism that has kind of bubbled up about like Stargates in Iraq and giants in Kandahar.
[00:25:37]  And like, you know, because you're right, it is.
[00:25:40]  Otherwise, you look at it and you're like, God, what did we do?
[00:25:43]  Yeah.
[00:25:44]  Like, and why?
[00:25:45]  And then the only explanations you have that actually make sense are like, oh, that's like really bad.
[00:25:51]  You know, when you look at like, say, how heroin functioned after we invaded Afghanistan.
[00:25:56]  Exactly.
[00:25:57]  I mean, we basically went into this country and then like opened it up for heroin.
[00:26:01]  Right.
[00:26:02]  And killed a bunch of people and then left.
[00:26:06]  And then.
[00:26:06]  But we left a lot of equipment there.
[00:26:08]  We left like all the equipment there.
[00:26:09]  A lot of nice stuff.
[00:26:10]  Yeah.
[00:26:11]  And produced in South Africa, which should have been a red flag for those MRAPs.
[00:26:16]  You know, like when you're buying vehicles that the South African like Afrikaners had to use in the 80s, you might be doing something wrong.
[00:26:25]  Well, it's just crazy.
[00:26:26]  Like it all ended up in this like in this sort of pointless place and then it's just it's just done.
[00:26:31]  Like we've moved on.
[00:26:32]  Obviously like the global war on terror is still actually happening.
[00:26:35]  It's funny.
[00:26:35]  It's sort of like thought of as like deployments to like like large-scale deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are not actually, I mean, obviously they're integral to the global war on terror, but these small-scale deployments by special forces are actually really the big, I would say, advance in military technique that's happened since then.
[00:26:54]  And that's still ongoing and in fact going to increase.
[00:26:57]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:58]  And so it's interesting because people seem to talk about the global war on terror as if it's over.
[00:27:01]  And it's certainly not.
[00:27:03]  And I think is the like medal giving period.
[00:27:06]  I haven't checked the army regs and seen if you still get like a global war on terror medal when you join or not.
[00:27:12]  But yeah, the idea that we're going, well, and that ties back into the Wisner stuff too.
[00:27:17]  But like the idea that we're going into back like back to just kind of killing people with a few guys that are using locally hired muscle.
[00:27:32]  Yes.
[00:27:32]  You know, for lack of a better word.
[00:27:34]  I mean, it almost reminds one less of like any military practices in the past couple hundred years and more of like how the mafia would franchise.
[00:27:42]  I mean, I think a lot about how they're one and the same.
[00:27:46]  Yeah.
[00:27:47]  And I mean.
[00:27:48]  Well, in terms of heroin.
[00:27:49]  Well, and also in terms of one of the other big interests and things that you can read on The Hunt for Tom Clancy, which you should subscribe to, is about the nuclear industry.
[00:28:00]  And I just want you to consider this scenario, which is Las Vegas, Nevada, 1949, 1950.
[00:28:09]  And you are the mobbed up cement contractor for the Nevada test site.
[00:28:15]  Yes.
[00:28:17]  That's generational wealth right there.
[00:28:19]  And I toured the Nevada test site one time because you can go out there and like take a Department of Energy tour.
[00:28:25]  They put you on a bus.
[00:28:25]  It'll like black out the windows if something flies over that's secret.
[00:28:30]  You have to like get yourself on a list, but it's well worth doing.
[00:28:33]  And the guy in the like radioactive waste disposal area where it's like shipping containers lined with something that they bury.
[00:28:41]  Like, you know, there's a contaminated office in Oak Ridge.
[00:28:44]  So, all that stuff comes there.
[00:28:46]  There's like spent nuclear material from this.
[00:28:49]  The guy that ran that site joked to us.
[00:28:51]  He's like, Oh, yeah, and this is where Jimmy Hoff is buried.
[00:28:54]  And I was like, Ha ha, wait, though.
[00:28:58]  Holy shit!
[00:28:59]  Like, is he?
[00:29:00]  I mean, yeah, like that makes a lot of sense, honestly.
[00:29:03]  Like, how do you get a warrant for the Nevada test site to go like dig up radioactive waste?
[00:29:09]  Like, that's a good point.
[00:29:10]  That's impossible.
[00:29:11]  Well, you know, that's funny.
[00:29:13]  That little visit you're describing there is, I feel like, in some ways, is very emblematic of your work.
[00:29:19]  Okay.
[00:29:20]  Which is you both physically and I guess also physically, but more in one location, kind of roaming the ruins of both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, but really the Cold War and especially.
[00:29:32]  I think that's a good way of putting it.
[00:29:34]  You know, you visited a lot of these, I don't know what you could call them, sites, pilgrimages to like various shrines to our national security state.
[00:29:42]  Exactly.
[00:29:43]  And you're going to University of Virginia.
[00:29:46]  I'm currently getting my master's degree in English literature there on my GI Bill blood money.
[00:29:51]  I got to say, you were one of the few grad students I've ever met who didn't take an immense disliking to me immediately.
[00:29:55]  Really?
[00:29:56]  Yes.
[00:29:56]  Grad students are probably my least.
[00:29:58]  Oh, they don't like you.
[00:29:59]  They don't like me.
[00:30:00]  Actually, though, you know what?
[00:30:01]  I had a party at my apartment because I got like, you know, I get GI Bill and they give you an apartment stipend.

=== University of Virginia (12:42) ===

[00:30:08]  So I finally, like, for once in my life, I have like kind of a swanky pad that I like.
[00:30:13]  Really?
[00:30:13]  Yeah.
[00:30:14]  You should come down.
[00:30:14]  You're like, you guys are welcome in Charlottesville anytime.
[00:30:16]  It's fun.
[00:30:18]  And, but I had a party, and this guy from the French department, Pierce, he comes up to me.
[00:30:23]  He's getting his PhD.
[00:30:24]  And he's like, Matt, did you go on Truanon like two years ago?
[00:30:30]  Two years.
[00:30:30]  And I was like, yeah.
[00:30:33]  And he's like, okay, I just now put those two things together.
[00:30:36]  Because I guess he was in my apartment.
[00:30:38]  My apartment's weird, you know?
[00:30:39]  Like, I've got weird stuff up on the walls.
[00:30:41]  And he's like, okay, that's where I know you from.
[00:30:45]  Interesting.
[00:30:46]  So, I mean, while they may overtly, you don't know if they're, you know, in their little earbud ear pods, earbuds, whatever they're called, whatever they are.
[00:30:56]  Bluetooth.
[00:30:56]  You know, at the gym.
[00:30:57]  Because I go to the gym.
[00:30:58]  Like, I've gotten into that.
[00:31:00]  I swim.
[00:31:01]  I don't do, you do all the like lifty stuff.
[00:31:04]  And I, that's not mine, but I like swimming.
[00:31:08]  And I now understand the concept of like, like, I haven't swam in a couple of days.
[00:31:13]  And I'm like, I got to get back like swimming.
[00:31:15]  Yeah.
[00:31:16]  Yeah.
[00:31:16]  I love it.
[00:31:16]  Really is my favorite thing to do.
[00:31:18]  But at University of Virginia, you have been going through the files of one Frank Wisner.
[00:31:24]  Frank Wisner.
[00:31:25]  And I, you know, fascinating.
[00:31:27]  We've talked about the CIA, obviously, in many different ways on this show and in terms of many different historical events.
[00:31:36]  Wisner, but we've described, I feel like, and we've talked about Wisner before, but we described how at the beginning of the CIA, there were these sort of OSS old boys.
[00:31:44]  Right.
[00:31:45]  Sometimes with military careers prior to the OSS, which is the Office of Strategic Services, that was this intelligence agency during World War II.
[00:31:54]  Set up by a wild Bill Donovan, a New York lawyer and Medal of Honor recipient with the fighting 69th.
[00:32:01]  And then it's peopled by a motley crew of characters, some of whom were admirable and many of whom who stayed with the OSS into its transformation of the CIA, a little less than admirable.
[00:32:13]  Yeah.
[00:32:14]  Yeah.
[00:32:14]  And sometimes like one in the same, right?
[00:32:17]  Like some of the things you're like, oh, that's really good.
[00:32:20]  Like, man, that was like great.
[00:32:21]  And then others you're like, wow, that's terrible.
[00:32:24]  Yeah.
[00:32:24]  You know, and often, and Wisner's a good example of that, where on one hand, you're like, like, I have a little bit of sympathy for him because like spoiler alert, he kills himself with a shotgun in 1965 after spending like after about three rounds in mental hospitals getting electroshock and you know such.
[00:32:44]  And so I've been in a mental hospital.
[00:32:46]  Like I've got, you know, I've got some sympathy for that.
[00:32:48]  And it seems like he actually internalized some of the like damage that he had done and it destroyed him.
[00:32:56]  Interesting.
[00:32:56]  Whereas some of the other guys can just like go along, you know?
[00:33:00]  Well, I mean, I've read a lot of Wisner's, I guess like some of the letters that he wrote to immigration services in the 50s.
[00:33:09]  Yep.
[00:33:10]  And some of his writings in terms of, well, we'll get to that.
[00:33:14]  He's got a very southern lawyer style, doesn't he?
[00:33:16]  He definitely does.
[00:33:18]  Don't say in three words what you can say in 12 or 15 fucking pages.
[00:33:22]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  So he's also like, you know, manic depressive.
[00:33:27]  So sometimes you catch him in the manic family.
[00:33:29]  So he is manic depressive.
[00:33:30]  That was, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:31]  That was like the reading through the transcripts that his widow Polly Wisner had done, Polly Knowles Wisner, who then married Fritchie of the like Fritchie art.
[00:33:46]  But reading through those, like her conversation with Kay Graham, because Wisner was good friends with the Graham family who ran the Washington Post.
[00:33:55]  And Phil Graham, also manic depressive, also killed himself with the shotgun in 1963.
[00:34:03]  And so like, so reading in the archives, I found one of the like transcripts there, and they both clearly say like our husbands were manic depressive, you know, and a lot of bad behavior resulted from that.
[00:34:17]  And then they killed themselves.
[00:34:18]  Well, let's go back a little bit in time to where that bad behavior was.
[00:34:21]  Where it begins in Mississippi.
[00:34:23]  In Laurel, Mississippi.
[00:34:25]  What is Laurel?
[00:34:26]  So Laurel is an unusual Mississippi town because during the Civil War, which, you know, people who listen to the show may recall was an American War between 1861 and 1865.
[00:34:39]  Well, Matt calls it the War of Northern Aggression.
[00:34:41]  That is not true.
[00:34:42]  My people were Yankees, my friend.
[00:34:44]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:44]  Yeah.
[00:34:46]  Well, let's see.
[00:34:47]  There was a strother on my grandmother's side.
[00:34:49]  They were rode with Quantrill, so that's the Confederate.
[00:34:53]  Okay, as well.
[00:34:54]  That's very Confederate.
[00:34:55]  Yeah, I'll throw that on there.
[00:34:57]  But the Farwells were Yankees.
[00:35:00]  I would say Quantrow would be a Navy SEAL if he was alive today.
[00:35:02]  Yeah, no, he's a brigand.
[00:35:04]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:35:07]  But they were all like, the Farwells are from New Hampshire and Massachusetts originally.
[00:35:13]  And they just don't like people.
[00:35:14]  They wound up in Idaho.
[00:35:15]  They didn't like people telling them what to do.
[00:35:17]  And they could get land out there.
[00:35:19]  So, you know, but so no, I'm actually very, like, with County Highway, that publication I'm writing for, I wrote a piece about going to this dinosaur park that was dinosaurs versus Yankees.
[00:35:37]  And I expected it to be like a lost world for a lost cause thing.
[00:35:41]  No, it was just like, like, one of the ladies in my department called it like white boys on acid.
[00:35:46]  And it was this guy who grew up in Waynesboro playing with like Union soldiers and dinosaurs and Confederate soldiers.
[00:35:56]  And so he made a dinosaur park with that.
[00:35:58]  But when I wrote it, I had to be very careful to be like, listen, the South was wrong in the Civil War.
[00:36:05]  Okay.
[00:36:06]  And like, my university, University of Virginia, is like built on blood.
[00:36:11]  Yeah.
[00:36:12]  You know, which I like, Yale was built on opium.
[00:36:15]  Harvard's built on slavery.
[00:36:17]  You know.
[00:36:18]  City College of San Francisco built on the back of O.J. Simpson's fucking arm.
[00:36:23]  Whatever he did in the motherfucking NFL.
[00:36:26]  Oh, man.
[00:36:26]  Well, I guess his arm was actually very famous for him.
[00:36:28]  Which rental car, was he a Hertz guy or an Avis guy?
[00:36:32]  I think he was one of them, right?
[00:36:33]  Yeah.
[00:36:34]  Yeah.
[00:36:34]  Wait, back to, back to, back to, back to Mississippi.
[00:36:38]  Okay, so Laurel, Mississippi, during the Civil War was the place where it's like pine forests.
[00:36:45]  And so there were tiny farms there, like hard scrabble farms.
[00:36:48]  It's like Appalachia or Appalachia in some ways.
[00:36:50]  If you say that wrong, Appalachians get mad at you.
[00:36:53]  Well, they can't listen to podcasts.
[00:36:56]  Anyways, so Wisner's, so this was a place where like the farmers there had been like, oh, so you're saying you're seceding from the Union, but you want us to pay taxes to the Confederacy.
[00:37:08]  Like, fuck you.
[00:37:10]  We're seceding from you.
[00:37:12]  Interesting.
[00:37:13]  And so it didn't have, it doesn't have the like cotton plantation racial dynamics that you associate with other parts of Mississippi.
[00:37:21]  And Wisner's people were German carpetbaggers from Iowa who moved in there in the 1880s to build like a lumber mill.
[00:37:31]  And they were like German, like serious German Episcopalians.
[00:37:38]  And so they actually like treated their employees fairly well.
[00:37:41]  like their employees had a 10-hour day before that was ever a thing.
[00:37:45]  They had like fairly good housing, you know, et cetera.
[00:37:48]  Like, I'm not like being an apologist for him, but compared to other, they were very progressive by Mississippi standards.
[00:37:55]  And Wisner is often described as like a conservative because he imported a bunch of fascists after World War II.
[00:38:02]  Certainly did.
[00:38:03]  Now, he's not, though.
[00:38:04]  He's a liberal.
[00:38:05]  He was always a like liberal southerner from Mississippi.
[00:38:10]  I don't think that there's any real controversial in his own mind.
[00:38:14]  Yeah.
[00:38:14]  But I don't think there's actually any real controversy.
[00:38:16]  No, no, no, no.
[00:38:17]  But I just, I read it described as like, you know, he was a conservative member of the CIA.
[00:38:21]  And I'm like, no, he was part of like their liberal wing.
[00:38:24]  Like they have different wings.
[00:38:26]  Well, he also split from Mississippi pretty early.
[00:38:29]  He went to boarding school.
[00:38:30]  He went to, which I went, I had to talk to Frank Wisner's son, Frank Wisner Jr.
[00:38:36]  The State Department guy.
[00:38:38]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  Who like I talked to his other son, Ellis, who lives in DC area, and he's very nice.
[00:38:44]  And, you know, I got along with him fine.
[00:38:46]  I was like kind of scared to call Frank Wisner Jr. because that's the guy who like went and told Morsi, hey, it's time for you to step down.
[00:38:55]  Yeah.
[00:38:56]  Like imagine having the stones to fly to Egypt where like people have had a civilization for 4,000 years and tell the leader of that land, it's time for you to go.
[00:39:09]  That's the kind of stone you work for the U.S. State Department.
[00:39:11]  I mean, but like, so, but he turned out to be very nice too.
[00:39:15]  Well, he's, it's funny.
[00:39:16]  To me, I listened to prep for this.
[00:39:18]  I actually listened to a couple interviews with Frank Wisner Jr.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:22]  And he very much seems like a liberal like part of the, I don't know what you would call it, the State Department apparatus, diplomatic wing, where he talks about the threat from China, but couches it in very like, you know, we need peaceful competition rather than war.
[00:39:40]  Well, at least for that, I'll give him that.
[00:39:42]  And I mean, that's one of the things where reading through all these early documents from these CIA guys is like, okay, a lot of the shit they were doing was fucked up and really fucked up, and I think it's bad.
[00:39:55]  Also, the context in which they're doing that is our alternative to doing this is nuclear war.
[00:40:03]  I'm going to disagree with that.
[00:40:05]  But in their, I'm not saying that that's actually the circumstance, but like just as we talked about how the military guys put themselves in a bubble, so too do like the crews of people who hang out at the Carlisle Hotel and down at the Greenbrier, right?
[00:40:20]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:21]  I see what, no, I see what you're saying.
[00:40:23]  So in their mind, they're like, we have to subvert the entire U.S. press and publishing culture because otherwise the communists will do it.
[00:40:32]  And then nuclear war, right?
[00:40:34]  Well, let's get back to high school.
[00:40:36]  High school.
[00:40:36]  So Wisner goes up to high school.
[00:40:38]  He goes to Woodbury Forest High School, which was founded by a Confederate general in 1870 or 1880.
[00:40:47]  I went to boarding school in New Mexico.
[00:40:49]  I went to a nice boarding school.
[00:40:50]  I was on full scholarship.
[00:40:52]  It's a weird story.
[00:40:54]  My boarding school was not this nice.
[00:40:57]  It's Gucci.
[00:40:58]  It's where Beto O'Rourke, you know, that Texas guy.
[00:41:01]  Yeah, the alternative position.
[00:41:03]  the guy that like is man of the people he went there um tuition's like out of sight it's more than like the government pays uva for my graduate school I can tell you that.
[00:41:12]  Oh my God.
[00:41:13]  The kid that toured me around was going off to Yale.
[00:41:16]  You know, like this is one of the, it's Phillips Andover of the South.
[00:41:21]  And they would probably be insulted, like insulted to, you know, they're like, no, no, no, Phillips Andover is now the Woodbury of the, you know.
[00:41:27]  So Wisner is there.
[00:41:28]  So Wisner goes there.
[00:41:29]  He doesn't have that good of a time.
[00:41:31]  And he, in fact, doesn't graduate because his parents pull some strings and get him into University of Virginia, which at this time, like UVA is a big school now.
[00:41:41]  Not like, not as big as other state schools, but still like fairly big.
[00:41:45]  At this time, it's like 3,000 students at a law school.
[00:41:48]  And it's mostly where the sons of the South, like the privileged sons of the South, go to learn how the social scene works.
[00:41:58]  Yes, right?
[00:41:59]  Which that has become very important to Wisner.
[00:42:01]  Incredible.
[00:42:01]  And Woodbury Forest becomes a nexus of all this too, because guys like Gordon Gray, who becomes very important.
[00:42:10]  He was a tobacco heir to the Reynolds family from North Carolina, was later Secretary of the Army during integration.
[00:42:18]  And his response to Truman's integration order was to send a note up to West Point saying, you know that portrait of Colonel Robert E. Lee that you have in Union Blue in the dining hall?
[00:42:31]  We would like you to take that down and put up a portrait of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate gray.
[00:42:38]  Yeah.
[00:42:39]  Which that only barely came down in like the last 10 years.
[00:42:42]  Yeah.
[00:42:43]  So all of the like officers being trained for the United States Army looked up at a portrait of a guy who also went there.

=== University Of Virginia Mysteries (15:36) ===

[00:42:50]  And then when he was a colonel, decided, you know, I can make rank another way faster.
[00:42:56]  And then they confiscated all his lands and buried like, you know, dead soldiers there.
[00:43:00]  So.
[00:43:01]  So University of Virginia.
[00:43:02]  University of Virginia.
[00:43:03]  Wizard's going there.
[00:43:05]  And he is studying to be a lawyer.
[00:43:08]  Yeah, he his, but he, he goes there and finds the track team.
[00:43:13]  And he is super, he's a super athlete in track.
[00:43:17]  He could go to the Olympics in 1936 or go to train for it.
[00:43:22]  But his father says, like, that's not what gentlemen do.
[00:43:24]  That's not that's a good idea.
[00:43:25]  No, that's not for southern gentlemen.
[00:43:27]  Yeah, you, you are from Lowell, Mississippi, son.
[00:43:30]  Yeah.
[00:43:30]  And you ride a donkey.
[00:43:32]  And so he went to law school and then went up and worked for a law firm called Carter Ledyard, which has its address, I believe, number two Wall Street still.
[00:43:47]  It's where Franklin Roosevelt practiced law before he got into politics.
[00:43:52]  It's the white shoist of white shoe.
[00:43:56]  And he gets bored.
[00:43:57]  Within five years, he's bored.
[00:43:58]  And the war is coming on.
[00:44:00]  So he joins the Navy.
[00:44:01]  He joins the Office of Naval Intelligence.
[00:44:04]  And they have him in a mail room in New York censoring mail for six months.
[00:44:09]  I would have loved to be one of the mail censors during World War II.
[00:44:13]  I wonder how many novelists got their start just by ripping shit off from like a business.
[00:44:19]  But just, can you imagine the power that you'd feel?
[00:44:21]  There's no gun that's more powerful than like, I can't wait to make whoopee with you one more time.
[00:44:27]  Black line.
[00:44:28]  Yeah.
[00:44:28]  You know, oh, I think we're shipping to Italy soon.
[00:44:31]  I'm so scared.
[00:44:32]  Black line.
[00:44:33]  Just leaving.
[00:44:33]  I'm so scared.
[00:44:34]  I would just transform every letter, every anodyne, banal letter to the wife into a horror story with excisions.
[00:44:42]  Yeah.
[00:44:42]  You can do it fairly easily.
[00:44:44]  You can.
[00:44:44]  I mean, even words like help, if you black out an entire sentence except for the word help and a period at the end of it, your wife is going to be freaking the fuck out.
[00:44:53]  Oh, we don't have telephones.
[00:44:54]  You can't call her.
[00:44:55]  Oh, yeah.
[00:44:55]  I mean, they exist, but you can't use them.
[00:44:57]  Well, and if you have, like, if you have a good enough indexing system and you can control both sides of that communication too, you can censor stuff from the wife where it's I'm so happy to see you becomes or like so happy to see you soon becomes like I'm blank soon.
[00:45:16]  Yes.
[00:45:17]  And who knows what that means.
[00:45:19]  Or or even any male name, black out the entire letter except for that male name.
[00:45:24]  This is the thing.
[00:45:25]  What is Raymond doing?
[00:45:26]  American soldiers, if you are listening to this, this is the closest I can get to this.
[00:45:30]  Jody is fucking, if you're on deployment right now and you're listening to this, back at 29 Palms, Jodi is fucking your wife right now in your car, on your couch, watching your motherfucking Netflix.
[00:45:43]  Spending your money.
[00:45:44]  Spending your money.
[00:45:46]  So I'm just putting that out.
[00:45:47]  And honestly, he's probably treating her better than you did.
[00:45:50]  He is.
[00:45:50]  She'll stay with you.
[00:45:52]  She'll stay with you.
[00:45:52]  Yeah.
[00:45:53]  But she'll continue to cheat.
[00:45:55]  And his kid, she'll have his kid say it's yours.
[00:45:58]  Your life is going to get a lot worse.
[00:46:00]  You need to come back from Germany right now and you need to quit the Marines.
[00:46:04]  So this is, I think I'm pretty good at that.
[00:46:06]  I had a, I went home with a woman one time when I was in the Army in Hampton Roads.
[00:46:10]  I brought her back to my barracks room and we got about halfway through and she's like, oh yeah, my husband's like deployed.
[00:46:18]  I'm like, fuck, man.
[00:46:19]  And I had like a shred of like, you know, now I'm like looking back at it and I'm like, I should have just like gone for it.
[00:46:25]  Yeah.
[00:46:25]  But I was like, no, I can't do that.
[00:46:27]  Like even to a Marine, like that's fucked up.
[00:46:29]  You know, and so sent her on her way.
[00:46:31]  Like that's.
[00:46:32]  That's true, they call him Matt Farwell, the fearful Jody.
[00:46:35]  It's, it was.
[00:46:36]  I just, I just couldn't go through with it.
[00:46:38]  Man, I felt bad.
[00:46:39]  Military spouses, if you are listening to this, my door is always open to you and only you.
[00:46:47]  My sweetheart.
[00:46:48]  I will spoil you like nobody else will.
[00:46:50]  He can't do that.
[00:46:51]  He can't do that for you.
[00:46:52]  I'll take you to one of those crazy Chinese clinics.
[00:46:55]  You don't have to go to the VA anymore.
[00:47:04]  But we've got to get back to Wisner.
[00:47:05]  So Wisner joins O AND I.
[00:47:07]  He is, he is censoring letters and he's bored as shit doesn't want to do it.
[00:47:10]  He's like I can run faster than any motherfucker in the country.
[00:47:13]  And thankfully he also was in a secret society at the UV at the University OF Virginia, called the Seven Society.
[00:47:19]  Who's this what?
[00:47:20]  Yeah, who's uh?
[00:47:21]  Whose members are only known after their death.
[00:47:24]  And it turns out he was in the Seven Society along with the guy Statenius, who became secretary of state at that time, a guy, Robert Kent Gooch, who was um very influential, like a UVA professor that was pretty influential in the espionage world.
[00:47:39]  Um, and then a whole cadre of like Lexington Based dudes um general Magruder, who was very important in the early founding of the CIA.
[00:47:48]  So he, he writes, he pulls some strings and he gets himself assigned to the OSS and he goes to a training camp for the OSS up in Canada called Camp X um, where he's instructed in the dark arts, you know, which is mostly like how to be like super sleazy.
[00:48:06]  From what I've I've never like gone through the training or anything but, like you know, from what I've pieced together, from what people tell me, it's kind of like how to be sleazy.
[00:48:15]  You know, it's like pickup artist training mixed with like lockpick and like shooting people.
[00:48:19]  So when you're undercover in Paris you have to wear a giant hat and you have to ask a hundred girls for a makeout in case that one says yes no, do you have?
[00:48:29]  You ever had Bob Baer on this show?
[00:48:30]  That's the old CIA.
[00:48:32]  No, like the old crazy CIA guy, should we?
[00:48:35]  Yeah he he, uh.
[00:48:36]  He's the guy, you see, that George Clooney movie Siriana.
[00:48:39]  I, you know, I never have.
[00:48:40]  He's the guy that uh uh, Clooney was based on in Siriana and he tried to kill Saddam Hussein in uh, the 90s and the um national Security Council got really mad at him for it and so he almost got prosecuted.
[00:48:54]  Yeah yeah yeah, and he had some feelings about it.
[00:48:56]  He had a book called See No Evil, but one of his disguises like when he was out on shit was he wore a diamond incisor, like because he's like people would just.
[00:49:08]  No one remembers anything else about you except that you had like a grill with a diamond tooth in it.
[00:49:14]  Interesting, and I mean that's when you're covered as a pimp in Sarajevo, so you can get away with it.
[00:49:18]  I was under, I was undercover at Coachella at one point and I was wearing like a full Native American headdress.
[00:49:23]  Oh, you were there for the flooding.
[00:49:25]  You were there for the flooding And I lost my career.
[00:49:31]  But so he joins the OSS.
[00:49:33]  He gets trained up at Camp X in Canada.
[00:49:35]  Camp X.
[00:49:35]  And he deploys, I think at first to Turkey, right?
[00:49:38]  First to Cairo.
[00:49:39]  Cairo.
[00:49:39]  Cairo.
[00:49:40]  And then he's in Cairo for a little while.
[00:49:42]  And then the Istanbul station is a mess because the guy that's running it, whose name is like Macintosh or something, I can't remember.
[00:49:51]  But he's like just, you know, screwing off.
[00:49:55]  And it's a mess.
[00:49:56]  So the thing with Turkey, I mean, for those of you who are geographically and maybe historically not inclined, Turkey is like one of the, it's like the biggest neutral nation around.
[00:50:06]  And Istanbul was Constantinople.
[00:50:11]  And it's been a center of like international intrigue since like before everything.
[00:50:18]  Yeah.
[00:50:18]  Like, you know, it's old.
[00:50:19]  But it's, you know, it's between, it's between Russia and, or the USSR at the time, and the Balkans.
[00:50:25]  The Balkans.
[00:50:26]  Yeah.
[00:50:27]  Which are at this point occupied by the Germans.
[00:50:30]  Right.
[00:50:31]  And so it serves as this like weird neutral place like a lot of North Africa, or not a lot, but some of North Africa was.
[00:50:38]  And it's where a lot of commercial cover enterprises are based too, because shipping, you know, like shipping's very important to any sort of like covert enterprise.
[00:50:47]  Yeah.
[00:50:48]  And so Wisner is sent there to like penetrate Nazi networks.
[00:50:54]  But also at this point, the OSS is starting to suspect that Uncle Joe Stalin may not be our best friend.
[00:51:02]  And there are some, there's a lot of OSS guys that are just like straight up working for the NKVD, actually, especially in the Balkans.
[00:51:08]  Well, it's funny you say that too, because the OSS had this strange sort of like, I mean, while Bill was recruiting everybody in the UK.
[00:51:16]  And it's oh social.
[00:51:17]  So it's basically like cowboys that know how to do country club shit.
[00:51:24]  Yes.
[00:51:25]  You know, it's people that did summers at Newport.
[00:51:28]  Well, there's this.
[00:51:29]  They know where the fork goes and how to eat an oyster properly.
[00:51:32]  There's also this, especially in the Balkans, this weird split between who are they going to support.
[00:51:37]  So like at first, I mean, this is, I can't remember what the book is called, even though it's like a 2,000 pages long.
[00:51:43]  But I think he's related to Winston Churchill in some way.
[00:51:45]  I've read the book.
[00:51:45]  It's this guy's like this memoir of a guy who, like a British Secret Service agent in the 1940s, who goes into Yugoslavia and likes, at first I believe he has to like, he supports the Chetniks, and then he eventually is like, we need to go with the partisans and like Tito's guys.
[00:52:02]  And there's this kind of split in a lot of places between most of the actual like together organized and armed resistance to the Nazis in a lot of the occupied countries comes from the communists.
[00:52:13]  But thinking ahead, which the communists are doing, the Americans are like, well, we have to find some alternative to these guys.
[00:52:21]  But unfortunately, most of the guys that are the alternative collaborated.
[00:52:25]  And so they were kind of cobbling together these like random groups of people.
[00:52:29]  But then ended up realizing that, well, as we see what happens in Romania, to go with the collaborator.
[00:52:34]  So he goes on to Romania.
[00:52:36]  Yeah, and so as soon as Romania, Romania was an Axis country, and then they had a coup led by the king, King Michael, who, and that's the point where the Americans are able to establish a foothold there.
[00:52:52]  Yeah.
[00:52:52]  Because they get like a military advance mission, which is mostly an OSS mission, whose job actually is their cover job, which they do successfully, is there were American prisoners of war from B-24 crews.
[00:53:07]  B-24s are bombers.
[00:53:09]  My grandpa Fartwell was on B-24s in World War II, but not on the Plietsky raids.
[00:53:16]  So the oil fields are in the oil fields.
[00:53:18]  So Wisner's first thing that he does in Romania, and one of the things that gets people's attention is he successfully organizes the repatriation of like 4,000, don't quote me on that number.
[00:53:32]  I don't remember what it is.
[00:53:33]  Some thousand.
[00:53:34]  Some thousand American airmen from POW camps in Romania back to like England and America.
[00:53:43]  And so that gets him on the radar.
[00:53:46]  I mean, and he's already somewhat, he's a smart, savvy operator.
[00:53:50]  He knows that Franklin Roosevelt is a stamp collector in the archives.
[00:53:54]  I found a note from Franklin Roosevelt thanking him for the complete collection of Romanian stamps.
[00:54:00]  Well, I have to, I have to interject a little bit of Belden family history here.
[00:54:05]  My grandfather was a, he was on it, he was a Jewish officer in a tank destroyer company during World War II.
[00:54:14]  Okay.
[00:54:15]  And they were, they landed like 12 days after D-Day.
[00:54:17]  They went through Europe.
[00:54:18]  Yeah.
[00:54:19]  And a lot of things they do once they cleared a town is they would blow up the bank vault and steal everything they could.
[00:54:24]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:24]  My grandfather.
[00:54:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:27]  My grandfather.
[00:54:28]  So all these people were stealing like, you know, like people's gold bars or their coins or their ancient whatever.
[00:54:33]  My grandfather thought, you know what's going to be really valuable eventually?
[00:54:37]  Stamps.
[00:54:38]  And so what he did is he stole a ton of stamps from bank vaults in Europe.
[00:54:43]  And you know how much those stamps, which my dad has, are worth?
[00:54:47]  How much?
[00:54:48]  Basically nothing.
[00:54:49]  But the Nazis, and keeping in line with the German character, were stamp obsessed.
[00:54:54]  And so I think a lot of people now, including myself, this is not exactly like a great area of knowledge that I have, don't realize how crazy stamp collector mania was.
[00:55:03]  Yeah, philology.
[00:55:04]  Philology.
[00:55:04]  Philateology.
[00:55:05]  Philology.
[00:55:06]  Philateology.
[00:55:07]  Philology is like shit.
[00:55:09]  Philatelist?
[00:55:09]  What's the person?
[00:55:11]  What is philateology?
[00:55:13]  Crazy name for.
[00:55:14]  I don't know.
[00:55:15]  I'm one of those people, too, that's like constantly mispronouncing words.
[00:55:18]  Philately.
[00:55:19]  That sounds like philatelli.
[00:55:21]  Philatelist.
[00:55:22]  Oh, I've got a philatelli problem.
[00:55:23]  And you know, we're like, you know what?
[00:55:27]  And guess what?
[00:55:27]  Little link up to Matt here.
[00:55:29]  That definition comes from Desiree News.
[00:55:31]  Ooh, from my people.
[00:55:34]  Yeah, you guys.
[00:55:35]  I grew up Mormon.
[00:55:36]  I am no longer Mormon myself, but that's my background.
[00:55:41]  But my grandfather steals all these stamps.
[00:55:44]  But the thing is, the Germans, they did have a lot of stamps because stamp collecting mania was like a huge thing because records were expensive.
[00:55:51]  All the things that people now collect, tennis shoes, records.
[00:55:54]  Right.
[00:55:55]  I don't know what else.
[00:55:56]  Like the thrill level was lower then, too.
[00:55:59]  Yeah.
[00:55:59]  Yeah.
[00:55:59]  Man, I got this stamp with a misprint.
[00:56:01]  That was like the only things that you could get that were rare and commonly available.
[00:56:05]  Or like rare, but easy, not that difficult to find, if that makes sense.
[00:56:10]  And not too expensive.
[00:56:11]  So your war trophies were a bunch of fucking stamps from like France?
[00:56:15]  All of it, yeah.
[00:56:15]  Like French stamps.
[00:56:16]  No, they're Germans because the Germans were like stamp collecting was so big in Germany.
[00:56:21]  That they were putting them in safe deposit boxes.
[00:56:24]  Like people might put Wolverine comments on some shit.
[00:56:26]  France had been occupied.
[00:56:28]  Exactly.
[00:56:29]  But it's a very similar thing.
[00:56:31]  Although a lot of France just enthusiastically collaborated.
[00:56:35]  That's very true.
[00:56:35]  Hey, you guys, Germans, you know, the Vichy.
[00:56:39]  Charles de Gaulle was like three Frenchmen and fucking typewriter.
[00:56:42]  Yeah, there was not many of the French guys.
[00:56:44]  So there was all these canceled stamps, like stamped over stamps, misprints, and all these, you know, like these variations of stamps that my grandfather thought were going to be rare and worth a bunch of money and were not.
[00:57:00]  At least like they're probably not.
[00:57:03]  I think that if, you know, you could have had cursed jewels, right?
[00:57:07]  I know.
[00:57:08]  And like had just unexplained things happen because, you know, some ruby was like.
[00:57:14]  Well, I'd take the ruby, right?
[00:57:15]  Well, you say that now.
[00:57:17]  But you know, but maybe not.
[00:57:20]  I know.
[00:57:20]  So maybe the, maybe the ruby, the cursed ruby will come to me that I said that.
[00:57:23]  It's an initial finger of the monkey's paw.
[00:57:26]  So Romania, 1944, Frank Wisner is in station.
[00:57:30]  He's in station and he's basically there to spy on the Russians.
[00:57:34]  And to have a little sex.
[00:57:36]  Let's make Frank.
[00:57:37]  Okay, no, that's the other thing is the Romanians are like, okay, shit, these Russians are coming in.
[00:57:43]  And the Russians are just like, oh, you have a nice house.
[00:57:46]  We're going to take all your, you know, much like everyone else.
[00:57:50]  They were like, we're just going to take all your shit.
[00:57:52]  So the Russian or the some of the wealthy Romanians, including this beer distributor brewer guy.
[00:57:58]  Who had, by the way, been a collaborator.
[00:58:01]  Who'd been a collaborator was, and you said he was the descendant of Vlad the Impaler?
[00:58:04]  No, She will get to the princess.
[00:58:08]  But he moves into this mansion with the whole OSS detachment because the like, so it's like moving into Joseph Kors mansion.
[00:58:17]  Yeah.
[00:58:17]  Because Joseph Kors is like, you'll keep Antifa from like looting my place.
[00:58:22]  Yes.
[00:58:22]  Right.
[00:58:23]  And so that's, but they're there.
[00:58:24]  Like they're feeding them great.

=== Collaborators and Propaganda (13:32) ===

[00:58:26]  They're drinking.
[00:58:26]  It's like a hell of a way to fight a war, honestly.
[00:58:28]  He doesn't even have a standard like Navy uniform there because they just packed him on a plane from like, from they're like, you did a good job in Turkey.
[00:58:36]  Go like fucking solve Romania, Frank.
[00:58:38]  Like, you're on fire.
[00:58:40]  And so he cobbles together.
[00:58:42]  I look through his scrapbook.
[00:58:43]  And so he cobbles together this like kind of cool ass uniform.
[00:58:46]  He's got like a fur, like Russian fur hat with like the U.S. Navy emblem on it.
[00:58:51]  Okay.
[00:58:51]  He's got a giant like field jacket, like an Eisenhower jacket with a big ass like Rambo flag on the side, you know, like taking up half of his arm.
[00:59:00]  And he's out there doing like he wins the Romanian king over basically by being like fun to be around.
[00:59:09]  Like he does magic tricks at parties and he can shoot like skeet over his shoulder looking through a mirror.
[00:59:18]  I have photos of all these, right?
[00:59:20]  Like he can do trick shooting and he goes out hunting and he hangs out and he's just kind of like broing it up with like the king likes cars.
[00:59:29]  He likes cars too.
[00:59:31]  And so he develops really good relations with the king, eventually being like, oh, hey, also, the communists are totally going to take over.
[00:59:37]  And you guys are like fucked.
[00:59:39]  So like get out of here.
[00:59:40]  And then he gets reassigned to Wiesbad in Germany, where Alan Dulles has been very impressed with his work.
[00:59:49]  And so this is kind of where Wisner, I mean, and a lot of OSS guys, to be fair, and Dulles', let's say, talents kind of combined.
[01:00:00]  Right.
[01:00:00]  Because Dulles is at this point making all these connections with Dulles has been like swinging his way through Switzerland.
[01:00:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:00:08]  Fucking everybody.
[01:00:09]  Well, Dulles is probably, I mean, but as part of his polyamorous side adventures in Switzerland, he's also been in contact with Nazis.
[01:00:16]  Right.
[01:00:17]  Well, I mean, because no one does costumed weird sex like Nazis.
[01:00:24]  Oh, no.
[01:00:25]  And that's, I feel like that's gotten away from us.
[01:00:27]  Well, I mean, remember Max Mosley, the Formula One guy?
[01:00:30]  No.
[01:00:31]  He was a Formula.
[01:00:32]  Wait, is that the Formula One chair that was like filmed having sadomasochistic sex while dressed as a Nazi camp guard as the prostitutes, one of whom husband worked for MI5, were dressed as Holocaust victims.
[01:00:50]  And whose dad, of course, we should mention was Oswald Mosley.
[01:00:53]  Mosley, the chair of the British family.
[01:00:56]  British fascists.
[01:00:57]  I have a fascinating book about the British Union of Fascists summer camps for adults that they had on the coast of the UK.
[01:01:05]  Oh, God, that sounds bad.
[01:01:06]  A ton of fucking photos and stuff.
[01:01:08]  Yeah, they're all just, it's their fascist summer camps.
[01:01:10]  Oh, yuck.
[01:01:12]  But they, so one of the things that Dulles was doing there was making these connections with these Nazis and who also saw which way the wind was blowing.
[01:01:21]  Yeah.
[01:01:21]  And were making plans for and many of whom didn't like that little corporal.
[01:01:25]  You know?
[01:01:26]  Yeah, because they were German conservatives rather than kind of like Nazis.
[01:01:29]  Yeah.
[01:01:30]  Yeah.
[01:01:30]  I mean, it's kind of a distinction without a difference.
[01:01:32]  Yeah.
[01:01:33]  They were still fighting for him.
[01:01:35]  But they wanted a, let's say, a return to, maybe they were maybe post-monarchists at this point.
[01:01:42]  Yeah.
[01:01:42]  But they were like, we have this nice building that I.G. Farben has been housed in, and we would like to house the Allied command there.
[01:01:49]  Yes.
[01:01:50]  And so this is also the beginnings of the Galen organization.
[01:01:53]  Right.
[01:01:53]  And starting at this point.
[01:01:54]  And Wisner is one of Galen's early case officers.
[01:01:58]  So Galen, I think he was one of the first people to interview him, actually, even after the war.
[01:02:03]  So Galen was the head of German intelligence.
[01:02:08]  And he essentially started this underground organization, underground, I'd say kind of in quotes there.
[01:02:15]  After the war, he just took all the files.
[01:02:17]  He just took all the files.
[01:02:18]  It's like walking out of your company and being like, I have all of the sales.
[01:02:22]  He basically took his guys and were like, we work for the CIA.
[01:02:25]  He Jerry McGuired.
[01:02:26]  Yes.
[01:02:27]  Drove me to money.
[01:02:29]  You know?
[01:02:30]  Actually, I've never seen Jerry Maguire.
[01:02:31]  You've never seen Jerry McGuire?
[01:02:33]  No.
[01:02:33]  You haven't seen most movies, Matt.
[01:02:35]  Oh, I had a very, like, I had a period in my teenage years where like I just went to movies all the time and read books.
[01:02:41]  You know, I was unhappy.
[01:02:42]  Yeah.
[01:02:43]  So that's what you do.
[01:02:44]  I'm sure many of our listeners will relate.
[01:02:46]  Yeah.
[01:02:47]  But so Wisner's in Switzerland.
[01:02:51]  Well, he's in Germany.
[01:02:52]  He's in Germany.
[01:02:53]  Excuse me.
[01:02:53]  Why is Vice President?
[01:02:54]  And this is after the war has ended in Europe.
[01:02:57]  And they're like, basically, do we send him to the Far East?
[01:03:00]  Or do, you know, because the war against Japan is still raging.
[01:03:03]  But MacArthur hated the OSS and didn't let them operate in theater.
[01:03:07]  And so they kept Wisner in.
[01:03:09]  And Wisner also, it should be said, in Romania, one of what radicalized Frank Wisner was in Romania watching the Russians go through looking for ethnic German names and just being like, basically, oh, yeah, you guys are Nazis.
[01:03:29]  We're fucking taking you and leaving.
[01:03:30]  But when Wisner sees it, he just sees a bunch of Germans being like profiled as Germans and taken away by the communists on boxcars.
[01:03:40]  And it really fucked him up.
[01:03:41]  Like his kids will still talk about how that was, both of them have said they thought their dad was in Romania for much longer than he was based on how much he talked about.
[01:03:52]  Basically all writing about Wisner that takes his career, even in like a paragraph long sense, will mention the Romania stuff.
[01:03:59]  Yeah.
[01:03:59]  Because it seems like whatever he witnessed there, thought he witnessed there or did witness there.
[01:04:05]  And that's where he becomes hardline against the communists before anyone else is.
[01:04:09]  Interestingly enough, not hardline against the Romanians, who had just overseen a brutal regime where they massacred Jews in ways that the Nazis couldn't even dream of.
[01:04:21]  I mean, the Iron Guard, who obviously, yes, rebelled against Antonescu, but like even Antonescu's integration of like some of the Iron Guard's policies into his own against Jewish people.
[01:04:30]  And then eventually in Transnistria, which is like the lower part of Ukraine that kind of is next to, not the modern Transnistria, the World War II Transnistria is north of Romania.
[01:04:41]  The policies they had there were equally brutal, but Wisner doesn't seem to mind that.
[01:04:46]  Those were generally like, it seems like the Episcopalian and Presbyterian, like college-educated folks that summer in Newport were able to overlook a lot of that.
[01:04:57]  Yeah.
[01:04:57]  Well, it's also a lot of the victims were Jews.
[01:05:00]  That's why I believe a lot of them were able to, you know, the Wasps were like, well, okay.
[01:05:05]  Okay.
[01:05:06]  You know?
[01:05:06]  Yeah.
[01:05:07]  It's distasteful.
[01:05:08]  Yeah.
[01:05:09]  You know, but it's like having a bad habit.
[01:05:12]  You know, it's like having, it's like having halitosis or something.
[01:05:15]  Like, I can overlook it if you can give me some money.
[01:05:17]  Yeah.
[01:05:17]  Or help me out with something.
[01:05:19]  You know, the.
[01:05:21]  So he comes back and he becomes a, he comes back to the U.S. Right.
[01:05:25]  And becomes a Wall Street lawyer.
[01:05:26]  He goes back to Wall Street and he's bored.
[01:05:29]  And Alan Dulles has gone to Wall Street and he's bored.
[01:05:32]  And they get together and start hanging out on park benches.
[01:05:36]  And then eventually Alan Dulles invites him.
[01:05:38]  And I have the records for this into the Council on Foreign Relations.
[01:05:42]  Not to sound like a nut, but like, you know, you do sound like a nut.
[01:05:46]  Well, it's true, though, all this stuff.
[01:05:48]  And so the so from there, Wisner starts to see that we need a propaganda agency that can operate in ways.
[01:06:00]  Basically, we need the kind of like the way that boss, like political boss party politics used to work, we need that for international politics.
[01:06:12]  Well, they also saw that the way that the Soviet Union and the Comintern, which at this point had been disassembled on Stalin's orders, which was a big mistake that he made, they had been, the Americans were so, especially these Wall Street guys, were completely under the impression that anybody who was a communist in Europe had been like hoodwinked or duped by the communist press.
[01:06:32]  Right, right.
[01:06:33]  By propaganda.
[01:06:34]  Not by like their like.
[01:06:35]  I mean, and how much of that do we see today, too, where it's like, hey, something is like very obviously like fucked up in the world.
[01:06:42]  Oh, you've been like Russian propaganda.
[01:06:46]  Those devious Chinese.
[01:06:49]  Yeah, and so they thought like, oh, no, the misery, the penury, the poverty that they saw in Europe, that existed, but the desire to get away from that and maybe transform to a new system, that was all because of communist propaganda.
[01:07:03]  But we don't have anything that can compete with that.
[01:07:06]  Right.
[01:07:06]  And so we need to kind of create an organization that can think outside the box, so to say, on this.
[01:07:13]  Also, you have that the Italians are about ready to have elections.
[01:07:16]  Yes.
[01:07:17]  And they're like, hey, what we'd like is a bunch of fucking communists in power because like that seems cool.
[01:07:23]  And actually the communists were the people fighting against the Nazis a lot.
[01:07:26]  Yes.
[01:07:27]  In Italy.
[01:07:28]  Like the resistance was often very communist.
[01:07:32]  And that can't happen.
[01:07:33]  It cannot happen.
[01:07:34]  You cannot have the land where the Vatican is go to the godless communists.
[01:07:40]  Yeah.
[01:07:40]  Like, right?
[01:07:41]  And this is relevant too, because early CIA is very Catholic and very Episcopalian.
[01:07:50]  Yeah.
[01:07:50]  and presbyterian but like very um mainline like christian right and And so they don't.
[01:08:00]  That's also why the Vatican becomes so essential in getting certain people out, right?
[01:08:06]  And James Angleton is over there, like, who we'll discuss later.
[01:08:10]  But yes, so Wisner creates an organization called the Office of Policy Coordination, and it's blessed off by General Marshall and Secretary of State Stetenius.
[01:08:23]  Now, General Marshall is from Lexington, or went to school in Lexington, and is old Virginia.
[01:08:31]  This is basically, I also think of this, we were talking about the Civil War early, earlier, but it's 2024, right?
[01:08:39]  None of us were alive in the 1960s.
[01:08:42]  No.
[01:08:43]  But we all have a memory of it, right?
[01:08:45]  A vague, yeah, yeah, you are.
[01:08:46]  You know, like from like TV, you know, your mom and dad talking about Woodstock or whatever.
[01:08:52]  So these guys, 20s and 30s, they all have a memory of the Civil War.
[01:08:57]  And it's kind of in the 45 and 40, the South kind of rises again, but clandestinely, as like General Marshall is running the Pentagon, right?
[01:09:08]  As Frank Wisner takes over this covert arms apparatus that not only can do propaganda, but also can do like assassinations and political action.
[01:09:18]  They're just going through refugee camps and being like, hey, man, you look able-bodied.
[01:09:22]  How would you like to go parachute into occupied Poland and blow up shit?
[01:09:26]  Well, so that becomes one of the OPC's main things is that they are trawling these DP camps, displaced persons, which are all over Europe because Europe has been thrown into this great conflagration.
[01:09:37]  There are like, you'll have like 100,000 Belarusians in like fucking Western Germany in like a DP camp or like whatever.
[01:09:45]  Yeah, 20,000 Poles in southern France.
[01:09:47]  Right.
[01:09:48]  On decommissioned Nazi like bases.
[01:09:50]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:09:51]  Or sometimes concentration camps.
[01:09:53]  Right.
[01:09:53]  And they have the OPC.
[01:09:56]  Europe's wild.
[01:09:57]  Totally crazy.
[01:09:58]  Has guys coming around and being like, hey, so what brought you to Western Germany?
[01:10:04]  And they would often find out that they were Ukrainians from the Heewy's or the or the SS who had joined some of the Waffen-SS, like the foreign legions within it.
[01:10:15]  And seeing which way they were.
[01:10:16]  The bad guys, right?
[01:10:17]  Yeah.
[01:10:18]  Okay.
[01:10:18]  Yeah.
[01:10:18]  Yeah.
[01:10:19]  Definitely the bad guys.
[01:10:20]  Okay.
[01:10:20]  Uh, and they're like, how would you guys like to maybe continue what you were doing?
[01:10:25]  But for us.
[01:10:26]  And this was part of the large-scale sort of like the hidden Fourth Reich that was being immediately constructed both during World War II and then after World War II, where all of the people who did these awful things basically under the cover of the Nuremberg trial.
[01:10:41]  So they got some of the Germans, they hanged some of them.
[01:10:44]  But even on that, they're like, hey, Otto Skorzeni, you can be really useful.
[01:10:47]  We're just going to bust you out.
[01:10:48]  Exactly.
[01:10:49]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:50]  We'll leave the gate.
[01:10:51]  We'll leave the door open.
[01:10:52]  No, they walked him out.
[01:10:53]  But all of these, all of these, like, especially where Wisdom is concerned, these people from Belarus who have been collaborators and, you know, oftentimes very brutal murderers of Jews and communists and whoever else they didn't like, they whisked a lot of them to America.
[01:11:08]  Right.
[01:11:09]  And in fact, to the East Coast, where they set a lot of them up.
[01:11:11]  I mean, there's a huge Ukrainian cemetery in, I think it's New Jersey with like Waffen-SS logos in it.
[01:11:18]  A lot of the Ukrainians also went to Canada too.
[01:11:22]  But they had this was like part of the also the beginnings of Gladio and what we saw with the stay behind networks.
[01:11:29]  So they would take all of these killers and these mercenaries and these, frankly, these traitors to America and then kind of embrace them within various different parts of the national security state or army.
[01:11:42]  And then they become useful to like, and they're disposable too.
[01:11:44]  Yes.
[01:11:45]  Because nobody gives a shit if you send them these guys off and they die.
[01:11:49]  And like it's sort of like how the Cuban exiles became after the Bay of Pigs failed.

=== Gobs of Money and Press Manipulation (05:12) ===

[01:11:58]  Yeah.
[01:11:59]  Where they were used for every odd job possible.
[01:12:01]  Yeah.
[01:12:02]  That was like, that was an update of that.
[01:12:04]  Well, it's the mafia, it's the mafia state, right?
[01:12:06]  Like we have, we have this, what's what's the CIA now, because the CIA gets started, I think, 1947, right?
[01:12:13]  We have the CIA basically using all of these criminals as hired thugs for whatever operations they need to get.
[01:12:20]  And that was that started OSS and earlier, but OSS was had liaisons with like Lucky Luciano.
[01:12:30]  You know, hey, can you help us invade Sicily better?
[01:12:33]  Yeah.
[01:12:33]  You know, like liberate the homeland.
[01:12:35]  And so, and so you have people who had committed sometimes like very major, well-known war crimes being taken under assumed identities, put through the immigration system in the U.S., and then settled here to become employees in some like, you know, typewriter room or whatever of the OPC or the CIA.
[01:12:53]  Right.
[01:12:53]  And being on the U.S. government's payroll.
[01:12:56]  That's why there's so many good German restaurants in Huntsville, Alabama.
[01:12:59]  Is it really?
[01:12:59]  Is it really?
[01:13:00]  Well, they brought a bunch of, like, Werner von Braun was down there and a bunch of Nazi rocket signs.
[01:13:04]  the other the other part of the equation so so so what is what else is wisdom getting into So they're doing all sorts of things in Office of Policy Coordination.
[01:13:28]  But the most interesting to me was the way he was managing the press through dinner parties.
[01:13:37]  And Wisner moved to Georgetown.
[01:13:41]  And he's a well-connected, personable, friendly lawyer.
[01:13:46]  He makes friends with Joe and Frank Alsip, who they at the time were kind of like what Tim Russert or who's that guy that's on there now, like Chuck Todd?
[01:14:00]  The TV guys that we like they were columnists where the conventional wisdom came out.
[01:14:05]  And they all had dinner parties together.
[01:14:07]  And basically, like the Alsups would write anything that Frank asked them to write.
[01:14:13]  And also so would writers at like the Saturday Evening Post and the Washington Post.
[01:14:18]  And, you know, kind of, and Wisner was friends with all of the publishers.
[01:14:24]  And so he starts to refer to this and to the press capability that we build up overseas with Radio Free Europe and the U.S. Information Agency and things like that as his mighty Wurlitzer that can play any tune he wants.
[01:14:42]  Do we need a sad story out of Nepal with a tinge of hope?
[01:14:46]  He can get that done.
[01:14:48]  And you see this in the files too, where the guy, I mean, if he were alive today, he'd be on Twitter all the time and be like sending screenshots to aides, like being pissed off, right?
[01:14:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:00]  At the time, it's he's like reading Washington Post articles or articles somewhere else, clipping them out, sending a memo saying we need to get out something about like this or that.
[01:15:11]  Get Joe Alsip to the Indonesia to report on how good the situation is there, you know?
[01:15:17]  And the way that he orchestrated this control wasn't just through like sheer force of personality.
[01:15:26]  It was also by throwing gobs and gobs and gobs and gobs of money around.
[01:15:32]  Yeah.
[01:15:32]  And so he also gets involved with, he's a lawyer.
[01:15:36]  And he was in, this is where the Seven Society stuff at UVA comes back into play because they're a, like, at the university, they're graffiti's everywhere.
[01:15:46]  They're kind of like skull and bones at Yale, you know?
[01:15:49]  But they're a philanthropic organization.
[01:15:51]  So, you know, a student needs money or something and it's kind of like public that they need this or that.
[01:15:57]  they might get a check in the form of like $7,777.77 that just miraculously appears in their bedroom, like their dorm room, right?
[01:16:09]  Or they might have to go dig in a certain place, you know, and it's all kind of theatrical and they might have, they've had checks coming down at football games, like, you know, kind of in a like puff of smoke and a check comes down with a balloon.
[01:16:28]  And so he's used to doing things without his fingerprints being on them.
[01:16:33]  And to do that, one of the easiest ways to do that, if you're a corporate lawyer, is to set up front organizations.
[01:16:39]  So say one of the more interesting cases is in 1949, he asks a man named Duncan Lee, who's a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, a Woodbury Forest graduate, was General Donovan's right-hand man and aide at OSS, and was also almost certainly a spy for the NKBD, passing along information to his Russian handlers.
[01:17:04]  He never gets prosecuted because he never, like, he only did it orally, Boss.

=== Government Paranoia (14:23) ===

[01:17:11]  And he's still a good lawyer.
[01:17:14]  Yeah.
[01:17:14]  And he's still a gentleman.
[01:17:16]  And so, and he's probably not spying for the Soviets anymore.
[01:17:20]  And if he is, who gives a shit?
[01:17:22]  We're going to have him set up this airline in Hong Kong.
[01:17:26]  So Duncan Lee purchases this thing called Southern Air Transport or Cargo Air Transport that becomes Air America later on.
[01:17:34]  Now Southern Air Transport.
[01:17:35]  Right, now Southern Air Transport.
[01:17:37]  But that's one of Wisner's Far East adventures.
[01:17:41]  Well, I mean, even beyond that, you know, Wisner had all of these, like, what you described, especially with the press stuff, is often kind of roped into what is colloquially known and probably officially known to as Operation Mockingbird.
[01:17:53]  Right.
[01:17:53]  Now, Mockingbird, I think anyone who spends time on like conspiracy stuff will see it pop up a lot.
[01:17:59]  Right.
[01:18:00]  There is a lot of smoke and mirrors about Operation Mockingbird.
[01:18:04]  Right.
[01:18:04]  Like the official thing that actually happened.
[01:18:07]  And there's also a lot of like just, you can, like, the state of U.S. publishing today is, if you walk into Barnes  ⁇ Noble, 90% of the books that are produced there are made by one German conglomerate.
[01:18:19]  Yeah.
[01:18:20]  Bertelsmann media group, right?
[01:18:22]  And so whether that's like CIA or not, it doesn't matter.
[01:18:27]  They're one huge conglomerate that has huge corporate interests, right?
[01:18:32]  I think that one thing that like, you know, obviously we have much more insight into these things that happened in the past than we do about what might currently be happening today.
[01:18:39]  But I think that the astute observer can realize that like a lot of the stuff that they might need to do in Operation Mockingbird and operations like that of that nature is now today, they won the Cold War, right?
[01:18:53]  Capitalism had its triumph over Soviet communism.
[01:18:56]  Right.
[01:18:57]  Not necessarily over Chinese communism, but over Soviet communism.
[01:19:01]  And that means like that the there is no competing hegemon there anymore.
[01:19:08]  Obviously, we're seeing that change a little bit with the rise, the dragon rising in the east of China.
[01:19:15]  China.
[01:19:16]  A lot of the stuff that they might need to lean on somebody to talk about is now going to be talked about or written about in such a way or the opinion is going to be taken in such a way that it just completely aligns with the CIAs no matter what.
[01:19:28]  Oh, I mean, and they're still on the, like, I think a fun question to ask any national security reporter is, do you have a signed non-disclosure agreement with any federal agency?
[01:19:40]  Because a lot of them do.
[01:19:41]  Really?
[01:19:42]  For the record, I do not.
[01:19:44]  I have never done any of that shit.
[01:19:47]  You made me sign an NDA before I came to your hotel last night.
[01:19:50]  Well, you know, I've been told that actually NDAs are now unconstitutional.
[01:19:56]  Which I believe in.
[01:19:57]  NDAs are bullshit.
[01:19:58]  It seems dumb.
[01:19:59]  Yeah.
[01:19:59]  You know, it seems bad.
[01:20:00]  No, I had to do one before I went to all those like parties with Diddy.
[01:20:05]  You know, I mean, and I don't remember what happened.
[01:20:11]  But, but, you know, but Wisner sets up all these different groups, which basically what I'm saying with that, with the, with the Operation Mockingbird stuff is like this stuff became so hegemonic and so in the mainstream of America that it kind of replaced any kind of like dissonant press or anything like that.
[01:20:30]  And we had, of course, a resurgence of like the dissidents in the 1960s, 1970s.
[01:20:34]  And then that itself was either killed by the state or replaced by various ways, many of them very similar to the Operation Mockingbird stuff.
[01:20:42]  Well, or even like, and this is, you know, this is just me having fun with it, right?
[01:20:46]  But let's say the New York Herald Tribune, right?
[01:20:49]  Which nursed a young sharp writer from Virginia, from Lexington, in fact, or from Richmond who went to school in Lexington named Tom Wolf, right?
[01:20:59]  During the time that Tom Wolfe was at the New York Herald Tribune, it was owned by an OSS veteran.
[01:21:04]  Yeah.
[01:21:05]  And Wolf's interesting, you know, and so are Hunter, so is Hunter Thompson.
[01:21:10]  And in my, in one schema, I like to think that Hunter Thompson worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, right?
[01:21:18]  And he was kind of your left limit.
[01:21:21]  You couldn't be any more left than Hunter, right?
[01:21:23]  He's he's as radical as you can go.
[01:21:25]  You can like drugs, you can like guns, you can kind of like hate this and that, but you're still going to get in the limo with Richard Nixon and talk football.
[01:21:33]  Yeah.
[01:21:34]  Right?
[01:21:34]  That's Hunter.
[01:21:35]  And Tom Wolf is kind of like corralling the Merry Prankster's message.
[01:21:41]  Now, that's just me being paranoid, right?
[01:21:43]  I don't have any evidence that like two writers that inexplicably like made money throughout their entire career and never said certain things, you know, were in fact working for the government, but they certainly knew where their interests were.
[01:21:59]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[01:22:00]  And could like surf to that.
[01:22:01]  And I think we see that in like contemporary writing, publishing, podcasting, you know, art, interpretive dance.
[01:22:09]  Well, yeah.
[01:22:10]  Today.
[01:22:10]  And you go where the funding is.
[01:22:12]  And I think a lot of it is like that there are like unspoken safe limits of like what you should do and what you can talk about.
[01:22:19]  And like one of those is like you can't really be too nice about official enemies of the U.S., right?
[01:22:24]  Like you can't say anything nice about Maduro or about China or about North Korea or anything like this.
[01:22:28]  The Gero that I had from the Yemeni guy today, though, I can say nice things about that.
[01:22:34]  But I couldn't say that the Houthis made nice things.
[01:22:38]  Exactly.
[01:22:39]  Because there's just like a limit of where you can go because you run past the limits of like polite, even like left liberal society because like, well, this is like an authoritarian thing that you're behind.
[01:22:51]  There's like this gentle chiding and then there will be a harsh one.
[01:22:54]  No, and I drove through Telluride, Colorado one time blasting the Taliban national anthem.
[01:22:59]  Okay, well, that's like, they weren't, I just wanted them to know that like the Mujahideen were there for them, you know?
[01:23:07]  Like the brave people, the brave oppressed people of like Telluride could one day be free.
[01:23:12]  They could also, I mean, they could join the banner.
[01:23:14]  They're the towns of Colorado.
[01:23:16]  But I think that is important to note is that like this stuff became so hegemonic that like, you don't really even need somebody looking over your shoulder.
[01:23:23]  You're looking over your own shoulder.
[01:23:25]  Right.
[01:23:25]  And you're looking for your own career and you're looking for your own whatever.
[01:23:28]  And if you've ever gone to like a dinner party with like normal people that have normal jobs, they all like do that anyways.
[01:23:35]  Yeah.
[01:23:36]  You know, like it's hard to operate if you're in like trying to work your way up, I don't know, like the Ford Motor Company.
[01:23:43]  Yeah.
[01:23:44]  If you're not like kind of, oh, yeah, I can't say I think space aliens are real.
[01:23:49]  Yeah.
[01:23:49]  You know, like.
[01:23:50]  Well, space aliens, maybe.
[01:23:51]  I mean, maybe at this point, maybe like five or six years ago, there's been a vibe shift on that because I was doing UFO shit fairly early.
[01:23:58]  I hate aliens, my brother.
[01:24:00]  You don't even need to get into that.
[01:24:02]  I love all my brothers and sisters from the world.
[01:24:05]  No, it becomes much like what we've been talking about today.
[01:24:08]  It devolves quickly to like creepy Nazi mysticism.
[01:24:12]  Yes.
[01:24:12]  And I don't like it.
[01:24:14]  Matt, I will say this, though.
[01:24:15]  And almost as a piece to that, I am probably officially racist against aliens.
[01:24:22]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:23]  What are you doing here?
[01:24:24]  If you're coming from another world, drop some, like, you need to make yourself assimilated.
[01:24:30]  Like, you need to get in here.
[01:24:32]  And, like, I don't want you creeping around in your UFO behind the clouds, in the clouds, at Area 51.
[01:24:37]  You're hanging out with the government.
[01:24:38]  You're hanging out with the Pentagon.
[01:24:39]  No, I'm saying just come here, be normal for a few years, get a job.
[01:24:43]  I understand you get the big eyes and the three fingers or whatever, but just like be normal and assimilate.
[01:24:48]  I don't like them coming here and being like, we have flying saucers.
[01:24:51]  Counterpoint, though, there's a remote viewing document where they sent a remote viewer to psychically spy on Mars a million years ago.
[01:25:00]  And there's a possibility that what we call aliens are in fact the original inhabitants of Earth who have been here the whole time.
[01:25:07]  And we, us, we were Martians a million years ago until, you know, it's also the plot of Superman.
[01:25:14]  And Stargate.
[01:25:15]  And Stargate.
[01:25:16]  Isn't that also kind of a no, that's not the.
[01:25:19]  So, I mean, it could be, I understand where you're coming from with this, but perhaps we are, in fact, the colonizers of Earth.
[01:25:27]  Of Earth?
[01:25:28]  Of Earth.
[01:25:29]  Well, what else?
[01:25:30]  There was nowhere else to go.
[01:25:31]  I mean, at least surface Earth.
[01:25:33]  You know, we haven't yet reached the hollow Earth.
[01:25:36]  We got into the Hollow Earth.
[01:25:38]  Frankly, it can get terrifying.
[01:25:39]  Yeah, I don't want to get down there.
[01:25:40]  Too many white boys down there.
[01:25:43]  I have went out underground alien-based hunting one time in Dulcie, New Mexico.
[01:25:48]  For dumbs?
[01:25:50]  I actually, I've got a piece in County Highway coming out on bunkers and like doomsday bunkers.
[01:25:57]  I went to one down in the Greenbrier, which is this Gucci-ass resort just over the border from Virginia and West Virginia and White Sulphur Springs, where like the Vanderbilts and DuPonts and such used to go have summers.
[01:26:10]  You know, when it's too hot and you get your vapors.
[01:26:13]  You get your vapors.
[01:26:14]  You have to go somewhere else.
[01:26:16]  And it's also like the site of they built a giant bunker there in the same time as the Frank Wisner, as they're bringing rocket scientists over this and that.
[01:26:28]  There's nuclear paranoia.
[01:26:30]  And so I went out there and, boy, that was a trip.
[01:26:35]  I don't begrudge, like, this was supposed to be the congressional bunker, too.
[01:26:39]  And I don't begrudge like the government wanting to save themselves.
[01:26:43]  I understand that.
[01:26:44]  That's a self-preservation instinct.
[01:26:47]  Pisses me off to no end that they choose like a Gucci-Gucci resort to do it, right?
[01:26:52]  How they come.
[01:26:53]  Well, just go to Omaha like everybody else.
[01:26:57]  Get in a good, honest woman's bunker in Western Pennsylvania.
[01:27:01]  Yeah.
[01:27:01]  You know, like go to Raven Rock like a man.
[01:27:04]  Exactly.
[01:27:04]  Don't go down to the fucking Greenbrier, you know, where you can go bowling where the asters like to bowl.
[01:27:11]  My thing about nuclear apocalypse, let me die.
[01:27:14]  Just let me perish in the initial blast.
[01:27:17]  That's all I want.
[01:27:18]  Or become a hideous mutant.
[01:27:20]  Googles.
[01:27:21]  Ghouls.
[01:27:21]  Yeah.
[01:27:22]  Oh, yeah, exactly.
[01:27:23]  Like, let me become like a fucked up 3x Goro or whatever, like from Mortal Kombat.
[01:27:30]  Two extra arms, maybe make my penis a little bigger.
[01:27:32]  Make a bunch of people.
[01:27:33]  Second head for companionship?
[01:27:34]  Yeah, give me a hand or whatever.
[01:27:37]  Like from a chemical from Bibowitz.
[01:27:39]  Have you read that book?
[01:27:41]  I have not.
[01:27:42]  No, it's a fantastic book.
[01:27:43]  I actually, I don't read much for an English major or an English.
[01:27:47]  I read weird stuff, not like, you know, weird fucking book.
[01:27:51]  I'll say that.
[01:27:52]  All right, I'll pick it up.
[01:27:54]  But anyways, anyways, anyways, back to Wisner.
[01:27:56]  We got to talk about Wisner.
[01:27:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:58]  So 1950s, he gets into a little bit of foreign policy stuff.
[01:28:04]  Besides bringing all the Nazis and all the killers and the things are going bananas down south.
[01:28:10]  And also, they need to dispatch a man named Kermit to Iran to take care of a problem there.
[01:28:16]  And I'll adopt my mid-Atlantic accent for this.
[01:28:18]  Shout out to fellow veteran Nico Walker for giving me a copy of Kermit Roosevelt's book about coup of the coup in Iran.
[01:28:26]  He bonkers, man.
[01:28:28]  Signed by Kermit Roosevelt.
[01:28:29]  Really?
[01:28:29]  Yeah, I have it in my house.
[01:28:30]  Oh, that's awesome.
[01:28:31]  It's like the nicest thing anyone's ever given to me.
[01:28:32]  Oh, that's awesome.
[01:28:33]  But yes, dispatches Kermit Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, over to motherfucking Iran because the two days, the two-day party, not the two days, it's not really a significant, but the two-day, the Communist Party is getting a little too big for the Britches.
[01:28:50]  Masade is not getting along with the British.
[01:28:54]  There's some problems with the oil revenues.
[01:28:56]  Problems with the oil revenues.
[01:28:57]  The British are like, listen, we really don't like this guy yet.
[01:28:59]  And the Americans are like, well, we can help you with this.
[01:29:03]  And at the same time, you have what Hungary was 54 or 56.
[01:29:07]  56.
[01:29:08]  56.
[01:29:08]  So, okay.
[01:29:09]  Speaking of Nazi fucking.
[01:29:11]  So we'll get to that.
[01:29:12]  But like, yeah, it's busy.
[01:29:15]  And also from a like CIA, Washington, Georgetown set point of view, boy, those two things are super successful.
[01:29:24]  Yeah.
[01:29:25]  Because for the price of like one soldier dying accidentally in, what, Guatemala?
[01:29:33]  I didn't know about that.
[01:29:35]  They overthrow that.
[01:29:36]  The R Ben.
[01:29:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:29:38]  They take out Masade in 53.
[01:29:41]  Right.
[01:29:41]  And then in 56, there's this uprising in Hungary.
[01:29:44]  Yes.
[01:29:45]  And all of our, that's like really, it's funny because.
[01:29:48]  And Wisner's in Europe for this.
[01:29:49]  Well, we talked about them recruiting all of these like former Einsatzgruppen, like death squad guys from Eastern Europe after World War II when they were kind of on the run from the Soviets and sending them back in.
[01:29:59]  But one thing we haven't mentioned is a lot of the guys that the U.S. would send in, these like Belarus or fucking, these white Russian, fucking Ukrainian, Polish, you know, former death squad guys, they kind of parachute back into the old country to start setting up these stay-behind organizations.
[01:30:14]  They would get killed.
[01:30:16]  Yeah.
[01:30:16]  And like they would, they would, they would drop, they would drop in country and then like no more confidence.
[01:30:21]  It seems that there was a leak in the house.
[01:30:23]  Possibly a leak in the house.
[01:30:24]  I believe a British man.
[01:30:26]  But 56.
[01:30:27]  Shilby was leaking it all.
[01:30:30]  Telling them all.
[01:30:31]  56.
[01:30:33]  In Hungary, they're like, we sent those men to the death.
[01:30:36]  We're getting it.
[01:30:38]  We're going to take out the Soviets.
[01:30:39]  And then Khrushchev, a lot of people talk about tankies.
[01:30:42]  First of all, I just want to be very clear here.
[01:30:44]  I've said this before on the podcast.
[01:30:45]  If you self-identify as a tankie, that is so fucking corny.
[01:30:48]  But Khrushchev sends in the tanks.
[01:30:53]  Well, yes.
[01:30:54]  And at this time, too, Wisner is in Austria and Germany, and he's like steadily going bonkers.
[01:31:04]  He's going crazy.
[01:31:05]  Crazy.
[01:31:06]  He won't sleep for a week.
[01:31:08]  He's reading all the cable traffic.
[01:31:10]  He's blaming himself, largely because he did kind of activate all these Nazi sleeper cells and also student groups that were different.
[01:31:21]  Grad students.
[01:31:23]  Grad students.
[01:31:25]  This is a guy who can get grad students to do something.
[01:31:28]  Well, so one thing you should, we should talk about the Wisner student groups, right?
[01:31:32]  It's a big deal.
[01:31:33]  It is a big fucking deal.

=== Wisner Student Groups (02:21) ===

[01:31:34]  And it factors into some other work I'm doing on it, too.
[01:31:38]  So he had all of these, like, and not just student, but religious groups.
[01:31:41]  There's a book.
[01:31:42]  You mentioned the Wurlitzer earlier.
[01:31:43]  The Mighty Wlitzer.
[01:31:44]  There is a great book called The Mighty Wurlitzer by I believe a guy named, I'm doing this off the dome, so forgive me if I'm wrong, Hugh Wilford, who just wrote a new book about the CIA that came out last month.
[01:31:53]  Is it good?
[01:31:54]  I don't know.
[01:31:56]  I ordered it.
[01:31:56]  It should actually be at my house today.
[01:31:58]  I was like, maybe we'll get him on the motherfucking pod.
[01:32:00]  Yeah.
[01:32:00]  And he's in Long Beach, so nice.
[01:32:03]  But we, yes, we, my friends and I and the CIA in 1950s start all these like religious organizations that are like corresponding to people behind the iron curtain.
[01:32:17]  And my friend Tim Shorick's starting to do work on how that worked in the Far East too, because his dad worked for the Worldwide Council of Churches, which was getting money right and left.
[01:32:28]  Because also in China, like the people with the best relationships in China at the time were either like Christian missionaries or representatives from Yale University, or they were guys who had been buying opium there since the 1800s.
[01:32:44]  God, yes.
[01:32:45]  You know, like some of the Boston Brahmin types.
[01:32:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:32:48]  Which is not too different from the Yale's.
[01:32:50]  Or are you talking about the China Hand type?
[01:32:51]  Well, the China Hand types that the welds, you know, that, hey, we made a killing and shipping.
[01:33:00]  We were running something through the Mediterranean Sea into China.
[01:33:04]  And the Barbary pirates wanted it.
[01:33:06]  So we sent Marines into Libya.
[01:33:08]  Yep, yep.
[01:33:09]  First of all, why do I get that voice when I do that?
[01:33:12]  That was the first overseas deployment of gas troops.
[01:33:14]  Yeah, it was to protect a fucking opium route.
[01:33:16]  But we're far afield from Hungary now.
[01:33:19]  So we're back in Hungary.
[01:33:20]  He activates all of his little organizations.
[01:33:23]  And then they get fucking crushed.
[01:33:24]  They get smoked.
[01:33:25]  They get smoked.
[01:33:26]  And he's at the Austrian border watching the refugees come over.
[01:33:30]  So watching dudes that he sent essentially to the, you know, coming back over.
[01:33:34]  And it breaks him.
[01:33:36]  His personal assistant has to take him to the like station chief Germany's house or Berlin's house, Tracy Barnes, who like looks exactly what you think like a CIA guy from that point should look like, takes him to Tracy Barnes' house and the assistant's like, hey, do you have any like model trains in the house?

=== Disassociation And Doubt (16:02) ===

[01:33:56]  And like Barnes' wife is like, yeah, like the kid has one upstairs.
[01:34:00]  And he's like, okay, we got to send Frank up there to like play with the model train so he can calm down.
[01:34:05]  Wow.
[01:34:06]  And so something very similar happened to me as listeners to this podcast will know about a week ago when I was at a concert.
[01:34:12]  I disassociated and thought I had cancer.
[01:34:14]  Oh, really?
[01:34:15]  And then no.
[01:34:16]  Oh, that's good.
[01:34:17]  Me?
[01:34:17]  I hope not.
[01:34:17]  I hope not.
[01:34:19]  And people are calling it a panic attack.
[01:34:21]  Many people are trying to besmirch my character with these things.
[01:34:24]  But I was brought back to earth by thinking of a certain phrase.
[01:34:28]  What was it?
[01:34:29]  Was your anchor?
[01:34:29]  I don't want to bring it.
[01:34:30]  This is the last time I'm doing this up on the show.
[01:34:33]  What if you said he, him, like a donkey says he-ha?
[01:34:36]  Oh.
[01:34:36]  Gender donkey.
[01:34:37]  Gender donkey.
[01:34:38]  And so that brought me back.
[01:34:40]  Were you at a Shrekgrave?
[01:34:42]  No, I was at a folk concert.
[01:34:44]  Oh, okay.
[01:34:45]  A little bit of Bossanoba in there.
[01:34:46]  Yeah.
[01:34:47]  Yeah.
[01:34:47]  So he's like, he goes fucking bonker.
[01:34:51]  And he had been going nuts before, too.
[01:34:53]  So I read that.
[01:34:54]  There's that, Burton Hirsch is the guy's name.
[01:34:56]  He wrote this book called The Old Boys.
[01:34:58]  Yeah.
[01:34:58]  Is this the one where he's telling the shit story like the whole time?
[01:35:01]  Oh.
[01:35:01]  Tells like a long involved story that involves like a Soviet officer and like stalls and not enough toilet paper.
[01:35:09]  And after that, his wife was kind of like, she buttonholed a couple of the CIA guys and were like, hey.
[01:35:14]  My husband's crazy.
[01:35:16]  Like, yeah, we might.
[01:35:16]  And so then he goes to Shepard Pratt psychiatric facility in 1956 as Dick Helms, who had met Adolf Hitler and interviewed him when he was an AP reporter, slowly like takes him and Richard Bissell kind of take or Bissell?
[01:35:35]  I don't know.
[01:35:35]  Take over.
[01:35:37]  Bissell.
[01:35:38]  You know what?
[01:35:39]  Chernon rule we haven't brought up in a while.
[01:35:41]  You can pronounce a name in any way you want.
[01:35:44]  Nick Sone.
[01:35:44]  So there's certain weird Nick Solne.
[01:35:47]  We call on this show objective words and subjective words.
[01:35:50]  There are some words that we all say the same way, and there are some that were and.
[01:35:55]  Oh, and.
[01:35:55]  But some people call it and.
[01:35:56]  Yeah, I guess that's true.
[01:35:58]  But there are some that are subjective.
[01:36:00]  Like any names or things that Liz says sometimes.
[01:36:03]  Is this a soda or a pop?
[01:36:05]  That's a soda.
[01:36:06]  That's a soda to me.
[01:36:08]  You're from fucking.
[01:36:10]  I'm a Rocky Mountain boy.
[01:36:12]  So when you're in college, this would have been a pop.
[01:36:14]  You wouldn't have to.
[01:36:15]  Until I was assimilated into the East Coast culture, and now it's a soda.
[01:36:19]  Let me ask you this.
[01:36:20]  What's a dirty soda?
[01:36:23]  It's a soda I want to hang out with.
[01:36:25]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:36:26]  No, I actually don't know.
[01:36:27]  What is it?
[01:36:28]  I think they're doing that in Utah.
[01:36:30]  Oh, I do know what that is.
[01:36:32]  It's like so much sugar.
[01:36:33]  That's right.
[01:36:34]  Okay.
[01:36:34]  Yeah, these are, so Mormons don't typically drink alcohol or use other types of conventional intoxicants.
[01:36:42]  No caffeine, right?
[01:36:43]  Yeah.
[01:36:44]  Well, the caffeine thing, no coffee.
[01:36:46]  No coffee.
[01:36:46]  No drinks, my hot drinks.
[01:36:48]  No hot drinks.
[01:36:48]  They are not for the belly.
[01:36:49]  No mocha either.
[01:36:51]  No decaf even.
[01:36:52]  But there are, like, and there's some Mormons that won't drink Coca-Cola or caffeine.
[01:36:59]  And then there are some that decide, that's all I'm going to drink.
[01:37:02]  But what I need is for you to add four different types of those syrups that like the baristas, you know, like my bikini baristas in Arkansas.
[01:37:11]  Yeah.
[01:37:12]  They have like the pump stuff and they can make you a drink that's just like a hundred, like a thousand things of sugar.
[01:37:17]  Yeah.
[01:37:18]  You know, real good, but real bad.
[01:37:19]  But it's interesting because Mormons, I feel like, are generally like in pretty good shape, right?
[01:37:24]  Like when you think of a Mormon, you sort of think of like a square chest that's going to be a little bit more.
[01:37:27]  I'm trying to buy it.
[01:37:28]  You know, I've been to Salt Lake City a couple times.
[01:37:30]  It's not nearly as poor scene as much of America is.
[01:37:34]  Yeah.
[01:37:34]  It's, I mean, yeah, they're suggesties.
[01:37:38]  They're inactive folk.
[01:37:39]  Because they have the zoomies.
[01:37:41]  And that's why.
[01:37:42]  Yeah.
[01:37:42]  And, you know, other areas, they're not consuming the alcohol calories.
[01:37:48]  So you get the soda calories, but you can only have so much.
[01:37:50]  I don't drink alcohol.
[01:37:51]  I'm a terrible shame.
[01:37:52]  But anyway, so fucking Wisner's in the nuthouse.
[01:37:56]  In Shepherd's.
[01:37:57]  That's crazy.
[01:37:58]  And this, for anyone that's going through and doing archival research, all you poor souls.
[01:38:03]  Actually, I really like it and I think it's fun.
[01:38:05]  But this is something where there's one file that was like financial invoices.
[01:38:10]  And I'm like, oh, that's going to be a boring file.
[01:38:12]  Okay, I got to look through it anyways.
[01:38:14]  No, it wasn't boring at all because it had day by day every book and every article of clothing that he was getting delivered to him at the mental hospital.
[01:38:25]  So like for me as a writer, if I'm like writing a novel that has Frank Wisner in it, it's nice to know that he's reading like a history of the British Empire before in the mental hospital right before they give him his kind of like, hey, you'll be fine doing this job as the station chief in London, which he goes to right after he gets out of the mental hospital.
[01:38:46]  Yeah.
[01:38:47]  And that's where actually my, the high school I went to comes into play.
[01:38:52]  Because going through that file, I see in 1960, Frank Wisner getting invited to be briefed in on this concept for the Atlantic College.
[01:39:04]  And I'm like, oh, that's weird.
[01:39:05]  Because I went to this place called the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico.
[01:39:11]  Oh, yeah, that was like the weird school you went to.
[01:39:13]  It was founded by Armand Hammer and King Charles back when King Charles was prince in the 1980s.
[01:39:20]  It's international baccalaureate and has students from 79 different countries.
[01:39:25]  When I went there, everyone was on scholarship.
[01:39:28]  Are you in the CIA?
[01:39:29]  No, no.
[01:39:32]  Thankfully, I do too much weed.
[01:39:34]  They don't let you smoke the weed in the city.
[01:39:36]  Don't let you smoke dope in there?
[01:39:37]  Yeah.
[01:39:38]  And also, I don't, I actually like, I grew up around those guys.
[01:39:41]  And like, then I think like my platoon kind of worked for them in Afghanistan for a little bit.
[01:39:46]  I haven't been very impressed by them.
[01:39:48]  Really?
[01:39:48]  I'm better at getting information than most of the case officers I know.
[01:39:52]  Like, they're not very personable people.
[01:39:53]  Have you like, have you hung out with CIA people this year?
[01:39:56]  Well, and I meet with one once a week who like gives us our episodes.
[01:39:58]  Like your handlers are a handler, right?
[01:40:00]  Yeah.
[01:40:00]  But he's your handler.
[01:40:01]  Yeah.
[01:40:02]  My handler is a maternal, like a very maternal, like 68-year-old woman.
[01:40:05]  Oh, well, they know the time.
[01:40:07]  I had to wear a diaper and it's this whole thing.
[01:40:10]  Oh, Elon got kicked out of one of those.
[01:40:12]  Oh, God.
[01:40:12]  And you saw the furry picture.
[01:40:14]  You saw the furry picture?
[01:40:15]  Oh, my God.
[01:40:16]  By the way, I know.
[01:40:17]  Any info on Elon's sex life?
[01:40:20]  Again, I make this call frequently, make it once again.
[01:40:24]  Please hit us up.
[01:40:25]  Oh, it's like the bay is such a like, just awful cesspool.
[01:40:31]  It's driven me crazy twice.
[01:40:33]  The Bay Area.
[01:40:33]  You know, it's why I feel some like sympathetic code with like Wisner's fall.
[01:40:38]  It's like, I've been in mental hospitals.
[01:40:39]  They're not fun.
[01:40:40]  I've been in a mental hospital in the Bay, but you know what?
[01:40:42]  Oh.
[01:40:43]  In there for six hours and they let me out because they declared me not crazy.
[01:40:46]  Ooh, good for you.
[01:40:47]  They thought I was trying to jump off a roof, but I actually was just ODing on it, bitch.
[01:40:52]  Well, like, this is actually the most sane person.
[01:40:54]  Yeah, and I was like, no, they started that right up.
[01:40:56]  I was kicked out of my apartment, and so I'm doing drugs on the roof, and I did too much.
[01:41:02]  Yeah.
[01:41:02]  I don't understand what part of this makes you think I was going to jump.
[01:41:05]  Yeah.
[01:41:05]  Like, okay.
[01:41:07]  Yeah.
[01:41:07]  And they let me out.
[01:41:08]  Overreacting as always.
[01:41:09]  Exactly.
[01:41:11]  But so Wisner goes fucking bananas, bonkers crazy.
[01:41:14]  It was bonkers crazy.
[01:41:15]  They let him out.
[01:41:16]  They let him out.
[01:41:17]  He gets electroshock.
[01:41:18]  And he tells Chip Bolan, who's like a Soviet analysis pooba at State Department.
[01:41:25]  He's like, you know, like, if you knew what happened to me in there, like, you'd never forgive yourself.
[01:41:30]  Like, you didn't have a good time.
[01:41:32]  Have you ever been Electroshocked?
[01:41:34]  I've not.
[01:41:34]  No, I got a stellic ganglion block.
[01:41:37]  You got PTSD, which was great.
[01:41:39]  And like that, I didn't, I just did that for Playboy.
[01:41:42]  Like, Playboy wanted me to go do a story.
[01:41:44]  I thought it was just going to be a dumb story and like something, you know, it wasn't going to fucking work, but they were going to pay me.
[01:41:49]  It helped out a lot, actually.
[01:41:51]  But I've never, no, the Electroshock scares me.
[01:41:55]  Yeah.
[01:41:55]  And frankly, like now that the VA, we were talking about veteran suicide rates earlier.
[01:42:01]  You know how many fucking pills the VA loaded me up on?
[01:42:04]  How many?
[01:42:05]  What's the most amount of pills you've been on at one time?
[01:42:07]  Like nine?
[01:42:08]  Nine pills?
[01:42:09]  All for the noggin?
[01:42:10]  All for the well, for the noggin.
[01:42:12]  And then I believe at that time there was some gabapentin and they were easier on the uh they were easier on the old perco set for a little while, you know, which was good times, man.
[01:42:20]  One time, one time I fucked, this was when I was, I had broken my back, and so I was going to school at the University of Arkansas while recruiting, while recuperating.
[01:42:28]  I fucked up in the morning and took my ambien rather than my Adderall.
[01:42:33]  You dumb motherfucker.
[01:42:34]  And so then to compensate for it, I just took twice the dose of Adderall and went to class.
[01:42:39]  Did it work?
[01:42:40]  Not really, man.
[01:42:40]  I didn't make any sense.
[01:42:41]  Because I don't take ambiene because it's like, it's like addictive or whatever.
[01:42:45]  I do.
[01:42:45]  But I take Trazodone and that also makes you kind of like that.
[01:42:48]  No, I don't like it.
[01:42:49]  I've been on that.
[01:42:49]  That's not that.
[01:42:50]  I do not like it.
[01:42:51]  Plus, it's an SSR.
[01:42:53]  Yeah.
[01:42:53]  You've been on.
[01:42:54]  Oh, yeah.
[01:42:54]  Yeah.
[01:42:55]  I think it is, but I'm not on it for that.
[01:42:57]  I'm on it for sleep.
[01:42:59]  And I'll tell you this: if you don't fall asleep, you get in some wacky motherfucking places.
[01:43:03]  But that's where I found the, and I'm not evangelical on like anything, but you've talked about it.
[01:43:08]  But this shot thing, well, I mean, obviously, you know, everyone has the capability.
[01:43:13]  He's there.
[01:43:13]  Just, you know, chat.
[01:43:15]  But like that shot helped me sleep.
[01:43:18]  That was like, that's the main thing with it.
[01:43:21]  Maybe I should get this.
[01:43:24]  It's safer technically than taking an aspirin.
[01:43:27]  Wow.
[01:43:27]  There's no, like, the only harm to it would be from your like checkbook for writing, you know, the check to the anesthesiologist.
[01:43:34]  I got, yeah, I got to be real.
[01:43:35]  If I got some crazy shot with a long name, people, the, the, the theories that people about me have.
[01:43:40]  Dakota Meyer got one.
[01:43:42]  It helped Dakota.
[01:43:43]  He talked about it.
[01:43:44]  Cord Meyer.
[01:43:44]  That does not help my case.
[01:43:46]  No, no, no, no, not Cord, Dakota.
[01:43:48]  Dakota.
[01:43:48]  The Marine that won the, that earned the Medal of Honor.
[01:43:51]  Not one.
[01:43:52]  You don't win it.
[01:43:53]  But Cord Meyer is another.
[01:43:55]  Apparently, you know, you kill a lot of people.
[01:43:57]  You have like something really fucked up happen, and then you kill a lot of people and maybe save somebody.
[01:44:02]  And that's how you get it.
[01:44:03]  Do you have any medals?
[01:44:05]  I have an Army commandation.
[01:44:07]  I have like three Army commendation medals.
[01:44:09]  I have a combat infantryman badge, which means I got shot at and like shot at people.
[01:44:13]  I wear that, and then I wear my gold star lapel pin, and that's because I have a dead brother.
[01:44:18]  Oh, yes, yes.
[01:44:19]  And who died in a helicopter crash.
[01:44:21]  So they give you a badge for that.
[01:44:22]  They do?
[01:44:23]  Uh-huh.
[01:44:23]  Yeah.
[01:44:24]  Man, really?
[01:44:26]  You don't have any Purple Hearts?
[01:44:27]  No, no, I never got shot.
[01:44:28]  I never got blown up either, which was cool.
[01:44:31]  Like, I saw people get blown up.
[01:44:32]  And those guys, the thing that fucks up from that is like, did you get blown up?
[01:44:37]  Did you have like one of mine?
[01:44:39]  Oh, that's not good.
[01:44:40]  But it didn't go off.
[01:44:41]  Oh, well, that's better.
[01:44:42]  Yeah.
[01:44:42]  Yeah.
[01:44:42]  That could have been like.
[01:44:44]  On my, like, my last day.
[01:44:46]  Oh, yeah.
[01:44:47]  Oh, man.
[01:44:47]  Look at this Polish guy who later did get both of his legs blown off by a mine.
[01:44:53]  That's such a like, such a like lethal weapon type.
[01:44:56]  Like, I had one day left until retirement.
[01:44:58]  Too old for this.
[01:44:59]  I was so pissed because they were like, they were like.
[01:45:01]  Too short for this.
[01:45:03]  He wasn't very far off, but they were like, go get him.
[01:45:05]  We need to leave.
[01:45:06]  Because they were actually taking me from the front that day.
[01:45:08]  I was going.
[01:45:09]  They picked me up.
[01:45:10]  My commander picked me up in a minivan.
[01:45:11]  Right.
[01:45:12]  Or not my commander, but what kind of minivan?
[01:45:14]  Like, whatever kind of minivan I got in Syria.
[01:45:16]  I don't know.
[01:45:16]  Okay.
[01:45:17]  And I had to go find this dude, this Polish guy, and I walked and I stepped on this like, I don't know if they have these in Afghanistan, but they're like long switches.
[01:45:28]  Yeah.
[01:45:28]  And they like, you like, they bury them under the ground, these little plastic things.
[01:45:32]  You step on the plastic things, it triggers explosives.
[01:45:35]  They were starting to do those down south after I got out of there.
[01:45:39]  So that's like why there's a lot of like legless Marines, you know, is they got better at like the anti-personnel shit.
[01:45:45]  Well, so I stepped on one of those and it just didn't go off.
[01:45:49]  And I was like, okay, keep on doing it.
[01:45:52]  Alhamdulillah, man.
[01:45:53]  Keep a push.
[01:45:54]  Hell yeah.
[01:45:55]  And that's another thing.
[01:45:56]  You know, people talk about like God in war or whatever, but sometimes you're like, man, I think these guys maybe are like way more in touch with God than we are because they're like really yelling about him.
[01:46:08]  I found it interesting how much cross-cultural communication has, like, how many of my Afghan war buddies who say shit like, inshallah, alhamdulillah, yeah, I think it's a great thing.
[01:46:24]  There's a lot, like, I also found a lot of us came back being like, oh, actually, like, those mountain hillbillies we were fighting in Afghanistan, like pretty tough.
[01:46:34]  Yeah.
[01:46:34]  You know, like, there's not much.
[01:46:38]  I don't know.
[01:46:39]  I don't have that.
[01:46:39]  Like, I don't have bad feelings towards those guys.
[01:46:42]  You know, I don't.
[01:46:42]  Taliban?
[01:46:43]  Yeah, I don't want to live.
[01:46:44]  I don't want to live under them.
[01:46:45]  You know, I don't think they, you know, I mean, it's not my style.
[01:46:49]  Yeah.
[01:46:50]  And I'm not Muslim.
[01:46:50]  You know, it's listen, it's there.
[01:46:52]  Hopefully they create some trade routes with China.
[01:46:54]  I mean, you know, do something.
[01:46:56]  They were all trained by the CIA and Guantanamo.
[01:46:59]  You know, they all got mind control to go back there.
[01:47:02]  It is true that, yeah, it is true.
[01:47:04]  I mean, no, they didn't.
[01:47:05]  No.
[01:47:06]  The Taliban Red unit's real.
[01:47:08]  Taliban Red Unit?
[01:47:09]  You know, like the Taliban Special Forces guys.
[01:47:12]  And have you seen the rollerblading Taliban?
[01:47:14]  I have.
[01:47:14]  Fuck, dude.
[01:47:15]  Like, we built those roads, man.
[01:47:18]  We built those fucking roads.
[01:47:20]  And who got those rollerblades?
[01:47:21]  Yeah.
[01:47:33]  So, we gotta get back to Wizard real quick.
[01:47:36]  So Wisner, it's it's and he actually quit.
[01:47:39]  Um, he quit the OSS originally because they wouldn't buy him 200 bicycles to send out, to send German snitches out on.
[01:47:47]  He's like, this is a chicken shit organization.
[01:47:50]  Like, speaking of the rollerblade.
[01:47:53]  I put in a requisition for 200 bicycles.
[01:47:55]  They wouldn't let me buy them.
[01:47:57]  Like, fuck you guys.
[01:47:58]  I'm going back to Wall Street.
[01:47:59]  And then he goes back to Wall Street.
[01:48:00]  He's like, God, this is bored.
[01:48:02]  I can't overthrow anything.
[01:48:05]  Well, so, so, you know, he's in London.
[01:48:08]  Right.
[01:48:08]  For 1960s.
[01:48:10]  How long is he there for?
[01:48:11]  He's there for about two years until he makes a 2 a.m. phone call to a British minister telling him what he should say the next day.
[01:48:18]  What was the 2 a.m.?
[01:48:20]  What was the, what was he saying?
[01:48:21]  Probably, I don't, it wasn't even that important.
[01:48:24]  It was just mostly that he was spinning out again.
[01:48:27]  Well, so that is that's that's something that I brought up Burton Hirsch's book, The Old Boys Earlier, but I didn't actually say what my point was from it.
[01:48:35]  One of the things that's described kind of over and over in that book about Wisner is that he would have these like manic moments, I guess, or like periods where you know, you're talking about the Operation Mockingbird stuff, right?
[01:48:45]  And like, you know, he's setting up all these like different organizations and like leaning on these journalists, but then sometimes he would like spend like hours on like trying to get one thing taken out of like an article that actually was not did not care at all.
[01:48:56]  And so he'd have these like manic like spin outs, and then kind of that would drive him kind of insane.
[01:49:01]  Mania, I think, is and he had like a pirate crew working for him.
[01:49:05]  Like Carmeloffee, who is fascinating.
[01:49:08]  Do you know about Carmeloffee?
[01:49:09]  No.
[01:49:09]  So Carmeloffy was an openly gay State Department officer in the 40s who like got caught up in the lavender scare, but he was incredibly effective when he was working at embassies in Europe.
[01:49:22]  And he would, I mean, he would like walk up to dudes and like pinch their nipples mid-conversation.
[01:49:27]  That's a bracelet.
[01:49:28]  No, I wouldn't do that.
[01:49:30]  So, and he would also get in trouble with the State Department because he had a sideline.
[01:49:35]  Like, he was like that character in Catch 22 that was always wheeling dealing.
[01:49:39]  Yeah.
[01:49:40]  You know, he'd send shit through diplomatic pouches.
[01:49:42]  Oh, I would love to do that.
[01:49:44]  He got so much shit done in post-war Germany because he went and just hung out with all the Nazis' wives at the country clubs.
[01:49:51]  Yeah.
[01:49:52]  And if, like, so he was like, what's the tea?
[01:49:54]  Yeah.
[01:49:54]  Well, and he would be like, you know, Franz should really do this.

=== Kim Philby's Espionage Tactics (07:37) ===

[01:49:58]  Yeah.
[01:49:58]  But like, Franz is not doing this, and it's not going to go well for Franz.
[01:50:02]  And if you know anything about Germans, you know that like women run those houses, like women run shit in Germany.
[01:50:10]  I know as little about Germans as humanly possible due to my distaste for that race.
[01:50:15]  My mother's side is German, Swiss German.
[01:50:17]  Oh, but some are good.
[01:50:19]  No, all the, all the good, honestly, all the good Germans and Swiss left in the 16, 17, 18, 1900s.
[01:50:27]  Like by World War II, all the good ones were gone.
[01:50:29]  They've been Germany.
[01:50:30]  I would agree.
[01:50:31]  The Anabaptists, the Mennonites, they're all gone.
[01:50:33]  They all split.
[01:50:34]  It's just all the most evil chocolate cheers on the planet.
[01:50:40]  So what were we talking about?
[01:50:41]  I don't remember.
[01:50:42]  Oh, wait.
[01:50:43]  What were we talking about?
[01:50:44]  We were talking about, oh, Wisner, 62.
[01:50:46]  62.
[01:50:47]  So what else happens in 1962?
[01:50:49]  Kim Philby.
[01:50:50]  Kim Philby, who Wisner was catching on to.
[01:50:53]  And I got to tell you, I've said this before.
[01:50:55]  I'll say it again.
[01:50:56]  Philby's the fucking goat.
[01:50:58]  Philby is like, okay, Philby is the like the skeleton key for understanding what role class plays in espionage.
[01:51:06]  Absolutely.
[01:51:07]  Absolutely.
[01:51:08]  Because everyone knows that Philby is probably not right.
[01:51:13]  There's something going on there that does.
[01:51:15]  There's something wrong.
[01:51:17]  But he's an old boy.
[01:51:18]  And he was in the right clubs.
[01:51:20]  He would never have betrayed him.
[01:51:21]  He has the correct tie.
[01:51:22]  Yes.
[01:51:23]  You know, he knows.
[01:51:24]  He's got his feminist wife.
[01:51:27]  Yeah, he's just fine.
[01:51:30]  I can't.
[01:51:31]  And James Angleton is like, oh, no, Kim Philby couldn't possibly be a spy.
[01:51:38]  I love James Angleton.
[01:51:39]  He's fucking wild.
[01:51:40]  He went to his grave in Idaho.
[01:51:42]  Really?
[01:51:42]  Yeah, there were orchids there.
[01:51:44]  Somebody still puts orchids on mother's grave.
[01:51:47]  Wow.
[01:51:48]  Yeah, man.
[01:51:49]  I mean, yeah.
[01:51:51]  And it's right next to the Japanese part of the cemetery.
[01:51:54]  Interesting.
[01:51:54]  Is the Japanese part of the cemetery then?
[01:51:56]  Idaho has a long tradition of Japanese potato farmers.
[01:52:00]  Well, had, had, up until the 40s.
[01:52:02]  And then they all got taken to internment camps in Utah where they were interrogated by Sam Walton of Walmart.
[01:52:11]  Then returned to the Midwest and started a line of chain stores.
[01:52:16]  But Philby really does unlock a lot of these guys and he breaks a lot of these guys.
[01:52:21]  That's one of the things they can't fathom the betrayal.
[01:52:24]  Philby's been in their homes.
[01:52:26]  And that's why I respect Philby basically so much for his work here because he dedicated his life and he really does seem to be obviously at some point becoming.
[01:52:36]  He was an Englishman, but also a communist, damn it.
[01:52:39]  But it's obviously at some point when you're in this for so long, it's got to be love of the game.
[01:52:43]  You know what I mean?
[01:52:44]  Oh, yeah.
[01:52:45]  And that's a John LeCarre-ass kind of way of thinking about it.
[01:52:49]  But I do think there's some reality there.
[01:52:51]  No, but it's true.
[01:52:52]  I mean, you meet any Wall Street dude, they have a similar love of getting away with shit.
[01:52:58]  There is something to it.
[01:53:00]  But Philby, I mean, obviously all the intelligence he gives about these Nazis, you know, being like, or these collaborators being like parachuted, all the things, all the intelligence coups are incredible in themselves.
[01:53:10]  But I think the real coup with Philby is this complete just like destruction of the psyche of so many Western spies.
[01:53:18]  Yeah.
[01:53:18]  And like this incredible blow to morality.
[01:53:21]  Got inside their OODA loops.
[01:53:25]  Douchebags might say now.
[01:53:28]  I don't like the OODA loop.
[01:53:29]  What the fuck is OODA loop?
[01:53:30]  You know, it's a military like theory conception, the observe, orient, decide, and act.
[01:53:35]  It was developed by a colonel named John Boyd, who is, there's like a theoretical wing of the military, like the intellectuals.
[01:53:42]  These are army guys that are also generally like the best small unit fighting force in the world was the Wehrmacht.
[01:53:49]  And you're like, okay.
[01:53:51]  Well, I beat them.
[01:53:53]  People don't understand.
[01:53:54]  People talk about the Army as like big things as like rape, heroin, killing civilians.
[01:53:59]  But really, one of their biggest creations that they make is slideshows.
[01:54:03]  And you need guys to make slideshows.
[01:54:05]  PowerPoints.
[01:54:06]  PowerPoints is mostly that you seem to do in the Army besides shooting.
[01:54:10]  Microsoft Office powers the U.S. military.
[01:54:13]  Incredible.
[01:54:14]  It's wild.
[01:54:15]  So 62.
[01:54:17]  Yeah.
[01:54:18]  Wisner's out of England.
[01:54:19]  Where does he go next?
[01:54:20]  He's out of England.
[01:54:21]  He becomes a special assistant to John McCone for about a year.
[01:54:26]  And that's kind of like the same thing that like if a general gets in trouble now, they become a special assistant to like the chief of staff while kind of their paperwork is processed.
[01:54:37]  So they're just like, yeah, shunt it aside, basically.
[01:54:39]  But then he gets out and he gets really into spy novels and influencing publishing like overtly.
[01:54:47]  He's decided, okay, I'm out.
[01:54:49]  So now what I can do is he gets with this Scottish writer. who used to work for MI6 named Helen McGinnis.
[01:54:57]  And he starts giving her notes on novels.
[01:55:00]  And it becomes almost a proto-like format.
[01:55:02]  And this was unintentional.
[01:55:04]  I didn't expect to find this link, but there's a continuity from Frank Wisner in the 60s helping Helen McGinnis with her spy novels up to Robert Gates helping Tom Clancy with his spy novels in the 80s.
[01:55:18]  Because weirdly enough, I found in the archives, there's this OSS dinner in the 60s, in 64, in fact, a year before Wisner kills himself.
[01:55:28]  Wisner is seated at a table at this OSS veterans dinner at like the Waldorf or somewhere in New York with Bill Casey.
[01:55:39]  And they operated very similarly in certain areas, specifically the way that they used black propaganda and covert influencing mechanisms, you know?
[01:55:51]  Because again, their line for this is it's moral and acceptable to do all these things because we're avoiding a war by doing these.
[01:56:01]  Yes.
[01:56:01]  Right.
[01:56:02]  Now, there are other ways to avoid a war that they just never consider.
[01:56:06]  Right.
[01:56:06]  But, you know.
[01:56:10]  That's what they think.
[01:56:11]  And then I think also.
[01:56:12]  We would like to be able to drill for oil anywhere in the world that we would like.
[01:56:15]  Well, it also becomes a self-fulfilling, not self-fulfilling, but like self-reinforcing thing where like you don't even really think about the nuclear war aspect of it.
[01:56:22]  It's like it's right because you're doing it.
[01:56:23]  It's like Elon Musk buying Twitter.
[01:56:25]  And then he just gets fucking like sucked into it and obsessed with it and it drives him crazy.
[01:56:29]  Exactly.
[01:56:29]  I mean, it seems like there's a universal, because obviously like any red-blooded American, like I'm, I'm partial, I've read so many spy novels.
[01:56:38]  Yeah.
[01:56:39]  And also just like through the course of not only the show, but like my whole life basically have read all these books about spies in history.
[01:56:47]  Right.
[01:56:47]  And one thing that becomes blindingly apparent is that it becomes its own fucking thing almost divorced from like whatever ostensible goals that it actually has.
[01:56:56]  And I think that's what makes it, especially in America, the CIA so dangerous.
[01:57:00]  And one of the reasons why places they recruit from, like we were talking about with Wisner, are they recruit a lot of frat boys, you know, a lot of religious people, like very religious people, people with some sense of like group identity that they're loyal to, like to the extreme.
[01:57:19]  Mormons in the FBI.
[01:57:20]  Mormons in the FBI, Mormons in the CIA.
[01:57:22]  Yeah.
[01:57:23]  Like, you know, both Mormons in the military, but not necessarily the combat arms portions, right?
[01:57:29]  That's the Jack Mormons going to that.
[01:57:32]  But there's a lot of like Mormons in logistics, you know.

=== Ecology and Timber Legacy (03:30) ===

[01:57:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:57:37]  Yeah.
[01:57:39]  And and and so he's he's dealing with this lady.
[01:57:42]  He's writing these, he's he's helping her write these books.
[01:57:44]  Right.
[01:57:45]  He's doing long reviews of Alan Dulles' The Craft of Intelligence book, which he probably helped write as well.
[01:57:53]  And he's kind of and he's also going into business with a guy named John Graham, trying to doing like various investment banking things, you know, working with various foundations.
[01:58:06]  He gets really into ecology at one point, which is weird because he's from a timber family.
[01:58:11]  Yeah.
[01:58:11]  So what kind of ecological like studies is a timber family going to do on like, you know, reforestation, right?
[01:58:19]  Like, and that's where a lot of like, a lot of the things that are just kind of out there in the world where you're like, okay, what's actually behind this?
[01:58:30]  Yeah.
[01:58:31]  You know, whether it's the way that certain oil companies will finance anti-oil things, as long as it's directed against a rival oil company's pipeline or project, right?
[01:58:43]  Like then they'll underwrite that.
[01:58:45]  That's fine.
[01:58:47]  The world is a strange and mysterious place.
[01:58:49]  Wilderness of mirrors.
[01:58:50]  It really is.
[01:58:52]  It really is.
[01:58:54]  65, though.
[01:58:56]  Yes.
[01:58:57]  65 comes up.
[01:58:58]  October, he's supposed to go bird hunting in Spain.
[01:59:02]  He's not able to.
[01:59:04]  He's having another episode.
[01:59:05]  He's had a hernia surgery earlier and possibly the anesthesia from that, you know, whatever.
[01:59:11]  But he has an episode.
[01:59:12]  It's severe enough that his wife, Polly, calls the groundskeeper at their farm in Galena, Maryland, where, you know, on the Eastern Shore, and says, would you please get all of Frank's guns out of the house before he arrives?
[01:59:25]  It's like that.
[01:59:25]  Yeah, it's like that.
[01:59:27]  And Frank gets there.
[01:59:28]  And the groundskeeper missed one.
[01:59:30]  It's his son's shotgun that's in his son's bedroom under his son's bed.
[01:59:36]  Frank Wisner ends his life with that.
[01:59:39]  How does his son deal with that?
[01:59:41]  Because you interviewed his son, right?
[01:59:43]  And the other son.
[01:59:45]  So it wasn't Ellis's shotgun.
[01:59:47]  No, it was Frank Wisner Jr.
[01:59:48]  Frank deals with that.
[01:59:49]  Well, first he's in Algeria for the State Department.
[01:59:53]  Frank G. Wisner.
[01:59:54]  Frank G. Wisner, the younger, is in Algeria for the State Department.
[01:59:58]  And it seems like he deals with that by becoming what his father could have been or would have been in a different circumstance.
[02:00:08]  How do you mean?
[02:00:09]  He's a globetrotting diplomat of influence who is also very stable.
[02:00:16]  He winds up marrying, he's Nicholas Sarkozy's stepfather.
[02:00:20]  He is.
[02:00:21]  Which is wild.
[02:00:23]  Like he marries a French aristocrat.
[02:00:25]  He's posted in kind of like every hotspot, but becomes like the consigliary there.
[02:00:32]  He eventually is the ambassador to India.
[02:00:35]  He then takes a high-ranking job with advisory job with both Enron and AIG.
[02:00:42]  Okay.
[02:00:43]  Both companies have very extensive intelligence connections as well.
[02:00:48]  And then his last act is President Obama needs him for one last job, one last thing, Frank.
[02:00:56]  And he sends Frank Wisner to Cairo to tell Morsi to step down during the Arab Spring and bring his old friend Hosni Mumbarik back in.
[02:01:05]  And Wisner speaks Arabic.

=== Craziest Army Rumor (06:27) ===

[02:01:06]  And now he's in retirement somewhere in the Hamptons, I believe.
[02:01:10]  Really?
[02:01:11]  So not, well, actually, like five hours from here.
[02:01:13]  Yeah.
[02:01:14]  I went out to Sag Harbor like a couple of months ago.
[02:01:18]  Yeah, it does.
[02:01:18]  It takes forever to get there.
[02:01:20]  I've only, I've been one town in.
[02:01:23]  Oh, okay.
[02:01:24]  I've never really been that far up onto Launch.
[02:01:26]  Well, you should ask Justin Timberlake about Sag Harbor.
[02:01:30]  Oh, yeah, because he's doing that little snizz up there driving around.
[02:01:34]  He had troubles that I sympathize with.
[02:01:36]  He's not looking good.
[02:01:37]  I know that you've done in the Army.
[02:01:40]  Yeah.
[02:01:41]  They don't kick you out of the Army for drunk driving?
[02:01:43]  Well, not during that time.
[02:01:45]  Now they would have.
[02:01:46]  And also, I had the blessing of super nepotism because I was the lowest ranking guy in a headquarters.
[02:01:56]  And everyone liked me because I had a combat infantry badge and had been over in the war.
[02:02:00]  And General Dempsey was my boss.
[02:02:02]  He was downstairs or my boss's boss.
[02:02:04]  He was downstairs.
[02:02:05]  He wound up writing me a very nice letter of recommendation while General Valcourt, who I also like very much, he had to write me a letter of reprimand, you know, for my for my, so I have a letter of reprimand from a three-star, but a letter of recommendation from a four-star.
[02:02:20]  And I got lucky.
[02:02:21]  If I were on the line, like they would have like fucked me.
[02:02:24]  You gotta do it.
[02:02:25]  No, they, I mean, they sent me down to, they sent me down to a Navy rehab called SARP where I learned a, we were, we in process watching like intervention, the TV show.
[02:02:37]  Uh-huh.
[02:02:38]  And I learned the expression, fucked up like a wooden watch from a Navy chief.
[02:02:43]  I really liked it.
[02:02:44]  I still remember it.
[02:02:45]  Fucked up.
[02:02:45]  It was like a wooden watch.
[02:02:47]  But then I left that because it was AA based and I couldn't stand that shit.
[02:02:50]  So, you know, but they were like, they were very kind to me during my like early PTSD timeframe.
[02:02:58]  Yeah.
[02:02:58]  Yeah.
[02:02:58]  You know, and I think they recognized that too.
[02:03:00]  They're like, this guy's.
[02:03:02]  Yeah.
[02:03:02]  We made this guy nuts.
[02:03:03]  Yeah, like it's kind of our fault.
[02:03:05]  You know, and so, but the most awkward shit was we had a Christmas party.
[02:03:09]  This was after I got my DUI.
[02:03:10]  We had a Christmas party and we were supposed to come in costume or like come in like something.
[02:03:15]  So I make this t-shirt that has like General Dempsey up top, and it's a little involved because Dempsey's hat is yellow, Valkourt's hat is red, and Bruner's hat is blue.
[02:03:27]  Those represent the artillery, armor, and infantry branches.
[02:03:31]  It's also the training and doctrine command colors, right?
[02:03:34]  So it's a clever t-shirt.
[02:03:36]  And I win the contest.
[02:03:38]  And the prize for the contest is a bottle of red wine.
[02:03:43]  And so they're like, Sergeant Farwell, here's your bottle of red wine.
[02:03:49]  We didn't think this through.
[02:03:50]  Don't drink and drive.
[02:03:53]  So that was, I was coddled towards the end in ways that others perhaps were not.
[02:03:58]  What's the, now I'm just asking random military questions.
[02:04:00]  I'm going to wrap up in a second.
[02:04:01]  But what's the worst rank in the military?
[02:04:04]  Corporal.
[02:04:05]  Why?
[02:04:05]  Because you have...
[02:04:07]  Well, yes.
[02:04:08]  Because your contemporaries include Hitler.
[02:04:11]  Mm-hmm.
[02:04:12]  And...
[02:04:12]  And also because you're the lowest non-commissioned officer possible and you get no respect from the other E-4s who are specialists wearing what they call the sham shield.
[02:04:24]  Is that the E-4 mafia?
[02:04:25]  The E-4 mafia.
[02:04:26]  I was told about this.
[02:04:27]  Yeah, and it's like you go from being in the E-4 mafia to being like, who's that guy that testified against him in Congress?
[02:04:35]  Vinman.
[02:04:36]  Yeah.
[02:04:37]  Wait, against who?
[02:04:38]  Against the mafia.
[02:04:39]  Oh, against the mafia.
[02:04:40]  Joe Vellachi.
[02:04:41]  You become like, as soon as you, as soon as you like.
[02:04:44]  I think fucking Trump.
[02:04:47]  Oh, no.
[02:04:48]  I mean, Vinman?
[02:04:49]  That's a different mafia.
[02:04:50]  Oh, yeah.
[02:04:51]  Oh, yeah.
[02:04:52]  Vinman's running.
[02:04:53]  His brother's running for Congress.
[02:04:54]  Sick of Vinman.
[02:04:55]  I was sick of Vinman for the second he came out.
[02:04:58]  National Security Council heroes like Oliver North.
[02:05:01]  What's the craziest rumor you heard while in the Army?
[02:05:05]  Craziest rumor I heard while in the Army.
[02:05:10]  It would probably be that General Petraeus really got fired because he was jacking off with teenagers on Chat Roulette while he was the Com ISAF commander and Greg Vogel, the chief of station in Kabul, had recorded it and flipped General Petraeus to become his agent.
[02:05:33]  And when General Petraeus was put in as director of central intelligence, the Near East Division was actually running him as their agent.
[02:05:44]  And they were very upset when he took his laptop to Best Buy, which had child sexual abuse material on it.
[02:05:51]  And the geek squad took it off and took it over to the FBI.
[02:05:57]  And the Mormons in Office of Security had to report that to the president.
[02:06:01]  And they had to pretend that Paula Broadwell and him had had a non-consensual affair that his wife didn't know about.
[02:06:09]  That would be the craziest rumor.
[02:06:10]  I don't know if it's true.
[02:06:12]  That is, Matt, an incredible rumor.
[02:06:15]  And that is, ladies and gentlemen, while you listen to this motherfucking show.
[02:06:18]  I can't say if it's true.
[02:06:20]  He's at KKR now.
[02:06:21]  What's that?
[02:06:22]  It's a big company.
[02:06:24]  Yeah, surely not using any of his operational knowledge for oil future.
[02:06:29]  Definitely not.
[02:06:32]  Where can listeners find you?
[02:06:34]  I am on the Hunt for Tom Clancy sub stack.
[02:06:37]  On Twitter, I am Hunt Clancy.
[02:06:39]  Or you can look for my articles in County Highway.
[02:06:43]  I had an article in Harper's, and I pop up in various publications that you may read and enjoy.
[02:06:49]  And do you have any advice for these motherfuckers out there?
[02:06:52]  Stay frosty, head on a swivel, sleep with one eye open.
[02:06:56]  They're after you.
[02:06:58]  Fair enough.
[02:06:59]  Ladies and gentlemen, that was Matt Farwell from the Hunt for Tom Clancy.
[02:07:02]  My name, as you well know, is Bryce Belden.
[02:07:06]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[02:07:08]  Moment of silence for Liz.
[02:07:12]  And we'll see you next time.
[02:07:14]  long Come out.