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Dec. 23, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:15:31
Edition 424 - Ralph Pezzullo

Ralph Pezzullo knows about US "covert operations" and the people who mount them - as the son of a diplomat he met many in countries like Vietnam and Nicaragua - a fascinating man with a amazing and true stories...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you as ever for all of your communications, the steers that you give me in your emails, suggestions of guests, and all that kind of stuff.
If you want to send me a guest suggestion or any thoughts about the show, you know what you have to do.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
And thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster, for all of his hard work on this show through this year of 2019.
And we are looking down the barrel at 2020, which is just astonishing to me.
You know, as we sit here at the end of the year, and I don't know where you are at the moment, I don't know what you're doing, but presumably, as we all do, you're thinking about what a new year might mean.
But I remember, as I sit here, being in this room and thinking about the turn of the millennium, you know, 1999 into 2000.
I remember my job at that time.
I was working for Capitol Radio in London and I had to go on air on the 1st of January 2000.
And what I was doing here, I wasn't out partying that night.
I was recording radio stations from around the world and recording the way that they saw the millennium in.
And so that I could go on the radio doing the news for London the next morning.
And I could actually play out recordings of how the world saw in that amazing event.
And to think that it's 20 years ago.
And I can remember listening to Art Bell at the time, who talked a lot about the Y2K bug and how that might affect the world's computer systems and tech systems as one century and one millennium clicked over into the next.
Ultimately, that didn't happen.
A lot of people say that's because a lot of the groundwork was done to make sure it didn't.
And some people say it was never going to happen.
And that's a debate I'm sure that will go on.
But to think all of that happened 20 years ago is just amazing.
But, you know, I guess that's how life goes, isn't it, really?
I want to send you my good thoughts.
You know that I never make any predictions for a new year.
It's a superstition that I have.
But I want to send you my best thoughts for the new year that is to come.
And that's, you know, from me here in London, in the quiet here now, thinking about the latest edition of The Unexplained, which we're about to do.
Now, the man we're going to speak with is a man who's been on my radio show.
And you know that every so often, not very often, but I ask somebody who's been on the radio show to come back and do a podcast with me so we can talk in a more expansive way about the things that they speak about.
This is the case with Ralph Pizzullo in Los Angeles, who you will hear has had a remarkable life.
His father was in the U.S. Foreign Service, the service that stationed people abroad in various places like South America or Vietnam.
He's been in a lot of countries and done a lot of things.
He was very young in all of those and gained a fascination for the people who carry out work for, on behalf of, the United States, the people who do covert operations, the military special forces and those sorts of people.
So Ralph has written extensively, fiction and non-fiction, about such people, knows a lot of these people because of his unique background.
He's also a man who's been involved in screenplays, a totally fascinating guy with an amazing story who knows people that you and I will probably never meet.
So the guest on this edition, we're going to go to Los Angeles and meet up at the end of the year.
This is with Ralph Pizzullo.
Thank you very much for everything that you've done for me over this year.
If you've sent a donation to the show, thank you very much.
And if you haven't, then please do consider that.
You know, I operate, my life operates, on an absolute shoestring.
So if you've enjoyed what we've done here, then please do consider leaving a donation for the show.
Of course, if you can't, that's absolutely fine.
Enjoy the show.
But if you'd like to leave a donation for the show, the website is theunexplained.tv, and you can follow a link there to make a donation.
If you have made one recently, as I say, thank you very, very much indeed.
Very, very gratefully received.
So if you get in touch with the show, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
I think that's the last thing I was going to say before we get to Los Angeles and speak to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, The Return of Ralph Pazzullo.
Ralph, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you, Howard, for having me back.
Well, no, listen, one of the things about doing conversations, and I don't call them interviews, I call them conversations because that's what they should be on the radio is, of course, you've got all of the furniture, all of the artifacts of doing radio around you.
You know, you have the commercial breaks that we couldn't exist without and various things which mean that you can only ever, with some guests, only ever scratch the surface.
So you can't actually go into the depths of things that you would like to.
And I felt with the conversation with you, which was great, and I wanted to talk with you again, the difficulty was that there was stuff that we couldn't get into.
And I think also it was one of those that I'd looked at the books, done the research, and I had a lot of specific questions that maybe didn't give you the chance to talk around things the way that we ought to.
So we're having a second bite of the cherry now.
And I think what we need to do, for our listeners who are listening to us as a podcast, and they don't hear the radio show out of the UK, and there's no reason why they should, can you first of all tell me a little bit about you?
Because your background for what you do is pretty unique.
And when I say that, what I mean is that you write about these people who are involved in undercover operations, but from a kid, you lived it.
Yes.
That's right.
Yeah, I had a very unique background.
My parents are both sons and daughters of Italian immigrants who came to this country at the turn of the century.
And they grew up in the Bronx of New York.
My father was a high school teacher.
And then he took an exam to join the diplomatic service, which in the United States is called the Foreign Service.
None of us had, you know, I was five years old when he joined.
Nobody in the family had ever heard of it before.
And suddenly we moved to Washington from New York City, and we went on this big adventure, which involved, you know, moving from country to country, usually every two and a half to three years.
His first assignment was Mexico.
Then we went back to Washington, then Saigon, Vietnam in the 60s.
So it was a very tumultuous time, a lot of violence.
I was there.
We were there during the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the buildup of American troops.
We were one of the few families that remained in Vietnam.
And then from Vietnam, we went of all places to La Paz, Bolivia, which is like the highest city on the planet.
And that was very interesting.
It was also a difficult political time in Bolivia.
There were a lot of strikes.
The miners who play a very important part in politics there were very unhappy with the government.
From Bolivia, we went to Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia.
From Bogota to Guatemala.
Guatemala at the time was in the throes of a leftist, fighting a leftist insurgency, so it was very dangerous.
From Guatemala, we went back to Washington, and then my father was named ambassador to Uruguay, Nicaragua.
And he was there during the, he was sent in by President Carter in 1979 to tell the dictator there, Anastasio Somosa, that the United States wasn't going to support him.
It was during a civil war.
And he came back.
He was able to negotiate Somosa's departure.
And then he returned to Nicaragua as the first ambassador to the Sandinista government.
And I was there for part of that.
It was a very, very interesting time.
And actually became friends with a number of the Sandinista leaders.
So I had a kind of unique perspective on that.
How old were you then?
I was about maybe 19 or 20.
And I mean, we're going to get into this stuff anyway.
But when you met the Sandinistas, they were all over the newspapers.
Of course, they were.
I well remember their exploits and what happened in that country.
Yes.
What was it like to know them as people?
It was very different.
They were, you know, they were kind of a motley group.
There were nine leaders at the time because they came from different factions and they had just sort of united at the end.
And, you know, we were relatively the same age and we just kind of socialized.
I went fishing with some of them.
I went on a fishing trip with them.
You know, they had different sort of political views, different perspectives.
But it was very interesting for me because I would see them socially and then I'd go home and my father and his colleagues would be discussing kind of what was going on within the movement.
And a lot of times it would just not match at all.
They were trying to figure out at that time sort of who was going to emerge from the nine leaders to kind of, they figured there would be, you know, one dominant leader.
And the guy that the United States embassy sort of picked to be, thought would emerge was a guy named Comandante Zero Eden Pastora, who was one of the heroes of the war.
But, you know, when I saw him socially, that was the last thing on his mind.
You know, he had been fighting for years, and he really just wanted to party and celebrate and chase girls, basically.
So you saw a side of them that not even your father saw, and your father was there at the sharp end.
Yes, exactly.
So I would come home at night, and my father would be sitting around with his advisors, and they would be discussing these things.
And I'd walk in and go, you know, well, I don't think that's going to happen at all because I was just with these guys.
And, you know, they're not talking about that at all.
They're talking about organizing a fishing trip.
You know, a lot of them had been in hiding for years.
They were young guys.
Some of them had been in the jungle.
Some of them had been in prison.
And they never expected the quick victory that they had because really what happened in Nicaragua was a popular uprising.
Basically, the dictatorship had become abhorrent to the people, and neighborhoods in the cities would just sort of barricade themselves in and say, the police and the military can't come in here anymore.
Right, so that's called civil disobedience.
But what was America's view?
What was your dad's view of all of that?
Official view, I mean?
Well, you know, it was hard to get a clear read on it because, you know, when my father came into the negotiations with Somosa and he was arriving from Uruguay, they called him in at the last minute, he found out that the United States had no contact at all with the Sandinistas.
And so, you know, they didn't know, you know, who these guys, I mean, they knew their names and their backgrounds, but they, you know, they had never met them.
They had never, so the whole kind of movement was kind of something of a mystery to them.
And as I said, it had been, there had been three different groups that kind of came together during the summer of 1979 in the midst of this popular uprising.
So the whole situation was very confusing.
And in that situation, where you're involved with people who are in the crucible of Political change in a country.
And we know that in South America, many parts of the world, change involves, you know, what are they used to say?
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
So, in some cases, change involved violence and unsettlement of various kinds.
The people who you knew socially, did they not see you as a spy in the cab almost?
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
They didn't.
You know, I just have an ability.
I think a lot of it came from growing up overseas and having to adjust to different people and different cultures.
I sort of haven't, you know, I kind of accept people just the way they are.
You know, I don't, you know, I don't judge them.
I don't have like a very strict kind of cultural, you know, perspective or myopia that I arrive with.
So I think people sense that and they, you know, they just accept me as like, you know, it's Ralph.
You know, he's a good guy.
You know, he's an American.
I mean, the other part of it is, is that, you know, people all over the world have a strange relationship with Americans.
Often there's a lot of enmity towards our government and the way our government, you know, treats other people.
But they generally, in my experience, are like the American people.
And, you know, they're attracted to the culture, the whole idea of freedom and being able to dress the way you want and believe what you want and do what you want.
You know, the best music, the best food, great culture, all the rest of it.
That's one side of the coin.
But of course, the other side of the coin is that a lot of these people, and especially in that era, which, as I say, I remember very well when I was young too, reading about it, they would have seen America as a sort of imperialist power.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
But, you know, I was, you know, 1920, you know, they didn't see me as an imperialist.
They just saw me as a guy their age.
You know, we had kind of the same interests.
I spoke Spanish.
I was familiar with their culture.
You know, I'd grown up with people like them.
You know, I went to school with people like them.
So, you know, it was easy and we could talk.
You know, some of them were Marxist-Leninists and some of them, you know, and I was familiar with all of that.
It all sounds really easygoing.
And I know that when we had the first conversation, I was surprised at how matter of fact it all was and that the marvelous stories that you tell of this time.
Were you never encouraged?
I mean, your dad sounds like a great guy.
I think I said this the first time we talked because it doesn't sound like he put any pressure on you at all.
He just allowed you to live your life there, which is the best kind of dad to have, whatever your father does, I think.
But were you never pressured, say in the case of Nicaragua or any of those difficult postings in South America at times of change, were you never pressured by, you know, the guys with buzz cuts and bulges in their jacket, you know, in the sides of their jackets to divulge anything that you might know?
No.
No.
It's not at all.
It's not interesting, right?
Yeah, I think they, you know, because, you know, it was a time of, oh, you know, it was a big time of change socially all over the world.
So I think like, you know, my father and his, you know, his friends, you know, you know, they probably trusted me less than, you know, some of the Southern Easters did because I wasn't of their generation.
I didn't have, you know, they knew my political views were different than theirs in the sense that I was just very, you know, much more open-minded about things.
It was the spirit of the agenda, wasn't it?
I mean, you were a young person, and that was the spirit of the age.
A lot of times, yeah, I had a kind of relationship with my father where often I would tell him things and he would go, oh, come on, Ralph, you know, where do you get that from?
And, you know, I would explain it to him, but he was always very skeptical about my point of view.
So we always had kind of this, you know, ongoing, you know, dialogue.
And we weren't really coming from the same, you know, same place.
And, you know, and that continued to the end of his life, really.
And what was your view overall, the time that you were a young person experiencing these countries, of America's mission in these places?
Did you get a sense that America was there to change things, to maybe gather intelligence, certainly to gather intelligence on those places, but maybe also to engineer situations in them?
Oh, yes.
We were definitely, you know, starting with Vietnam, I was very aware that we were, you know, we were in these countries with a purpose.
We were trying to, engineer is a good word.
We were trying to engineer an outcome in another country.
And it became very clear to me at an early age, maybe 10, 12 years old, that we were, you know, our whole approach was wrong.
That we went into these countries, we didn't really understand the culture or the people.
And we thought, you know, we could just sort of use them as pawns in a, you know, kind of a strategic political game, you know, that they didn't even fully understand.
And we put labels on people.
You know, they were communists or they were nationalists or, you know, and the labels were often very inaccurate as labels are.
You know, they're kind of, you know, they're generalizations.
And, you know, somebody who was an insurgent in Vietnam and somebody who was an insurgent in, you know, Guatemala or Nicaragua, you know, completely, you know, they shared, you know, certain characteristics, but they had a completely different cultural, historical background.
Well, I guess we've hinted at some of that, haven't we?
Because some of these South American movements were movements of the people, uprisings, you might call them.
Whereas on the communist side of things, it was very much down to ideology, I guess.
It was ideology.
I mean, you know, we got very caught up.
The United States, you know, and most of the Western world, I think we got very caught up in ideology, especially during the Cold War.
And we sort of saw everything through that lens.
You know, I remember when I was in Vietnam, you know, I was a kid.
I was, you know, 10, 11.
And I was the, you know, and all you heard about were, you know, the communists, the Viet Cong, they're communists, they're trying to take over.
And then, you know, the whole theory that they would first they take over Vietnam and then they would move and, you know, spread communism throughout the world.
I was the bat boy on the Special Forces softball team.
And we played, there was a ball field near Tonson Newt Air Force Base, which was eventually bombed by the Viet Cong.
And I would hang out with these guys who were kind of the tip of the spear.
You know, they were fighting the Montagnards up in the north.
They were, you know, fighting the war back then.
And I would hang out with them after ballgames.
They would drink beers.
I would drink sodas.
And I would ask them about, you know, what is it like?
And they would, this was back in 1964.
They would say, you know, it's, this isn't a, this is crazy.
This isn't a, you know, this isn't a war between communism and democracy.
You know, these are people, they don't even know who the president of their country is.
You know, they're just fighting for a better life.
If anything, it's a nationalist movement.
You know, and, you know, so.
So did you get the impression that some of these people, and look, many heroic deeds were done in any campaign that any country fights or engages in.
There are people who will do their duty to the best of their ability, but did you get the sense in those meetings on the ball field that some of these guys, their hearts were not really in it?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, they were young.
You know, they were 19 years old.
They were from, you know, Georgia and, you know, Alabama, you know, Texas, you know, young kids, you know, young guys.
You know, most of them had never gone to college.
They were just, you know, and they were patriots.
They were, you know, highly trained, you know, loved their country.
But they were thrust into a situation and told it was, you know, it was characterized a certain way.
And they were the ones on the ground doing the fighting and, you know, dealing with the opponents and our allies.
And they were seeing it completely differently.
And when I went back to my father and would report this to him, he would basically say that they don't know what they're talking about.
Now, what kind of, as you were learning about their side, your side, and you were also, I presumably, you had contacts with the other side, as you had in Nicaragua?
Did you have that too?
Well, it was a very, you know, Howard, it was a very strange circumstance because what happened was it was a, Saigon was a very dangerous city.
And our school was, we only went to school like a few hours a day because it was so dangerous.
And I found out that the embassy, and I'm kind of an active, you know, person.
I've always been that way.
And I found out that the embassy ran a shop.
They employed something like 70 to 90 carpenters, plumbers, all locals.
And they would go around and repair houses and paint and refurbish them and so on.
And because I had so much free time on my hands and I didn't want to stay at home, I ended up going to this shop and sort of volunteering.
And I became friendly with all these guys and they used to basically pick me up at school in a pickup truck.
They'd wait for me and I would go off and work with them.
And so they were all just, you know, laborers in Saigon.
I'm sure probably half of them were Viet Cong.
You know, I didn't know that at the time.
But, you know, so did you never feel, I presume you were so close to it, and it would probably be only in retrospect that you'd think of it.
You never felt any sense of risk because we know that, you know, one word in the wrong ears, you could have had a bullet in your head.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I never really felt in danger.
I mean, not working with them because, you know, we were friends.
I played on their soccer team.
I used to go to their weddings.
Right.
On the one side, you're friends with the special forces guys on the ball team back at base.
And on the other side, you know people who are connected with, at the very least, with the Viet Cong, who are supposedly the enemy.
That puts you in an absolutely, once again, a unique position.
Yes.
Yeah.
I found myself in situations like this a lot in all these countries because I just, you know, I was just a curious kid.
Like I said before, I didn't really have any judgments.
I wasn't brainwashed into anti-communism or anything else.
I was just sort of skeptical.
And, you know, I just sort of was like, you know, I want to find out what's going on.
What is it really going on?
At least, what does it seem like to me from my perspective?
And what about the realities of it, though?
Because everything that I've read about Vietnam, and as you know, the Brits certainly overtly were not involved in Vietnam, so we only knew what we saw on the television and what I see on historical representations of it now.
But it was a very, very bloody, no-holds-barred campaign, wasn't it?
What of that did you see?
Well, I saw a lot of it because there were lots of terrorist activities against American.
They were really directed against sort of military outposts, official government offices.
The embassy was bombed.
The bars where GIs hung out were bombed a lot.
They didn't really go after civilian targets, but you would hear bombs going off.
You'd hear gunfire practically every night.
There was no question that it was a very, very dangerous situation.
Now, my parents are kind of, it's unbelievable to me now that my parents let me just sort of loose in this city running around.
They never knew where I was because, and, you know, all the other kids who were there, the American kids, you know, they were basically never allowed to leave their house.
So I was, you know, lucky in a way.
And maybe my parents were a little irresponsible to let me just wander around, you know, but I did.
And because of that, you know, I get to see it a tremendous amount and really get a feel for what was going on in the country in a way that probably very few Americans did because they were either bunkered in their homes or in their offices.
And I was out on the streets.
I was eating at the little noodle places with the workers.
Did you speak the language?
I did.
I did.
Yeah, at the time I did.
It would be an enormous help.
And I guess, you know, even now, if you want to visit Vietnam, an enormous help for you, too.
That country changed so much.
Is this, Ralph, where you got the zest for and the interest in covert operations and those people who are involved in them?
Yes, absolutely.
You know, it was never a plan.
It just sort of happened.
But yeah, when I started, you know, pursuing a career as a writer and some people like of this, you know, in government, former government undercover employees and guys in the intelligence community started to approach me,
it was a very, you know, it was easy because, you know, we trusted one another like right away because, you know, they could see I had no axe to grind in terms of like who they were and what they did.
And I also sort of understood the kind of people they were and the kind of life that they had led because, you know, I had seen it.
Every embassy everywhere in the country has a CIA component.
And, you know, it's not talked about, but everybody knew who they were.
And I was friends with some of them.
I was friends with their kids.
I would, you know, we would socialize.
And so, you know, I knew, you know, what kind of life they led, the pressures they were under, the sacrifices they made.
And so when I was first approached, it made it easy.
Sounds to me like you would have been a fantastic asset yourself.
Were you ever approached to be in the service?
You know, not directly.
When I was in graduate school, I was invited.
It was a very strange thing.
I got a letter from the head of like the Strategic Air Command, like a four or five-star general, inviting me to Omaha, Nebraska, where they have their headquarters and their underground bunker where they have all the, you know, they control all the nuclear weapons and so on and so forth.
And I was taken on a tour along with, usually it's a tour that's reserved for congressmen and senators.
And they decided, this was in the 70s, the early 70s, they decided to invite, I think it was a dozen students who they identified as future leaders of the country, potential leaders of the country.
And I went there and it was a three-day experience.
And they're basically indoctrinating you in why the United States needs more nuclear weapons and why the defense budget should be higher than it is.
And it was a really interesting experience because some of the kids, I remember there was one kid from Stanford, and he was the editor of the newspaper and a real radical.
And within three days, all of them were completely converted, sort of the military point of view.
And I was the one holdout.
I was the one guy who was kind of like, okay, this is really impressive.
But, you know, I would.
But you went in there with a mindset.
You had known and interacted with some of the people on the other side.
You know how the world works.
So I would have thought on one level you'd be perfect.
And on another level, you would just completely be the wrong guy.
That's exactly right, Howard.
That's exactly right.
Because you'd ask too many questions.
That's exactly right.
Exactly right.
So, you know, I was approached by the State Department when I finished school, And they wanted me to join the Foreign Service.
And I went through an oral exam.
And during the oral exam, I remember one of the questions they asked me was about Mexico and the whole problem with drugs and so on and so forth, illegal narcotics coming from Mexico into the United States.
And I remember one of them, there were three people asking me questions.
And I remember one of them said, well, what do you think about that?
What do we do with Mexico?
And I said, well, it's not, the problem isn't really Mexico.
The problem is our problem.
We're the market for these drugs.
And we have to focus on why.
And why is this enormous hunger?
And oh, the guy, he was horrified by my answer.
Right.
So they were looking at things from the source end, and you were looking at things from the market end.
Yeah, yeah.
I was looking at the whole kind of picture.
I mean, I'd lived in Mexico.
I know Mexico, and Mexico is what it is.
But they're not this evil country that's just saying, okay, let's get everybody in the United States addicted to drugs.
That's, you know, these are criminal groups who, you know, see an opportunity, a market in the United States, and they take advantage of it.
But if the market, what I was telling the guy is if the market wasn't there, if there wasn't this huge thirst for drugs and illegal drugs in the United States, there wouldn't be a problem.
And he was appalled by my answer.
And the response I got, they did offer me a position, but they said, "You have to look at some of your ideas.
They're kind of..." Exactly.
And I declined.
I turned down the opportunity.
My father was horrified.
But I just sort of saw where this was going.
Like, if I go into this institution, you know, I know too much.
I've seen too much.
I'm not going to be able to just sort of parrot and go along with the sort of prevailing ethos.
Yeah, exactly.
So look, if that was the situation and you weren't going to become a recruit, why the ongoing fascination with the people who did?
Well, you know, they, you know, I've just always been, it's always been interesting to me the dichotomy between what goes on in Washington and how decisions are made in terms of foreign policy and the perspective of the people on the ground.
Because there's a big gap usually between the two.
And I saw it in my father's experience.
I saw it over and over.
And I saw the fact that the United States, we still continue to make the same mistakes over and over, where we get involved in other people's crises, political crises, sometimes with good intentions, but we never really understand what we're throwing ourselves into.
We usually pick a side and sometimes they're not even aware that we're picking a side like we did in Afghanistan.
And then we, you know, it takes us 10 years or 12 years to realize how we've kind of, you know, trapped ourselves or gotten ourselves into a situation that we can't succeed at.
And then, of course, the lessons that you learn.
And look, America is not unique in these things.
I'm sure the United Kingdom, too, has been up to this and many other countries too.
But sometimes the lessons you learn, you learn the hard way.
And we keep doing the same thing over and over again.
And other countries do the same thing over and over again, as you pointed out.
But, you know, we don't learn.
It's a strange, strange thing.
And it's very tragic because a lot of times, you know, there's a tremendous loss of life, both of Americans and of the Native people.
And as there was in Vietnam, as there has been in Afghanistan and Iraq and Haiti, and, you know, we could go on and on.
But none of that, as I know, is at the core of your work, detracts from the abilities, from the qualities of the people who actually go out and do the hard stuff, who actually go and execute the policy.
For example, in Afghanistan, we talked briefly on the radio show about a guy who I think has had a massive impact on your life called Gary Burnson.
Talk to me about him.
Well, Gary is a fascinating guy.
He approached me, I think it was 2003.
I just received an email from him basically saying, you know, I'm an intelligence officer in the U.S. government, and I want to write a book.
I want to write two books, and I've been researching, trying to figure out who I want to work with, and, you know, I've chosen you.
And, you know, I didn't know who he was.
I responded, and we met in New York.
And he, you know, he was a, you could tell right away, the guy is a force of nature, tremendous amount of energy and drive.
And he told me a story, which was incredible, about how he helped to capture the leaders of the Japanese Red Army, which was a terrible, you know, terrorist group that operated in the early 70s all over the world.
They committed, I don't know if you remember, but they shot up the airport in Tel Aviv with automatic weapons and they killed.
It was like a massacre.
It was horrible.
And of course, in Europe, this is at the same time that here in Europe we had the Badermeinhoff people and That kind of thing.
It was that era, yeah.
And they were allied with all these groups.
And it was actually run by a woman.
A very fascinating story.
Anyway, Gary had tracked them for years and finally found one of the leaders posing as a masseuse in a Buddhist monastery in Timbuktu.
It sounds like a James Bond movie.
It does.
Right?
So he tells me this story, and I was like, you know, my jaws like, you know, falling open.
And I was like, hey, I'm in.
Let me talk to my agent.
You know, we'll work something out.
And he had to go back to Washington.
So I walked him to the train station.
And as he got on the train, he said, and then we'll write the second book, which is about when I went into Afghanistan after 9-11, and I had bin Laden trapped in Tora Bora.
And I almost killed him.
And I literally grabbed him by the arm and I pulled him off the train.
And I said, Gary, tell me that story.
And he did.
I have to say that before I asked him that question, I would have said, well, you probably did.
Why are you telling me this?
Yeah, it's again, goes back to just that sense of the bond that people sense that you have no agenda.
I mean, I recently wrote a book with an FBI undercover officer, and he told me he had interviewed, he had spoken to 10 different writers, and every one of them, they would have like a negative view of the FBI, or they didn't really understand how he could do what he did.
And he said, as soon as I spoke to you, I knew you were the right guy because you just kind of got me, you know?
For the last half hour, I've heard all the reasons why that is absolutely true.
And you were the right guy for the gig.
Gary Bernson, though, we've left a question hanging here, and my listener is probably thinking this.
The Japanese Red Army person who was tracked down as a masseurs, as we say here, what was Gary Burnson's mission then?
Was the mission to, let's put a, you know, to say it nicely, to neutralize that person?
Basically, it was to take down the Japanese Red Army, yes.
Not to kill them, but they're all in jail.
They were sent back to Japan and prosecuted there, and they were sentenced to life sentences, and they're in jail.
So how did he do that?
I mean, I presume he couldn't call the cops.
No, no, no.
It was just, it was actually, you know, like a worldwide, you know, search where they, you know, this was before the internet.
And so they basically were just tracking, you know, the movements of these people and, you know, just try to, it was, you know, basic like intelligence work where you go to a place where you've heard that they were and you try to find somebody who saw them and then ask that person, you know, well, who were they talking to?
Where did they go?
You know, detective work, basically.
Do you think that kind of stuff is, I'm sorry I'm interrupting here too much, but do you think that kind of stuff is going on now in places like North Korea?
Absolutely.
Oh, yeah.
That's basically what they, I mean, that's how they caught bin Laden.
It was just detective work.
It wasn't anything.
Yeah.
They just, you know, they're constantly looking for, you know, people who want to do the United States harm.
Well, you know, a lot of us will say, thank God there are people like that because we would never have got bin Laden.
I know there are many conspiracy theories about that, but let's just say, you know, on the face of it, we would never have got bin Laden if there hadn't been people willing to put themselves in harm way, like, for example, Gary Bernson.
Before we talk about his mission in Afghanistan, which was probably the most risky thing, I guess, that he's ever done.
Yes.
What about him?
Give me a thumbnail sketch of the kind of person he is.
What qualities does he have?
And how is he able to do this stuff?
Well, he's like a type personality.
Lots of energy.
Very, very driven man.
But no fear.
No fear.
He's a believer.
So he really believes in the values of the United States and protecting freedom.
And he's like a lot of these people, very mission-oriented.
They kind of wear blinders.
They don't see a lot of the complications or the political ramifications of what they're doing.
They just see a mission in front of them and they execute it.
Often they, you know, this is to the detriment of their personal life and their families.
Gary had a family.
It's a type of person.
You find them, you know, in the State Department, in the military, in the CIA.
They are, you know, they're very similar.
You know, really dedicated people, willing to sacrifice, you know, their lives.
They don't, you know, they're not doing it for money or fame.
They're believers and, you know, often very, very effective and heroic in their actions.
So what was his mission?
You know, I'm getting this.
I know it isn't like Mission Impossible.
It's not like you go into a phone booth and there's a tape recorder with a tape that will self-destruct with a mission on it.
But what was his mission and how did he get it?
The Afghanistan one.
Yeah.
So basically what happened was Gary had been in Afghanistan before 9-11.
As you probably remember, Al-Qaeda kind of came on the map in 1998.
They bombed Two embassies in Africa, in Kenya and Tanzania.
Gary was called in when those bombings happened to sort of go to those countries and start the initial investigation into who did this and why.
So that was his first contact with al-Qaeda.
And then in 2000, he was sent into Afghanistan with a small group of people on a mission to find Bin Laden and kill him.
It was during the Clinton administration, and they were in the process of locating bin Laden with the help of local Afghans who were part of the Northern Alliance, which was Shah Massoud.
You know, Afghanistan is a very tribal country.
So the Taliban, their base of strength is in the south among the Pashtun tribe, which is the most populous tribe of Afghanistan.
And there was always opposition to the Taliban in the north among the Tajiks and the Uzbeks, which were sort of smaller tribes.
And the leader of sort of their armed faction was a guy named Shah Masood.
And so Gary, back in 2000, Gary and a handful of military and intelligence officers were sent into Afghanistan on a mission to find bin Laden because the United States knew he had camps there and eliminate him.
And they were, the mission was aborted by the Clinton administration, and these guys reluctantly left.
And did the guys, including Gary, have a sense of what the person they were tracking was planning?
Yes, they did.
They knew that he had been behind the bombings in Africa and behind, remember there was a U.S. battleship, the Cole, USS Cole, that was attacked in Yemen.
I think 12 American soldiers were killed, a lot of injuries.
That is always cited as a prelude event to 9-11, but it's a big leap, isn't it, from attacks like that to the most devastating attack on New York City and the American way of life that was those terrible events of that month and that year.
Yeah, well, I don't think they had any idea that bin Laden was planning something as big as what happened on 9-11, but they knew that he was this very wealthy, charismatic, Saudi Sunni radical.
And he had a real group of followers who were very dedicated to him.
And they were planning attacks.
They had issued a manifesto that basically said, we're going to attack the United States everywhere we can find them until they leave the Middle East, particularly Israel.
And we will kill.
And they even said they would be willing under their reading of the Toran that they would attack civilians.
So they were definitely public enemy number one, he was.
And so their mission was to find his camp and get rid of him.
And yes, you said public enemy number one, but for most of us in the world, the first we ever heard of him, maybe we just missed it in the newspaper reports, but the first we ever heard of Osama bin Laden was after 9-11.
Yes.
And of course, people were saying, well, how come you've got this bogeyman?
You've got a name so quickly?
That's how a lot of the conspiracy theories arose after 9-11, because America appeared to have a suspect very soon after the events.
But from what you're saying, they knew all about this man and were aware of what he was up to.
Yeah, they had been tracking him for years.
Yes.
And they knew where his camps were.
I mean, the thing that you learn when you do, you know, you're exposed to the people I am and you hear the stories is that, you know, there are things going on right now and there are terrorist attacks that are stopped all the time that, you know, we never hear about.
But you've got these.
Do you get information about those things?
You just hinted that you do.
Yeah.
So there are, you know, the FBI and the CIA, you know, they're stopping things all the time.
Well, there are lots of people who've said over the years, for example, that, you know, there have been plans that have been thwarted, not only in your country, but I think also in this one, to do things like attack sports events and those sorts of things.
And so you're aware of those kinds of things being thwarted and stopped by the kind of people that we're talking about.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
So this is an ongoing mechanism that's cranking away 24-7?
Yeah, that's why they get paid.
Their budgets are billions of dollars.
And, you know, that's their mission is to protect the United States and our allies.
And they're very good at what they do.
I remember a couple years ago, I was working with a guy from SEAL Team 6.
And this was before all the controversy with North Korea.
And we were just talking once.
And I said, hey, have you ever been to North Korea?
And he said, oh, yeah.
I went on like two or three missions to North Korea.
And I said, really?
Like, I've never heard, you know, that sounds pretty far out.
And he said, oh, yeah.
And he described what they were.
And they went in and in one case, they were destroying or retrieving nuclear weapons that North Korea got their hands on.
And they found out that North Korea had bought a nuclear or procured some nuclear weapons, I think, from Belarus during the fall of the Soviet Union.
And they were keeping them in a cave in North Korea.
And how were they able to neutralize those?
I mean, you can't just call Uhire or Yu-Haul and stick them in the back of there and drive them out of North Korea.
How did they neutralize those weapons?
That's exactly the question that I asked him.
And he said, well, they were in these tunnels, and we didn't have the capability to breach the tunnels.
So we actually went to Norway.
I think it was Norway, one of the Scandinavian countries had built underground, really very highly reinforced underground bunkers, tunnels, during World War II.
And so they asked permission.
They went to, I think it was Norway, and they figured out, you know, they experimented on how to breach these tunnels in Norway.
They went, they, you know, were airlifted into North, dropped into North Korea, and they were able to breach these tunnels and remove the nuclear weapons.
And I asked him, I said, well, were you successful?
And he said, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you hear stories.
The same individual, he was very active in the 70s and 80s.
And he said, I said, have you ever done missions behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War?
And he said, oh, yeah, all the time.
And I said, well, how did you get there?
And he said, well, we would go on commercial airlines sometimes.
And they would close off.
It would be like a commercial flight to Moscow.
They would close off the back.
It would be a 737 where there's a door in the back.
They would close off the back section of the plane and seal it so that they could open the back door when they were near their target.
And they would parachute out of a commercial airline that was on a, you know, people on the front had no idea.
Gee, I thought the only person who ever did that was D.B. Cooper.
Same here.
Wow.
Same here.
But, you know, you hear these things and you go, you know, and they're not making it up.
So these people have no fear.
Equally, they must be.
And what is their training?
What's the protocol for if you gamble?
Say, for example, you're in North Korea and you're on a mission and it's obvious what you're doing by the time you're caught.
What's the protocol?
What do you do?
I think they, you know, they think they're suicide missions, most of those missions.
Yeah.
So even in this day and age, we hear about these things in World War II.
They're sent out with a cyanide pill.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And these, you know, this kind of thing goes on all the time.
So I'm sure, you know, if you look at whatever the hotspot is in the world today, North Korea, Venezuela.
Iran, I guess.
Oh, absolutely.
Iran.
Absolutely.
We've been conducting missions in Iran, you know, all the time.
I remember when there was the, you know, a couple of years ago, when there was the debate about, you know, Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and the whole negotiation, the treaty that was signed with the United States and, you know, the nations in Europe.
And I was talking to somebody in the intelligence community, and he basically said, hey, Ralph, we're never, ever going to let Iran get nuclear weapons.
It's not going to happen.
Well, I think there will be a lot of people who would be quite relieved about that, but it's a question of how you achieve that, isn't it?
Because you don't want to be doing it in a way that inflames, that makes the entire Middle East erupt.
Well, he said basically, you know, we'll do it by clandestine means.
So, you know, we will disrupt their plants, which has happened.
And of course, everything happens online these days.
Yeah.
So everything is controlled digitally.
That's right.
That's right.
And they attacked.
Remember, there was the, what was it, the Stutniks computer virus?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm sure that was, you know, we had something to do with that.
You know, they, you know, these are, you know, the stakes are extremely high.
And, you know, all of us are very vulnerable in certain respects.
And, you know, we invest a lot of money and, you know, in stopping attacks, not just in the United States, but, you know, all over the world.
Back to Gary Burnson, who has, as we say, is a man who's had an enormous amount of influence on your life by the sounds of it.
So there he is in 1998, 1999, just before 9-11.
He is on the cusp of the Tora Bora Caves, which is the hangout of Osama bin Laden.
He's been given information that suggests he is there.
He is in a position to take him out.
But the order is given not to do that.
Did he ask, and how did he ask?
Why?
They did ask.
In fact, they lied and they said that they couldn't leave Afghanistan because of the weather was bad.
And they were planning to just sort of, you know, go, you know, get, they were, you know, they wanted to get bin Laden.
And basically the government at a certain point said, hey, we see that the weather is perfect in Afghanistan.
So, you know, forget, we know you're just, you know, using excuses.
You got to get out of there now.
They were told that the reason that they couldn't was that the Justice Department couldn't find a legal reason to kill him.
And so it was made, the decision was made at the White House.
Now, this is before 9-11, and so the Patriot Act, which was passed right after 9-11, sort of gave the United States the legal room to, you know, eliminate terrorists before they strike.
But in those days, that Was 2000, that legal permission was not there.
How did Gary Bernson, when he read the reports of 9-11, when he heard about it, like the rest of us around the world heard the shocking events, how did he feel about that?
Oh, it was like a gut punch.
They were devastated, all of them.
Yeah, they were horrified because they could see, you know, they knew something was coming.
And it was, you know, they were horrified.
Horrified.
Yeah.
I know that you've done research on, you've known the people who were involved in the ultimate demise of Osama bin Laden in that operation that very nearly didn't happen as efficiently as they wanted it to.
There was the helicopter that they had to abandon and destroy there, but he was ultimately dispatched there.
What do you know about those events?
The picture that Hollywood gives us is that the whole thing was monitored by the Pentagon, the White House.
It was all done on closed circuit.
It was a very surgical kind of operation.
Yes, there was a severe hiccup in it.
It might have gone wrong, but it went right for them in the end.
There must be a backstory behind all of that.
You know, I met some of the guys who went on the mission and I've talked to them.
And, you know, they were very kind of almost casual about it.
They basically said, you know, we did, we've done, you know, that year we had done 30 or 40 missions that were much more dangerous than that.
So that, one of them described it to me as like a piece of cake or shooting at paper targets.
And I asked them about the helicopter, you know, malfunction and crash.
And they said, you know, something always goes wrong.
So they train, they expect something to go wrong.
And in that case, it wasn't so drastic.
And they, you know, they all pointed out that they found when they got to the compound, there was no, you know, very, they were surprised that there was so little resistance, that bin Laden was really like a retired old man, you know, living with very few bodyguards.
And who informed on him, though?
Oh, it was basically they found he was he was he didn't trust anybody.
He was very, very careful about his security.
So he was receiving all of his communications through thumb drives that were delivered by a courier.
And they were able to identify the brother of the courier.
And it was just like I said before, it was like detective work.
It took them years to track the brother.
And finally, there was some communication between the two brothers.
And then they were able to figure out, you know, track the movements of the brother who was the courier.
And they saw that he was visiting this house in Abbottabad.
And they put the house under surveillance.
And they eventually got a picture of bin Laden standing on one of the balconies.
And they knew he was there.
And then there was a whole, a long period of time where they were wondering, you know, I mean, Pakistan was a very close ally of ours at the time.
And, you know, we were basically going to go into their country without telling them.
But not only that, there was a Pakistani military base very, very close.
So I think a lot of people were surprised that the operation was able to happen, yes, but doubly surprised that they were able to get out.
Yes.
Because they got into what is a sovereign country.
They got into the country.
They carried out the mission.
And they had a snag in the mission, which they overcame, and they got out.
Yeah.
Well, the whole thing took, I think it was 28 minutes or something like that.
And there was a delay.
It was supposed to be faster.
So it was all timed.
You know, Pakistan is complicated.
You know, they have an intelligence service called the ISI, which is, you know, very influenced by Islamic radicalism.
And they were close to bin Laden and probably protecting him.
And so the whole mission was very, very delicate.
Very delicate.
I think that's probably an understatement by the sounds of it.
I guess the last thing that I want to ask you about, and this is something that we couldn't get to on the radio show, and fascinates me, people like Gary and the other people who do these things on behalf of America or other countries, when they cease to do it, because it's not something that you can do when you're 65, you have to be in the prime of life.
You have to have your head set right.
You have to be physically able to do it and spiritually able to do it.
What happens to you when you leave?
What happened to Gary?
Gary's still around.
He's, you know, I'm not exactly sure what he's doing.
I think he's involved in things that are going on in Venezuela and around Venezuela, but I'm not sure.
When you say involved in things that are going on in and around Venezuela, does that mean that he's freelancing?
Yeah, you could put it that way.
Yeah, you could put it that way.
I mean, I'm not sure.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but, you know, a lot of them kind of hang around.
You know, they retire, but they're still consultants or private contractors.
You know, they're brought in to do training.
They're brought in for their expertise in certain areas.
You know, most of them kind of hang around.
You know, it's the kind of work that there's so much excitement attached to it.
It's impossible to replicate anywhere else.
And so most of them, you know, I know some of them who do retire and some of them who, but a lot of them kind of hang around and they do, like I said, consulting work type of thing.
But if you faced danger at that level, now I'm not saying this is everybody, this may be just a few because these people are so carefully handpicked and trained.
But if you faced that kind of danger on that kind of level, and presumably on some occasions you may have had to kill people, doesn't that mess with your head in some of the cases?
And I wonder what kind of support they get to reintegrate into what we call normal life.
Well, it's getting that aspect of it has been improving.
There's more understanding of the psychological repercussions.
One thing I've learned is that human beings, they can be extremely well trained and incredible athletes and muscular and able to withstand all kinds of hardships as a lot of them are.
But still, mentally, all of us are pretty fragile.
And as you say, they see things that are very hard to kind of make peace with.
And a number of them have confided to me that one of them, I remember talking to a Navy SEAL, and he said, you know, tremendous guy, if you met him, very, very nice, honorable, you know, wonderful person.
And he said, you know, Ralph, I have some dark spots on my soul.
And he said it with, you know, a lot of sadness.
You know, it's part of the price that they pay.
And, you know, I think they struggle with it.
You know, they, it's interesting, you know, in popular media and popular culture, often these people are described and portrayed as sort of cold-blooded killers, right?
But that's not who they are at all.
In fact, they don't want these organizations, CIA, Navy SEALs, Special Forces, they don't want people like that.
They don't want, you know, they want people with, you know, human beings with a conscience because, you know, they don't want people that just go into a house and start shooting everybody.
You know, they want to be, you know, they're trained to be careful, to be human, to understand that, you know, these are people with families and children, and they try to be very surgical about what they do.
So when they're in those situations, they have a lot of thinking to do, Ralph, I would guess.
But when push comes to shove, there will have been occasions for many of them where they've just had to pull the trigger.
So I guess their speed of thought is incredibly fast.
And they're trained.
I've seen, witnessed some of the training, and it is amazing.
It's amazing.
They don't even have time to think.
It's instinctual.
And they are, you know, they have techniques where they can slow down their thinking.
They're chosen in part because they, you know, most of us in dangerous situations, we panic and our brain sort of it gives off an enzyme that makes us want to run.
And they find that the people that they recruit in Navy SEALs and special forces and so on, they test them and they find that their brains don't produce this enzyme the same way,
that they have the ability to remain extremely calm in stressful situations, and they can even sort of slow down time in terms of the way they react to things.
And that sounds strange, but I can remember being on a motorway here and having 1.5 seconds to take one of three actions that I hoped would avert a very serious accident because something had happened in front of me and I had to do something about it.
And I was amazed that, number one, I was incredibly calm about that on that occasion.
Time slowed down and in 1.5 seconds, I analyzed it.
And thankfully, and we're having this conversation now because I did, I did the right thing.
So presumably they're trained to get inside that portion of the brain that does that.
Absolutely right, Howard.
That's absolutely right.
And a lot of us have that.
I have the same thing.
If I'm in a dangerous situation, which I've been in before, things become calmer.
It's weird.
And I can, like you did in the traffic situation, sort of go, okay, if I do this, this is going to happen.
And time seems to slow down.
And they have that and they train in that area.
They train to kind of enhance that.
And the methods are very advanced.
But like I said before, it's not the cold-blooded killer type of thing.
Those people are psychopaths, they're sociopaths.
They don't want anything to do with that.
And those people are, you know, they're dangerous to everybody.
Now, you've written not only fact, but also fiction about these things, and you blend the two together really well.
I mean, that's how you've been as successful as you are at all of this.
But do you have, on a personal level, any regrets that you didn't get involved in all of this?
Because you have a relish for it and an interest in it.
At this stage of your life, where, you know, we're all too old to do These things now, but do you have regrets that you didn't do this?
Not really, not really.
No, I, you know, I admire it.
I, uh, it fascinates me, obviously.
Um, and I do enjoy, you know, adventure, and but you know, I'm much more interested in, you know, human psychology and also, you know,
how people are kind of, you know, get involved in world events and, you know, what their motives are and what they learn along the way, what they learn about themselves.
You know, I'm much more interested in that than actually, you know, putting, you know, putting on uniform and, you know, going out there myself.
I admire those people, but that's not me.
Right.
And I think you share that fascination that I certainly have, and many of us I'm sure will have about how an ordinary guy from, say, I don't know, from upstate New York or Florida or Arkansas or Preston in the UK can suddenly find themselves at the tipping point of history.
Yes.
Yeah.
That is an amazing thing.
What are you working on at the moment, Ralph?
Right now, I'm working on a TV series about a man named Dr. Gerard Bull, who was a space scientist and a ballistics expert from Canada, who was assassinated in Brussels in 1990 and was building a super cannon.
That was his dream.
He dreamt that he believed that instead of using rockets to send satellites into space, you could build this enormous cannon and just blast them into space.
You could do a dozen a day at a fraction of the cost.
And he was able to build a cannon and prove this in the 60s.
And through a whole series of events, the United States and other countries lost interest in that idea.
And then in the late 80s, he found a sponsor in Saddam Hussein in Iraq and got himself into really perilous water.
And who assassinated him?
Well, his death has always been a mystery, and I have been able to figure out who did it.
And that will be revealed in the series.
Okay.
Well, what an amazing story.
And we have to have a conversation about that.
Ralph Pazzullo, I loved our conversation last time on the radio.
I've really enjoyed this one, too.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Howard.
It's been a pleasure.
And if people want to read about you, you do have a website, so please go ahead and tell me what it is.
Yeah, it's ralphpazzullo.com, R-A-L-P-H-P-E-Z-Z-U-L-L-O.com.
Thank you for giving me this time, Ralph.
And happy holidays when that time comes.
Happy to you, and thanks again.
Thanks, Ralph.
Take care.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
And that's it.
Ralph Pazzullo, and I think there's another conversation in the making there.
So we'll check back with him maybe in six months or so.
See how he's getting on with that remarkable and rather chilling story that he told us at the end there.
Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained through the year of 2019 as we stare into 2020.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next, we meet in a whole new year.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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