Inside JSOC’s Most Secretive Undercover Missions | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Inside JSOC’s Most Secretive Undercover Missions"

The Team House – Eyes On Geopolitics
Host: Dee Takos
Guests: Jack Murphy, Sean Naylor, Zach Dorfman
Date: May 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the clandestine world of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operatives working under non-official cover (NOC)—a topic often associated only with the CIA. Hosts and veteran investigative journalists discuss the history, inner workings, and risks of JSOC’s secretive deep cover missions, drawing on their recent deep-dive article on "The High Side" and Zach Dorfman’s forthcoming book about CIA NOC operations. The conversation juxtaposes JSOC’s approach to deep cover against the CIA’s, examines real-world missions and tradecraft, and unpacks the ethical, practical, and bureaucratic hurdles faced by America’s most secretive operatives.

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Key Discussion Points, Insights, & Memorable Moments

1. Genesis and History of JSOC’s NOC Program

• Origins:
  • JSOC was established in December 1980, and its use of non-official cover began shortly thereafter (04:24).
  • Missions in the 1980s included operations in Suriname, Haiti, and especially Lebanon, where the aim was to recover American hostages in Beirut (05:18).
• Tradecraft in Early Years:
  • Example: JSOC established a logistics front company in Cyprus to move people, equipment, and intelligence into and out of Lebanon (05:18, Jack Murphy).
• Notable Moment:
  • “Some Delta guys came in and working with surrogates on the ground, wiped out some of the guys that had killed the CIA station chief, Bill Buckley.” (06:35, Jack Murphy)

2. Ethical and Legal Dilemmas in Partnering with Unsavory Characters

• Complex Relationships:
  • JSOC operatives occasionally worked with drug smugglers or local criminals, raising serious ethical, legal, and image concerns (07:34).
• The Dilemma:
  • "Is it moral, ethical and legal for our intelligence community to interface with known terrorists, with drug smugglers, with like, really bad people? ... On the pragmatic side, yeah, of course… when that comes out in the press, it doesn’t look very good." (07:57, Jack Murphy)
• CIA's Legal Boundaries:
  • The CIA implemented stringent restrictions post-9/11, even instructing case officers to tell assets not to engage U.S. personnel directly in hostilities, putting them in “impossible situations.” (09:04, Zach Dorfman)

3. Recruitment and Cover Challenges

• Who Becomes a NOC?:
  • It’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to take a career Ranger or SEAL and turn him into a convincing deep cover operative (15:24, Zach Dorfman).
  • Native language, cultural skills, and ethnicity are prioritized over combat prowess (14:04, Sean Naylor).
• Blown Cover in Practice:
  • Operators stick out due to physique, mannerisms, and associations: “You got like three guys open up a dive shop in the Maldives and it's like, what are these guys doing here?” (15:24, Zach Dorfman)
  • Training exercises showed trainers could easily pick operatives out “more often than not,” sometimes before biometrics or facial recognition even came into play (15:24).
• Funny Story:
  • Operators on a surveillance training mission posted up their windowless van next to an elementary school, resulting in concerned moms calling the cops and the trainees getting hauled into jail before revealing their government connection (18:36, Zach Dorfman).

4. Difference Between CIA and JSOC NOC Approaches

• JSOC:
  • Generally short-term, mission-specific deployments—targeting and logistics focused, not built for deep, multi-decade cover (26:25).
• CIA:
  • Tries to recruit and mold NOCs from early adulthood, keeping them under deep cover for potentially their entire careers, including running real businesses abroad and maintaining a total disconnection from the U.S. government (27:02, Zach Dorfman).
• Financial Discrepancies:
  • CIA NOCs, despite lucrative covers like “high-powered lawyer,” still get paid a government salary—“Absolute nonsense.” (29:03)
  • There’s an internal tension: “If you're supposed to be a high roller, you gotta have that Mercedes… everything has to become part of your cover.” (29:04, Zach Dorfman)
  • Military cannot generate profit through front businesses; “when you bring those [Persian rugs] back to the United States, they all have to go into the burn pit and be destroyed.” (31:58, Jack Murphy)

5. Tradecraft “Shenanigans” — Creating & Maintaining Deep Cover

• Fake Retirement Ceremonies:
  • JSOC sometimes stages entire fake retirements for operators to plausibly disappear, including fake paperwork, only to return years later and “retire again” for real (54:44, Jack Murphy).
  • “Everyone in that guy’s unit thinks it’s real, thinks that guy’s really retiring, except for him.” (54:44, Jack Murphy)
• Erasing Identity:
  • Back-end teams delete operatives’ digital footprints, including credit histories, sometimes by hacking if companies don’t cooperate (54:16, Jack Murphy).
  • “They have relationships with a lot of these companies… if they don’t cooperate, there are ways we’ll just hack into it and do it anyway.” (54:16)
• Logistical Complexity:
  • It can take up to 20 support staff and massive, ongoing resources to maintain a single NOC cover (54:23, Jack Murphy; 54:59, Zach Dorfman).
  • “The value proposition can be very controversial… the juice is just not worth the squeeze for NOCs in general.” (54:59, Zach Dorfman)

6. Legendary Missions and Nightmares

• The “East European” NOC:
  • This operator, born in Eastern Europe and fluent in local language/culture, spent years undercover with Task Force Orange—drove a bugged car from Jordan to Baghdad ahead of the 2003 invasion (34:27, Sean Naylor).
  • Survived an attempted abduction in Lebanon, was shot, sewed himself up in a hotel room on a doctor’s phone instructions, completed mission, and received a classified Silver Star (38:10, Sean Naylor).
• Iranian Operations:
  • Male-female JSOC NOC team successfully infiltrated Iran by securing legitimate visas and flying in under cover—so significant they briefed President Bush on return (42:53, Sean Naylor; 47:49, Zach Dorfman).
  • “It was considered a… template to base future missions on.” (43:01, Sean Naylor)
• Risks:
  • Under official cover, you get deported if discovered. As a NOC, you risk indefinite detention or execution; “the US government is not going to claim you at all. So the pucker factor… is incredibly high.” (47:12, Jack Murphy)
  • “There was one case of a CIA NOC in the 1950s in China who… spent a decade in a Chinese dungeon and died. The US government… just said ‘he’s not one of ours.’” (47:49, Zach Dorfman)

7. Institutional and Bureaucratic Obstacles

• Decision-Making Dysfunction:
  • JSOC’s need to get flag officer approval for every business decision in a clandestine operation undermines cover plausibility (51:00, Host/Jack Murphy).
• Reintegration Trouble:
  • On return, NOCs may have to rebuild their lives from scratch, as their official history is erased or “they don’t exist” in credit or personnel databases (51:52, Jack Murphy).
• Short vs. Long Game:
  • The CIA “plays the long game,” whereas JSOC’s NOC operations are mostly “one and done” or “two and done” (41:02, Jack Murphy).

8. Debate on Relevance Amid Technical Advances

• Tech vs. Human Intelligence:
  • Bureaucratic preference shifts toward signals intelligence (SIGINT) and technical surveillance, lessening appetite for expensive, risky NOC missions (57:04, Host/Jack Murphy).
  • HUMINT from U.S. case officers has declined, replaced by reliance on liaison partners (58:37, Zach Dorfman).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the real risk of deep cover:
  “If you get busted under official cover… you’re deported… But if you’re under non-official cover, you’re getting taken down into a basement somewhere and shot. Like, the US Government is not going to claim you at all.” – Jack Murphy (47:12)
• On the practical and ethical paradoxes:
  “By doing that, you’re putting yourself close to people who are doing very, very bad things—and you get that blowback and you get that Washington Post, you know, smell test stuff.” – Zach Dorfman (09:04)
• On recruiting operators as NOCs:
  “It's very hard to take somebody who grew up in a Ranger platoon or a SEAL platoon or something like that… and then turn them into this sort of like lone wolf intelligence operative.” – Zach Dorfman (15:24)
• On maintaining cover identities:
  “When you come back to the United States and you’re trying to integrate back… on paper you don’t exist.” – Jack Murphy (51:52)
• On cost-benefit skepticism:
  “The value proposition can be very controversial… historically, there has been a powerful stream of thought within the US Intelligence community that the juice is just not worth the squeeze for NOCs in general.” – Zach Dorfman (54:59)
• On the future of human intelligence:
  “We have grown accustomed… to relying predominantly on SIGINT. That has not changed. That has only become more prevalent over time.” – Zach Dorfman (58:37)
• On the CIA’s deep cover culture:
  “There were people who never went to the Farm, they never set foot in Northern Virginia necessarily. They lived abroad for 30 years. They never went to Langley, they never went there after they retired. They retired undercover.” – Zach Dorfman (27:02)
• On the legendary ‘East European’ NOC:
  “… drove an SUV from Jordan into Baghdad completely kitted out with hidden antenna… parked this vehicle, stayed in Baghdad for a while, again undercover. … He got shot in the gut… called a US government doctor whose contact information he had… talked him through how to sew himself up, and then he continued with his mission.” – Sean Naylor (34:27, 38:10)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• JSOC NOC history and Lebanon ops: 04:24 – 07:34
• Working with criminals/ethical debate: 07:34 – 12:03
• Operator versus support NOCs & training failures: 14:04 – 20:22
• Differences between CIA and JSOC NOC structures: 26:25 – 29:03
• Legendary missions (‘East European NOC’): 34:27 – 40:35
• JSOC in Iran – briefed to the President: 42:53 – 45:52
• Risk: official vs. non-official cover: 47:12 – 47:49
• Complexity of cover (fake retirements, digital erasure): 51:00 – 54:23
• Cost, skepticism, and bureaucratic inertia: 54:59 – 57:47
• Big-picture: future of HUMINT vs. technical intelligence: 57:04 – 60:32

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Conclusion

The episode offers an unvarnished look into the rarely-discussed world of JSOC deep cover missions—detailing the origins, tradecraft, and ongoing challenges of running non-official cover programs outside the CIA. The conversation paints a picture of constant moral compromise, immense personal risk, and a bureaucratic machine struggling to adapt human intelligence operations to a new age of technical surveillance. It’s a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of intelligence, special operations, and global geopolitics.

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Further Reading:

• “The High Side” – Deep Dive Article (linked in episode description)
• Forthcoming book by Zach Dorfman: "Deep Cover" (Penguin Random House, expected Summer 2027)

Keep up with the guests:

• Jack Murphy, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman (links provided in episode description)

Transcript

[Host]

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[Jack Murphy]

Interesting shenanigans was fake retirement ceremonies that you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years in, maybe not in the military. And they decide, hey, we're going to take this sergeant major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is and we're going to put them under a non official cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence. We'll actually hold a fake retirement ceremony and everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real, thinks that guy is really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork so that if something someone does look, it's like he's not in the military anymore, that's done with and then sent out and do his mission for a year or two and then when he comes back he will have a second real retirement ceremony that puts him out of the military.

[Host/Interviewer]

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I got a special one today. I have Sean Naylor, Jack Murphy and Zach Dorfman on. They are the authors of an incredible new article on the high side. Go check that out. That link is in the description. That's Jack and Sean's news outlet. They do, they do stuff that, you know, most investigative reporters or journalists don't do at all. They dig deep. They probably have some of the best sourcing too in like special operations and the national security world. This specific article was incredible. It was about J Sock Knox, non official cover. And everybody thinks when you Hear Knock. You think CIA guys, CIA, Knox and stuff like that. But J Socks had a pretty, a relatively robust program for going on 40 years probably.

[Jack Murphy]

Right.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like since the 80s. Yeah. So guys, welcome. I don't even know where to start.

[Jack Murphy]

Well, I mean, go ahead. Well, I think maybe like the genesis of the article was actually Zach approaching me and you know, Zach, do you want to plug your book a little bit and explain like, how this article is an outgrowth of the larger research that you've been working on?

[Zach Dorfman]

Sure. Although it's funny because I remember. It's interesting because the nature of memory being what it is, I remember both of us having a conversation and then I don't remember who actually like initiated the idea that we should, we should do this, but we were talking about the book that I'm working on, which is a history of CIA's KNOCK program, where it's a history of the CIA essentially throughout the. Its NOC program. And then you and I were talking, I mean, I want to say almost like the like December of last year, it was like holiday, it was like around the holidays, about how, you know, I mentioned it to you and then you started talking about the JSOC NOC program and how the special operations world had been also engaged in the deep cover, commercial cover space for many, many years and how there had never really been a, you know, an exhaustive look at that or there was certainly not been reporting on that anytime recently. And from that we decided to kind of, you know, start digging and through conversations with a bunch of folks in the, in the space, we, I think, I think we, you know, I wouldn't say exhaustively, but I think we, we have uncovered a good, at least first pass, you know, history of where things have gone, where things began and where they've gone over time and the challenges that are currently being faced by special operations folks trying to do deep cover work.

[Host/Interviewer]

When did this, when did the program really get going?

[Sean Naylor]

Probably in the, in the early 1980s. It couldn't be before the 1980s because JSOC wasn't established until December 1980. But as we, as we lay out in the article, JSOC had a number of operations going on in the 1980s that they used operatives under non official cover or commercial cover, as it's sometimes called for. And these stretched from Suriname to Haiti, but especially Lebanon. And Jack did a lot of reporting on the, the sort of missions that they, that they were engaged in, the sort of people that they were in contact with in Lebanon.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah. And so this is kind of like, the fun part of being a reporter is that you meet with some spooky character at a bar in Manhattan with a notepad and ask him 150 questions over the course of an hour. And so this person that I spoke to worked under non official cover. He was a member of jsoc. He spoke fluent Greek and also learned Arabic. So he was, you know, at least trilingual. And he was, you know, based out of Cyprus. And, you know, JSOC was establishing sort of a front company, a logistics company that moved air freight back and forth from Cyprus to Lebanon. And that was kind of a way for JSOC to get into the country, to get people into the country, to get equipment into the country. And then a lot of it had to do with working through surrogates. There are different Arab groups and Christian groups that we were working with in Lebanon at that time. And the main effort really was about trying to recover American hostages that were being held in Beirut. And this was just one of those intractable foreign policy problems at the time. And JSOC at the time was, was nascent. It did just come into existence right on the, you know, tail end. It was created because of the failed hostage rescue in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw. So there are a few other interesting tidbits that I think we, we pulled out of this stuff in Lebanon that some Delta guys came in and working with surrogates on the ground, wiped out some of the guys that had killed the CIA station chief, Bill Buckley. So there's, there's definitely some stuff that was going on in Beirut at that time. But unfortunately, as my source told me himself, he's like, we were not particularly successful in getting the American hostages out. You know, there, there were some, like, close calls where they're like, we think we located them. We think they're being moved from here to there. Maybe we can interdict them. But those operations just, they never reached enough. The intelligence never reached the fidelity or the threshold that would need to be met for those operations to be greenlit.

[Host/Interviewer]

One of the things that I found pretty, like wild was like, how they're working with a Lebanese, like, drug smuggler, essentially. Like, and it's just like. And me and Jock were talking about yesterday. He's like, you know, this guy was just hyper capitalist. Like whoever had the green, this drug smuggler was playing ball with. You know what I mean? Like, if you could pay me, I'm down to do almost anything.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah. And I mean, that goes back to this classic question that I know Sean and I have Written about, and I'm sure Zach has probably written about or at least encountered. Is, is it moral, ethical and legal for our intelligence community to interface with known terrorists, with drug smugglers, with like, really bad people? If you want to catch, you know, you know, a Pablo Escobar or a Osama bin Laden, you know, you probably have to talk to some really bad people that are in his inner circle. Same thing with people like Soleimani, Saddam Hussein and so on. And you know, on one, the, the, the like pragmatic side of it is like, yeah, of course you go and do it. You know, you do what you have to do to get the job done. But when that comes out in the press, it doesn't look very good. Like you've been rubbing shoulders and maybe even making. I'm not saying this happened, but for instance, if you were making cash payments to an intelligence asset that had American blood on their hands, that does not look good, to put it mildly. So I don't know, what do you guys think of that conundrum?

[Zach Dorfman]

So I think a couple of things that are interesting that you raise. I mean, one is traditionally, you know, my, you know, my knowledge of this is much deeper on the CIA side just having spent a long time done reporting in this space. But one of the issues historically for the NOC program inside the agency was the, the legal concerns and the strictures regarding the actions of a staff officer versus an asset or a source, right? So it's like, it's one thing to have a source inside Al Qaeda or inside a transnational criminal organization like drug, you know, drug trafficking organization. It's a different thing to infiltrate a staff officer and have that person actually be engaged in the space. Right. CIA folks will say that post 9 11, they actually set up a very stringent regime from the general counsel's office. And I imagine this was probably the case in JSOC as well. Although there's always, there's always exceptions. On these exceptions, you can sometimes drive, you know, you could drive a truck through these exceptions, right, about what you can and cannot do. But, you know, the idea was that you didn't want the actual shooters, right? You didn't want to, you didn't want to recruit a shooter. You wanted to recruit a logistics guy. And logistics guys were much more, less likely to actually be the people that were, you know, that were engaged in stuff where they had American blood on their hands. CIA General Counsel post 911 actually told people in the field, Knox in the field and assets, they told case officers to tell their Assets. By the way, if you are ever in a situation where you think you might be, you might be engaged in a firefight, you know, with, you know, you know, US Citizens, US Troops, US Personnel, you got to shoot over people's heads. The people the US Troops firing at. You don't know that you're a knock or that you're a, you're a CIA asset, but you, you can't try to kill them. They could try to kill you legitimately and you can't try to kill them. So it literally put people in an impossible, it put people in an impossible situation. And the CIA lawyers knew they were putting their assets and their deep cover officers in impossible situations. I mean, in general, one last thing. You know, having your source get close to people that were engaged in the drug trafficking business, like part of me says, okay, yeah, that's why you have people under non official cover. Right. Like you want to get them close to people that folks under official cover cannot get to. The defense attache in Beirut is not going to get close to that guy. Right. The second political secretary in the State Department who's a CIA officer is not going to get close to that guy. So the reason why you choose those covers is to infiltrate those worlds that will provide you that access. But then the paradox is by doing that, you're putting yourself close to people who are doing very, very bad things and you get that blowback and you get that Washington Post, you know, smell test stuff.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, you're muted.

[Sean Naylor]

Oh, beg your pardon. I think it's worth pointing out that in, in the high side, we, we explored this issue some months ago with an article about sort of an elite CIA proxy force in Afghanistan, a sort of. As a CIA elite human intelligence unit that was basically directed by, by the CIA. Even though it was all Afghans and they wanted to recruit, they had the apparent opportunity to recruit one of the men who was in the room when Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was murdered in, in, in 2002, in the months after, after 9, 11. And that, that, that raised a lot of issues at, at, at CIA. So I think, you know, like, I mean, I'm just really trying to plug, plug the high side here, but we, you know, we've looked into this in, you know, in, in one of our other, in one of. All the more reason to get a paid subscription.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, the link is in the description. I got you, Sean. Don't worry.

[Sean Naylor]

Okay, thanks, Steve.

[Jack Murphy]

So maybe we start talking a little bit about like how the military creates NOx and sort of the system in which that works, because I think that's sort of like part of the mystery of it for a lot of people. And you know, I think in the article we talk about both trying to take operators, you know, you know, people who are trained Special forces guys to become NOCs, but also it seems like it's really more common and more effective to use support personnel.

[Sean Naylor]

Yeah, I mean, I think the, the military historically has, for missions like this where your ability to pass as a local or as a member of whatever community you're supposed to be, you're penetrating has to be basically perfect. The military is going to prioritize native language skills, native cultural skills and, and ethnicity beyond, you know, how quickly you can get the long walk finished to get into, you know, to get into Delta.

[Host/Interviewer]

So they don't want them to look like Jack, basically, like 6 foot, 1 inch, white guy, 200 pounds, like salt

[Jack Murphy]

and pepper hair, blue eyes.

[Host/Interviewer]

Unless they're going into, into Ireland or something, you know.

[Jack Murphy]

Zach, do you want to tell some of the stories that you reported on about, you know, these attempts to train guys who are operators into NOx? Because, I mean, I think one of the things we talk about in the article is that it's very hard to take somebody who grew up in a Ranger platoon or a SEAL platoon or something like that, and it's like team environment, and then turn them into this sort of like lone wolf intelligence operative.

[Zach Dorfman]

This has been a consistent, persistent problem for the JSOC NOC program for many decades. And I don't know if they've ever been able to solve it. And it may actually be the, like, the great unsolvable problem problem doesn't mean that there haven't been brilliant operators. It just means that doing this at scale has been very, very difficult. I mean, it's been very difficult for CIA too. But, but I think that the, the, the, the history of folks, I mean a lot of it is overt, right? And it's very hard to scrub, if not impossible to scrub. And then there's the cultural stuff, right? I mean the, the, the joke always is, is like you can recognize these guys because they all have the operator beard. They all like, they're wearing the Merrell watch. They got the boots they like, they're all super fit. Like they look, there's a certain type and anybody who is trying to spot them, when you, when you marry that up with the open source data about their past, it's not hard to be like, what's going on here? This isn't legit. Right. You got like three guys open up a dive shop in the Maldives and it's like, what are these guys doing here? We know something, something is amiss, right? It doesn't take, you don't have to be the world's greatest counterintelligence service to figure out that something seems wrong about a certain place. And the folks that are working there. You know, when we were reporting this out, I had a source of a former contractor who described exercises that he and others would put on for, for operators who were looking to get into this commercial cover space. And one aspect of it was they would, these guys would fly in to, as part of the exercise, they would fly into airports in the US and they were, the airports were supposed to be, quote, unquote, foreign airports. And it was supposed to be like, this is a, you know, this is a denied area. This is a, you know, walk through the airport. And we want to see if you could walk through the airport. And the, the trainers didn't, hadn't necessarily seen the guys faces beforehand. And the trainers were saying, I'm gonna be able to spot every single one of you. And more often than not, they would do it. You know, they would literally, they would watch, they would do surveillance on these folks getting off different airplanes from all over the country and all over the world flying into these US airports. And the trainers would say, that guy's an operator. That guy's an operator. That guy's clearly an operator. And so you're already, you're blown from the moment you get in. This is, we're not even talking about biometrics, we're not even talking about facial recognition. We're not even talking about gait analysis or whatever. I mean, this is just good old fashioned CI work. And these guys would not necessarily know how to comport themselves either. They would get dragged into secondary as part of the exercise. They thought they would, you know, they were super slick. They'd get dragged into secondary. The folks in secondary who knew who they were, right, would try to, you know, you know, ruffle their feathers a little bit. You know, one story that I was told which is quite humorous actually is as part of the exercise, these guys were told to surveil a location.

[Host/Interviewer]

This is the best.

[Zach Dorfman]

I don't know, it's story, the story's amazing, right?

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Zach Dorfman]

Surveil this location and do it in a way that is not going to draw attention to themselves. So they got what, you know, like a windowless van. You know, what my source said was basically like, you know, your classic like, pedophile van, right? And they didn't realize that where they were supposed to be surveilling was right next to, like, an elementary school or nursery school, and they just posted up there. And of course, all of these. All these local moms were like, yo, who the fuck is that? You know, and they call the cops. They call the cops on these guys, and the cops knock, knock, knock on the van, and there's like three buff dudes or whatever, you know, with beards, just sitting in the van. And of course, they get taken in, right? Of course they could take it into the local cops. And then there's this whole ordeal because if they call the FBI, they get a little get out of jail free card, right? Where if they're in real trouble, they can say, hey, I'm sorry, sir. You know, Mr. Officer. Like, I'm actually doing elite military training.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm one of you guys.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah. Here, you know, here's a number of a local FBI agent who can, you know, who can attest to the fact that I am, in fact, a employee of the US Government. But you don't want to do that, because then you can fail out of the exercise. So eventually, after spending some time, you know, in the local jail or being interrogated by these police officers, they say, okay, fine, we give up. And they, you know, they admit to who they are and what they're doing, and everything gets worked out, and it's fine, but, like, it's just an example of, I don't want to say the hubris, but just the difficulty in getting these guys in the mindset of doing something so radically different than what they've done before.

[Jack Murphy]

Hey, guys, I want to tell you tonight about my new novel, the Most Dangerous man, coming out June 9th. I think, like a lot of you, I read in high school the short story the Greatest Game, which is almost a century old at this point, but it's the classic premise of man hunting man for sport. This book is based off of that a little bit, but also on story. Stories that I have heard over the years about safari guides that have actually taken hunting parties, wealthy people hunting poachers in West Africa. That idea kind of cooked off in my mind when I was asked to write a novel and get back into writing fiction again. And this book is about a ranger with the Ranger Reconnaissance Company who's on a mission in West Africa and gets kidnapped and hunted for spirit by a group of wealthy tech billionaires. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I think you'll have a good time reading it. It's quick, fast and furious, fast paced action, action novel and I hope you all check it out. It's up there. You can find it wherever books are sold. The hard copy, the hardback, the soft cover and also the Kindle ebook edition. And we'll have some links down down in the description for you. The book comes out June 9th and I hope you all let me know what you think of it.

[Host/Interviewer]

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[Host]

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[Jack Murphy]

There's a. You know I didn't mention this, it's not in the article but I remember there were a couple Americans that appeared to be operating under some sort of official cover. Diplomatic passports. They got hemmed up in Libya. This was quite a while ago, this was like 10 years ago or more by this point. And so this made the news. You know these Americans got arrested trying to cross the border from Tunisia to Libya. What the hell's going on? The Libyans had taken pictures of these guys passports when they detained them. And I went and looked up one of the guys names and oh look, he had run in a marathon in Fayetteville, North Carolina right next to Fort Bragg.

[Host/Interviewer]

Oh my God.

[Jack Murphy]

So it's just, it's very hard to erase the past of someone who is a career soldier. Just their footprint is so strong and their associations with the military are so strong and even those cultural things, you know, the way soldiers walk and stand and things like this, their mannerisms just separate Them from the average person. I think one of the other interesting things that came out of it was the difference between how the CIA uses Knox and how JSOC uses them, which

[Host/Interviewer]

is because isn't JSOC usually? It's like a short term kind of thing. CIA is usually more of a long term kind of thing.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Why? Maybe they run into those issues because they're not like really home growing these knocks.

[Jack Murphy]

Well, from like young. The short term versus long term thing is like a product of what they're trying to accomplish, really. JSOC uses Knox for targeting and for logistics too, but they're more interested of like, go in, find the bad guy, locate him, you know, that kind of thing. Um, or maybe drive this van around this country with some surveillance equipment in it or whatever the case may be. Um, or. Zach, do you want to go into like, kind of the difference of how the CIA utilizes them?

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, I mean, the J Stock folks also, it's. It's kind of like somebody gets into country, you get arms caches, you get, you recruit a, you know, a local vet who can serve as a, you know, as a doctor if things go like really, really south. It's like that kind of stuff. It's like prep intelligence, preparation for the battlefield, I guess, is a lot of it. CIA has a much different history. Traditionally, things are changing because of the difficulties surrounding what they call ubiquitous technical surveillance and just the way in which it's much harder to stay hidden than it used to be in the past. But CIA would try to nat. Would try to grab people very young, put them on the deep cover, knock, commercial cover track, and keep them there for their whole careers. Like no connection with the US Government ever. And it was pretty successful in doing that for a long time. I mean, there were people who never went to the farm, they never set foot in Northern Virginia necessarily. They lived abroad for 30 years. They never went to Langley, they never went there after they retired. They retired undercover. Some of them never touched US soil or very, very rarely. And if so they did it. They did it in a way that, you know, if they had a connection to South Florida, they would like go to South Florida for reasons that comported with their cover. They sometimes successfully ran businesses, sometimes not. I mean, that's, that's another. That's a whole other issue. Right. That I think JSOC and CIA is both had, which is like.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, when I found this out, what you're about to say, it blew my mind. Like somebody's Working as a high powered lawyer, let's say, and is also a knock for 30 years and supposedly making half a million dollars a year. They can't keep the money.

[Zach Dorfman]

No.

[Host/Interviewer]

They're getting paid as like a CIA officer.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Host/Interviewer]

Absolute nonsense.

[Zach Dorfman]

So there was, I mean, not to. So in the book, I get into this because in the early days, in the early days of the NOC program, I mean, I mean early days, like 1950s, like right after the CIA was founded, there were debates about this and there were folks within the CIA that were like, if we're going to make this work here, we need to actually let these guys make a buck doing their jobs. Because you can't have a guy be, you know, be a CEO at GE abroad and working two jobs and, and just making a civil servant salary. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense as a coffer mechanism, right? Because if you're supposed to be a high roller, you gotta, you gotta have that Mercedes, you gotta have that apartment, you know, you gotta be able to go on vacations where people in your kind of class group go, right? Like everything has to become part of your cover. And that has historically been an issue too. And there's a lot of resentment in CIA because there used to be this sense that CIA people under non official cover were just kind of like gaming the system, you know, like, oh, I gotta be, you know, I'm a big shot, I gotta drive the bends, right? Like I gotta go to the south of France for three weeks. Because everybody else in my firm does, you know, in the summertime. But yeah, I mean, over time CIA would use Knox for intelligence gathering. They would use them to handle ultra sensitive sources. Like if somebody was recruited by a case officer under diplomatic cover, the moment that person was recruiter, let's say it was a high level government official, right? They would not want that case officer to ever have any, any interaction with that senior government official again, right? So what they would do is they would turn that person over to a NOC who had no USG connections and that knock would generally fly in from another country just to have meetings with that person. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that CIA has done over time. It's not, that's not really the, like the core of this article. So I don't want to get too far afield, but the agency had a, had developed a much deeper, a broader theory of the case, right? A theory of the case for why you would have folks like this doesn't mean it didn't have a lot of problems. It just means that they had deck, they had decades of lead time on JSOC to figure this stuff out and they had a broader set of uses for their knocks. And JSOC came at it from, I think, self consciously not needing it for quite as many things. And it had many decades. It had to play catch up. And I think it's still playing catch up. But to be honest, I think for CIA there's also been huge issues over the last, well, arguably since its founding, but particularly in the last 10, 15, 20 years in making the program work. So it's not, you know, not to skip to the end of the article, but like there's, there's a lot of questions about the future of the practice in general, not just for CIA, but, you know, for JSOC too.

[Jack Murphy]

I think one of the other big differences that came out during our research was that these sort of non official cover businesses that the CIA stands up can generate profit, whereas the military cannot generate profit. One guy even told me, he's like, if your cover is a carpet salesman and you buy a bunch of Persian rugs in the Middle east, when you bring those back to the United States, they all have to go into the burn pit and be destroyed.

[Host/Interviewer]

Can't even take one for the house,

[Jack Murphy]

for the crib, Nothing even even. One of the guys told me, he's like, we had there was a mechanism to return our frequent flyer miles.

[Host/Interviewer]

Crazy.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah.

[Zach Dorfman]

I want to just say one quick thing which is that that is a really important difference. And there's a phrase that I heard a couple times called non appropriated income, not appropriated budget. And that refers to the ability to take those profits and plow them back into operational funds. But it is a black hole and there is no, there is very little oversight over non appropriated funds or income. So if there's anybody listening to this podcast who has any experience or insight into that world, because it's a very important world and it's one that gets very little attention because it tends to escape not only congressional oversight, but also oversight within the buildings themselves, because you can just take the money that you have earned and use it to, I don't know, purchase more real estate or go on operational missions. Like there's, we are talking, we are talking tens, hundreds of millions of dollars over time that can be, that can be earned in some of these, in some of these proprietary schemes. And so it's a, it's a topic that generally does not get any on

[Host/Interviewer]

the contras yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yes. That is, I think that is a great example now that we got Iran back in the news, right, this idea that you are, yeah, you're taking covert action funds that you should not that are arguably in Iran contrast, legal from the jump, but like. And then you are plowing it into something else and it is, it is a kind of dark side of the moon aspect to US Intelligence activities.

[Host/Interviewer]

I want to know about the East European.

[Jack Murphy]

Tell me about that freak Sean, about that one.

[Host/Interviewer]

Sean, give us a scoop. You're on mute.

[Sean Naylor]

The East European was the sort of. The name, if you like, or that I, I gave to an individual whose, whose true identity is known by Jack and me. But I first encountered when I was reporting Relentless Strike, my book about jsoc.

[Host/Interviewer]

And

[Sean Naylor]

some of the material in, in fact most of the material in the article about the East European comes, comes from the book. Because he was sort of the quintessential successful noc. I mean, even though we had sources that were claiming, oh, JSox, NOCs only do short term missions and so forth, this guy sort of was the antithesis of that. He had joined Delta Force early in its existence and he spoke, he was, you know, born in an East European country and had the, you know, had all the cultural and linguistic skills, therefore, to pass as a native of that country. And in addition, as with others from the JSOC and particularly the Special Mission Unit community, he had a convenient missing part of his career because in the army those folks go into something called the dasa, the Department of the Army. What's the S stand for, Jack, do you remember?

[Host/Interviewer]

System?

[Jack Murphy]

Maybe. I, I can't remember either, but it's

[Sean Naylor]

basically the, it's basically a restricted list of names that isn't made public that doesn't appear on, in other army databases.

[Host/Interviewer]

So

[Sean Naylor]

this guy was sort of converted into a noc and he had a sort of a commercial cover alias. I believe that his original country of birth helped out with this. And he, he traveled the world basically under alias doing, doing. Doing the, the j. Socks bidding. And in, in, you know, one of the cases that, that we describe in, in the article, he, he drove a, he drove an suv, I believe, or certainly a car from Jordan into Baghdad completely kitted out with hidden antenna so that it could pick up all sorts of communications from Iraqi government types in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And then he sort of parked this vehicle there and then, you know, and then basically stayed in Baghdad for a while, again undercover. And then. And Then left. You know, there's another episode of again, a guy with a, I presume a fairly long term cover who is leaving a country near Lebanon, but not Lebanon itself, but was passing through Lebanon

[Zach Dorfman]

as

[Sean Naylor]

part of his cover and was basically jumped by some guys. Now, whether this was a sort of just a street crime and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or whether this was Hezbollah or somebody like that trying to kidnap him, it's unclear. But he, you know, they had guns, he fought them off, he wrestled one of the guns out of their hands. But in the sort of process of all of this, he got shot in the gut and he had to basically go back to his hotel. And then he called a US government doctor whose contact information he had and said, here's my problem, I've been shot. What do I do? The doctor talked him through how to sew himself up, and then he continued with his mission. So, you know, there were all these steps he had to take to keep himself, as they say, clean. And he did all of that before leaving the theater. So he went through all the steps that he would have had to have gone through had he not been shot, despite the fact that he had a gunshot wound. And then he had to fly out commercial. And finally he flew into a friendly country that's not in the Middle east and got some real medical care. But that became a sort of a legendary episode. He was part of the sort of intelligence, Special ops intelligence unit often referred to as Task Force Orange. Had a lot of different cover names over the years, and he received a Silver Star for his actions. But the citation for that silver star is classified. I found out about it many, many years ago and sort of looked into it. But, you know, I was told that that's a legendary, legendary case of a, of a commercial cover operative, you know, getting in the shit, if you like, and then having to get himself out.

[Host/Interviewer]

Jack, I remember we had George Hand on. He worked. I don't know if he was a knock supposed like, you know, J Sock knock, but he was in Delta Force and he was, he would go with like a female operative to. Was it Bosnia?

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was not non official cover. I don't believe. I think they were under official cover for the most part when they did that.

[Host/Interviewer]

But it's just to say, like, there's women that are doing this job too.

[Jack Murphy]

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the more interesting aspects of this is that, you know, they recruit people from across the army and across the Navy. Not Just special ops guys, because they're looking for people who have those language abilities and that ethnicity that. That they. The mission requires, and then they put them through a training course, actually a series of training courses, depending on what they need. But it's interesting that, you know, a lot of them are one and dones or two and dones. So they'll go and do one or two missions, and then they're going, you know, presumably they'll get a Bronze Star and sent back to their. Their parent unit. So I. I mean, it's. It's interesting the way it works. You know, as one person told me, you know, the CIA plays the long game with these programs, but JSOC just doesn't have a long game. There's no such. There's no such thing.

[Host/Interviewer]

It's got to be weird. You do a couple missions like super squirrely secret shit, and then you go back to your parent unit.

[Jack Murphy]

There's. There's an even crazier story, I mean, that Sean and I will try to write about in the future, about a guy who's a conventional army dude, had those language skills, that ethnicity, and the army him up and put him undercover with some really bad people. And when that mission was done, he was awarded a Silver Star and sent back to his unit, the motor pool or whatever it was.

[Host/Interviewer]

Jesus Christ.

[Jack Murphy]

It was a year undercover.

[Host/Interviewer]

Oh, my God.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Talking about, like, the male, female, like the TFO couple that went into Iran in 2014. And they. It's. They've been doing it several times since 9, 11. Tell us a little bit about that, because that sounds like, insane. Even before, like, we had all these crazy tensions and the sanctions and everything with Iran. Oh, Sean, you're on mute again.

[Sean Naylor]

Beg your pardon. I'm trying to protect everybody from my dog Veto's barking.

[Ryan Seacrest (alternate)]

No problem.

[Sean Naylor]

Yeah. That was a case in which Orange and JSOC writ large had been sort of pondering how to get people into Iran. And it turned out, you know, actually to be a little easier than. Than some of them thought. They. They had imagined that the easier way would be to drive overland and. And cross at a land border rather than go through where you can pick up a visa as you're going through the sort of the border checkpoint. But it turned out that they were able to come up with COVID identities that withstood the visa application process at an Iranian embassy and were able to fly in commercially into an airport. It's usually considered. That's usually considered a higher bar to get through the higher bar of security. Than just crossing at a desert checkpoint somewhere. But it worked. And they were able to, it was a male female couple, which as we've discussed, usually is thought to attract less scrutiny than a singleton military age male or, you know, multiple military age males hanging out together. And they were able to stay in a hotel in a large, in a large Iranian city, you know, drive around. They, they could have sort of undertaken a sort of a mission there and then to sort of collect on the Iranian nuclear program. But since that wasn't originally part of their mission, they chose not to. And they returned basically, I think the same way they, they came in via commercial, commercial air. And when they got back to the States, they, they briefed the President on their, which was President George W. Bush at the time on, on their accomplishments. It was considered a, you know, a terrific success and a, and a template, you know, to, to base future missions on.

[Host/Interviewer]

So it's safe to say we've been doing it since, ever since we saw that it's relatively easy to get in there.

[Sean Naylor]

Yeah, I would say that's probably true. I mean, with anything like this. And I'm just sort of, I think, stating the obvious, you don't want to do missions like this just because you can. There has to be a real need to do it. Because just because it worked the previous time doesn't mean that somebody somewhere in the Iranian government hasn't retroactively or retrospectively figured out what you did and taken steps to prevent it in the future. So, you know, I mean, there's some good fictional TV series, both Israeli and French, about people conducting non official cover missions against the Iranians, some in Iran, some elsewhere.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, the bureau. Right, that's the French one.

[Sean Naylor]

It's the French one, and I think the Israeli one is called Tehran, but I'm not sure. And I mean, they give you a pretty good sense of just the sort of the white knuckle ride that can be.

[Jack Murphy]

The other difference. Sorry, Zach, I'll let you go. The other difference to point out to listeners between official cover and non official cover cover is that if you get busted under official cover, that you're posing as a State Department person, even if you're in Moscow or somewhere, like maybe you get your shoulder pulled out of the socket when they arrest you and then they dub you Persona non grata and you're deported out of the country, you're going back home. But if you're under non official cover, you're getting taken down into a basement somewhere and shot like the US Government is not going to claim you at all. So the pucker factor in a place like Tehran has got to be incredibly high.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, that's 100% true. I mean, the best case scenario is that there's an implicit understanding that. That, you know, you're actually, like. You never actually admit to it, but. But Iranian or Chinese or Russian counterintelligence knows that you're actually CIA or jsoc, and then there's somebody that they're willing to trade you for. But, I mean, there have been cases where there was one case of a. Of a CA knock in the 1950s in China who. Who spent a decade in a Chinese dungeon and died. I mean, the US Government, they disavowed him, and they just said, he's not one of ours. And the Chinese government said, we know he is. And the US Government said, no, he's not, and he rotted away in the dungeon and died. I mean, it doesn't get much more serious than that. Since we're talking about Iran, I think it's pretty interesting, actually, because, you know, Iran, this is the case for the Israelis, too, but we don't have diplomatic relations with the Iranian government. Right. So you cannot operate under a US Passport. And frankly, you wouldn't necessarily want to operate under a passport of a friendly Western country either. Although more or less some have been useful. Right. I mean, there have been times where we've had allies from Eastern Europe who have provided cover for people going into Iran, and you've had people that have been able to speak those languages, and so it's been, like, pretty effective. But again, these are sophisticated counterintelligence services. They know what they're looking for. And so then you need to really think about, who do we have that can operate under a third country passport who is not going to attract any attention of Iranian counterintelligence? And that's really, really hard. And I don't want to take anything away from the folks that Sean spoke about, but I think it's very illustrative that as a mere proof of concept of getting a tan, what they call a tandem couple, which is like when you have two operatives, two deep cover officers working together, pretending to be almost always like a romantic couple married, something like that, going into a country like Iran, checking into a hotel and walking around and leaving unscathed was considered notable enough for those people to then brief the President of the United States. I mean, that tells you about how difficult this stuff is considered to be, how dangerous it is, and how rare it is. I mean, it's the Truth is, is that we don't do a lot of this in denied areas because it's so dangerous, because the stakes are so high, because there is no recompense for people if they get caught. And there have always. There has also been periods of more or less willingness to undertake missions of this kind of dangerousness. Like you have folks at the operator level who are willing to go in and then you get people in the bureaucracy who pull people back. And that's been a source of tension too, over the years.

[Host/Interviewer]

Talking a little bit about the bureaucracy just reminded me when, you know, the. If J. Sock sets up a shell company or a fake business to a cover business to like and starts making money or they want to make a business decision, they have to, to make that decision, they have to like shoot it up the flag, back to the flag officer to see like if it's a yes or no. And it's like what the is a one star or two star general or whatever. Colonel, how are they making the business decision that's like happening on the ground? Like, why would that even be in

[Jack Murphy]

like, the floats described to me as, you know, you're undercover as a businessman that can't make any business decisions.

[Host/Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack Murphy]

So it makes the COVID just very difficult to work under.

[Host/Interviewer]

That's the great. And isn't like the key thing keeping your cover as clean as possible? It's like, hold on, I have to call my wife or whoever he's trying to, you know, act like he's going to make it. You know, it just makes no sense.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, there's all kinds of like, shenanigans that go into trying to like, maintain those covers. As we found out that they'll go in and electronically delete all of your records. They'll go to like, credit card companies and they have relationships with a lot of these companies that they'll like, okay, we're working with the US Government. They'll delete your credit history. And it's like you're born again. And it creates a lot of difficulties because when you come back to the United States and you're trying to integrate back into life as a civilian, it's like on paper you don't exist. Even just guys who are official cover guys that go on the Dasser and they've been on that Dasser for like 10, 15 years. It takes several years to just come off that damn list. And that's just official cover guys we're talking about there.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, it's, it's pretty unbelievable.

[Jack Murphy]

There was one, the other interesting Shenanigan was fake retirement ceremonies that you'll have a guy who has, you know, maybe he already has his 20 years and maybe not in the military. And they decide, hey, we're going to take this sergeant major or this lieutenant colonel or whoever it is and we're going to put them under a non official cover and send them to some part of the world to gather intelligence, will actually hold a fake retirement ceremony. And everyone in that guy's unit thinks it's real, thinks that guy's really retiring except for him. And then he will be given fake military paperwork, like fake discharge paperwork so that if something, someone does look, it's like he's not in the military anymore, that's done with and then sent out and do his mission for a year or two and then when he comes back he will have a second real retirement ceremony that puts him out of the military. But again, I mean that just is again one of these problems with finding someone who's very late in career. You know, you imagine finding a special forces command sergeant major that's been doing the job for 20 years and then trying to put them under that cover versus trying to find a kid in basic training and then putting them in that cover.

[Host/Interviewer]

You Jack, you mentioned about like us hitting up like credit reporting companies and whatever to like delete information. Where did you, did you say it where they do this? If, even if the company says no, we'll just go in and do it ourselves anyway.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, I had a, I had a guy tell me that that like, yeah, if they don't cooperate, there are like

[Host/Interviewer]

ways we'll just hack into it and do it anyway.

[Jack Murphy]

There's something that, that the nerds at the Pentagon do to delete all that stuff. And we talked about this is another facet of Knox that we haven't really talked about is that when they're under a commercial cover, that cover company that they're ostensibly working for is maintained. Sometimes up to 20 people are maintaining that cover. So it's super expensive to create and maintain non official cover. It's a really big undertaking. And that's why as Zach was saying, we don't do a lot of it. You know, it's not, it's not super prevalent.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, just to like put an exclamation point on what Jack just said. Every noc, whether JSOC or at CIA, requires an immense amount of support. All the support people have salaries. All the support people may or may not want to be doing something with their careers that involve supporting a NOC full Time, and then you got the actual costs of the knock. Right. If you. If you're going traditional and you have somebody that's a business person, there might be those associated costs that I mentioned before, Right. Kind of keeping up. Keeping up the. The illusion of the lifestyle. So, like, one knock can be an extraordinarily expensive proposition. And if you have somebody and you have eight people supporting them and that knock, all they do is meet with some sensitive sources in a couple countries, and people start looking at budgets. There's the kind of. The value proposition can be very controversial. It doesn't mean that they don't have really important uses. But historically, there has been a stream of thought, a very powerful stream of thought within the US Intelligence community that the juice is just not worth the squeeze for Knox in general. And so, you know, for various reasons, there. There has been a lot of skepticism over the years about whether they are worth it. You have other folks who are totally, you know, evangelized about it and say, well, you know, you're not read into it. Right? So there's. You get. You get into that game where it's kind of like, if you understood the compartments that I was read into, you would know why NOx are so valuable. But since 99% of the people don't actually know, they don't know what they don't know. And it's. It's impossible to, To. To make a, Like a, an honest assessment, you know, when people just kind of. They just say, well, you don't, you know, you're not written. Right. So. But overall, I would say that. That the attitude has been pretty skeptical over time, and I don't think it's getting any less skeptical.

[Host/Interviewer]

Is that because, like, we're, like, more and more reliant on, like, technical surveillance rather than actual human intelligence? Because there's no way we have a huge network in Iran. Like.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yes, there's no way. I mean, I mean, yes, that's. I mean, you could. We could write, you know, we could write an entire encyclopedia worth of books, you know, on, you know, like, Like,

[Jack Murphy]

I mean, yeah, if you're a bureaucrat, are you more comfortable with, like, signals intelligence and technical surveillance, or do you want to rely on human beings which have a track record sometimes of being unreliable and, as Zach points out, costing a ton of money and a ton of grief if they get caught?

[Sean Naylor]

Yeah. Although, of course, to play devil's advocate, I mean, oftentimes what the United States is relying on is human intelligence from partner nations, and it's not as if those satellites that are collecting all the imagery for the National Reconnaissance Office and all the audio and other signals intelligence for the National Security Agency are cheap either. So there's, you know, there's, you know, swings and roundabouts. There's a number of angles to this. I suppose the intelligence communities, polite, politically correct responses. They want all sources of intelligence to feed into one big picture.

[Zach Dorfman]

But without question though we have, we have grown accustomed in US Intelligence to relying predominantly on sigint. That has not changed. That has only become more prevalent over time. We do get important humint from liaison from intelligence partners. But like what they call unilateral human sources that are like recruited and handled by US Intelligence community officers from various three letter agencies has declined significantly over time. And what that means for the future of intelligence is like, man, that's a whole nother podcast that we could talk about for many, many hours.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. What's the case officers union saying about this? Like they can't be fucking happy.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know actually. But I don't know if there's a lot of questions about whether those folks are going to be able to operate the way that they did. Right. Because again, part of the. So if you look at one level up on this whole debate, it's about if we can't get human the way we used to do, we knew, do we need to change the COVID mechanisms that we have been using predominantly in order to get closer to sources that we need, need. Right. And so if we can't rely on being military attaches and diplomats of various sorts, do we need to move out of those embassies to then do our jobs? Non official cover has always been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for folks who think that official cover is just not getting as close to the people that we need to. But it has so many problems and structural issues of its own that it has created other issues along the way. And neither has been able to come close to pacing with the, the technical collection capabilities that the US government now has.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, it's going to be an interesting next couple decades, boys. Excellent episode, excellent article. The High side. The link is in the description. Zach, when is the book coming out about the CIA Knox? Are we working on that?

[Zach Dorfman]

Next summer? Yeah, next summer. Penguin Random House. The provisional title is Deep Cover, but it's, it's. I mean I got a long way before publication, but the book is written, it's in revisions, it's a hit, it's, it's A. It's a. It's a new history of the CIA through this very problem that we've been. We've been discussing going back to the founding of it to. To today, so. Should be interesting.

[Sean Naylor]

I haven't seen a word of it, and I can already tell you it's going to be well worth buying.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. And. And for Team House listeners and eyes on listeners. I want to put Zach's links in the description. He's written a couple times. A few times with. With Jack before. You guys did the. The Soleimani strike article, right? Credible one. Another one, too. Which other one have you guys worked on? This one blanket.

[Sean Naylor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

This is the second one. Haven't you guys done something else, too?

[Jack Murphy]

I don't think so.

[Host/Interviewer]

Okay. Solomoni article is incredible too. Really good.

[Zach Dorfman]

Worked with Sean a bunch. Worked with Sean on a big article on the first Trump administration's plans to potentially kidnap WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and some discussions they were having about even targeted. Targeted assassinations.

[Host/Interviewer]

So obviously on Julian Assange or just in general?

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

It's a smart.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, always have a high profile at all.

[Host/Interviewer]

Not high profile at all. It's smoke. The guy from WikiLeaks.

[Zach Dorfman]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it got stopped, but, I mean, that's a whole nother discussion, you know, but it was. It was a. It was. It was a. It was a wild ordeal, man. They were thinking about doing gun battles just, you know, in the streets of London with, you know, the Russians, that they thought they were gonna put them on a plane, send them to Moscow, but. Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Was somebody smoking meth before they came up with that idea?

[Zach Dorfman]

No comment.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like what kind of. I mean, how are these people, like, even working? Like in the. In the government? Wow.

[Zach Dorfman]

To ask that question is to answer it.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. Everybody check them out. Check out Sean, check out Jack, check out Zach. Those links will be in the description, of course. The high side. Check that out. Check out their sub stack. And anything else? Oh, yeah. Patreon.com the teamhouse. You get both eyes on and team ass episodes. Add full free and early and you help support the show. Guys, a pleasure.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah. Thank you, everyone.

[Zach Dorfman]

Thanks, guys.

[Sean Naylor]

Thank you.

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[Jack Murphy]

Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Team House Podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the Team House on our Geopolitics podcast, eyes on things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor on the high side, anything else that we have going on books. We recommend upcoming guests that we have coming on the show and also you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well. If you go and check it out. We send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our [e-mail] join again. The website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com join so so we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.

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Foreign

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[Sean Naylor]

Shadows.

[Bradley W. Harp]

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[Bradley W. Harp]

It's World War II and American spies are on a secret mission to stop Nazi Germany from building an atomic bomb. I'm Bradley W. Hart, host of the National World War II Museum's podcast series Secret World War II Spies and Special Ops. The largest conflict in human history wasn't just one on the battlefield, it was also one in the shadows. A new season is available now. Find and follow Secret World War II wherever you get your podcasts.