Transcript of Inside JSOC’s Most Dangerous Mission Ever | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS New

On one hand, it's about a, a type of, uh, mission that JSOC has been training for since its inception, which is counterproliferation, um, counter weapons of mass destruction. Uh, but it also zeros in specifically on the case of Iran and, uh, the plans and the training exercises that JSOC has conducted to potentially go into Iran by force and remove the highly enriched uranium. And this is an operation that would be incredibly complex and incredibly dangerous. Some people in the command began referring to it as Eagle Claw 2.0, which is a reference to Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, in which Delta Force and the Rangers went to rescue hostages that were being held in Tehran. The whole thing ended in a fiasco at a desert staging ground called Desert One, where a helicopter and aircraft were blown up. Other helicopters were disabled by a sandstorm. The operation fell apart for a variety of different reasons. A lot of them were technical and mechanical, not because the guys didn't have the balls to do it. They certainly did.

Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode, special episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I'm joined with Jack Murphy, investigative journalist, podcaster, 43-year-old. Happy birthday, Jack. Jack's birthday today. Uh, you guys have a new article, you and Sean Naylor on The High Side, about basically detailing the entire, uh, raid that's been planned since the beginning of the war to go in and grab the highly enriched uranium out of a I guess the— if you— once you dig into the article, it's two sites that they were really planning on hitting, uh, but there's— there's intelligence suggesting maybe there— it's at three sites. So obviously an incredibly complicated, uh, mission. Um, yeah, the article's great. Check it out at The High Side. The High Side, that link is down in the description. Uh, it's stuff that no other journalists, I feel like, get. So really good shit. I'm sure that people are freaking out down in, uh, down in, where's JSOC based out of Tampa? Brag. I'm sure they're not happy there today. Cause you go into some good detail, like you name the squadrons and everything, but like, just give me the whole, give us like the, you know, quick pitch on what the article is about.

Yeah. So the story is called Iran WMD Raid Inside JSOC's Most Challenging Mission Yet. I wrote it with my colleague Sean Naylor at The High Side. Sean's on vacation, so he's not here today. So I'm the bestie yet, sorry guys.

Sean's working on his tan.

Yeah, I hope so. And so the story is about, on one hand, it's about a type of mission that JSOC has been training for since its inception, which is counter-proliferation, counter-weapons of mass destruction. But it also zeroes in specifically on the case of Iran and the plans and the training exercises that JSOC has conducted to potentially go into Iran by force and remove the highly enriched uranium. And this is an operation that would be incredibly complex and incredibly dangerous. Some people in the command began referring to it as Eagle Claw 2.0, which is a reference to Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, in which Delta Force and the Rangers went to rescue hostages that were being held in Tehran. The whole thing ended in a fiasco at a desert staging ground called Desert One, where a helicopter and aircraft were blown up. Other helicopters were disabled by a sandstorm. The operation fell apart for a variety of different reasons. A lot of them were technical and mechanical, not because the guys didn't have the balls to do it. They certainly did. But you ran into these insurmountable problems. And I think this operation, you know, I had a Delta Force veteran one time tell me, he's like, you know, Operation Eagle Claw was so complex that even today with all the fancy helicopters we have and great technology, we probably still couldn't pull something like that off.

And I think that was a thought process that went, you know, it kind of carried forward into this operation. And again, the guys, you know, the commands were certainly very eager to get in and do this mission. But there's also some trepidation. In some corners about what the likely prospects are once the operators get on the ground. What I mean by that is the movement into Iran, into a denied area, is difficult. You have to get there. You have to establish some sort of a staging ground. This operation would require an improvised landing strip, if nothing else. You'd have to land aircraft for two reasons. The first is that you would have to land all kinds of engineering equipment, bulldozers and excavators and stuff like that, because the tunnels that lead into these underground facilities have been collapsed and destroyed. Largely, they were destroyed by Operation Midnight Hammer a few months prior to all of this kicking off, where we went in and bombed these sites. But there are also reports that the Iranians went in themselves and collapsed and booby trapped some of the tunnels. So you have to move in heavy excavating equipment.

It's not, that's not a JSOC mission per se. That's more of a, just a conventional Army or Navy operation where you're having to bring these guys in.

So it's not just like 100 operators going in, doing the thing, getting out, right?

Correct. It's not the bin Laden raid where like 15 guys are going to go in there and like save America and kick some ass, right? This would require probably in the neighborhood of 1,000 to 1,500 boots on the ground. You would have Rangers doing an outer cordon, and then you would have, in this case, it was a development group, SEAL Team 6 had the lead on this one. They would be the assault squadron that goes in, and if there's, of course, a security element, they're going to be eliminated by the operators. And then at some point, the excavating, excavating is going to have to take place that we talked about. And then there's a unit called the 21st EOD Company, which would go in and actually secure the device. They're the ones that have the WMD training to do that. And then it becomes the whole process of getting it out of there. We're told that something in the neighborhood like 300 to 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that would need to be moved. There's a separate, yet another element that would handle that called the Technical Escort Unit. And they are the guys that manage and move nuclear materials, fissile materials from point A to point B.

They're part of the US military. They've done operations in the past. For instance, they removed highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan in the 1990s. And even this one, this flew under the radar. But I mean, the US government reported this themselves in a press release just in the, like maybe a month and a half ago. We removed highly enriched uranium from Venezuela from a student, like a academic student reactor or something like that that they had there. And again, that would be the technical escort unit that would manage that. And the Venezuela thing, that's done in the Kazakhstan mission that I mentioned. These previous operations, they were done in cooperation with the local government.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a permissive environment. Yeah.

Right, right. We're going to go in. We're going to take this dangerous material off of your hands. And in return, you know, you're going to get favorable economic deals or whatever, whatever the case is.

Right. Yeah.

This would be by force. Now, the whole scheme of the operation that I just laid out, the technical escort unit brings the uranium out. It has to be flown out on fixed wing because of the static electricity created by rotor blades. That's a whole other thing. Now, everything I'm describing in this Iran mission would also be conducted in a CBRN environment, you know, chemical, radiological, biological, and nuclear. And that would require wearing protective suits, you know, the protective masks, the whole nine yards. And while you're doing that, you're having to assault, excavate, secure, you know, render safe all sorts of different devices.

And hold off the Iranian military from coming in, you know, basically attacking you the whole day.

While they're lobbing drones and ballistic missiles at you and all kinds of fun stuff, right? So it's an incredibly complicated mission. JSOC has trained extensively for this type of mission. However, as far as I've been able to ascertain, they never really trained for an operation where they first had to do the excavating of the site, where they had to like dig it up. There are some past examples where this was looked— something similar was looked into. In the 1990s, there was the Tarhuna facility in Libya where Gaddafi was running an underground chemical weapons facility. And this is really interesting. The plan to go and deal with that was for the Delta Force guys to load vehicles onto these huge Marine Corps hovercraft, drive them, you know, through the sea, the Mediterranean, up onto the beaches, and then go as far inland as they can, stop, drop ramp, unload the vehicles. Then the vehicles drive to the facility and they would be taking with them, towing with them industrial mining equipment, industrial drills. You know, these things that would, you know, go vertical and you drill down into the earth. And what they were going to do was go in the top of the facility, drill down into it, and then using a cement mixer truck, they would pour an explosive slurry down the hole into the facility and detonate it and destroy the facility.

But there's also, again, there's complications there. They carried out feasibility studies at the Nevada Test Site on this, drilling into bedrock to see how fast it can be done. And even with the best equipment and the best professionals doing it, it could take weeks.

Yeah.

So all of these things are much more complicated and you just run into these sort of insurmountable problems. But I think one of the other things that this article explores a little bit is that there are limitations on what small teams of special operators can realistically accomplish. Um, you, you just run into these problems where, you know, the, the, there's only so much that they can do, right?

I mean, yeah, they basically— what it— how it read was essentially like, you know, Silver Squadron, Ranger Battalion, and maybe some elements from 82nd Airborne or whatever would shoot their way in to get to, uh, Isfahan and, uh, either Fordow or Natanz. I don't know which. I know Isfahan was probably the main one. And then set up a perimeter, a security perimeter, for weeks at a time so they could have a construction project going on, right? Like, that sounds insane, right? Because we always know that, like, or at least we think that, like, you know, JSOC and special operations in general is usually used outside of, like, Iraq and Afghanistan where it was more long-term, but like, they're used for quick hits like that's their whole— that's their bread and butter. That's where they make their money, essentially. And then to send in a bunch of like the 21st EOD guys and equipment, it's literally like set shooting everybody up, setting up a construction site for like a month, probably.

Yeah.

And hopefully, fingers crossed, we could get all the stuff out and bring it to Washington, right? Is like the lab where they could do like the, you know, the investigation on where it's from and all that stuff and just, you know, securely retain it.

Yeah, that's another aspect of this operation that has changed over the decades is that in the beginning, in the early years, the idea was interception or sabotage, destruction, that you would go in and destroy the facilities like we talked about in Libya. What it evolved into over the years was that JSOC would actually go in, secure the fissile material, secure the warhead, whatever it was, and actually take it out with them. And from what I can tell, this would be done for a couple of reasons. You know, if it's, you know, a Russian nuclear warhead or something like this, we would want to obviously study that and reverse engineer it in detail.

You know, see where they got their stuff from, right?

Obviously, like to see how we can defeat that kind of technology. But also, yes, if, you know, if we went into Iran and we secured fissile materials, we would want to study those materials in the lab here in the United States and determine if another country gave that to them. You know, and again, I do not know this for a fact. I'm just saying, you know, theoretically, if like Russia or China were to give them fissile material, if like something like the AQ Khan network were to like render that, that sort of material to them, that's—

Yeah, there's a really interesting quote that you just posted when you reposted the article just now. I don't think this is an operation— I don't think this operation has been done before, even in a training environment, said the former defense contractor, adding that if the facility itself was buried in rubble, JSOC would probably just completely destroy what remained with explosives rather than try and dig out the fissile material. That sounds insane too. Like, how is that— you know, it's already covered up, it's already for the most part buried anyway. Um, Also, in the article, you also mentioned about like the worry about even taking a couple of kilograms of enriched uranium and making a dirty bomb. Wouldn't that also— like, you know, there's probably environmental factors to be thinking about if you're blowing up fissile material in place, right? I mean, sure, it's underground, so maybe it'll be a little bit less impact, you know, impact the environment, but still, there's dangers there.

If that course of action was taken, I think the idea would be that you would fully collapse what remained of the tunnels and just entomb the material inside, which arguably is more of a delaying measure. It's not really a final resolution to the problem. The problem being that you can't really just leave highly enriched uranium under the deserts of Iran forever, because if some idiot were to go and dig that up, doesn't have to be the Iranian government. I mean, say some, some terrorist organization even. Went and digs that up and just a few milligrams of it could cause a serious issue. Like you said, if you blew up a dirty bomb, you know, in, you know, Eastern Europe or Western Europe or wherever, you know, you could cause a huge disaster. So you can't really just leave the material out there. Someone has to secure it. Now, maybe we reach a deal with the Iranians and they secure it. I know at one point there's even talk with the Chinese government that they might go in and secure it., or we could reach a deal with Iranians where our forces go in there peacefully and secure it like we did in Kazakhstan years ago.

Yeah.

Um, but you can't really just leave the material out there under the desert forever. Um, but for the time being, it seems like that's kind of what's going to happen, at least for the foreseeable future, that we're going to monitor these sites, um, with satellites. And if anyone started moving excavating equipment in there, we would be able to detect that and pick it up pretty quickly. Because, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Cain, got briefed up on this and he went and briefed President Trump and the president decided not to greenlight this operation, largely for the reasons that we've been talking about, that it's high risk. There could be quite a few American casualties. And there are some other things too, some OPSEC things that I think some people in the community are I'm glad we're not going to have to use. There are things that relate to like electronic intelligence and things like this. Basically capabilities we would use that we would only be able to use once because our adversaries would afterwards understood what— understand what we did and they would adapt. So they're kind of high-end capabilities that are considered to be like one and dones.

You know, you're only going to get one shot at it. And so I think perhaps this is the administration coming to terms with what we were discussing, that there's limitations on what you can accomplish, that JSOC isn't just the easy button you can press to resolve tricky foreign policy issues. Throughout President Trump's two administrations, there have been a number of, you know, lightning-fast operations that were highly successful. The killing of al-Baghdadi in Syria. The killing of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, then more recently the Maduro capture in Venezuela. And then even Operation Midnight Hammer was kind of, you know, quick airstrikes. There wasn't really any downside for the United States per se. But with this particular operation, now you're coming up against that wall where it's like, okay, we're not going to be able to just helicopter, you know, 25 operators in to kick some ass and come home. Like, it's, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

I mean, you kind of see it a little bit, what happened with the F-15 pilot that got the F-15 that got shot down in the Wizzo that was out there for— I can't even remember what it was, like almost a week, right? He was out there and—

no, just like 2 days.

I'm sorry. Yeah, 2 days. But like the operation that JSOC went under, undertook essentially, you know, it was not easy. It didn't seem— you lost a lot of assets. Thankfully, no one died on our side. But still, like, think about that, do you know, essentially doing the same thing, right? They wanted to land fixed-wing airplanes. They did. It got stuck. They got stuck in the sand, essentially. So they had to improvise. So just thinking about the scale and the scope of what this would entail, it sounds crazy. It sounds like it's— it also like kind of mirrors or parallels like everyone was talking about Karg Island and stuff like that, like taking Karg Island. It's like, okay, yeah, we'll send like 500 or 1,000 Marines in there, secure the island, take it. But then they're literally getting pounded until— for what? Until when? Right. Yeah. I also did like the sub— little subplot drama in terms of like the JSOC officers and stuff like that who were like, you know, we could totally do this. Like, this would be easy, you know. And I also like— I want you to talk a little bit about the the friction between like JSOC and CENTCOM specifically?

Yeah, the issue was that, yes, I mean, the, the JSOC head shed sounds by all accounts pretty eager to go ahead and do this. They wanted to get on with the mission and get it done. They've been kind of on standby for this mission for about 3 months, which is kind of unusual to have JSOC forward deployed for such a long period of time. I think they had to issue a bunch of waivers just to keep them forward deployed that long.

The question, Jack, sorry, is it because like the JSOC guys are supposed to like continue to rotate into like the hot, like, you know, into another job? You know, like, is that it?

Well, yeah, they have to maintain a high state of readiness and you can't, you have to rotate the guys on and off that high state of readiness. So that they can do their training, they can go on leave, their professional development, et cetera. So there's this rotation schedule with the different squadrons and the different Ranger battalions. You know, as we talked about, you know, JSOC is kind of tailor-designed for highly precise surgical operations that happen, you know, during a period of darkness. They're not designed for like long duration operations. That's more of like a special forces mission, a conventional military mission. Even Rangers, you know, bring a lot more assets to the table for like a long duration mission. But so, yeah, JSOC was eager to get on with it, but CENTCOM wanted to— that is Central Command, the overall combatant command over the Middle East— was more interested in prioritizing other targets. There's also a thought that all kinds of triggers would need to be met in the lead up to executing this operation, that we had to do more things to eliminate Iranian air defense and their various military capabilities before we even attempted this mission.

So just as an example, JSOC had two Reaper drones circling objectives that they wanted to hit that they were interested in in Iran. And they wanted like that kind of like persistent 24-hour eye in the sky over those targets. And two of those drones got shot down by the Iranians. And I'm not sure the precise number. I think since the war started, we've lost like 15 Reapers or something like that. So this is a different kind of war. This is not Afghanistan or Iraq where we had uncontested airspace. And so this is kind of like where the friction kind of developed, I think, a little bit between CENTCOM and JSOC. And, but now we're at this point where it seems increasingly clear this operation simply isn't going to be executed and it's simply on standby. As like a deterrent to like wave your finger at Iran, like, hey, you better cut a deal with us.

Yeah, we're ready to go.

Like, yeah. Because I've been told that the forward deployed JSOC guys and their attachments, enablers and so forth, are already starting to trickle back to the United States because this forward deployment was impacting mission readiness for so long.

Yeah. Well, like, I mean, I guess it hasn't changed much, right? But even during Afghanistan and Iraq, like, Um, and Syria, you know, JSOC and Ranger Battalion, um, deployments were usually like 3 months, give or take, maybe 4. So we're like coming up to that. So it's understandable why, like, you know, they want to bring people back and maybe rotate them out.

Yeah, some guys were afraid that this whole thing was going to turn into, um, like their deployment to Cyprus after Gaza happened. And they spent— I mean, I think they may have spent something like— I don't have the number in front of me, but I think it was a couple hundred days that that they were assigned to. Oh wow, that's a long— Yeah. And all that standing by to stand by and the only people who got to play on the Gaza thing were the TFO guys. So I mean, I guess the upside is hard to see an upside, but the F-15 pilot getting shot down and the WIZO, the JSOC guys did go out there and get to, you know, do their thing and rescue that guy.

So there were elements from that JSOC squadron that was waiting for the, uh, highly enriched mission that went in for, for the—

yeah, yeah, there were certain elements of them.

Yeah. Um, and also just to remind everybody, when the JSOC deployed after October 7th and the Gaza War started, that was for the potential of going in to evacuate embassies, right, and grab and get hostages and hostages out of Gaza. Yeah.

And there's a huge article also on the High Side about that Gaza deployment that I wrote a few years ago when it happened.

When you mentioned the TFO guys, like TFO guys were on the ground?

So yeah, in Israel, yes. And what was going on was that they were working with the Israelis and the Israelis would in turn be sending, they would be sending their spies, their surrogates and so on into Gaza. And what the TFO guys were fielding, they were fielding to the Israelis highly classified technology, signals intercept technology that used like some sort of AI on it. It was like some, it was the most sensitive stuff we've had, I'm told. And we're giving that to them and like not even telling them what it was or how it worked. Just like, here's the on button. Like when you get where you're going, just flip it on and then flip it off and come back and we'll take it.

And of course, yeah, the Israelis didn't, didn't try and see what the fuck that was about for sure. No way.

I'm sure. I mean, they know the deal, of course. But yeah, so the TFO guys got to go out there and do some stuff. I mean, when it first happened, I was told there's a TFO bird that got diverted from the Black Sea over Ukraine stuff down to Gaza. Had to fly all the way down and start doing coverage on that. I mean, we sent so much air assets to Gaza. I mean, the amount of drones we were flying over were insane.

Yeah. Funny you mentioned that, like, that TFO team got diverted from Black Sea to Gaza. The Silver Squadron or SEAL Team 6 and JSOC, their mission, they were prepping for something having to do with North Korea, right, before the Iran stuff popped off. You have any idea what that was about?

Um, I don't know if there was a specific training scenario or like a specific real-world scenario that they were training for. Um, usually the training scenarios are realistic, but maybe not necessarily for like an actual situation that we— that's imminent, right, that you're gonna have to execute on. That would be a mission rehearsal rather than a training exercise. But there are a number of underground North Korean nuclear facilities, command and control bunkers, and that's a, that's a whole other can of worms. And so like, when we're saying it's going to take, you know, 1,000 people to do this Iran mission, I mean, to take one of these like underground North Korean facilities would probably take a division.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, that's so crazy. And the other interesting, like, little tidbit in the article was before 9/11, JSOC— like, this was a big, big part of JSOC's mission, essentially, you know? Like, you wrote, like, hundreds of millions of dollars went into, like, training them up and getting them ready for this.

Yeah, from, from the very beginning, before Delta Force was even validated, um, when they were, like, trying doing the train-up and getting their stuff together. They were training to intercept what were called INDs, improvised nuclear devices. You know, what if a terrorist organization built a nuclear bomb, which is kind of hard for a terrorist organization to do, but this was a legitimate fear at the time. And exercises were run where, you know, the Delta guys would go and secure, you know, a tractor trailer that had a simulated weapon in the back. And then like the, the NEST guys, the nuclear emergency search team dudes would go in and secure it. There are all these different like nuclear teams that, you know, people don't know about. You know, we mentioned the technical escort team. There's another element called the Joint Ember Immune Team, which like red teams nuclear facilities and nuclear convoys testing their security. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. But so the JSOC participated in a number of early exercises in the 1980s. They had having their EOD guys go down in the Department Department of Energy would test them on rendering safe devices, and they'd have exercises where they'd have to break through security to get to the device and then disarm it.

And as that mission evolved over the years, during the Obama administration, for example, there was— well, this is interesting. This isn't in the article either, but during the Obama administration, the plan for Iran, the classified plan was called the Nitro Zeus. And some of it was done in conjunction with the Israelis. Like we were developing some joint munitions, like bunker buster type bombs. And Nitro Zeus was sarcastically referred to by some in the community as New Zion. And interestingly too, Obama also decided not to greenlight that whole Iran plan. He was like, no. Like, that's crazy. And he went with Chappo instead and negotiated the Iran deal. And, you know, it seems like President Trump is getting to the same place, but only after this prolonged period of back and forth bombings and other nonsense.

Probably $100 billion wasted and 13 servicemen died.

Yeah. But at that time, back during the Obama years, you know, and not just then, but subsequent afterwards as well. JSOC was doing these exercises where like a squadron would free fall into the Nevada test site, heavy drop all of their vehicles. Once they get on the ground—

What's heavy drop all their vehicles?

Like push the vehicles out of the back of an airplane with parachutes.

Okay.

And then once they get on the ground, do like, you know, 30 kilometer overland movement to a simulated underground nuclear bunker. There are a bunch of tunnels at the Nevada Test Site. I think one might be called like J-Tunnel. And these missions, these training missions were not done administratively. Like they went underground and were explosively breaching like heavy vault bunker doors. Yeah, pretty hardcore stuff. So yeah, they trained extensively. I mean, and there's another case that I talk about in the article just prior to 9/11, also in Kazakhstan, there was a biological weapons lab and the lab was kind of set up and run by this guy named Ken Alibek, who was a Kazakh, but obviously also a member of the Soviet Union because of what was going on when he was born there.

Yeah.

And he wrote a book that I read called Biohazard, which is fascinating. He eventually defected. But in the 1990s, we were looking at that facility and they were going to use it as a takedown target for Delta to come in and do as a training exercise in conjunction with the cooperation of the Kazakh government. And it would be this great experience for the unit to go and actually seize a live— it wasn't currently producing biological weapons, but it had everything there that you would need to do that.

Yeah, there's pictures in the article.

Yeah, so it's about as realistic a scenario as you're possibly going to get.

Yeah.

And they were all jocked up to do that. There were JSOC guys that would come to Kazakhstan undercover with the DITRA guys. And like, and so again, it's a way for like Delta to get to certain places and like measure vault doors and stuff like that. Like, oh, this is how the Russians build this, you know?

Right.

This is how they, the chemical weapons vats are made. And there's all this stuff involved in producing biological weapons and like, how they're aerosolized or how they're deployed even from ICBMs. Like this, this stuff just gets increasingly technical as you dive deeper and deeper into it. And that training operation got pushed to the right because of the 9/11 attacks and eventually just went away, got taken off the board because the guys were so busy, you know, fighting an actual war.

Yeah. Do you think that the capability over the 20 years of the GWAT kind of have eroded on that side, or no? Do you think they still train pretty hard?

I think they train pretty hard for this one. This is the, you know, all the terms you want to throw out, the no-fail mission, you know, the National Command Authority. It's actually known as the Zero Four Hundred mission, the counter-WMD mission, as opposed to the Zero Three Hundred, the counter-terrorism mission. I think they train extensively for this, not just the operators, but all of the enablers, all these other guys I've been mentioning, DITRA, technical escort unit, and so on. I think it's taken quite seriously. And the Special Forces commanders and extremist forces also had this mission, a component of this mission. And even though the CIF no longer exists, those companies in Special Forces, I think, continue. And Special Forces does have a counter-proliferation mission, so I think they continue along these lines. But it's like everyone kind of has a hand in it, you know, the SEALs, the Rangers, and so on.

Other interesting one is after 9/11, and when we went into Afghanistan and smoked the Taliban, Pakistan got so fucking so like paranoid that we were going to come in and snatch their nuclear weapons. They started putting them on like trucks and stuff, making them mobile to make it as hard as possible for us to come in and like interdict and that stuff.

Yeah, so a funny story about that. There's a picture of that that I put in the article, and the, the picture is something I found on the internet. It's not something that was like provided to me, um, so other people have seen it for sure. Um, and the picture depicts what appears to be a moving tractor trailer a non-standard, you know, non-military helicopter dropping what appears to be 4 operators and helmets and plate carriers on top of this tractor trailer.

And like jeans too. They're wearing like jeans and shit. Yeah.

With a huge, with a huge saw, you know, for sawing through the top of the vehicle. And I was looking at that picture for a long time trying to figure out like, what the hell are they training for here? And I remember I woke up one morning and I must have been having dreams or something. And it occurred to me, I was like, hey, wait a second. And I went and found it. And there was an article in The Atlantic written years ago about how the Pakistanis were so afraid of the United States coming in and stealing their nuclear weapons that they started loading them on the tractor trailers and driving them around the country to make them harder to intercept. And that article in The Atlantic, I'm sure, was the United States government leaking that information to try to tell the Pakistanis, like, knock it off.

Like, yeah, we're not going to do this.

Well, well, more to the point, stop driving these vehicles all around your country in an unsecure, you know, relatively unsecured manner where something terrible could happen. Right. Um, so, uh, that's where that, you know, when, when I saw that picture, I was like, oh, okay. That's the scenario that they were training for.

Insane. Yeah. Insane, man. I just try and think of like what these JSOC guys, especially during the GWAT, man, right? Like, you know, brutal deployments, training, training for this mission as well. I mean, it's understandable why a lot of guys come back kind of really burnt out.

Yes. But I've also had guys tell me that they found this particular mission set to be very professionally fulfilling and gratifying.

Okay.

That, you know, it's not a hazy counterinsurgency mission. It's something very direct and something of immediate national importance that, you know, it's again unlikely that a terrorist organization would ever develop an actual nuclear bomb without a state sponsor. But, you know, if, you know, Russia lost control of a nuclear weapon, if, you know, some terrorist organization did develop a chemical or biological weapon, which is a lot more plausible, this is a realistic scenario that could actually happen, unfortunately. And I mean, it's a good thing that we have all of these guys that are ready to go and deal with it.

Yeah, I could see it particularly being like a big worry after the fall of Soviet Union when all those Soviet republics were breaking up and stuff like that.

And like they had nuclear weapons and it's, it's honestly, in my opinion, you know, take it for what it's worth. It's, it's, this is a low percentage sort of thing. Yeah, like it's not likely to happen. We've never— not, not with nuclear. We've never had this happen with chem, bio. I guess we have, but we've never had an actual incident, you know, that these guys are training for, that they would have to respond.

Thank God. Yeah.

Yeah. Thankfully. But if it did happen, the consequences are so dire. If somebody got one of these devices into a port in the United States, or one of our allied countries, you know, in South Korea or wherever else, the results would be catastrophic.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because once it's out of the bag, like getting it into America in a port is probably relatively easy, right? Because we're not checking everything.

Maritime is not and has never really been watched as carefully as like, you know, commercial air. But since 9/11, there have been all kinds of efforts made on detection side by federal law enforcement. There are some ways to spoof the machines, as I've learned. Some of them are relatively simple.

Yeah.

But they have made some tremendous progress, I think, on that.

I had a question. I lost it. Fuck. What are you working on now? For High Side?

There's, I mean, there's a handful of stories that are, that we're thinking about. I know Sean is back to working on Willie Merkerson's story. And the next piece is about his actions in Sudan. And with the, when the, this was in the '80s when the Libyans were crawling all over Sudan and the CIA did some very, very interesting stuff to get them out of there. Um, yeah, so that's, that's, um, you know, probably the next piece this summer. Uh, there's also something, um, with the Rangers that I'm gonna look at that, um, probably will go out this summer. And then there's some other like long, longer term things over the horizon, um, that I probably shouldn't really get into yet.

Okay, cool. Um, I'm trying to remember the fucking question I had, but I can't anyway. I want people to do me a favor. I want them to go and check out The High Side. Obviously, that link is in the description. And Jack is also a writer of novels. He's got a new novel out that came out in June, June 9th. Yeah, The Most Dangerous Man. That link is in the description as well. Oh, my question is this. I just remembered for this whole like Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz, like, you know, like gathering of intelligence, we didn't send like RRC guys in. That's how I remembered it because there's an RRC Ranger in Jack's book. That's why I remember my question.

No, no. Interestingly, in the, during the planning for the Gaza hostage rescue, there was talk about sending RRC in to do that, to get eyes on for the JSOC mission. I haven't heard anything about that kind of thing in regards to Iran though.

Yeah. I mean, the facilities are pretty fucking deep into Iran, right? So it's going to be pretty tricky to have an RRC guy. How do you infill them, right?

Like, I mean, you could.

Helicopter?

Is the risk worth the gain? I think if anyone were to do that, you'd probably have the Israelis using their proxy networks on the ground. And we have proxy networks on the ground too. Not as good as having a Ranger, but You know, it's, it's still something.

Yeah. And we're heavily relying on Israeli human, right? I'm, you know, you mentioned in the article slightly that we are pretty much like not totally relying on them. Obviously, we have like the GEO stuff and the SIGINT stuff. But I think from what I've read and what you've written in the article is like we're pretty heavily relying on Israeli intelligence as well.

Definitely working in close cooperation with them.

Yeah. All right. Anything else, Jack? Anything on your mind?

It's always something on my mind, but today, today I'm just taking it easy.

Birthday boy.

Yeah, it's my birthday. So yeah, I'm just chilling. And the next episode of The Team House we're going to do is with Wayne Barnes. I just finished his book. I believe the title is A Traitor in the FBI. And it's this whole aspect of how the FBI identified Robert Hanssen as a traitor that I've never heard of before, that I knew nothing about. And the book was so good. It's like one of my favorite espionage books now. Wow.

Okay.

Yeah. So we'll have Wayne on the show this Wednesday. People will see that episode later this week, I guess, Friday, Saturday.

Saturday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm really looking forward to that.

Um, it's— we should probably make a compilation video like we did about Roberts Ridge, not Roberts Ridge, but Red, Red, with Eric Red Wings. Red Wings. Yeah. With Eric O'Neill. And then we'll have Wayne on. And, you know, we've had Jim Olson too that was talking about spies and stuff like that. So I feel like we could do that compilation video for that. Yeah. Yeah. Excited about this one. Yeah, I love the counterintel stuff so much. It's like my favorite shit.

Yeah, you'll, you'll really like this one.

Yeah. All right, listen guys, wish Jack a happy birthday in the comments, number one. Like and subscribe also. If you're listening on audio, you could subscribe there, rate it 5 stars as well. The High Side, which is Jack and Sean Naylor's news outlet, that link is in the description. They literally write the stories that the New York Times, Washington Post, and no one writes. They have better sources than they do. They don't take— they're not stenographers for the DOD or intelligence agencies. They actually get you the story. And The Most Dangerous Man, Jack's new novel, it's an awesome book. I read it. I actually read it. One of like the only 3 books I've read in my life. I read like one of the first drafts too. Yeah. Really good, cool story. Tell me a little bit about The Most Dangerous Man, because I think there's like a great pitch for it too. Like, yeah.

So the book, of course, is a modernized take on the classic short story The Most Dangerous Game, which was the first, you know, fictional work that dealt with the idea of man hunting man for sport, which is a premise that has been used over and over. In this book, my book is about an RRC ranger who gets kidnapped in West Africa and is hunted for sport by a group of finance tech bros. And they're led by a South African safari guide who's a pretty hardcore customer.

Very hardcore customer.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the book is about them hunting this ranger for sport and how he turns the tables on them. I really had a lot of fun writing it. I'm halfway through writing the draft for the sequel. And really appreciate everyone who's taken the time to read the book, review it on Amazon, all that good stuff.

Yeah, it's really good too. It's like a commentary on like life too. What's going on now, like society now. It's very funny. Like the stuff with like the, the billionaire people, like the billionaire tech guys and like their, their, their like thought gurus, their thought leaders, the guys that they like really kind of, you know, take really seriously. It's so fucking funny some parts. And it's awesome. Also, like, Jeremy Lopez, his one kryptonite is like hot chicks. That's his one kryptonite.

I mean, yeah, I mean, he's a Ranger and I tried to make him an actual character. He's not some stoic operator guy, you know?

Right.

Ground branch guy out down on his luck, you know, dishonored and disgraced, you know. Now, this is a young Ranger guy. Who has a lot of personality.

No. Yeah, it's an awesome book, guys. Check it out. That link's in the description. And if you have bought the book, review it on Amazon or wherever you bought it on, like Goodreads or wherever. That's important as well. Jack, I love you. Happy birthday.

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it, man.

Yo, for the audience, he never says I love you back to me. I'm going to get it from him one day. One day.

One day.

I drop I love yous on you a lot.

Like, you know, ironically.

Yeah, I do. It is ironic. I like making men feel uncomfortable. I don't know why. It's fun.

Anyway, gay chicken champion over here.

Thanks, bro.

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 TeamHouse, 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 newsletter at teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. Again, the website for that is teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.