Its at this point a definitive history of the secret organization and its so thick i want to start with this one because if you are a normal reader you might think that its easier to get information and get you say i want to quote you here because it is pretty succinct that i began the project that research and writing a book that the secret organization that controlled other secret organizations was going to be a challenge and so it proved several people who figure prominently in the events described in this book to requests to be interviewed. So how hard is it or how hard was it and how long did it take . Guest it took three years of research and writing. Thats not counting my two decades plus as a reporter on the Security Issues prior to that in the previous books and just by osmosis its also not counting the time spent in the editing process after the three years were up. It was very difficult but obviously not impossible to find the people and the other published words or unpublished works that were the extraordinary stories of the organization from its roots in 1980 to the present day against the Islamic State. Host lets start from the basics. Guest that conducted the United States militarys most sensitive secrets special Operations Missions, it was formed in 1980 as a result of the failure of the operation eagle claw which was the attempt to bury the marry the hostages in tehran and in the wake of that failure, the pentagon put together a bluechip board of half a dozen active and retired military officers, and one of the recommendations was the creation of a prominent Counterterrorism Joint Task force with a permanent staff and with unit assigned to the task force permanently because the rescue attempt had been kind of did buy sort of an ad hock pickup team staff and units that were not used to working together. And its called choice because it has units for each of the services. Can you talk about those . Certainly. It has the special Missions Unit of the socalled services underneath it. The better known of those are the armys delta force Operational Detachment and the navy seal turned them to because the sixth Seal Team Six organization with most of its recent history known as the special Tactics Squadron through the series of name changes but before all that there is a unit that i referred to because that was the nickname and the joint special Operations Command, and it joined the special Operations Command in the 2004 timeframe because it existed for a couple of decades before that and in addition to those units they call on the regimen which is a sort of elite infantry airborne light infantry unit to pick and the the army army is one 60th special Operations Aviation regiment in the niche organizations. Host it also has the National Designation so what is the importance of that command . Guest it is is the command operationally is normally depending on what part of the world operating and for instance if it is in iraq, it would report to the u. S. Central command who is the Combatant Commander for that part of the world. Obviously from him it goes up to the pentagon and to the white house in very short order but it really works for the secretary of defense and for the present. And the difference between what jsoc to does and the paramilitary division does whats the difference . There is an overlap between the organizations now and you will find the members of that organization in the battlefield as it were in the same embassy doing some of the same work. The obvious difference is that the command is a lot bigger and has a lot more firepower. The special Activities Division you would expect to be working in battlefields in which the United States is not at war with perhaps the slightly shadier characters than the military and with different legal authorities than the military. But increasingly, especially in the last few years the special Operations Command and special Missions Unit have expanded the human intelligence gathering apparatus are increasingly encroaching on the difference. Host it might sound and arcane question that its the difference between what is covert versus what the cia does versus clandestine which is supposed to be. They said that emerged two. The difference between clandestine as it has been explained to me is the clandestine operation is something that the United States doesnt want anyone to find out about ever so if you for instance send an operative into the country to the group. If you gave the mujahedin the missiles to shoot the soviet planes out of the sky in afghanistan, the soviet helicopters and the fact that theyve been shot out of the sky isnt a secret once it happened but you are trying to do is hide the u. S. Thinker prince on the operation so its ayn rand portend legal distinction. I think in the Information Age its getting harder and harder to keep those things separate. Host as you described jsoc has pushed forward and the limits of what might have been seen as the limits before. Guest that is true. Jsoc sends people to the facility facility with a heavy operated Training Course and it has expanded the number of people that are operating under cover and its so getting into the intelligence side of things, the cyber warfare side of things, so increasingly the sort of behemoth is increasing on the territory that we would have thought was the arena in which the Intelligence Surveillance agency another strange fact is that the cia is a known organization or acknowledged organization that that testified occasionally to congress. Their status is still not at college, true . If you look at the official there isnt really a website somewhere that says training and equipping, you had written a book about an organization that the United States actually says doesnt exist and it wants to keep secret but you decided to shouldnt be a secret, talk about that. Why do you think its important i think its important for a couple of reasons but the main one is that in the wake of 9 11, the joint special Operations Command has become i would argue the main effort in the United States war on terror so while it was conceived as an organization that had very narrowly defined mission counterterrorism Hostage Rescue Missions expanded through the 80s and 90s but was always viewed as an organization that would be a thought on the sidelines sort of on the fringes of a major war the country has been at war now for more than 14 years as the special Operations Command has been the main effort in that war. I think the public is owed for more information about an organization they are paid to expand and that is fighting the war with their money with their sons and daughters in their name van a small secret organization that is chasing the loose nukes around. Host and exciting in a particular way. Can you talk about the development of that because before it really didnt happen to capability that its grown to have. Guest i think that while the general who took over and took command of the joint special Operations Command in late 2003 certainly revolutionized in scope and speed the manhunt capability and we can all talk about that. There are those that would argue that the groundwork has already been made in the pre 9 11 era. In december of 1989, jsoc not only spearheaded the invasion of panama, but then when the dictator went to ground in the immediate aftermath of that, it was the forces that were hunting him around until he took refuge and eventually standard. Following on from that in the early 90s, it was the jsoc forces that conducted or helped in the first case conducting Pablo Escobar the drug lord that ended with his death and then mohammed, the warlord hunt that didnt go as successfully and functionally ended with the october battle that became memorialized in black hawk down. Host they wanted to jsoc to do the war criminal hunt and they did so but it was i think the chamber of the joint chiefs that set up a time we dont do manhunts. Guest they may have said that, that they did a lot of hunting, and in fact the balkan stuffer persons indicted for war crimes. The hunt was considered the crucible in which at least on the personal level much tighter bonds without putting the cia special activities and the special Mission Units personnel from delta, Seal Team Six and others. Host talkative about the difference between a adult hot. And the different types of things they do and their division on the battlefield. Guest that i would argue has slowly been eroded now. Ddelta was the First Organization to come into being created in the late 1970s under the command of the Legendary Special forces officer called Charlie Beckwith and it was still a largely modeled on the British Special air services as a counterterrorist unit and it was the first of what is at the center of the eagle claw in the attempt to rescue the hostages in tehran and shortly thereafter, 1988 and the timeframe, Seal Team Six was created under the command of an officer, and the initial concept i think in the eyes of those that created it was to conduct the sort of missions that word typically conduct in the maritime environment so if a plane got hijacked me be the first choice to rescue the passengers at the airport in the third world would be the be the delta force and of a cruise liner got hijacked in the first choice would be Seal Team Six. Although they famously said Something Like if the canteen has water in it as a matter of time for that effect. In the post9 11 era in particular, those distinctions have started that they have operated basically since october of 2001 in afghanistan because the landlocked country. Mcchrystal in the middle of the last decade invited the various theaters in which the forces were operating up and put different units in charge of them and in particular Seal Team Six dot afghanistan while delta was focused on iraq and the sort of larger purpose the middle east. A little later, mcchrystal put a Seal Team Six and operations and put the rangers in charge in afghanistan. Now there were units from all of those organizations in the other theaters so it wasnt exclusive one to the other but that is largely how to put down. Host and you talk in the middle of the book about the chapter called jsoc on steroids and it talks about maturing in iraq and using a the mohawks that were the iraqis. And in one passage he wrote that in essence if it was possible they would send it was risky for such missions sometimes the camera cars which were local vehicles in which units had hidden cameras in such a way that an auto manufacturing disguised backup cameras in the vehicles so and the vehicles they were designed to do what . Guest im just giving a hypothetical that if the bill to force ddelta force was used by the insurgents by al qaeda in iraq and they wanted to case the joint back prior to an assault but they didnt want to take the risk they could put an iraqi wretch riveted and drive it passed in the stream of traffic. They got the objective they want to assault at night. Host what is the track record working with the iraqis . I think they were rather controversial because they did somethings that might not have been approved or that sort of thing. Guest the track record working with them in my understanding was very positive. People spoke very highly of them and they were taking major risks of course as the iraqis were doing this and several of them got captured and killed. Jsoc also has worked very closely with the iraqi kurds and their intelligence organizations to develop the targets both within iraq and iran to the best of my knowledge. So i think that is considered as a fairly successful set of relationships. Host you mention at some point of the new campaign against an old enemy and you say that the invasion of the occupation of iraq gave more opportunities to penetrate iran and that they were keen to get their own people in iran so at this time when we know the relationships, how are they getting their own people in and what were they doing there . Guest theres two ways to do that. Host not so obvious. Guest one is to pay them on americans to do it, spies basically so they might have a legitimate reason to go into iraq to the countries where theres a lot of training as and so forth going on and then do it that way and the other is to send americans undercover, and it took them a while to figure out how to do that and it could be that they overestimated how difficult it was going to be. At one point they were amazed to find out that they showed up with an american passport and had a Border Crossing david geddes visa stamped and just walk into the planned it for about a year coming into the missions were changed. At first they wanted to attract some of the al qaeda folks who have been sent with taken refuge that they had under the various forms of arrest, and at a certain point in the planning of how to get folks into iran they changed back into see if its possible to monitor some of the Nuclear Activities may be a taking soil samples and that sort of thing and sending them in. So they sent with the military would call a proof of concept. They send a couple of folks and they drove around, came back out. They have a very forcible cover reason for being in iran and that gave them the proof. Obviously the fact that the United States also was an occupied power in afghanistan at the same time which has a border with iran as well it gave them two routes. Host and what did they learn . Guest i could tell you in greater detail. Certainly they learn how to get around. But im not sure how much of a focus that has been because they obviously had other to invest time and money is a classic example that they figured out ways to penetrate with their own people and especially with allies. Host the book is filled with anecdotes about technology that they are developing along the way and obviously one of the most important and probably one of your scoops in the book. Can you talk about that . Guest the xbox is a reverse engineered and provides explosive device basically a bomb that was developed by the delta force and seal team 6 now who are basically taking apart the ied that had been found on the battlefield to see how they were manufactured in at a certain point in time the lights went on and we now know enough about these that we could build one ourselves and we could build one out of locally secure routing and materials so that there would be no way for anyone who found it to trace it back to the United States, and adult forced used the xbox against targets that were very politically sensitive to strike in iraq and the premier Nouri Al Maliki was happy to have jsoc conduct a withering campaign against the sunni insurgents and al qaeda in iraq but was far less enthusiastic of the permissions for targeted shiite militants even though they were supported by iran were killing 11 americans so this was the work around in a few cases to kill those crates without knowing that that was the americans that did it and its important to say that these were not ieds ~ for people that the restrictions placed but the restrictions placed on the use of them meant that usually the Delta Force Operator would have to have eyes on the target. It had to be detonated at a time that code of the targeted individual but not a whole bunch of civilians. Host and usa in you say in the book the political restrictions those imposed actually hobbled the Task Force Operations and thats one of the reasons they decided to take this on to work around it but they also worked at the fbi. This was something designed so that if the fbi went and investigated they couldnt figure out who did it, which sounds borderline legal. Host this is my understanding of that and ive gone back because a couple of newspapers publications have picked up on that and i wanted to see exactly how i think the way that i wrote is correct but maybe i wasnt clear enough and its been misinterpreted. My understanding of what i was told is that that was a hypothetical that they wanted to reach. It wasnt that the fbi was investigating these things and jsoc was trying to hide from it. One thing the fbi had liaisons and personnel task force is. That was the standard that the folks designing the xbox wanted to reach. If this ever got handed to the fbis center that does the sort of forensics this sort of forensics on these things, they wouldnt be able to tell that it came from americans. They would think that it was a locally designed militant. I dont think that it was we were hiding from the fbi. Thats just the technological bar they set for themselves. Host nonetheless, as the u. S. Government has said many times its criticized the use and set up task force to figure a task force to figure out how to mitigate them and get they end up using the same technique although more carefully as you say word they are debates about whether this was ethical or correct . Guest there were debates about it because one of the sources told the ahead and been involved in the genesis they had decided not to use it because as you imply that im on the same level as the folk that they were fighting. And suppose the counter argument for t