So how hard was it to do this book, how long did it take . Guest it took three years of fulltime research and writing, obviously thats not counting my two decades plus as a reporter on military and National Security issues prior to that, you know, gaining a lot of that information of previous articles, previous books and its also not counting the time spent in the editing process after those three years were up. It was very difficult but, you know, obviously not impossible to find the people and, you know, in some cases the other publish works or unpublished works that could power the story of this organization from its roots in 1980 all the way to the fight of Islamic State. Joint special Operations Command is the command United States military secret special Operations Missions. It was formed in 1980 as a result of the failure of operation eagle claw which was the at the same time to rescue the american hostages in iran. The pentagon put together a Blue Chip Board of half a dozen retired military officers and one to recommend the study the failure and make recommendations and one of the recommendations was the creation of a permanent Counterterrorism Joint Task force with a permanent staff and with units assigned to that task force permanently because the rescue attempt had been conducted by sort of an ad hoc pickup team of a staff and units that werent used to working together. Its called joint because it has units from each of the services. Can you talk about those units . Guest certainly. It has the special Mission Units, so called, of the services underneath it. The better known of those, the army force, special forces Operational Detachment delta and the navys Seal Team Six. The air force has an equivalent organization that for most of the recent history 24 special tactics but went through series of name changes before that. Theres a unit that i referred to a lot in the book as Task Force Orange because that was the nick neighboring in nickname in special Operations Command and it joined quite later in the sort of 2004 time frame, but it existed for a couple of decades before that. In addition to those units, the 75th United States army, Airborne Unit that has been to 9 11, taken on a lot of the characteristics of special units and the army 160th Operations Aviation regimen, Helicopter Unit plus a variety of smaller organizations. Host it also has the designation as the National Admission force. What is the importance of that . Whats is its chain of command . Guest normally depending on what part of the world its operating in. For example, if its in iraq, it would report or afghanistan, it would report to the u. S. Central command commander who is the sort of the Combatant Commander for that part of the world who runs that part of the world as you obviously know because you wrote a book about those guys. And then its obviously from him and it goes up to the pentagon and to the white house in very short order. But it really works, it really works for the secretary of the defense and for the present. And the difference what jsoc does or military division does, whats the real difference . Guest theres certainly an overlap between two those two organizations now and youll often find members of each organization on the same battlefield as they were in the same in the same embassy doing some of the same work. The obvious difference is joint Operations Command is a lot bigger and a lot more fire power, the special Activities Division you would expect to be working in battlefields in which the United States is not at war with perhaps slightly shady characters in the military and different authorities, different legal authorities than the military, but does not but increasingly specially in the last few years, joint special Operations Command special Mission Units have expanded their human intelligence gathering apparatus . Host you know its important the difference between what is covert, which is what the cia does versus calndestant, which is what they do, how important is that or was that since you sort of said they merge or overlap . Guest the difference as i understand it is clandestant operations is something that the United States doesnt anyone to find out about ever. If you for instance, sent an operative into a country who recruits spy for the United States and then pull that operative back out that would be an operation, you wouldnt want anyone to know that occurred. If on the other hand, you as an example historically gave the missiles to shoot planes, soviet planes from the sky, helicopters, clearly that the helicopters are being shot out of the sky isnt a secret once it happened. You you are trying to do is hide the u. S. Fingerprints from the operation. I do think that in the Information Age is getting harder and harder to keep those two things very separate. Host specially as you described jsoc has pushed the limit. Guest yes, i think thats true. Jsoc, cias facility where operating Training Course and and it has in each of it special Mission Units. As i said, expanded the number of people that operate undercover and its also getting into much more heavily the signals intelligence side of thing, the cyber warfare side of things. Increasingly its become starting to approach of what we traditionally would have thought with arena in which the civilian intelligence. Host the cia is a known organization, acknowledged organization and testify occasionally to congress. Their status is still unacknowledged through if you looked on an official jsoc, theres really not a website, somewhere it says they do training and equipping. Youve written a book about the organization that the United States actually says doesnt exist and wants to keep secret but you decided that it should not be secret. Why did you talk about that a little bit. Why do you think its important to know about this group . Guest i think its important for a couple of reasons. The main one is that in wake of 9 11 joint special Operations Command has become the main effort the United States war on terrorism. Once conceived an organization that had missions Counterterrorism Missions and expanded those certainly through the 80s and 90s but was always viewed as an organization that would be if not on the sidelines but on the frenges of a major war. The country has been in war for almost 14 years. I think the public is owed far more information that they paid for to expand and is fighting wars with their money, with their sons and daughters in their name than, you know, some small secret organization thats chasing loose nukes around in the form of a union. Host fighting in a particular way. The manhunting. Can you talk about the development of that . Before 9 1 9 11 it didnt have the capability. I actually think that while general took over, took command of joint special Operations Command in late 2003, certainly revolutionized in scope and speed the jsoc manhunting capabilities. And we can talk about that. There are those who would argue that the ground work had already been laid in the pre9 11 era. In december 1989, jsoc not only spear headed invasion of panama, when noriega went to ground, it was jsoc forces that were chasing him through, hunting him around panama until he took refuge and eventually surrendered. Before to that, first conducting pablo escobar, colombian drug lord which ended in his death and mohamed ided, ended with the october 1993 that became memorialized in the book and the movie. Host i remember in bosnia they wanted jsoc to do the war criminal hunt. And they did some but i think it was joint the chairman of the joint that said at the time we dont do we dont do manhunts guest may have said but did a lot of manhunting and, in fact, the bulk, they call it, personses indicted of war crime. Between the cia and special mission unit personnel from delta seal team. Host talk about the difference between the seals and delta and the types of things that they do. And their division on the battlefield. Guest yeah, i would sort of argue that that division has slowly been eroded now. Delta was the first of those organizations that come into being. It was created in late 1970s under the under the command of Legendary Special forces charlie and it was stood up, largely modeled on the British Special air services as a counterterrorist unit. And it was the force that that was at the center of eagle claw, attempt to rescue the hostages in iran. Seal team six was created by under the command of an officer called marsinco and it its initial concept i think in the eyes of those who created it, maybe not marsincos mind was to conduct the sort of missions that delta would typically conduct except in a merit time environment. For instance, if a plane got hijacked, maybe the first choice to to rescue the passengers off of it at some airport in the third world would be delta force. If a cruise liner got hijacked then the first team would be seals team. Although marsinco said if my cantines got water on it merits wartime. Post 9 11 era in particular, those distinctions have started to blow up particularly when it comes to seal teams. They have operate operated almost since october in 2001 in afghanistan, mccristal divided the various in which the forces were operating up and put a different unit in charge of them and in particular Seal Team Six, delta was focused on iraq and the sort of larger part of the middle there. A little later mccristal put seal teams in charge of somalia and yemen and put the rangers in charge in afghanistan. Now, there were units from all of those organizations in the other so there wasnt exclusive one to the other but thats largely how it break down. And you talk in the middle of the book about a chapter on steroids and it talks about theyre maturing in iraq and using the mohawks that were iraqis and in one passage you wrote that in essence getting close to a person of interest was possible, it would send the noniraq it was too risky, the mohawks used delta camera cars which were local vehicles which units had hidden cameras in such a way that an automanufacturer might have des disguiseed cameras. Im giving a hypothetical here. If delta force had information that a particular building was used as a safe house by alqaeda and iraq and they wted to case that joint, if you like, prior to an assault but they didnt want to take a risk of putting an american or even an american in disguise and put an iraqi, drive it past in the stream of traffic with everybody else not raising any eyebrows at all and come back and theyve got film of the exact objective that they want to assault that night. Host whats the track record of working with iraqis, you know, the mohawks were controversial because they things that might not have been approved with jsoc, that sort of thing . Guest people speak very highly of them. They were taking major risks, of course, as iraqis 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 targets both in iraq and in iran to the best of my knowledge. I think that thats considered inside jsoc as a fairly successful set of relationships. Host and you talk about iran in your book and mention that at some point they begin what you call a new campaign against an old enemy and you say that the u. S. Invasion and subsequent 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 dont have relationships with iran, how were they getting their own people in irand and what were they doing there . Guest theres obviously two ways to do that. Host no so obvious. [laughter] guest one is to pay nonamericans to do it, you know spies basically. You know, pay an iraqi who might have a legitimate reason to go into iran where theres a lot whats going on and do it that way, the other is to send americans and your own people undercover and it took them a while to figure out how to do that and, you know, it could be that they that they overestimated how difficult it was going to be. At one point they were amazed to find out if you showed up with an american passport you could get the veto stamp and ride in. They planned it for about a year and the mission sort of changed at first they wanted to practice with alqaeda folks who had been sent, taken refuge in iran and iranians had various forms of arrest and at a certain point they changed that to, seeing if its possible to monitor activities by taking soil samples or that sort of thing and sending them in. They sent as what the military would call a proof of concept, they sent in a couple of folks and they they drove around, came back out, they had a very plausible cover reason for being in iran and so that that gave them the proof. Obviously the fact that the United States also was for all purposes occupying power in afghanistan, at the same time a border with iran as well, gave them two routes to do this. So host what did they learn . Guest i couldnt tell you in great detail. Host okay. Guest certainly, you know, they learned how to get around there. But, you know, people were im not sure how much of a focus thats been for jsoc because they had hotter places that they had to invest time and money, syria being a classic example, but but they certainly figured out ways to penetrate penetrate iran both through with own people and allies and the kurds. Host the whole book is built with anecdotes probably the most important and one of your scoops in the book is the x box. Can you talk about that. Guest yes, the x box is essentially reversed engineer explosive device ied basically a booby trap, a bomb, that was developed by delta force and Seal Team Six personnel who were basically taking apart ieds that had been found on the battlefield to see how they were manufactured. At a certain point in time sort of a light went on in a few brains that hey, we now know enough about these that we could fill one ourselves and we could build one out of lobingically procured or obtained material so that there would be no way for anyone who found it to trace it back to the United States. And were used against politically sensitive. Politically sensitive with the iraqi government. It was only too happy to have jsoc come back to a withering campaign and alqaeda and iraq, but was far less enthus enthusiastics. This was the work around in at least a few cases to help those guys without without people knowing that it was the americans that did it. Its important to say that these were not ieds that killed lots of other people. The whole the restrictions placed on the use meant that a usually Delta Force Operator would have to have eyes on the target, it had to be detonated as a time that killed the targeted individual but not a whole bunch of civilians. Host and you say in the book that the political restrictions, those imposed actually hobbled the task forces operation and thats one the reasons to take this on but worked around it and they also worked around the fbi. This was something designed also so that if the fbi went and investigated it couldnt figure out who did it too which sounds borderline legal. Guest this is my understanding of that. Aye gone ive gone back and i wanted to see exactly how i worted it. I worded it. Maybe it wasnt clear enough u. My understanding of what i was told it was a bar that they wanted to reach. The fbi had personnel in jsoc task forces. That would be very hard to keep it from them. Hey, if this got ever handed to the fbis center that that does the sort of the forensic on these things, they wouldnt be able to tell that it came from americans. They would think that it was a locally procured that it was used by some local designed by local militants. That was just the bar that they set for themselves. Host nevertheless has the u. S. Government said so many times, criticized use of ieds, set a task force to figure out how to mitigate them and they end up using the same technique although more carefully to what you say. Was there debate that this was ethical or correct . Guest i certainly know that there were debates about it because you know, one of the source being in Seal Team Six told me that although they had been involved that unit had been involved in the genesis of the x box, they decided not to use it because as you implied, a feeling that that just put them on the same levels as the folks that they were fighting. I suppose the counterargument for that is if youre using an explosive who kilter ris leader or militant leader and not killing anybody else, what how is that any different with killing him with an air strike or putting a bullet in his head. Booby traps have been part of ware warfare for as long as air strikes were on air. Certainly if you want to keep the american fingerprints on the death invisible, you cant struck the guy with a predator because thats obviously an american an american method. Host targeted killing way, whats the magnitude of what they did . I mean, at the height of the iraq war, lets say august 2006 they were launching more than 300 missions in a 24hour period in iraq alone. Ive never seen or been told one exists a complete of how many folks its important to note that in a lot of the raids whether its iran or afghanistan , there were no bullets fired at all. People would surrendered or wouldnt be there in the first place. Thats a success rate of capturing or killing, what they would call the jackpot rate. You think the target is in t