1242: Christopher Whitcomb | A Life Among Spies Part One

22:06Yeah. It's a dangerous job day in and day out. Yikes. Yeah, another guest on the show, he joined the SEALs and he couldn't swim very well. Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. But he made it and then they were like, now I got to teach you how to swim. But it took him like four tries and he had, what is it called? Like rhabdo where you overtrain and your muscles start to, it's so decayed you can't function and you get poisoned from the lactic. Yeah, it's complex. It's hard. There's a different type of person psychologically. Yeah. I mean, I think you can have a basic physical ability. It's got to be better than basic.

22:35Yeah. You've got to be fast. You've got strong at these things but you have to have a mechanism that shuts off the quit mechanism you've got to have a different psychology it's more psychology and decision making than it is shooting or physical it's not about push-ups and pull-ups and swimming and it's not about those things at all yeah it's interesting one of my friends is ben greenfield is like a really athletic guy that's an understatement he wins these like tough mutters and all these competitions so he did like a a special forces pseudo training thing and they had to make it harder for him like They would dunk you in a tank of water and people would panic.

23:07And then he was fine. So they were like, okay, well, now you can only breathe through a straw. And he's like, okay. So he said it was a hell on earth. You get really good at being miserable. I mean, everything is miserable. That element is. And then you go sleep under a rock for a week with no food. It kind of sucks. But there are rewards as well. It's like CrossFit with live ammunition and fewer Instagram posts, I guess. Yeah, no Instagram posts. Yeah, not back then. You mentioned the firefights and the shootouts and stuff like that. And I'm wondering what goes through your head in a situation like that.

23:37Like, what are you thinking when you're going to gunfight? When I was a kid, you would fight all the time. It's just what you did. Somebody calls you a name, you punch him in the nose, you roll around a little bit, you buy him a Coke and go back to school. I lived in an era, in a place where fighting was not necessarily a really bad thing. It was just part of the way you resolve things. Now we look at things differently, right? But I always said it doesn't matter if you fight, if you're trying to hurt somebody with your words, or if you punch him in the nose, or if somebody picks up a rock or a knife or a two by four or a gun, it's an escalation and you get a nuclear bomb.

24:08So it's all a fight. In my estimation, the one-on-one intimacy of a fight, however that may be with a gun or with a fist or whatever the case may be, is very different than a war situation. Because in a war, I remember very clearly I had this perception that I didn't have a clue who to go after first. Like you're in a situation where you have more than one target and you have more than one threat and you've got to make a decision on who gets it first. Like I always wanted what it was like to be in a D-Day or Gettysburg or something where you have thousands of people or the Peloponnesian War or whatever.

24:44When you have large groups of people running each other and you got to pick one person and you got to go after that one person. That's difficult. That's different. That's a whole different thing. Yeah. I can't imagine being also, they're basically sending kids into these situations too. Yeah, that's right. That's the other thing is like you're 19 and you're like running at the beach And you're like, no, I don't really want to do that. And it's like, okay, well, you're going to get shot in this boat for sure. I mean, imagine that kind of courage. Imagine the countless thousands of people, just Americans, not other countries.

25:11Yeah. Just Americans in the last 250 years have gone to war at 18 years of age with no clue what to do or how to do it. Very little training. I mean, it's crazy, that kind of commitment, sacrifice, and courage. It's wild. I hit a certain point. I can't remember how old I was, maybe like 30 or maybe I was 28. And I was like, oh, I can actually die. Yeah. And I was like, this is an uncomfortable feeling. I didn't have that for the decade prior. You need to find people who are in that decade. And then they're like, oh, I've seen enough movies to know that I'm going to make it out of this. That's what happens to the main character.

25:42You know, that's the first thing. I remember we, the training for this, that first unit that I was part of, they came up with this stuff called simunitions, which is using real guns, real bullets. With the yellow plastic. Yeah. They shoot choked down paint pills. It's not paintball. It's real guns. But we would start running CQRs. be with those. So you get tagged and then you go, oh, I would have survived that. I would have survived that. And it changes your thinking. Oh, that's interesting. It really dramatically improves your sense of survivability. And if you think you're going to survive and you're going to accomplish the mission, you're much, much more capable of doing it.

26:15Once you take the magic out of anything, I mean, whatever people in life, they say, well, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do that. Once they learn the clue, a magic trick, you learn the key, all of a sudden it takes the magic out and it's a different thing altogether. It reminds me of boxing. I took took a couple of boxing lessons and the coach was like, here's the problem. You're afraid of getting hit. I'm like, yeah, it's going to hurt. He's like, wham. And I was like, ah, he's like, you're still, you're fine. You didn't even fall. And I said, that's true. And he goes, that's going to happen a bunch.

26:41It's fine. Right. And I was like, all right. And then he's hitting me and I'm blocking it. And he's like, now that you're not afraid, you can go forward when somebody is going to hit you instead of just curling up and waiting for them to be done and get tired. Cause that was kind of my strategy before was I don't want to look at it. It's going to hurt. You know, and he's just batting me in the head. And he's like, you should probably do something instead of just stand there and get hit. So that sounds like with the simunitions, it's like, okay, all right, you got shot in the arm. So now you know you should probably shoot back at that guy and, you know, charge forward instead of just standing there while he's aiming the gun at you.

27:10Well, in fairness to these guys, they ever watch this thing and say, get this guy Whitcomb to stop talking about us. He doesn't even know. Yeah. But in the day, everybody was very good at shooting, fighting, and if necessary, dying. That was it. But it was all about the mission. This team that I was on, this is interesting because I want to come, I got a question for you. It was interesting because the first three years I was on this team, we never had, we had everybody. We had our own surgeons. We had our own, we had a medical component so that when somebody did get hurt, we could deal with it.

27:38That's probably a good idea. In-house. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good idea. In-house. We don't want this. Listen to this. The first three years I was on this team, there was no immediate action drill for somebody going down. What does that mean? Oh, I see. I mean, if you and I go through that door at four o 'clock in the morning and you take a flyer and you go down, I didn't stop to take care of you like medics in the military. I would jump over you and go and accomplish a mission. For three years, nobody ever talked about helping anybody. You would go back after it was over. So it was a different type of thinking.

28:08But one thing I want to bring up, I watched the show where you're talking about the situation in Mexico and you're in the backseat of that car, in the backseat of the taxi cab. Yeah. And I think you make a really brilliant point that very, very few people look at in life writ large, that most people who are not familiar with a crisis don't know when to make the decision that it is a crisis and get involved. So many people through the history of time have pushed it up to the point where it was too late. And you made a fascinating statement about when you decided to get engaged and you put yourself in a position where you could interact with the threat with no training whatsoever.

28:46Right. So I find that really fascinating. That was, you're talking about, so for people who don't know, this is when I got kidnapped by the taxi in Mexico and I didn't, there was no smartphones. So I wasn't screwing around looking at Instagram chicks or whatever. And I was looking out the window and realized we were going the wrong way. And then I asked a guy to drop me off and he said, no, that was a big red flag. And I remember thinking, I can't be getting kidnapped because that's never happened to me before. And then immediately going, that doesn't make any sense. Why would, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't happen.

29:15And also if people get kidnapped and they get killed as a result, well, then they're not talking about that. So maybe I should pay attention. That's what you're talking about, right? I am talking about it because it applies to absolutely everything in life. I don't care what it is, a motorcycle race and you brought up that or whatever the situation. situation. Many people, I think it's just built in to mammals, get to a point, everybody knows fight or flight, but getting to fight or flight is what is a problem for so many people in society. Once you get to the point where it's fight or flight, it's probably too late.

29:44I mean, you're running or you're fighting, but you might be dying. So it doesn't matter, but it could be anything. I mean, you're selling a house and you're negotiating and there's a moment where you go, this has never happened before and you get engaged. When human beings can anticipate variability, look at all that risk and make decisions early, they're going to be so much happier with the decision-making. And that's something I learned very early. There's so many times that I look back and I go, oh, if I'd maybe not been so afraid to challenge this particular thing or engage a little bit more, dive in a little bit more, do it again a different way.

30:15That's for sure. People want to duck their head, put their head in the sand. Most often it does not go well. Anticipation is very big. What do you think is the hardest decision you had to make in the field under pressure? I don't know right off the top of my head, but I would say that thing I talked about in the book, for those who haven't read it, I wrote a book about my life in that world from basically from 9-11 until now. Yeah, anonymous mail. It'll be linked in the show notes. So the bottom line is this. I ended up creating these situations where it were more and more difficult. And I ended up on an intelligence community gig in Somalia.

30:47So I flew to Nairobi. I hired a Cessna 182B. I flew into Baidoa, Somalia when they stood up the government. I was there literally when they made Somalia a country. It lasted about three weeks. I was going to say, I've never heard of that city, but maybe because it's not under government control. It wasn't a city. It was a patch of dirt you could land in. And it was a warehouse that had been blown up so many times. They gathered the government and the United Nations in this one building. It only had half a roof because the other roof had been blown off. It had a dirt floor. Anyway, I was there when that happened.

31:19I got stuck there and I ended up about, I think it was about three weeks later, in Mogadishu. Okay. This was after the first battle of Mogadishu, which was Black Hawk Down, and the U.S. government pulled out, and it was a very short time before the second battle of Mogadishu, which I helped precipitate to a certain degree. So I ended up in the second best airport in Mogadishu, which was called K-50. And K-50 had been an old Russian landing strip. And I had to get out of the country and I couldn't get out of the country. I was supposed to get out on one of the cot flights. They have this group called Bluebird Air in Nairobi that would fly cot or mirror.

31:55It's like a Copenhagen type thing that everybody stays high on. Oh, yeah. The stuff that you put in your lip like chew, but it's super addictive and you build a tolerance. And it's real bad for you. It's real bad for you. And it gets rots your teeth out. And if you get an AK-47 and you're 13 years old, it's even less good for you or the people around you, which is the whole country. So I went in on my own. I was supposed to get a ride out on one of these cop flights. That didn't happen because changes were made with the people that were paying me. It went bad. So anyways, I ended up in Moishu, 4 o 'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, whatever the case was.

32:32And it was just me. I had a technical. I had a team. I had my own army. Technical is like it's an old Toyota pickup truck. It's a Hilux usually. It's a Hilux. They love those. Yeah, they love them. Well, it's because they run forever. They do. When I saw a Hilux not in like a dirty war zone with a machine gun welded to it, I was like, oh, people actually drive these? Oh, that's what that is. Yeah. Oh, this is what it's supposed to look like when it has paint on it. Why is Toyota financing all these wars around the world? But they're everywhere, right? Yeah, the Taliban vehicle of choice. So I had one of those welded in the back.

33:04It's called a DSHK. The Dushka or whatever. A Dushka, which means sweetheart in Russian. They call it sweetheart. So I had a Dushka and I had guys with AKs and whatever else. I was actually in an old Toyota Corolla that got shot up at a roadblock trying to get there. So anyways, I get to Moog. I got$600 in my sock. That's all I had left. because there's no money. There's no military. No ATMs. There's nothing. There's nothing. I mean, it's bombed flat. It's an inhospitable location. I'd been there a long time. So I get to this airport and there's an old plane on the runway. Like you see in the old DB Cooper thing where he jumped, like the stairs come down in the back.

33:40Yeah. And I could see it in the distance and somebody told me I could get on that plane. That's why I went there. It was like two and a half or three hour drive from Baidoa. So it was over. My technical was gone and I'm surrounded by all these guys staring at me going, who the f*** is that guy? And that's kind of what kept me alive because nobody wanted to make a decision to take me if I worked for their boss. There's seven guys and they're all vying for whatever. Who's going to kidnap this guy and hold it for ransom? You might get a raise. You might get an extra dollar a month, but you might get your head chopped off with a butter knife too.

34:11And so anyways, I ended up there, zero options. I had $600 and a passport. They came out, this guy came out and took my$600. When I say airport, It's not an airport. There was a blue tarp that sold Nestle water and top ramen noodles you could eat dry and a bunch of starving. I don't want to make it sound less worse than it was, but it was bad. And there's this plane. So I know if I get on the plane, I'm going to survive. If I don't get on the plane, I'm not going to survive. I couldn't swim anywhere. You're right. That was it. So anyways, they came, they took the 600 bucks and now I have no money.

34:42And I don't know anybody. I don't have a ticket. I don't know that I'm getting on the plane. Then the guy comes back and searched me to see if I had any more money and took my passport. Now I'm in Mogadishu on my own doing a gig with an agency and I have nothing. No money, no passport, no technical. Shoelaces, I could maybe strangle myself. I could do an Epstein on myself maybe if I, you know. That's the backup plan. So that was a bad day. So that was, I think that was probably a point in my life where I said, I want to tune this up a little bit. But I did get on the plane. That's the bottom line.

35:16Who's playing with it? It was just a charter. Somebody flew a charter in. I still have no idea why or how. I have a ticket. They actually wrote up this little thing, and I saved it. So I walk out, and the staircase goes up. I think I made it. I'm looking out the windows. This plane was so old, you couldn't see out the windows because the glass had been bead-blasted from landing in the sand. Yeah, so it's all like, what do you call it? Like opaque? Opaque, yeah. Almost foggy because it's been sanded down. Yeah, so I just take sandpaper to the windshield of your Porsche 911. and you know and so you're looking at you see the army or whatever it remains rolling up and you're like please don't be coming for me yeah yeah yeah yeah but then so they you go through this up and down it's hope really the thing that sustains you is hope you hear people talk about it that everything is horrible but maybe it's going to get better so i'm on the plane the stairs come up the engines start up and i think we're out of here then all of a sudden the engines spin down and you can see the light coming in from the stairs coming down yeah f*** me yeah these guys came on, but they took the guy in the seat right behind me, which was a bad day for him, but it was a great day for me.

36:21And then stairs came up and I remember going down the runway, looking out and going, I'm really getting out of here. It was interesting because when I got back to Nairobi, I had flown into Nairobi commercial. I flew out of Nairobi on a chartered plane that I paid cash for. So there's no record of me leaving. So when I came back in, I had to go back through the airport and I had nothing to show that I had left the country to go to Somalia and they knew I came back from Somalia. So that, that was kind of complicated. Oh yeah. What do you even do? I mean, how do you handle that? Make a phone call with a number in West Virginia.

36:53That makes sense. Yeah. I need a fake re-entry visa for Kenya. I've had plenty of those, man. Plenty of those. Yeah. Oh, look. Oh, it's in my other passport that I'm also not supposed to have. I'm not talking to you. Call this number. Chris is out here wrestling with moral questions that end up in history books. Meanwhile, I'm just wondering if my laundry's still in the dryer. Anyway, while we sit with that existential dread for just a second, here's something a little lighter. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Mint Mobile. You ever get a holiday gift that ends up in a drawer two weeks later?

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38:27Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. I honestly don't know how I made it through all those Michigan winters. It wasn't just the cold, it was the darkness. By five o 'clock, it felt like midnight, and before long, I'd slip into that fog of low energy and just the blah mood that I now realize was seasonal depression, plus lack of sleep, plus everything else as a teenager. This time of year is a way of doing that. It sneaks up on you. It's easy to pull back and isolate without even noticing, and that's why BetterHelp is encouraging everyone this November to reach out.

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39:27Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at betterhelp.com slash Jordan. That's better, H-E-L-P.com slash Jordan. This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. I've been so burned out cranking out content lately that all I can think about is travel. There's just something about stepping out of your routine that hits the reset button like nothing else. I got a trip to Patagonia coming up, which I'm ridiculously excited about. It's that magic of meeting new people, trying foods you can't pronounce, exploring new cities. That's really what travel's about. frankly not the checklist or the perfect itinerary but the experiences and connections you make along the way those moments end up being worth more than anything you buy which got me thinking while you're off exploring your home is just sitting there empty why not host it on airbnb while you're away if you ever considered hosting but you were worried maybe it'd be too much to manage airbnb's co-host network can help with airbnb's co-host network you can hire a local co-host to manage everything from creating your listing and messaging guests to on-site support and even design and styling.

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40:56If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, go ahead and email us, jordan at jordan harbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Chris Whitcomb. Man, most of us panic when our phone battery hits 2%. Meanwhile, you got real decisions to make. Okay, so let's go back to the question you asked, why did I write a book that skips around? Yeah, yeah. I rest my case. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know and there's so much stuff we haven't talked about about the writing i worked on as a speech writer on capitol hill yeah wrote for the new york times and gq magazine and i mean there's just so many bizarre things i don't it's hard to figure out where to start it is it's hard to make a through line it's all through line yeah if hollywood made a movie about the hrt or or just these kinds of teams in general what what's the first thing you would tell them to stop doing if you were consulting on that movie hiring angelina jolie just stop hiring angelina jolie stop hiring her.

41:50When American Sniper came out, look, she's enormously talented and she's remarkable in every conceivable way. So it's not about Angelina Jolie. It's the idea that you could make a movie called American Sniper and take a book about a real guy who did real things. And all of a sudden in the middle of a gunfight, he's going to make a call home to talk to his kids and talk, I love you with her. There's not a lot of time to think about your kids when you're in a gunfight. So many of the things that make those stories remarkable, those lives remarkable to moviegoers they don't resonate with the people making those movies.

42:22I've been in this town for a long time. You've been in this town for a long time. And there are things when you go into a studio and you talk about plots. So what I would say is if you want to make one of these, make a story that resonates. And there have been some remarkable movies. I'm a big fan of Catherine Bigelow. I'm a big fan of Peter Berg. I'm a big fan of many people who embrace the inhospitable core of what these things are about. Combat, violence in general is ugly. So don't aggrandize it, but by the same token, don't soft sell the reason you're making the movie. So I was not a big fan of American Sniper.

42:57What's the dumbest injury you ever saw somebody get during training? This is me, because oftentimes I'm an idiot, but we were doing this thing with asps. You know what happens? It's like a baton. Yeah, the extendable baton. Like you're running and I keep on so I tag dogs. Anyways, you run this thing out. So we were practicing one day and we're practicing some kind of, of a fighting thing. And we had these asps and we had these blocks of wood and you would swing at this thing. Like when we were doing the thing, we'd go up and he'd come down and you go faster and harder. And it's a competition, everything you do.

43:28And I remember somebody was going harder than I was. And I went up and down when I did, I came down on the top of the guy's hand that was holding the thing. So that was one of the stupidest. Oh, it was bad. It was really bad. But listen, you get hurt, you know, people die all the time. So that was a stupid mistake, not the worst. Yeah. If you're going to get injured in that line of work, you want to have a good story. Not just, yeah, my training partner. It was just embarrassing because then everybody laughs and the poor guys lost two fingers and, you know, it's unpleasant. Yeah. That's no good.

43:59So, Curran, I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry. You ever hit anybody with one of those ascendable batons? I've hit people with about everything you can imagine. Yeah. When I was working security, I used to, I mean, I wasn't carrying a gun. And I remember these Mexican gangsters, they would always get really drunk and start shooting and I would hit them with the baton yeah and they would break all the time these batons are you think you're such a unstoppable badass with this metal stick and then you hit somebody in the arm and their arm might break but your baton is bent and you go oh this is only good for like one whack well things are we had better quality ones than you did yeah i guess so because i've never broken one but i will say how you hit somebody makes a massive difference yeah because they're designed for specific things to change behaviors.

44:40They're not designed to... They're less lethal force. Could they be used and kill somebody? Yes. That's not what they're designed for. But you've got to apply them in certain ways. And bone, joints, things like that change people's opinion. But then you add drugs and alcohol. If you push on... These guys are always coked up. Yeah. So we would try to choke them with it because I couldn't often wrap my arms around the guys because they were big. Oh, wow. So I'd choke them with a baton. Or I would tap them on the top of the knee or the shin because that hurts, but it doesn't have to do anything other than leave a bruise.

45:10But there was a guy who wouldn't let me go and he was a little bit older. I just couldn't get his arm off of me. So I whacked his arm and I remember it, I remember it broke. But then I remember looking at my baton like, oh shit, this thing is a piece of garbage. You're right though. It wasn't, the brand was not ASP because those are expensive. It was a knockoff brand. So I went out and bought an ASP after that. And you could tell because the cheap ones, if you use them enough, they fall apart. They just fly apart because they're made out of shitty. If you're depending on something for your safety, your well-being, probably good stuff.

45:40Yeah. Generally a wise choice instead of going to the gas station baton or whatever. What's a survival skill everyone thinks they need but is actually useless? Oh, wow. Survival skill that everybody thinks he needs. While you're thinking, I'll give a funny example. Give me one. We were talking about earthquake survival and safety, and my wife is like, okay, I'm on it. I was like, you got to get us an earthquake survival safety kit or something like that. Can you research that? She's like, yeah. About a week later, I said, what'd you get? She goes, I got a fire starter. I'm like, what? What are you doing?

46:10We need like water and food. Right. You know, like a crank radio or something. She's like, all right, back to Amazon. I got a story for about everything. So I'll tell you the story. Yeah. So I lived in Venice for a long time, off and on for - Italy or California. Well, I've been to Venice, but in California, Venice, California. So there's a restaurant on Abbot Kinney. I'm not going to say the name of it, but it was a very prominent restaurant at the time. And there's a garden in the back and we'd have a lunch every Friday. so we'd get some really interesting people we'd sit around have lunch and we'd tell stories and talk about interesting things right so these are very highly successful well-known people this afternoon and the topic was this if the earthquake comes if it all goes to hell in southern california yeah what are you going to do so everybody thought about it for the week they came back and we had the conversation so it starts with this one guy and he said i am going to take$10 ,000 and I'm going to have it broken into fives and tens.

47:03This is a true story, a hundred percent true story. He goes, well, look, if you know, nobody's going to be able to make change. So he went out and took 10 grand and he did this. This was not a hypothetical and had twenties and hundreds and whatever converted to fives and tens because of the shit went hit the fan, they wouldn't have to make change. The second guy said, I went out and I got a motorcycle license and I bought an 80cc scooter because everybody's going to be trying to get out of LA. You won't be able to get gas. I can go around them and I can ride this scooter out of town. And I said, well, that's okay, but you'll get like seven miles and then you're out of gas, you're hitchhiking.

47:41So that didn't go very well. The third guy said, I went out and I bought a gas grill, a sleeping bag and something else. I can't remember. All I remember is a sleeping bag. So they're all very happy with themselves. Everybody's going right on. This is fantastic. Yeah. Good decision making. You're going to survive. And they look at me knowing my background. What would you do? And I would say, I didn't do anything. I'm going to go to your house. I'm going to take your motorcycle to your house and get your sleeping bag. And I'm going to go to your house and take your$10 ,000 and then go on my way.

48:10Go on my way. Yeah. So the answer is people oftentimes think, what do I need to survive these things? Many, many times you're wrong. Like I knew people at various times. I'm not a gun nut. I have guns because I think I should in society. If something happens, I'd feel badly if I didn't for other people. And just because I've had so much training and experience with them. However, I have these friends who at various times would go out and buy 10 ,000 rounds of ammo or whatever. And they'd say, why aren't you buying ammo? And I'd say, because I don't want to carry 10 ,000 rounds of ammo. I need about three rounds so I can take yours.

48:42So people realize you need shelter if it's cold, you need food and water and sleep. You don't need much of anything except a plan. And if you have that - Or a helicopter. You'll be fine. Helicopter's fine, but they run out of gas. They get shot down. That's true. Yeah, I suppose. Oh man, getting shot down in a helicopter. How easy is it? You're the only guy I've talked to recently that might know this. How easy is it to shoot down a helicopter? Because one, you got to hit it. That can't be easy. And you got to hit it somewhere that matters, which is probably also not that easy. Another great story.

49:12One of the guys on my team, because this team I was on, this hospital rescue team. It was some of the most extraordinary people he ever met. One of the guys' name was Jimmy Yacone. Jimmy Yacone was in one of the helicopters in Black Hawk Down. When you see, I think it was like Jeremy Piven, who I used to be friends with way back in the day. And Jeremy Piven was playing Jimmy Yacone. And they got, I think it was Jeremy that was playing the role. They took an RPG. They're flying around Mogadishu in a Black Hawk and they take an RPG. It explodes. I think it killed the guy in the left seat. I think Jimmy was in the right seat and it knocked him unconscious.

49:42He wakes up as the helicopter's going in, wakes up, pulls back, saves the day, survives. He ended up being on my sniper team after he left the Army. He went to the FBI, to the hostage rescue team, and was on this thing. So I asked him that because I've been in helicopter crashes too. You have? Yes, but not as a result of gunfire. And I asked him that. And as it turns out, it's pretty hard to shoot down a helicopter. Yeah, you would think, yeah. You've got to hit a control mechanism of some kind. Yeah. You got a hydraulic kind of whatever. A fuel tank or the pilot, I guess, right? Yeah, exactly.

50:14Yeah. Well, maybe not the fuel, but you know what? Speaking of these things, how you talk about these, Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books talked about in World War II, the government wanted to try and keep their planes from getting shot down. You know this? Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. So they said these planes were coming back and none of them were shot in the engine. So they said, well, we're going to armor all these other things. And somebody said, well, they came back because they weren't shot in the engine. Right, right. So it depends on how you look at it. In reality, helicopters go down for a lot of different reasons.

50:45They're remarkably resilient to gunfire. Vietnam's a perfect way to prove that. The old Hueys, and we had them. I flew in one for years and years and years. They're pretty durable. There's not a lot in them. I mean, there's a lot of metal and some open space, but they're not as easy to shoot down as you might expect. What's it like going down in a helicopter then? Because I assume you're not dropping like a stone or you wouldn't be here right now. I remember I used to be terrified of flying. I grew up flying on private planes. Another story. So I joined the FBI and I got assigned to the Springfield, Missouri office, which had a military base called Fort Leonard Wood.

51:20And my job was to do certain FBI stuff on this base. I went up there one day and we had to fly somewhere in a helicopter. And I get in this helicopter and I'm thinking, I'm not all that excited about being in a helicopter. and uh it was a vietnam era huey takes off it was a bad day and we're in this thing and through no fault of anything this is not war this was nothing the thing broke and it gets a master caution light there's a light at the top of the circular panel and we had headphones on and it was one of those things where somebody said oh shit or whatever and it was a master caution and it was i think it was it lost the gearbox.

51:58I think that's what it was. And we auto-rotated. So I say crash landing, nobody got hurt. What is auto-rotating? It's a mechanism helicopters have that use the inertia of the blades. Sorry to helicopter pilots. I'm going to get 700 emails about this, but it's okay. That guy's a moron. He doesn't even know. He made the whole thing up. This one was widely reported because when you crash a helicopter in the army, there's a report. I was on it. But anyways, I don't know the exact mechanism, but I do know there's an inertia thing. And it was a hard landing. Did the thing blow up and end up being in an Angelina Jolie movie?

52:33No. But it was classified as a crash landing. I didn't really know what was going on because the whole thing was new. It's like you in the taxi cab. You're thinking, are we really going down? And I'd never been in a helicopter before. I didn't even know what that meant. But anyways, that was one of them. So everybody survived then, yeah? Yeah, yes, everybody's so bad. The pilot must have been pretty happy about that. I don't know. That would be really scary. Yeah, pilots are... I went for a glider ride a couple weeks ago. It was in New Hampshire. I went to see my folks. And I go up for a glider ride, and I said something about death or whatever because I've had so many bad experiences flying.

53:09And the guy goes, we're not in the death business, or we're not in the dying business. And that's pilots, right? Yeah. I mean, they dodge it every day, but it's physics. What if your life depended on slipping past KGB surveillance using nothing but a fake mustache and a latex mask? Former CIA Chief of Disguise, John Amandes, takes us deep into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage, where outsmarting your enemy meant mastering the art of becoming someone else entirely. I worked for 27 years for the CIA. The office that I worked in was like Q. We had all kinds of techs. One half of the office was technical, it was chemists and physicists and engineers, electrical and mechanical, people with such esoteric specialties.

53:51It was so important. It was the bottom line to a lot of the things we did. The other half of the office was my half, which was people who would deploy those tools, who would take them to the field, who would hand them to James. Sort of an inside joke. All the case officers, we called them all James. and part of us didn't trust James with our gear. As we might have spent$5 million on a program to develop that camera system that fit into a Mont Blanc pen, we usually figured out how to go with him. So if he broke it, we could fix it. If he lost it, we could find it. If he forgot how to operate it, we could refresh him.

54:28It was a little inside joke. If he left it on the subway, maybe we could go get it. So we traveled around with James. We not only equipped him and we trained him, but we also very often accompanied him. A lot of our technical expertise would come into play. People are very aware of the threat that that technology can play. How can you use it? What can it do for you? It's given us opportunities to do things we never dreamed of. The real work in OTS was solving problems. To hear more about how spy tech, disguise, and raw nerve shaped modern intelligence as we know it, check out episode 1027 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

55:30your decisions and your psychology and your relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at SixMinuteNetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

56:01The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in this kind of black ops, undercover type stuff, these episodes are really popular. Definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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