Original subtitles

Most of us, when we're young, are idealistic.

Well, I was idealistic.

And I was sort of a guy that liked to push against authority.

I liked to do the unexpected.

I enjoyed chaos.

Different people are drawn to different jobs. I was drawn to special things in

the military.

The CIA was not on my radar when I grew up.

Something happened to me that it changed my outlook to my life and how I viewed

my sense of purpose.

If there was a situation where it's uncertain, what do you do when you

encounter bad guys?

When do you talk to people, negotiate?

When do you shoot people? When do you run? When do you fight?

I'm willing to gamble my life, and I don't mind gambling my life.

In espionage, there's a hierarchy of sources when you're recruiting sources.

You know, everybody wants to recruit the code clerk from the enemy country that

works in their embassy with all the secret codes, right? That's the gold

standard that everybody wants. Well, that actually very, very rarely happens.

My name is Gary Harrington.

I joined the CIA in 2004.

Before that, I was in Army Special Forces and assigned to 5th Special

Group, which focuses on the Middle East.

I actually retired from the Army on a Friday and then went to work at Langley

a CIA officer on Monday.

For me, by that point, my military career involved decades of training and

in foreign countries and being in Afghanistan.

being in Iraq.

And at that time, I had no idea I would be back in Afghanistan trying to track

down al -Qaeda and Taliban.

On the ground in Afghanistan, it's apparent the ongoing U .S. air attacks

damaged the Taliban's ability to wage war.

During the Afghanistan war,

The CIA had multiple missions in Afghanistan. We deployed because of 9

number one was destroying al -Qaeda, getting Osama bin Laden. And so we had

get as close to the enemy as we could to collect intelligence and to conduct our

operations against terrorists.

As these strikes continue, reports are trickling in that Taliban commanders are

beginning to defect.

We need to get those sources. We need the intelligence, and we need the impact

that having those guys secretly working for us can provide.

My name is Chris. I was a CIA lifer, worked for them over 30 years, and most

my time was spent on counterterrorism in the Middle East.

Gary struck me right from the outset as somebody that had good instincts and

good judgment. You know, he wasn't a kid. He was an older Special Forces

soldier. He'd been in third world countries before.

He'd worked with indigenous forces before.

So right off the bat, I could see that he brought something special to the

table.

In 2006 and 2007, I was in my second year as an operations officer

for the CIA.

I served in sort of a quasi -position where I did some paramilitary things at

nighttime, and then the rest of the day I worked undercover in an embassy.

And about that time, I had had some success at establishing contact with

some members of the Taliban in Pakistan.

I started learning some habits and traditions.

of how you interact with people that might provide information.

Now, learning that was almost like the secret code, like I might offer money to

a Taliban mullah who can't take money or can't take a gift, but I knew how to do

it in a way that would not offend him and would give him cover to take

it. You know, I would give them just a traditional gift that one of their

tribesmen might give them.

But then somewhere in that, I made sure there might be some money in that.

And then I would never speak of it.

But then the next time I asked, would you meet me, I rarely got a no.

I got word that someone that was on the top ten wanted list, a Taliban

mullah, might be willing to come and meet with me and perhaps

work.

Gary's effort to recruit a senior Taliban leader was of high interest to

others. Bringing a high -level Taliban commander over to our side could be of

tremendous importance.

A top -ten mullah in the Taliban would know more about the organization of

strategic plans, maybe finances, avenues of resupply, perhaps.

As a senior person, they knew someone even higher on the list.

Maybe they were any of the Taliban that had contact with al -Qaeda.

Of course, I had no proof of that, and the proof would be, let's try to get him

to come across, and that would be our proof.

When you consider an operation such as... To meet this mullah, there are a

of things you have to take into mind. The first face that Taliban mullah sees

shouldn't be an American face.

So an Afghan general was assigned by the minister of defense to work with me,

and we developed this operation.

The only place he could meet was in a very remote, dangerous place where there

had been no U .S. presence.

And it was far from any.

The Afghanistan -Pakistan border is a lengthy one, some 1 ,500 miles with

terrain, some very mountainous, some more desert stretches from Pakistan's

border with Iran all the way up to the far north of Pakistan.

My name is Mike Vickers. I'm a former CIA operations officer and former

undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

The border region is quite dangerous.

Areas that, for instance, I could operate in as a CIA officer in the 1980s

become no -go terrain.

After 9 -11, the environment had gotten a lot more hostile, threats of

bombs or assassinations.

You know, every environment is different.

And sometimes that's a scary thing.

Having physical courage is a big part of being a CIA officer, especially a case

officer in the field. And so having somebody like Gary and his Special

pedigree, that meant that you had that physical courage quality that you need

go far out away from safe areas in the hope of making a hugely important

achievement.

So we were told...

This guy would come out of Pakistan at this really remote place, and

we were going to meet him and get him in our control and then move him to

somewhere where we could sit down and have a conversation about what we might

able to do together.

Fortunately, trying to figure how you would get somewhere like that undetected

fits right in with...

my experience in training as a Special Forces soldier.

So I worked with the SAD guys in the Special Activities Division, which

later became known as the Special Activities Center, to devise a plan,

would we do this?

All these areas out by the border of Pakistan are essentially hostile.

My name is Mick Mulroy. I was a Marine.

I still am. We're always Marines. From there, I was recruited into the Central

Intelligence Agency into a component that's called Special Activity Center.

Once you leave the bases, you go into harm's way, and you have to be ready

that moment on. Sometimes you go heavy with a lot of very overt force, but you

can't do that on most intelligence operations because you defeat the

clandestinity. So you have to plan for all of that.

With the SAD guys doing a lot of the planning, we figured that, okay, the

vanguard or the initial group of us would get three thin -skinned vehicles.

when I say thin -skinned, I meant unarmored, non -U .S.-looking cars or

SUVs or pickups that fit in with that remote village, which was located on the

Pakistan border.

between the Nangarhar province and Nuristan.

That area in particular is the wild west of Pakistan.

You have different ethnic groups.

The Pakistani intelligence service has informants, but it's also the insurgent

groups or terrorist groups that make it very dangerous.

So it does make it a challenging operational environment.

If it's a high -threat environment, then the ideal is you have a three -inch

thick window, But then they're going to know who you are. If you're going out in

a thin -skinned vehicle, if there's a confrontation, then you're going to be

very vulnerable because the bullets can go completely through it. So you have to

balance your ability to obviously protect yourself with your ability to

in.

It's very rare that the CIA allowed somebody to move in an unarmored

particularly an operations officer as I was.

But it was deemed essential for this mission.

And so at like 3 .30, 4 o 'clock in the morning, we kicked off to go on this

mission.

And in our group was probably four or five SAD guys, myself, and

I had that Afghan general wearing civilian clothes and his driver.

They were in a separate pickup truck than the U .S. guys.

These operations are usually seen as long shots.

You operate on the assumption that this could all be a provocation, could be a

trick. The goal could be to harm us, to harm the case officer, harm others.

I was concerned that we could be being set up.

We knew that it's not common for cars to be traveling in the middle of the

night.

And if we have headlights on, well, that's going to give us away really

So we want to drive with headlights off, which means we have to have night

vision goggles on.

But who can drive at night without light?

So we had a plan that if we ended up coming right by a house, We would turn

the lights right before we got there, so they might assume that we were a local

or somebody trying to travel to the border.

Operations conducted close to the Pakistan border could be especially

You had enemy across the border using Pakistan territory for sanctuary, and so

the enemy had more opportunities, more potential to make a move against us at

the border.

And they did. They did so routinely.

The Special Activities Division had a group of Afghans that they

trained. We had two pickup trucks with those, and then each of those trucks

had a machine gun mounted in the back, and they would stay behind us.

like a 30 -minute delay between us and them.

And, of course, guns tend to draw guns. So you want them not necessarily with

you, but you want them to be able to react. So if something happens, either

you're ambushed or this whole thing is a setup, you can strong point in a

location long enough for these other folks to show up.

So that was our security thing. We didn't have a predator flying overhead

provide surveillance in advance.

We had no idea to call for air support.

So we drove outside of Zulalabad on paved roads for a while and

then started getting on trails and gravel roads.

It was dark.

You have to drive really slow.

That was our job, to be masters of chaos. And in many ways, that typifies

Harrington.

because he can find himself amidst chaos and find a, not just a good solution,

but a great solution to whatever that challenge may be.

So I'm John Mulholland. I was a colonel commanding the 5th Special Forces Group

when I met then Sergeant 1st Class Gary Harrington the same day I took command

of it.

Gary became my...

My go -to guy when I had some hairy, thorny problem that I really needed

to take ownership of now.

And he was also a man with the moral courage to do the right thing.

The operations of Torp World were aimed at pinpointing the number one high

-value target, which was Osama bin Laden.

In the fiercest fighting yet of the Tora Bora campaign, U .S. special forces

joined Afghan guerrillas in attacking al -Qaeda positions.

There was intelligence that pinpointed bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains.

So I was asked to help support that, and Gary was one of the first guys I sent

out there to do that.

We didn't really have many U .S. troops on the ground at that time, so we're

going to try to use...

Local, untrained Afghan warlords to try to go against al -Qaeda.

There's that tension that's always at play with your indigenous counterpart.

But that trust and rapport, everything begins with trust and rapport.

And I would say Gary was masterful at doing that.

In war zones like Afghanistan, it's littered with hidden caches of weapons.

And these things aren't necessarily safeguarded like in an American

bunker. When they move these things, it's...

Not unheard of, but a mistake's made and there's a terrible explosion and they

lose people.

That means done, vaporized.

So in some cases, it's the more junior local guys who get told, hey, you're

driving the truck that's full of a lot of Big Bang in the back.

And Gary felt it was important for him to show that, hey, look, I trust you

guys, and I'm willing to accept the same amount of risk as you guys.

So one day on his own, Gary just jumped in the front of the truck with so many

young guys driving one of those dicey, explosive -filled trucks just to send

that message that, hey, I'm here with you guys. We're all part of that. That

selflessness of Gary, willing to accept that risk, took him to a whole other

level of respect with those indigenous fighters in that group.

That's the kind of guy Gary was.

Finally, just before dawn, we rolled into the outskirts of the town.

We wanted to get there before people were moving around a lot because any

village, people have to get up and go get water from a communal water pump.

So you wanted to be there before that activity got too heavy.

When it comes to conducting risky operations in a war zone, we've got to

maintain clandestinity, and we've got to have a low profile.

There's probably bad guys living right there in the village, but if not,

sure going to tell them, and it's going to be found out very soon.

And then, of course, the reaction would be, and they did this often, they would

set out on the radio.

there's Americans here, they're in this location, their only way out of here is

these two routes, and then they would try to start setting in ambushes.

As it was getting dawn, we were trying to figure out, okay, we have three

vehicles, the two thin -skinned ones that we were in, and then the Afghan

general had his truck. These are strange vehicles that don't belong here, so how

are we going to get them out of sight?

We found one.

house that had you know it was a compound with a big mud wall around it

enough room that we could get the vehicles in it and out of sight but to

someone at random like this certainly has the chance that they could turn you

over to the bad guys with all assets whether they're intelligence

assets or action -oriented assets.

It is difficult to fully trust individuals out there, but we do

can. But ultimately, it is a judgment call.

So I had the general who spoke the language go up and ask

the... Guy that lived there, it was a man and his family.

You know, I don't think we were threatening. Matter of fact, we always

nice to the people and help out where we can, be extremely polite.

We paid them a little bit of money to open the gates. We backed our vehicles

there and enclosed the gates.

And we stayed inside there as we tried to use our cell phone to make contact

with this mullah that we hoped was coming out of Pakistan.

We tried repeatedly to make contact with this person at the phone number we had.

We were unable to get a good signal.

So because we couldn't get a signal, and the time is going, and now the village

is waking up.

I'm hearing villagers move around.

You hear chatter, laughter.

Life is going on.

Now I know that by now, this family that we're keeping sequestered in there

where we are is going to be missed.

First it'll start, and then word will start spreading.

I always say it's sort of like when you go in a place like that, it's like

lighting a fuse.

Picture dynamite. The problem is...

You don't, A, know how long the fuse is, and B, you don't know how big the

explosive is on the other end.

All I know is the fuse is burning, and very soon the bad guys will know that

we're there and that we are a ripe target for them.

Cell coverage was non -existent in that area.

The villagers told us that there was a place further forward from where we were

that you could sometimes get a cell signal.

Then the Afghan general turned to me and said, hey, I blend in, let me go

forward to that place and try to make phone contact. To go forward from where

were kind of meant you were stepping on Pakistani territory.

And none of us had permission to be in Pakistan, and the general surely

shouldn't have been there either.

But in the end, I decided that the mission was going to be a bust, and let

give him one shot to try to go forward and make contact.

Meeting with members of the enemy in the war zone may be more drawn out than

some other operations, but the potential payoff is huge.

And so if we could find a way forward that we were comfortable with, We were

going to try it.

So I need to put some guidelines and protection any time you let somebody go

out. And I told him that, hey, I can give you 30 to 45 minutes, but we have

be out of here because now it's past 8, 30, 9 o 'clock. Word is out.

That fuse is burning. The fuse is burning.

But, you know, off he went with the promise he'd be back in 45 minutes.

30 minutes passes by.

I extend that to 45.

No general.

Now we're all getting quite hyper.

What has happened to him? Were the Taliban or Al Qaeda waiting outside?

Did they grab him when he came out?

Are they getting ready to attack us?

Now, almost another hour has passed.

Even more people are aware we're here. The attack may be in progress. So

everybody's getting more and more amped up.

And the SAD guys are starting to ask me, hey, what are we going to do?

And I was honored, to be honest, that they asked me because a lot of SAD or

former special forces, Marine recon, SEALs, that normally would be one of

calls.

I think the CIA special operations people that were supporting him, that he

working with, had more trust in Gary than they might have had in somebody

because they knew that Gary had a great special forces background.

He's not all starry -eyed. He's got a good grip on the situation.

I thought back several years before.

In 2002, when I had been the tactical leader on a team, I was assigned

as a special forces soldier on an intelligence mission, and there was the

team leader. His main job was to keep us hooked up with this Afghan warlord.

And it was out in the middle of this valley in the Taliban and al -Qaeda

territory.

So we just roll into this vulnerable location.

There were probably a total of five or six Americans.

And I noticed the person we were supposed to meet didn't show up.

And then I noticed that what few locals had been around disappeared.

You're thinking, is this an ambush?

You know, it kind of made my spine tingle.

So as the tactical leader, I turned.

to the CIA team leader and said, I think we're in a bad place.

People are disappearing.

We're really vulnerable here.

And I think we've been set up. And, you know, he said, well, we're supposed to

meet this person here.

And I remember saying, hey, 10 minutes more, but then we got to get, you know,

used to read stories about the special forces guys in Vietnam, and they didn't

really care about authority.

did things their way.

And that, I admit that that appealed to that part of my personality.

And so, yeah, I was like, it was time to get out.

You know, it's like that thing you see on a movie where they suddenly notice

that there are no birds and no animals and it's definitely quiet.

That was the feeling in that moment, that pregnant moment.

Before an ambush, so we were kind of sitting ducks in the middle of this big

bolt.

And the CIA team leader happened to be Chris.

I was blissfully unaware about how dangerous things were getting.

I think the first time or two, I probably pushed back and wanted to do a

more, collect some more intelligence, make some more contact.

The operations officer, you know, he's focused on doing his meeting and running

the intelligence aspects of that. And it's my job to pay attention to the

safety. And so I was like, yeah, you know, this seems like that moment

just before an ambush.

I realized that if Gary, this experienced special forces soldier, is

nervous, then maybe I should be nervous too.

Ultimately, Chris followed my recommendation and we left.

After we got back, we found out that the signals intelligence had overheard

Al Qaeda on the radio saying that they...

had an ambush against us, but we left before they could get everybody in

Had we stayed, we'd have been ambushed, and there weren't really many of us to

be able to fight that off.

Gary Harrington did an awful lot for that team, probably saved me from

probably saved the other team members more than once.

I look back to how we avoided that ambush.

Some of it was instinct.

But that instinct is born on decades of training, being in foreign countries,

and, you know, all combined to help make that instinct or that feeling an

informed one.

So I started discussing options with the SAD team leader.

And at that point, our options were, A, forget the general, we leave, and he and

his driver will have to make their own way back, or, B, stay there longer and

try to give the general more time.

He also happened to have a letter on him that was signed by the minister of

defense. If he were stopped and captured by Taliban or al -Qaeda, that letter

would give him away as a member of the government. So that would be instant

death for him.

And then what if he were stopped by Pakistani officials?

Relations aren't that great between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now you have a senior officer here illegally in another country, and he's

got a letter that he's doing some kind of secret mission or whatever for the

minister of defense. So that would be a huge international incident.

The other alternative that the SAD guy came up with was we can make one attempt

to try to recover the general.

Maybe he's a little bit further forward trying to make phone contact. Maybe he's

made contact, and the guy says he'll be there in a minute.

But now to do so, it's broad daylight, and we're going to be seen when we come

out, and we're going forward.

further into Taliban and Al Qaeda territory, what are we going to do? How

going to be protected?

Up to that point, the mission had been to get the mullah that we came for.

With the general gone and our time essentially run out, the mission

had to shift my mind.

Either you adapt.

or you die. That is the key to any military operations, is the ability to

based on not what you planned, right, but what is actually unfolding in front

you.

To try to go get him meant that we were certainly going into more dangerous

Taliban -Al Qaeda territory.

The smart thing to do, what the agency would want me to do, is leave now, get

your people out of here, save the Americans.

It's tough about the Afghan, but he's going to have to make it on his own.

But then there's that warrior ethos of never leave a teammate behind.

And the Afghan was with us and trusting us.

So I didn't want to leave him behind.

Now it gets back to that whole ethos of working with your indigenous

counterparts. They're part of your team.

The S .A .D. guy said, well, we can call up those two trucks of Afghans, the

machine guns on the truck, because the secrecy is over. And then at least when

we move out, we'll be a force to be reckoned with.

And, yeah, I debated that. But it was kind of one of those moments where I

we kind of looked at each other like, yeah, we're following the warrior's

We're not leaving. We're going.

So the warrior code is beyond just being a good soldier. It is more.

of an ethical moral code than any of that. It is wisdom. It is justice.

It is courage.

It is honor. It is your honor. That's what matters more, and in some cases,

to be dramatic, than life itself.

So, sure enough, we left the compound.

The trucks came. We all left in our little convoy.

So now, If it's my career, it's my career. If we have to fight our way out,

know, we get in a gunfight, then that's what it is. But we're doing it.

Horton favors the bold. And that was something special about Gary is he

put off by the long shot nature of something.

Long ago in my military career, I made the decision I'm willing to gamble my

life. And I don't mind gambling my life.

When I was 17, I had a religious experience that was a seminal moment.

I grew up around Charlotte, North Carolina.

My parents were children of subsistence farming families.

I was one of those people bullied a lot in school.

And in high school, I started getting panic attacks.

Once in a while, I'd start to go into a class and suddenly waves of panic would

hit me. So I'd started skipping school.

Unfortunately, I did that enough times where I failed the 11th grade.

I was distraught. It was nighttime.

I walked outside in the woods there. I walked to a dark place.

Just needed time alone thinking about having to face the realities that I

And while I'm there, I see, but off in the corner over here, what I think is

like a little bubble, gas light.

I'm a rational thinking person.

So I, oh, it must be I've heard of swamp gas or something.

And then it sort of slowly went this way.

And then it started getting bigger.

Then at one point, essentially touched the ground. Then I heard a voice come

of there.

I was terrified.

And the voice said, do not be afraid.

I have a purpose for you.

I didn't know what to think.

I was pretty shaken by it.

And then I wondered, well, what does that mean?

I have to go be a preacher now?

That's not who I am.

So then when I became exposed to the Marine Corps and the possibility that,

you're going to serve, from that moment forward, I felt I had a purpose.

I'm going to serve my country and be in battle. After that, I pushed every

opportunity I had to get involved in whatever was the most dangerous thing,

most elite.

Who's facing combat?

I'll go there. High probability you're going to get killed.

It dovetailed with what I said, hey, my purpose, because I thought that's what

my role was.

So that sense of purpose was essential for this mission.

One of the first things we hit, like a kilometer or two down the road, is a

little rock and mud hut, and it was two Afghan border guys.

They were the final outpost looking over Pakistan.

Our operations were limited to the country of Afghanistan.

In terms of conducting operations into Pakistan, as a matter of normal course,

that was not going to happen.

And as we rolled up, they said, you can't come here.

And we said, where are you going? We're going forward.

They said, well, you can't do that. You can't cross here.

And we're like, yeah, we're going.

So off we went.

So we've probably now gone a couple kilometers past that checkpoint.

And suddenly from behind us, you see a plume of dirt that looks like smoke

flying up. And there's some vehicle racing down this dirt road as fast as it

can, trying to get to us.

Is this that ambush that we've been expecting?

Now we all go on alert.

Is this a car going to hit us from this side and then somebody else from

somewhere else?

So as this car starts approaching closer and closer, we stop, got our weapons

ready, pointing towards the car, ready to fight it out.

Part of being a professional when it comes to either a military or

is not just shooting straight. It's also knowing when to shoot and when not to

shoot and taking that.

level of discipline that you don't end up harming somebody that either is an

innocent or obviously on your own team.

Everybody had their weapons ready to start firing at the car.

And then it stopped like 50 yards behind us.

And the door opened.

And out jumps the general.

And he's all happy.

And he comes running up, grabs me, and starts hugging me. He almost has tears

his eyes.

And he was so, so happy.

Even with the speeding car, even knowing that this could be, you know, somebody

coming to do harm to them, they held fire as they should. And it turned out

be the exact person they were trying to recover.

And I'm like, hey, where's your vehicle? What happened? And he explained to us

that he and his driver had driven forward and they saw a Pakistani border

outpost. And the people in the outpost saw them, so they pulled their vehicle

over. on a hill before that and parked it and turned it off.

And then the general said he told his driver, get us out of here.

But he went to turn it, and this was a dilapidated old pickup truck, and his

battery was dead.

And by now the Pakistanis are coming towards them.

He realized that he had that letter on him from the Minister of Defense and

he could not be stopped with that on him without causing an international

incident.

So he told his driver that, hey, you stay here with the vehicle because the

driver had an Afghan refugee card issued by Pakistan. So he had some credibility

there. And just tell him that I'm some guy you gave a ride to. And then the

general jumped out of the truck and started running.

He claimed that the Pakistanis fired twice.

But he ran for his life back towards where we were.

And when he got back partway, somebody told him that, hey, those Americans went

that way. So he commandeered a vehicle and had that person drive him to where

were.

He was so thrilled that we came after him. I'm not sure if he expected that.

it really, really sort of cemented the bond between he and I from that point

forward.

One of CIA's most important

is the sacred bond we have with the foreigners that help us.

I think a lot of the foreigners that work with us feel it. Some of them

certainly have experienced it.

There's something in us, and especially guys like Gary, that know we're not

going to leave that foreigner who's part of our team, we're not leaving them

behind.

Once we had the general, That portion of the mission is over. And while I had a

great sense of relief, okay, we've got the general, then it was let's get the

hell out of here and turn the vehicles around and start going.

But it was still going to be a perilous trip out, and I was pretty nervous.

In the Afghanistan -Pakistan Theater,

Roads that run along the bottoms of valleys are sometimes the only

There was a lot of times where our folks had no choice but to go to a certain

location, traveling a certain road in and coming out on the same road.

Generally, you don't want to do that because if you've come in by that route,

they want to try to ambush you on your way out, they might set up there.

And so that was kind of another thing that made this even more dangerous.

And they could mount a pretty sizable force pretty quickly.

So a platoon size, 30 individuals, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades,

pretty complex ambushes.

They've been doing it forever.

While we certainly could run into IEDs or an ambush.

We were emboldened and felt strengthened by the fact that we'd just recovered

the general. So we drove until we started getting on trails.

And once we got off the secondary roads and the dirt roads and hit

Jalalabad, we knew that the danger was over. And it was with a great

sense of relief.

that we had, I felt, gone into the belly of the beast and come out.

To my knowledge, that mullah was never captured.

I always have doubt now, did the guy that we had contact with, did he get

feet, or was it all a lie to lure us somewhere where we could be attacked?

One of the things you learn as a CIA case officer is that you only have a

of successes for many, many attempts.

You know, I've heard people throw out the numbers of, you know, one or two out

of 100.

But one of the things you develop early on is an attitude that there's a lot of

value in making the good attempt. The only way we're going to achieve anything

is to try.

To have a career as long as mine was, which between the military and the

was 35 years, I had a sense of purpose. For a lot of that time, my sense of

purpose may have been war.

I felt that my role in life was to serve, and I didn't really expect to

it. As I neared the end of my military career then, I started looking at the

agency.

is when I first started thinking that, okay, maybe your job is to just keep

serving. Maybe this whole thing of getting killed is not you.

I think that Gary's time early in the war and the time that he spent working

alongside CIA officers, I think that very much helped him in that next career

inside the CIA.

I think it was a natural evolution for him to continue doing what he'd done so

well in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

A lot of people say, particularly with the CIA, would you go back and do that

all again?

Hell yeah, I'd go back and do it again, every bit of it again, to feel like I'm

serving my country and have the adventure of a lifetime while doing it.

Being a case officer is a job that it's going to take everything you've got.

It's going to take every class you've ever taken, every job you've ever had,

every bit of work experience, every book you've ever read, every movie you've

ever watched.

It's going to take everything you've got to come up with the best set of

security measures that allow us to do something that's really, really

get it done, come back alive, and then go back the next day and do it again.

and not have anybody know.