You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Are you curious how Spycast gets made? Join the International Spy Museum as a Spy Fan member for just $50. Spy Fan members unlock live virtual studio recordings of upcoming podcast episodes, plus invites to exclusive events online, a store discount, and a spy sticker for your laptop. Your membership also fuels the creation of Spycast, the International Spy Museum, and helps preserve real stories of espionage. And for a limited time, use the discount Spycast fan, all caps, no spaces, for $5 off of a Spy Fan membership when you purchase online. Visit www.spymuseum.org/membership to learn more. Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingberg, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe. It's Spycast's 20th year, and we start off 2026 with Brian Carbagh. He served in the CIA for about two decades, retiring as the director of the Special Activities Center, the agency's arm for covert action, where some of the most bold and dangerous work happens with authorization from the president. It's a world few know about firsthand, and even fewer can discuss. Brian gave me an inside look into the job, which she held from 2017 to 2021, pivotal years in the United States and the world. Brian, welcome to Spycast. Thank you for coming. Thanks so much for the invitation, Sasha. So this is not a therapy session, but you are sitting in a chair, and I'm going to ask you about your childhood. What did you want to be as a kid? I was a kid growing up at Upstate New York, small town, I grew up watching special operations, movies, war movies, and I was really attracted to one serving our country. I wanted to serve. I went to a military service academy, but two, I just really had this desire to see the world. And when I joined the Marines, I had a chance when I was a captain in the Marine Corps to be a part of a special purpose Marine Air Brown Task Force, which was my first real exposure to different countries, different cultures, different languages, different types of food, different ways of thinking, but all in the pursuit of like having friends and partners in my case in the special operations units in those countries. And it was awesome. And for me, you know, as that kid that grew up in a small town on Upstate New York, wanted to see the world, dabbled it in a little bit, and then having had that experience in the Marine Corps. In my mind, I was like, I know where I want to go when it was towards the CIA. I wasn't exactly sure at the time at BCIA, but it was really sort of what emerged to be my number one choice. And how'd you go from the Marines to CIA? My first stop on that journey, that sort of transition from active duty military to CIA was in graduate school. So as I said, the last year that I was in the Marine Corps and when I went to South America, loved it. Came back, started reading a ton about the intelligence community, about the CIA, about the craft of human intelligence. I loved being in sort of small, really sort of specialized teams in the military. And I enjoyed that teaming aspect, like sort of unified behind one cause. And I wanted to try to recreate that and find that in my next step. And I wanted to stay operational. I was still a pretty young guy. I didn't want to be the person putting thumbtacks in a map and sort of being sedentary. I wanted to be active. I wanted to deploy and travel and I had been developing an interest in counterterrorism stuff. I did, that was one of those dudes who watched the news all the time. So I literally have like report cards from my elementary school teachers who were saying, like, wow, Brian is very aware of current events, you know, for a sixth grader. So I obviously had like somehow or for some reason had that, that part of me that was interested in global things. So I came to DC and went to grad school at Georgetown. So I was at the school of foreign service, but I really wasn't sure what I was getting into. And I felt like come to DC, go to a graduate school and program that will give me an opportunity to be exposed to different elements of the community, the national security community sort of broadly defined. And it was when I was at Georgetown, I decided to apply to CIA. Tell me about your first days at CIA before I fast forward us into the latter part of your career. Yeah. I look truthfully telling you, my first few days at CIA, a huge sense that like, I probably wasn't good enough to be here. I was proud of myself and what I had done, but as I got recruited to come into what was then referred to as ground branch, which is ground department now. I looked at myself and I compared myself to some of the other people in that, you know, it's like, dude, is this a mistake like today, do they know that I'm not, you know, I'm not that good. I'm thrilled to be here, but it was a little bit of a confidence thing, right? So I was nervous, but I will say this, I was heartened. My first day there, I walked in and ran into Mike's band. And he was my former teammate in the Marine Corps. We had been at Second Angle Code together, a Marine unit. And I had known Mike for a few years. I lost track of them when he left active duty Marine Corps. And there he was in ground branch on my first day. And you know, Mike became the first casualty, right. He's now a star on the wall in agency headquarters. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I saw Mike, my former teammate. So there I was my first week, my first day, literally on the job with a lot of uncertainty. You know, am I the right guy? Am I qualified? And there's Mike who had been there before me, he's like, dude, you're the right one. And I'd greet people there who I was very lucky to become friends with and served as mentors in mine as well. That sort of imposter syndrome is surprising because from the outside, there are so many people, especially men here in the US, who lionize people who come from the ground department. I think it's probably pretty common, right? I look at myself and say fear is a very powerful motivator for me, right. And over time, whether in that circumstance, my first week in ground branch, it's like, okay, am I going to be good enough? And like someone who goes through any type of crucible type training, you can use that fear and just get it immobilized you and you're going to buckle at the wrong time or you're going to cavitate and either miss the shot, perform poorly on the jump or whatever the task at hand is, where you can use that fear or something that's going to drive you and really sort of motivate you and I choose the latter in that case. Trust the process and trust yourself and push through that, which I'm grateful I did. So at one point in your career, you met Greg Vogel, who is considered a living legend. And he is well known now for having saved the life of Hamid Karzai, who is going to become president of Afghanistan from an accidental US bomb drop. You guys worked on a major operation, Operation Anaconda, to go into Afghanistan in 2002, take out members of Al Qaeda. What did he teach you? How much time do we have, right? I mean, Greg is that football coach you wanted to impress, he's that father figure you want to do right by, Greg was the chief of ground branch when I first started. So himself, a very accomplished marine before he joined ground branch and ground branch is one. There's also air maritime weapons. Correct. Yeah. Sasha, with you sort of falling under the rubric of the CIS Special Activity Center, SAC organizational construct changes a little bit over time. But yeah, ground department now is one of the maneuver departments. And as you said, there's there are others there. So Greg, at the time, was the director of the chief of the ground maneuver unit and had already been seen. And for the new person, new guy checking in, he just knew that Greg is, is that guy? Like he's, he's the person you'd expect to be in that job, sort of right out of central casting, confident, but not arrogant, humble, you know, very transparent, you know, where you stand with someone like Greg and I think there's, there's a lot of power in that leadership model. It was, hey, this is where you need to be. This is the standard and to all of us. So you knew what the standard was and Greg embodied it and lived it. So I'll be forever grateful that I was able to team with and learn from, work for Greg. And for people to know him, he's also has this amazing sense of humor. And as I got more senior inside CIA, you realize one of the things you really do look for in people over time is the sense of humor because it can get pretty fast and you can always find a reason to hang your head or be pissed about something. But keep it a positive attitude, find a humor and pretty much everything you can as a good way to keep yourself focused on what matters and give yourself a little bit of resilience and Greg embodies that too. So yeah, he's, it's been amazing. And you ultimately spent 24 years at the CIA. Take us back to the moment that Vogel offered you the job to lead the special activity center, which is one of the most important and covert jobs inside the agency. Thanks, Sasha. Yeah. That's a great question. That's a special moment for me. So as we've talked about, Greg is, is a legendary per-military officer, leader at the time. He was serving as the deputy director of operations, so the senior, clandestine service leader inside CIA. And I was serving as chief of staff to the director of CIA at the time. And the director's lead scheduler tapped on the window in my office and said that I had a visitor, the visitor is Greg Vogel, the DDO. So he needn't announce his, his arrival, but he was standing in the lobby of the director's office that he said he wants to see you. So he came in and closed the door to my office and said that he was very excited to tell me that I was the next director of the special activity center. It's really not a kind of job that you send in an application for. It's a job that you're picked for. So that meant an immense amount to me that Greg would walk down, see me in my little office in the director's suite, someone who I and the rest of us all looked up to, for him to come down. And for me to see the look on his face where he was really excited and sort of proud to share that moment with me and tell me that he'd selected me for that job. But I also recognized the significance and the sort of weight of that responsibility. I was very grateful for the trust and confidence he had in me. But he also shared to me kind of turn around and looked at me on the way out the door. And he, I won't use the exploitive, but he said, don't eff it up. Like don't get it wrong. The people down there deserve leadership and you're going to give it to him. It was just a very cool moment for me. Yeah. Any hesitation for you in taking that job, you had been the director of the ground branch in the SAC before you understood the immense pressure. I imagine that leading the SAC, there would be even more pressure, more demands. I wouldn't say hesitation. Greg has such love for that unit, that command, the men and women there in the mission. If Greg Vogel felt like I was the right person to take that job, then I trust Greg. I had an immediate recognition of just the enormity of what's being asked because of the risks that the men and women take there around the world every day to include now. Hasitation, no humility, yes. And an overriding sense of the importance of what's being asked of that entire command and pressure on myself right away to say, I can't let them down. In fact, Greg, Greg gave me a small sort of three by five piece of paper that he had framed and it was a quote from a Marine infantry platoon commander of Vietnam, and who was ultimately killed in action in his pocket. They found this piece of paper where he had written, please God, don't let me fail my Marines. And Greg gave that to me when I was the chief of ground branch and his point was don't let this unit down. That flash in my mind, like please God, don't let me fail my Marines, don't let me fail the special activity center, the people who work there. He must have really understood that you felt the enormity of the task. What was your strategic vision for the SAC and how did it ultimately differ from vocals when all was said done? I wouldn't say that my vision or sort of my approach was necessarily different than Greg's predecessor or my predecessor. I think in a unit like the special activity center was such a distinct mission, right, which is to be prepared to and when called upon to carry out global covert action in support of presidential authorized covert action findings. That all being said, that has to be responsive to what's playing out on the world stage, right? So what's the international environment look like then? So when I got to the special activity center, and we're talking 2017 at this point 2017, you were five or six months into the first Trump administration. There's appropriately re-examination of what our country is doing in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or others, but you also start to see the ascendance and the importance of great power competition. So it's not to say that China didn't matter to CIA in 2001 or in 2017, but between 2001 and 2017, China asserted itself in a way that it was demonstrably different than what it had before. So you start to see, I would react negatively when people say there's a pivot inside CIA or a pivot and special activity center to sort of great power competition. That would imply that we weren't paying attention to it before. We were, but I would say it's a broadening of the aperture. So it's not that my predecessors weren't doing it. They were, but we had to just do more of it and faster because that's the way the world was evolving. And let's break down some of these elements that you're mentioning as they became problems in priorities. From 2017 to 2021, there is reprioritizing from counterterrorism to great power competition as you're describing this. So why don't we start with 2017? At this point, al-Qaeda, of course, is still a threat, but the louder, larger threat is ISIS. There has been a degrading of ISIS. But what did it look like for you in terms of the missions, the resources, and the support? I think precisely to your point, you saw metastasizing of the counterterrorism threat, right? You saw this expansion, this mutation, it wasn't just al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan anymore, sort of hunker down in caves. It was the attacks in Belgium and France and the UK and in other places. It was the ascendance of ISIS, its violence between ISIS and the Afghan Taliban. It's violence between ISIS and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and in other areas. So what we found ourselves facing as intelligence officers, again, classification sort of keeps me at a certain level. But I think precisely to your point, the threat had changed enough and it became even more dangerous. So I think what we saw globally, we paramilitary officers, is that the violence level in our operations started to increase dramatically. Because whereas in some cases, you could have the application of force that would be precise enough or overwhelming enough to de-escalate as counter-tutive as it might sound. It's to be able to present force and say to a potential enemy, combat, life is about making decisions. You have an opportunity to make a good one or if you make a bad one, it might not end in your favor. And for the longest time, you would see people who would say, all right, I'm done, guns down. With the rise of ISIS in Central Asia and in other areas and across the Middle East, the levels of violence just really sort of skyrocketed. You didn't have that, I'm going to compromise or I'm probably going to get released if I get detained. Anyways, you just have that I'm going to bring as many of you down with me as I can. So we started to face greater kinetic violence levels, greater challenges in terms of the types of support that our forces required, which was again sort of unique at that time. When we come back, Brian talks about how the rising threat of China, the fall of Afghanistan, and Russia's build up of troops near Ukraine, how all of that looked from inside the Special Activity Center. In the world of covert operations, superior intel can be the difference between mission success and total compromise. Your enterprise is a high-value target. Stop letting threat actors breach your digital perimeter. Palo Alto Networks provides the Zero Trust Security Platform you need to gain the upper hand. They turn noise into actionable intelligence, automating your defenses across cloud network and endpoints, don't operate in the shadows, gain total visibility, and help secure your mission. Visit PaloAltoNetworks.com and fortify your digital defenses today. I mean, we're talking about terrorists who beheaded people and sexually enslaved women, repressed people with a brutality that almost felt like it could have come from medieval times. Right. Yeah. So, how, doing that day after day in 2017, how did that affect paramilitary officers? For someone to serve in ground branch or an era maritime branch, they've already served in a special operations unit. They've been a CEO, they've been a Marine, they've been a Ranger. And with that comes real tremendous resilience and a development of some best practices to be able to see things and as Greg used to say sometimes, you know, when you touch the fire, you're a little bit different on the other side of that. You do develop an ability to have some emotional and mental resilience and some endurance. So we have some pretty specialized human performance programs within the unit as we should. What we started to see even before 2017, but I think it starts to accelerate as the violence levels go up, your go-to behaviors to moderate your sleep, to have the right type of diet, to make healthy life choices, to have balance in your life with your family, your loved ones, people you care about, your friends. That starts to, over time, you're looking at immense damage and risk to the system. So let's move to around 2019. We have now seen China rising up through technology with, say, Huawei telecommunications giant offering 5G services that the United States sees as a national security threat. Here's the SolarWinds cyber espionage campaign that hits the United States pretty hard. How did Beijing's goals and its capability, how did that either directly or indirectly affect the center for you at this time? You see an acceleration across a number of different fronts, right? China's pulling every lever they're using every tool to challenge a rules-based international order. They have both a will and a capability to do it. So our challenge at the time had been to make sure that we're relevant. So we would say, "Hey, we have to make sure that the types of hiring we're carrying out, the people we're bringing in, the equipment that we're buying, the types of technologies and tradecraft that we're employing, it has to be relevant, it has to be applied against the types of targets and strategic issues that matter." It was, I think, a challenge to make sure that we're drawing on the best minds inside SAC and across the island and make sure that we're ready if and when that call ever came. A geostrategic threat like the Chinese with ubiquitous technical surveillance, global intelligence capabilities presents a very high bar that special activity center or any other intelligence operation has to pass. But I think it's just good form. It's good tradecraft, good planning to make sure you're planning and training against a very high standard so that what you're doing isn't revealed. We got that at the time. Okay. So let's move forward to 2020, which was when the world almost stopped turning with the pandemic. I know that covert operations did continue, but what was it like from your vantage point? I'd say, I think for any of us, any American, right, that covert experience is surreal. I think anyone near us, we ask. Still, I'm still processing it and also want to forget it at the same time. Totally. That's one of the many reasons I drink bourbon. I think, yeah, surreal, no matter what, but to be, to be inside CI at the time is unique and to be in role inside special activity center and to be serving alongside the team there to your point. It's not like operation stopped, like people didn't sort of go pencils down. It's not like we sort of had a global truce with, with our potential adversary. So the work needed to continue, you know, it was Greg who had said, you know, when talking about the role in special activity center, it's hard people going to hard places and doing hard things. So to that point, being in hard places in 2020 during COVID meant you may not have the medical support you might need. You don't have the ventilators. You don't have, you don't have the things. So we had to, there's a whole new element of sort of logistical planning and medical planning. We have a job to do and we're not going to expose people to, to even more risk if we kind of void it. But it, it was like a bizarre sort of interlude in the movie, right? You're like, wait a minute, like as a country, we're still in Afghanistan. We're on all these places around the world and we're trying to do all these things. And now we got to deal with like with this and some of the bizarre protocols that get layered in writing, you see, regardless of where you want is on the political spectrum, like, do this. Don't do that. Keep this many feet. These operations are already hard enough. People are gone several hundred days a year and now you're layering in like bizarre elements to how we're trying to do the work or even if you look at someone who's been deployed in a war zone for a hundred days and they're, they're cooked, right? They're tired. Like I need to get back. What do you do in quarantine? Where do they, where do they quarantine? How long do they have to quarantine? Do they have to quarantine? So you just, and I saw really good people, you know, really no really intended people inside CIA trying to do the right thing just we're all struggling to try to figure out like what's the most compassionate thing to do for the teams coming back? What's the right thing to do by these protocols that seem to evolve every single day? How do we get the other group of people to get out there in time because we can't not be doing our thing? So yeah, it's a cool question I hadn't really even thought about. Yeah, it's just a weird bizarre overlaying of things that we're trying to do for one another. But again, it's your point. You have terrorist groups. They're doing their thing and they're going to continue to fight and they don't, you don't care about COVID. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 2021 now. Afghanistan collapses, falls to the Taliban. The CIA have been working with the paramilitary forces, zero units. And in the midst of this major chaotic evacuation and collapse. What is it like for you? I can't comment on any of the zero unit or whether or not CIA was participating in that regard. I would say for me, as the director of special activity center, over the arc of my career, when I first got to ground branch, I had deployed in some other areas around the world before 9/11, but 9/11 changed everything. And you know, some of my most formative combat experiences, the people I looked up to and lie in eyes, both Americans and Afghan teammates, that Afghan journey for me was deeply personal. So to see it sort of coming down around us collectively. In 2021, those feelings that I was having weren't unique to me. There have been so many Americans in uniform, not uniform who sacrificed so much. There's so many Afghans who did as deeply traumatizing. But again, we have a job to do and we had work to do as an agency and as a center to make sure we were looking out for U.S. interests, U.S. partners at a time that was deeply, deeply, deeply chaotic. And I had just come back from Afghanistan just a few weeks before the violence starts to unroll and unfurl in the summer of 2021, because we could see things obviously rapidly deteriorating. When I think through the challenges that paramilitar officers face in terms of the deployments, the time away, the physical and moral courage that I saw so many men and women have to demonstrate all the time when I saw the looks on faces of people who came back at the end of August and early September who were there who helped and just did absolutely amazing things to save as many lives as they possibly could. I saw people who I'd personally been in combat with do some amazing things and they just sat my office in tough shape because of just the chaos and the human tragedy that was playing out at Hamid Karzai International Airport, H.Kaya. Right. People hanging from planes. Yeah, hanging from planes, babies being passed across, to concertina wire, babies, children being separated from families, all the worst parts of humanity as this this overriding sense of doom hung through the air and the heroism displayed by not just the Americans who were there, but by so many Afghans too to quietly get out. Those who'd risked an immense amount on behalf of our country is something that was just to even hear the stories. Again, to be clear, I wasn't there in August, but yeah, it just a really deeply traumatic. In the sense that we as a country had just invested so much, the missions still mattered a great deal. There was still CT work yet to be done. None of us felt like it was time to sort of pack up our things and leave. Those are political decisions and we get that right. If you're around the covert action space long enough, you realize, this isn't the space for idealists. These are sort of hard decisions made by presidents on both sides of the aisle and you have to find yourself sometimes in this scenario where you've got to play a bad hand and there was a bad hand to play in the summer of 2021 and we tried to do the best we could. And yeah, it was a traumatizing period of time for everybody. Yeah, a period of a lot of pain for a lot of people and painful to even think back over. So now let's just talk a little bit about something else that we saw happen. Russia's build up along the border in Ukraine twice in 2021. For me personally, the question I kept asking myself and Russia experts at the time, why is why would Vladimir Putin, this is a high stakes gamble? Because the FSB was lying to him and telling him what he wanted to hear that he was going to be able to take even a few days. Yeah, shocker, right? He's obviously being given bad information and a organizational structure. We also, we have plenty of our own faults, but there is a willingness and a system built around speaking truth to power, whether I'm the director of special activity center chief of ground branch or just trying to run a business. You need subordinate, you need to create atmosphere and environment where people feel comfortable telling you what's actually going on. But what's going through your head as you're seeing the Russians building up their forces along the border? There are packets of blood. There's all these supplies being brought in. I think what's going through my head at the time, you're coming off the very traumatic transition out of Afghanistan. And to have enough of the right kind of people to be able to absorb these, you know, sometimes feels like a surge very quickly becomes like the new normal. So the part of me who was the director of SAC as Afghanistan is winding down, that's looking at a team that is highly accomplished, but also maybe could use a few minutes to catch their breath. Now I'm looking at the Russian shipping blood for like, it's coming, like they're going to do this. Despite I think the best efforts of American leaders and European leaders to disabuse Putin of the idea of going and do it, they're going to do it. And for me, I just, you think about, you know, your friends and your teammates and your colleagues, you're probably, again, I can't say whether it does or doesn't, but you look at and say, this could be another big ask of the special activity center at a time when they're already coming off of all these different things around the world that they're being asked to do. And here we go again, potentially. Yeah. And you have called covert action a team sport. The men and women that you're working with there have deployed for 220 days a year. They leave behind their family. It's mentally and physically demanding. So how did you handle that? The question's tough because you asked me how I handle that. Again, I view even leadership, I get the fact that I'm the director of, ultimately I'm responsible, right? I have to set the tone and the direction of vision. But I think the way I try to go about addressing your question, which is, you know, the core of, I think the essence of the leadership challenge in a place like special activity centers you have again, this amazing workforce and not just the paramilitar officers. Again, it's the, it's all the quiet heroes on the periphery. The target is the analysts, the sport officers. They feel those deployments, whether they're on the road 220 days or not, they feel the losses. Because sometimes you'll come back as an operator and you're not going to share with your chain of command what you saw, but you might share with that person who's a support officer, you might share with someone who's maybe not precisely directly in your chain of command, but they're your friend and they help you deploy or they're the target you see occasionally. So those losses and those personal challenges, those behavioral health things that we start to see in one another resonate across the entirety of that workforce, not just the employers. So how do I do it? How do we do it? Have you tried to create that a leadership climate and a culture that realizes it's okay to say that you're not okay? And that's a very hard thing for people from, you know, from that particular unit, people who are used to just sort of take the pain, suck it up. That's how I got through selection. That's how I get through all these deployments. There comes a point in time when you're in your theories, you're in your forties, you're in your fifties and you're still doing this, you're still deploying 200 plus days out of the year. You know, the body keeps the score and whether it's emotional stuff that we're all dealing with. Life comes at all of us. And certainly these deployments do too. So we had to create a leadership environment, a culture where the guys and gals understood it's okay to say, I might have to sit this one out or I need to press the pause button. I have to get some help. So that's one, but two, you better have the programs to support them. And I think that had been a bit of a journey for the CIA. It takes a different approach to say, human performance and sort of behavior of health, not saying it's right or wrong, but different than say, do you have military doctors and others. But through great partnerships across the country with nonprofits, like the Third Option Foundation and some help from from CIA, we were able to build programs to start to care for officers who were over deployed, overtaxed, overstretched to layer in additional support for them. And once more, you better have that type of one culture and two capability, I think, to care for them and their families when things go sideways because it happens to all of us. And when I think about the conversation we're having right now, you haven't been afraid to be vulnerable and share some of your own insecurities. Did you share some of your own story with the paramilitary officers to set an example for them to feel like it was okay to step away or get support? I certainly tried. You know, I was very open. For me, my own personal journey there, as we transitioned from 2012, I'd say from 2011 to 2012 and then accelerate through those years, the toll of loss starts to mount immensely for me. Mike Span, as I told you, Mike and I had been friends and his loss, his lost residue with me, that that one felt very close to home. And I got to a point where clearly, like my friends and teammates could just see it on me, right? You're struggling. You don't want to admit it. There are sort of go-to behaviors to help you through those types of situations, some of which are healthy, some of which are very, very unhealthy. And I think I was probably sampling all of them. So I think people saw it on me. The toll that was taking on me personally, so I personally started to go see a therapist in 2016. I shared that very openly, absolutely changed, you know, my life and my ability to deal with what it was that I was seeing, which frankly, paled in comparison to what so many of my teammates saw. But I was always very open with that. With my own challenges, the mistakes I made, and I felt like part of, you know, being a strong leader is, you got to be credible and you have to be authentic. And I didn't want to be positioning myself as someone who, like, well, this isn't affecting me. It shouldn't affect you. Like, it starts to hit all of us pretty, pretty hard. And to deal with so much loss, too, I mean, I've walked into the CIA past the wall of stars. And, you know, you see more and more stars being engraved on the marble. Yeah, that's a special place. And the overwhelming majority of those stars are from men and women from special activity center. So I think probably, for me, the experiences of being in front of that wall, whether you're with family members who are now coming into visit the director because they've lost their loved one, or you're there in the annual memorial ceremony that one day a year where the names are read. And it's where Gina Haspel, former director, rightly said, it's the most important day of the year at CIA. And she's right. You had mentioned third option nonprofit organization that helps the family members of paramilitary officers who were killed in the line of duty. Yeah. Thanks. As you said, I'm one of the three co-founders of third option. We built third option to take care of the families of our fallen initially and to take care of the families to include parents of our fallen children of our fallen officers, but also the families and our current operators. We get to deploy together and go to go do these things, but it's our families and our loved ones back home who in so many ways do sort of suffer in silence. And it's a unique change from service in the military where you may serve in a secretive unit in the military, but you have a family support network. But prior to third option foundation, our family members didn't really have that. And when I think of the people who are the real heroes in the CIA's covert action story, it really is the family members, it's the loved ones, it's the parents, it's the kids who are left behind while the officers go out and do their things. So it's a very special organization. I'm really proud and fortunate to play any part in it. It's been a great partnership with CIA. So it's a very cool story. It's mind-boggling to me that nothing like this existed before third option began. I think it speaks to what we just saw as the real rise of the deployment rates and the physical challenges and the rates of combat. I think third option sort of grew from the recognition that these were different times. This wasn't just a surge. This is the new normal. Yeah, it's just a great story amid some other backdrops that maybe aren't so great. Are there aspects of the job that you miss beyond the people that you served with? You nailed the one part of that answer I was going to give you because everybody says that. Everybody always says that. Yeah, you miss the people for sure. That's the most overriding point of loss for me is that day-to-day engagement with the minimum across the agency, particularly across SAC. I think the mission is powerfully unifying too. In a positive sense of the term, it's intoxicating. You just sort of draw on in, right? It's a high energy thing. No two days are ever going to be the same whether you're a brand new officer and ground branch where you're in this special activity center front office. Each day is different. Each phone call could have a different meaning at the other end of that or each ops meeting. Each deployment is different. So I definitely miss the energy and the sense that we're being asked to go do work that matters with some of your closest friends and teammates. That's a really special thing. Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about the SAC in your time there. Thanks so much for the invitation. I'm really grateful to be here. Thanks for listening to this episode of Spycast. If you like the episode, follow us on Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And leave us a rating or review, it really helps. And if you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at
[email protected]. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you from Goat Roadio and the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
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