The One CA Podcast

218: Winning Against Global Networks (Part II)

Please join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know.

Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations

and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization.

With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started.

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

 

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy

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Transcript

00:00:10    JACK GAINES
I love a quote you had about starting as a journalist and how they just drop you into some shitty situation. You got to quickly figure it out and then explain to others what's going on.

00:00:21    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, I mean, when I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And all I knew was that I didn't want to be in school anymore. All of my professors were recommending that I go in the master's or PhD program and become a professor. And I knew I didn't want to do more school. And the only things that I really liked were traveling and writing and researching. And so somebody was like, well, why don't you try journalism? And I was like, oh, OK, that sounds like a good idea. And for years, I literally thought that journalism was something you did when you couldn't think of anything else to do. I didn't even know there were like Columbia University and a prestigious school for it. But what I've realized and appreciated. Since leaving the industry and moving into other sectors in the information space and the research space is that it really trained me for a lot of things. I can write quickly. I can respond. That capacity to be dropped into somewhere and quickly figure it out. And there is a methodology. And particularly working for the Associated Press, we were drilled on the methodology of... rigorously assessing what the most important points are and putting them first and going from the most important point down to the lesser important points because literally stories get cut from the bottom. And unless they're big features that are meant to take 8 ,000 words or something, but bot news gets cut from the bottom. And I'm old enough that the first newspaper I worked for still laid it out with... gluing the copy to the page and then mimeographing it. And so they literally would say, we have to take two inches off your story. It would have to be written so the bottom could just be cut. Then I moved into doing broadcast, radio and television, where you usually have to explain your story in a minute 40 or less, sometimes 45 seconds. And so that really gives you a rigorous training. in boiling something that can be quite complicated, especially in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, down to a very, very basic thing. Once I moved into working as a consultant to the government, several of the military commanders I worked for would always have me be the one that would brief high -level policy. I first thought that that was just because they wanted to tell that they had a woman on their team. But I actually realized that it was because I was accustomed to and trained in explaining something in really simplified terms in a minute and a half. And that was often all we had time for. If you're trying to brief a four -star or an assistant secretary, you're not going to get much time. Right.

00:03:11    JACK GAINES
And when you're in the back of the room and you're watching somebody struggle to get to the point, I'm sure you're gritting your teeth going, you're dying here.

00:03:17    GRETCHEN PETERS
Oh, yeah. They're reading their PowerPoint painful. And so I really realized later on that those skills that I learned as a journalist were actually very, very useful. And I wasn't intimidated by being dropped into some place that I knew nothing about. When you work for the AP, it's just a really good training for explaining what's going on. And then that kind of led you to writing a book,

00:03:41    JACK GAINES
then that kind of led you to writing a book, Seeds of Terror, back in 2009. Terrific book, by the way. And it's funny because I worked in 2013 at the Kabul embassy running the Taliban counter -influence program. And one of my complaints was that they were producing as much income through illicit trade as what the U .S. coalition was bringing in to fight them. We had a gap in our understanding of how powerful and capable this force was because we were not accepting that they had money. And they had access and they were using it against us.

00:04:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
So one of the things that I learned when I worked for DOD, and I worked mainly with the intelligence folks, is that military intelligence traditionally is trained to try and figure out where the artillery is coming from. And things like, what is the physical terrain? What is the physical terrain and where is our enemy positioned? They don't look at money. They don't look at how their adversary is financed because traditionally the United States has fought other states. And so the adversary is financed by the other state. And so in these irregular warfare situations, there was kind of this broad acceptance that the Taliban was being funded by donations. Pakistan, but also donations from the Muslim faithful in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That was widely accepted. And it was true. But from my research, that money represented a fraction of their earnings. And the vast majority of it came from drugs and extortion and timber smuggling and artisanal mining and all sorts of schemes. And what's also interesting is that if you got down to the company level intelligence officer, that guy or occasionally that woman knew all of that. They knew what the local commanders were doing around them to earn money, but they would never report on it. It was in their heads. And so I would go and meet with them and say, how are they making money locally? And they would sit there and explain it all. And I would say, why am I not seeing this in your intelligence reports? And they'd be like, do you think that's important? They'd never been told to report on it. And so it was just something that was happening in kind of in plain sight all around them. And there was kind of a total strategic failure. to try and understand how the adversary was financing himself, to try and disrupt that financing. And it's funny because it's one of the main dictums in Sun Tzu's teaching. I'm a big fan of Sun Tzu, but one of his main dictums is it's much better to destroy his donkey cart than to shoot a soldier. You'll have much more impact because they won't be able to supply themselves. They won't have the funds to mount an army. And it's something we just didn't work on. in that case. And there was a recent story that we talked about before agreeing to do this podcast, this recent story about the Russian smuggler that was supplying goods to Ukraine.

00:06:43    JACK GAINES
That was Maxim Marchenko?

00:06:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah. There was still a failure to break down his donkey carts. And this is the blind spot that I felt like I was banging my head against the wall to explain for years. You can go and arrest Chapo Guzman or the commercial equivalent that I always give is that we could go and fire a drone strike at the CEO of Toyota and it wouldn't stop them from putting out cars. So what is it in Toyota's supply chain that if you disrupted it would grind their supply chain to a halt? The reason I use the Toyota example is that there was a fire in a Toyota plant that produced a certain valve that went into every single Toyota model. And it destroyed that plant. They didn't have an alternative source for that valve. And it cost the company, I forget what it was, but something like 20 % of GDP that year because they couldn't replace it. And so it ground everything to a halt. And so when I've worked as an advisor on these projects, I've tried to help my clients and partners. understand, to map the supply chain from soup to nuts and to look for that moment, that part where there's no resiliency in the supply chain. Because what tends to happen with U .S. government interventions or interdiction efforts, law enforcement tends to hit them over and over and over in the places where their activities are the most visible. The reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras.

00:08:12    JACK GAINES
reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras. it's easier for them to show that in Congress, a call for funding, than it is to spend two, three years on a network and maybe get it to collapse.

00:08:27    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, with a very predictable result that they become more resilient at those levels. And yet in the fly chain, they're not resilient at all. They don't have a deep bench at all. And if you take one or two people out, arrest them, kill them, whatever's allowed under the rules of engagement, we'll throw the entire network into a disarray.

00:08:47    JACK GAINES
Right. And so we need to change the grading funding to focus on did you take the network out? Is this a recurring issue or not? And show that as success versus the big catch or the supply drugs.

00:08:59    GRETCHEN PETERS
100 percent. They're graded and funded and promoted. And those things have very little long term impact.

00:09:05    JACK GAINES
Matter of fact, drug cartels now kind of plan on getting a big shipment caught. They almost prep for it.

00:09:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Not just that. We had evidence when I was working with the DOD in Afghanistan that the Taliban were actually calling in tips to the coalition. They would send a drug shipment down one road, maybe a reasonably timey one by Taliban standards, and then they'd have a much bigger one going down another road. They'd tip off the coalition to the small one in order to provide cover for the much bigger shipment that was moving somewhere else.

00:09:36    JACK GAINES
A gold flag or a red herring.

00:09:38    GRETCHEN PETERS
False flag, yeah. I'm sure drug traffickers in other parts of the world do it too. Why wouldn't they?

00:09:43    JACK GAINES
Yeah, I'm sure they do. The cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures.

00:09:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures. But even organizations like the UNODC and the DEA acknowledge that at best, they tend to seize between 10 and 15 percent of the total supply. Even those numbers, I think, are optimistic.

00:10:02    JACK GAINES
I think they are too, because the market price of most of these drugs remain constant.

00:10:07    GRETCHEN PETERS
The main salt? Yeah, constant.

00:10:09    JACK GAINES
Yeah, that was a great point. You actually are one of the few people I know who's taken down networks. The one I remember is when I was at AFRICOM, you were in South Africa, and you worked with some partners and allies to take down a smuggling network on the east coast of Africa that was doing all kinds of trade along the coast and then shipping it up into Southeast Asia, correct?

00:10:30    GRETCHEN PETERS
The operation was run by the DEA Special Operations Division. A lot of people played a role in making it happen. But I had been hired with my colleague Kathleen Miles to map the supply chains that were moving elephant ivory and rhino horn from sub -Saharan East Africa to mainly consumer markets in East Asia, Vietnam, China, places like that, Malaysia. And what we found, there had been a very unfortunately misleading article that got a lot of attention about Joseph Kony. That was a cover article in National Geographic by one of Geographic's big, famous authors. And it basically had convinced the U .S. government and various other people, lots of conservation groups, that Joseph Kony was the big player in smuggling ivory, which was nonsense. Kony's army were doing all sorts of terrible things at the village level, but they were like 150 guys. They were mostly malarial most of the time. They'd moved. tiny amount of elephant ivory. And what we found when we started looking into the supply chains was that the big players that were moving multi -ton shipments of ivory off the coast of Africa were the same networks that were moving multi -ton shipments of drugs and timber and containers full of people off the continent. Those were the people that had the capacity to move illegal goods through ports. They had bought off senior customs officials. We were working on this project through my then NGO and we were funded by State Department, USA, the Elephant Crisis Fund, a few other groups. But I knew one of the DEA agents who was based in Kenya who had helped get members of this one network arrested that we believed were sort of the super facilitators for a lot of the ivory and drugs that were moving off the Swahili coast. not just from Kenya, but mainly from Mombasa, but also from Uganda and Tanzania and to some extent partnered with some other smugglers in Mozambique. And once we managed to team up with this DEA team and started looking into it, it was fascinating. I got to listen to some of the undercover recordings and Bhaktash Akasha, who was the head of this network out of Mombasa. was bragging to the DEA's confidential sources who he thought he was going to do this big drug deal with. He was bragging to them about how he had a route into various countries. He was like, we've got a route into Uganda. We've got a route into Tanzania. We've got several routes into Mozambique. And what I realized listening to him is that he was not talking about a physical route like a road or a airstrip. He had all of those things. He had access to all of those things. But he was talking about a corrupt pathway in each of those countries. Then he would start talking about which vice presidents were on his payroll and which customs directors were on his payroll. which logistics companies were secretly shadow -owned by him and his family or shadow -owned by the, it was always the president's brother, sort of like Afghanistan, and how they sort of had this vast underworld network that was hiding in plain sight. Having an inside view on how all of that worked really gave me a much better perception of the importance of really mapping these supply chains and all of the supporting. entities, the tiny airlines, the trucking companies, the freight forwarding companies, those guys did get arrested. Eventually, they got not extradited. They paid off the court system more than $2 million to make sure none of their extradition hearings ever went forward. So eventually, under pressure from the U .S. and various other things happened, the president of Kenya just handed them over. They were just sort of expelled from the country, and they're still in jail in the United States. And after that, there wasn't an ivory seizure of more than, I believe, a few kilos coming out of Mombasa for several years after their takedown. And so it was a case where taking out the kingpins did make a big difference because it disrupted those corrupt pathways.

00:14:46    JACK GAINES
But there were multiple people throughout the node that were picked up, not just the guy who was just bragging about his network, right?

00:14:54    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, multiple people picked up and extradited, but also one of them flipped and started cooperating with the DOJ. And so there was a huge expose of their criminal network throughout Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania. And so that made it a lot harder for those entities to move illicit goods.

00:15:12    JACK GAINES
Right. That would be a great case study to show the example of how networks work and how to break them.

00:15:18    GRETCHEN PETERS
It was a great learning experience for me. I can say that.

00:15:22    JACK GAINES
We figured it out that time and we actually collapsed the network. How come we're not figuring it out now? What seems to be the lesson lost?

00:15:29    GRETCHEN PETERS
Well, I think the lesson lost, number one, is that simply taking out the Kinkin is usually not going to have much of a long -term impact. That you don't want to just arrest the Pablo Escobar or the Chapo Guzman. You need to map the network. from soup to nuts, to look at what happens at the procurement phase, what happens at the sort of production phase, the drug labs where it's mixed up. And that might happen in several phases. Who are the people that are able to move it both at the national level, say it moves around Africa first or South America first, and then who moves it transnationally and who receives it in the consumer markets and how it gets distributed at the consumer level. And once you understand all of that and the key players, you can start developing strategy to interdict key players at each point to really collapse the production. And you can look for places where there aren't a lot of redundancies, like the Toyota valve strike. So I used to talk about something called the martini glass model of the criminal supply chain, because normally what you find is that there are lots and lots of actors. at either end of the supply chain. So there'll be lots and lots of farmers growing opium in Afghanistan or lots and lots of farmers growing coca in Colombia or weed or whatever it is. There'll be lots and lots of poachers poaching elephants comparative to the exporters. Then there'll be lots and lots of people. who sell whatever the illicit good is on the retail end. The guys standing in the corner selling dime bags or the people selling pills on Snapchat today. But in the middle, in that stem of the martini glass, there's very, very few networks that have the capacity to move multi -ton shipments of illicit goods through transnational ports of entry. And those are harder to replace. So if you can get to that level and take them out of business, it's much harder for that to get reconstituted. And if you can expose at the same time the criminal patronage networks that make their business possible, then you really add bang to your buck.

00:17:40    JACK GAINES
Right, because then they can't just reform that network.

00:17:43    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. But either end of the supply chain, under Timit Waugh's model, those tend to be the people who are the most visible. The farmers that are growing the crops or the people that are selling drugs or selling whatever it is are much more visible. They have to be more visible. But they're also easily replaceable. And so another paper I wrote a few years ago called The Curse of the Shiny Object. talks about the fact that human beings intuitively tend to attack problems where we see them. But we can really have a lot more impact if you attack the problem where it's not as visible. As humans,

00:18:17    JACK GAINES
humans, we hide our most secretive, critical things. We don't put our most sensitive parts out in public. That makes sense.

00:18:24    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. But also the places where illicit activity is more visible has to be more resilient because the criminal networks know it's going to get. interdicted. And so it's sort of predictable that they'll make it easier for them to replace the guy that's driving drugs across a corner. But certainly in a lot of parts of the world, in the court systems, they really, really like to catch somebody with a trunk load of drugs or a trunk load of eyes. And then they like to catch them in flagrante. And it's much, much harder under certain judicial systems to prove a conspiracy. And I used to have this argument with U .S. government officials about Afghanistan. I would be trying to convince them that the Taliban was a major drug trafficking organization. They would want to hear The Intercept with Mullah Omar on the phone trying to trade a bag of heroin for a dirty bomb. He's not the guy that does that. He's the Tony Soprano. sitting in the back of whatever the Taliban's equivalent of the Bada Bing is, collecting envelopes of money from his guys who do that. He coordinates the network and he keeps the network together, which is also an incredibly difficult job because, again, we're talking about violent criminals. These guys are constantly getting into beefs with each other. So the person who's running the network, it is very much like a lot of those mafia movies where the New York mob is fighting the New Jersey mob all the time. That used to happen all the time in Afghanistan, and I saw it in Africa as well. And so the really powerful network commanders were not the ones that actually did the wheeling and dealing. They're like the conductor of the orchestra. Another one of my often repeated sayings is that a criminal supply chain, it's kind of like an old line about Gilda Radner doing everything as Fred Astaire, only backwards and in heel. We have all the same roles and functions and operational nodes as a commercial supply chain. And they're usually hiding in plain sight.

00:20:37    JACK GAINES
And my concern now is that with the success of the Taliban and Hezbollah in surviving attacks and conflict, it has become a playbook for upcoming emergent autocrats, kleptocrats, and also states that want to conduct state capture or neocolonialism as Russia is doing in Central Africa. It's their playbook now for creating chaos and disorder while then setting up an illicit network and then replacing the political sphere with people that support them so that they can lock that country up and then start reaping out all the resources.

00:21:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Absolutely. I mean, we've seen that on Afghanistan, which has been handed back to essentially a narco -terror regime. We've seen it in Russia as probably the preeminent example of a really, really powerfully criminalized. society that's creating all sorts of havoc around the world. I don't know if you tracked even Dudley and Jeremy McDermott's website and publications called Inside Crime, but they've been doing some really fascinating reporting recently, both on state capture, but also cocaine production across Central and South America, which is just exploding and gross. And they're also tracking the formation of new multinational networks. that include Italian and Albanian crime networks that didn't used to function in Central and South America that are moving unprecedentedly huge amounts of cocaine into Europe. And they're also writing about the growing power of the narco insurgency in Mexico, where 60 percent of the states of Mexico are now really severely impacted by the narco presence. And these multifaceted networks are forming new and more complicated. global supply chains. And I just critical that our government and other partner governments understand how these are structured from end to end, how they work together from end to end. I just don't know that there's a lot of that kind of strategic analysis going on, but we can measure the impact. Colombia alone, according to some of the recent Inside Crime reporting, cocaine production increased by as much as a thousand tons just last year. That's yielding a supply that's over $66 billion. That's almost 20 % of Colombia's GDP. We're back to sort of 1980s level. And again, that's just Colombia. I could tell you similar stories about South Africa and Congo and some of the stuff that's going down in Burma. Ecuador is another place. Venezuela. So it kind of feels like everywhere I look, there's higher and higher levels of state capture going on. Even here in the United States, there's been some reporting about dark money behind some of the big crypto packs that are really going after politicians in this country who are just suggesting that crypto products should have the same regulations as other securities. And so pretty scary stuff. And I think the other thing. that is not anywhere near well enough understood, including by me, in part because we haven't had the resources to study it, is the extent to which illicit networks are financing disinformation and misinformation campaigns on social media. We know they're out there. We know that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, to some extent, are financing big and destructive misinformation campaigns. But I don't think there has been anywhere near a comprehensive enough effort to understand some of the illicit networks that seem to be financing this kind of stuff.

00:24:13    JACK GAINES
Is there state -sponsored criminal organizations leading the effort? Or is it that the criminal organizations are kind of running the PRC and Xi Jinping just happens to be the guy that's there as the leader on their behalf? Because Sam Cooper, the reporter, he had Christopher Mayer on. And Vera was talking about how the Macau criminal family is who supported Xi Jinping and actually helped him rise to president, which means that if they got him there, I like what mom used to say, you know, I brought you into this world. I could take you back out again.

00:24:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. They're going to take a pound of flesh. That's for sure.

00:24:52    JACK GAINES
Yeah. So and so that makes me question, is PRC a criminal state or what?

00:24:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
Totally. John Casara has done some really interesting work on that, too. It's a big topic to get your arms around. But some of the money laundering efforts, TD Bank just went down for what was it like a two point something billion dollar fine. Just crazy amounts of cash being deposited into TD Bank accounts by mainly Chinese students studying in the United States and not Chinese American students, but actual. Chinese students here on student visas that were possibly being forced to do this, who knows, to pick up fentanyl money and deposit it into accounts. But when a foreign student attending college in Chicago is depositing millions of dollars in cash, a bank should flag that and stop it from happening and alert authorities. It's not a normal thing for college students to have millions of dollars in cash. Right.

00:25:54    JACK GAINES
I found it. $18 trillion in transactions. Right.

00:25:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
I mean, crazy.

00:25:58    JACK GAINES
So basically, almost the U .S. budget.

00:26:01    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not the only bank. Word on the street is there's a couple more banks about to go down in this investigation. So I'll be fascinated to hear what those supply chains look like. And I will be very interested to see what emerges from those court cases about the involvement of the Chinese government. And the way that they intersected both with criminal networks out of China, but also the way they intersected with criminal networks in Mexico.

00:26:27    JACK GAINES
Well, the reason that I suspect there's a playbook that's been built around these processes is that when Assad finally stabilized from the Civil War and it looked like he was going to stay in power, he immediately went to distributing narcotics in Italy. It seemed like someone had said, OK, now that you have some control, this is what you need to do. You need to start making money. You can do that by setting up a little circle of oligarchs. and then have them start doing narcotics chain, go send it to Italy. And that's when he started getting busted for selling drugs. I've thought, it seems like there's a pattern they're following. It's very similar to other patterns in other countries where a dictator will take control and suddenly trafficking is up, narcotics is up, and then they maintain this long -term instability in the country in order to do whatever they want, like in South Sudan.

00:27:13    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. There's this sort of fantasy in our development space that we think that dictators in these countries want to stabilize things, but they don't. Because if they stabilize things and impose the rule of law, then they can't smuggle anymore. That's the source of income. So we mustn't go into these situations thinking that stability is the end goal of the government officials there. Another way to look at it is that if we want to try and stamp out that illicit activity, say there's drugs coming into the United States that we want to curtail, you have to look at ways to give those networks some sort of peace dividend. Maybe you can interdict and arrest some of them, but some of them you're going to have to convince as part of your end strategy to getting into something that's not illegal or at least not dangerous to the United States. And so I don't see that strategy happening either. It kind of has to be a lot more nuanced and holistic than what I view as sort of very blunt approaches, like we'll arrest this guy, we'll seize a couple tons of dope, and then we'll call it a victory, move on. And actually stabilizing a region, shifting their economy on a substantial level, if you're talking about a place like Afghanistan or Colombia, where a large percentage of GDP comes from drugs or other illicit activity. Shifting that is a massive investment. And what we've seen, again, in places like Colombia and Afghanistan is that we're not very good at imposing it. In fact, I'd say we suck at that.

00:28:49    JACK GAINES
Yeah, because we want them to make free choices. And free choices is that the gangster down the street is kind of pointing a gun at your head and say, hey, why don't you mule this drugs for me and I'll give you a little money. We don't give the opportunity for anything like that to be successful. If there is a criminal organization running a country, that you're able to freeze their assets and negotiate reforms in exchange for them recovering what they had hidden all those times. And what that does is after the reforms, then they have to get out of the country, and that reformed country then shifts back over to a representative government and economy. But it's going to take that type of reverse extortion, basically, to get these type of people. All you know is getting them out of the way.

00:29:28    GRETCHEN PETERS
All you know is getting them out of the way. and or working with them much more closely to help transition a government into some new economy. There's two examples of this, at least that I know of in Afghanistan. In 1980s, during the Muj period, and also post -2001, senior drug traffickers came to the United States and said, look, I'd love to get my community away from growing opium, but I need financial support to do it. We need to have our irrigation systems rebuilt. We need to have new markets developed for us. Afghanistan used to be, in the 70s, one of the world's number one exporters of raisins. It was one of the plans for Afghanistan was to reinvigorate their raisin industry. And the California raisin lobby got in the way of that. They didn't want to lose market share. So it's farmers in the United States and Europe would never survive without farm subsidies. And essentially what the drug traffickers are offering Afghan farmers, and the same is true in Mexico and South America, is a subsidy program. They come and they prepay their profits. They do it at a predatory rate. But effectively, these are farm subsidies. And if we don't come in and say, OK, we're going to help you guys grow wheat or pomegranate, but we're going to subsidize you to get back into that industry and we're going to consistently be there. That's what we never were able to prove to the Afghans. In the few places where there was real investment in it, people did shift, and they were able to make those economies work. But it was all at a very, very small scale, and it never lasted that long. Because before you knew what, we were ready to pull out again. The surge was over. We were done. We weren't going to keep troops in Helmandar. We weren't going to keep them in Kandahar. And so it all just collapsed. These are changes that aren't going to happen in six months' time. They're going to happen over the course of a decade. When we start to look at the investment that you have to make, I guess one of the biggest enemies to the kind of comprehensive reform that I'm talking about or that we're talking about is the short termism and the fact strategies generally only lasted a year or two in places like Afghanistan and administrations would change. And now we're in a situation between the Democrats and the Republicans where when you switch national security policy and foreign policy really changes course. And so if I were an Afghan farmer or Colombian farmer, I wouldn't listen to us either.

00:31:48    JACK GAINES
We're a little skittish.

00:31:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
skittish. We change our mind too much. So,

00:31:51    JACK GAINES
yeah. But I think part of that one year you're talking about is because people like me, I went in for one year to redesign the Taliban counter -influence program. I redesigned it. I relaunched it. And then I was out. And then the next person coming up is like, well, I don't know. You know, even though I was showing results, who knows what their thoughts were. So they may rewrite it in their own image. And so that's the difficulty of the one -year tour is there is nothing solid that can be created.

00:32:19    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not even one -year tours that are part of a five or 10 -year plan. You have a one -year tour, but you're trying to implement A, B, and C outcomes. And whoever follows you will be tasked with following those up with. the ENF. It was just sort of every year there was a completely different plan. That was to me one of the big failings in Afghanistan. And I think we're seeing some of the similar problems in Ukraine. I think the number issue is that there's this misconception among a lot of policymakers that you can just sanction an entity and that's the end of the story. That to me is one of the other big problems. The government will announce sanctions and then that's it. And they sort of assume that all sorts of things happen as a result. Another argument that I used to make when I was working in this space was to say that the sanction is kind of like an arrest warrant. Then you've actually got to resource Akeem to then go out and enforce those sanctions and try to put those businesses out of business and to go and arrest people who are sanctions busting. And if you don't, the sanctions are just a piece of paper.

00:33:26    JACK GAINES
Just create a workaround after you for anything that did happen. Yeah. Colin, what are you working on now?

00:33:31    GRETCHEN PETERS
So I had an NGO that was doing mapping work on transnational organized crime networks to actually do the sort of supply chain mapping that I was talking about. And we still do that work, but we rebranded ourselves as the Alliance to Counter Crime Online because we started discovering the extent to which a lot of illicit networks were shifting their activities into cyberspace. And in particular, onto social media platforms. If you had asked me years ago, where would you buy ivory or drugs online? I would have said the dark web, Silk Road, East West, one of those dark web marketplaces. But actually, a lot of it is on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Most people on the dark web, they're on social media. And so that's where the criminals are, too, at least at the retail level. And in many ways, illicit actors are also organizing on social media. They're using Facebook groups, so they're using WhatsApp groups or Telegram groups to organize and coordinate, put out hits on people. If you've never looked at narco Twitter or narco Instagram, it's just astounding the extent to which Mexican narco organizations use those platforms to recruit, to advertise about the gangster lifestyle, to put out hits on people in some cases, to announce hits on people. to coordinate strategy, all sorts of stuff. It's amazing the way that illicit networks are using social media. And so we've been working to try and get the laws changed, governing liability for hosting illicit content and conduct. And we have been also doing research and also doing advocacy work and public education.

00:35:11    JACK GAINES
It's spreading criminal networks even faster because it's instant and it's global.

00:35:16    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exponential. Any crime sector that we've looked at. Once it starts trending on social media, the rates of crime look like a hockey stick and is across every sector we've looked at. Human trafficking, the spread of child sex abuse content, drug trafficking, wildlife crime, animal abuse, kidney trafficking, things that I didn't even know were a thing, like the illegal tarantula trade and the illegal orchid trade. once it moves online and starts connecting buyers and sellers through the algorithms. And the algorithms play an important role in growing these crime sectors. But there's other tools, translation tools, embedded payment platforms. There's all sorts of ways in which social media is really reshaping criminal supply chains. And you can get to the point where quite a few steps of the criminal supply chain. will happen on social media platform. And really just producing the good and physically moving it is one of the only parts that doesn't happen online. And if the criminal good is, say, a video of a child getting raped, literally the entire thing can happen on social media. Literally the entire criminal supply chain can happen online.

00:36:35    JACK GAINES
Are we at a point where global criminality is going to start overcoming global governance? Or is it just... that it's just feeding off of us until everything collapses?

00:36:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
I hope not, but I think we could possibly be heading into an era sort of like a new dark ages where lots of parts of the world are basically ungoverned spaces or they're governed by illicit organizations. And we see a decline in both good governance, but also human rights. And we'll probably see all sorts of follow -on migration crises as a result of that.

00:37:10    JACK GAINES
Like an exploitation economy.

00:37:12    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exploitation economy. Exactly. That's the word I was looking for.

00:37:15    JACK GAINES
Well, thank you. Do you have any last thoughts, any projects beyond that that you want to talk about or meetings or public events that you want to pitch? I think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet

00:37:22    GRETCHEN PETERS
think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet is changing illicit supply chains and the way illicit actors operate and that we in the United States do more to address the laws that give tech companies immunity for that needs to come to an end, but also that we really start to rigorously enforce our very, very powerful anti-corruption laws and to really rigorously pay attention to the problem of state capture globally. Cool. Well, thank you, Gretchen, for your time.

00:38:08    JACK GAINES
This was awesome.

00:38:09    GRETCHEN PETERS
All right. Well, thank you so much. It was great to see you again.
 

217: Winning Against Global Networks (Part I)

Please join me in welcoming Gretchen Peters, one of the best counter-network people I know.

 

Gretchen came in to discuss the current challenges with targeting kingpins and criminal organizations

and how she maps and targets a network to ensure that the leaders get prosecuted and that the arrests also collapse the criminal organization.

 

With our adversaries using criminal networks to forward their foreign policy goals, I felt this would be a pertinent discussion on how the US should respond. This is a two-part episode, so let's get started.

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

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Special Thanks to Jazz…venue for the sample of Paris Jazz Lounge. Retrieved from https://youtube.com/shorts/E2i8w6cdQR8?si=UqceqAb1c3oeElTy

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Transcript

00:00:10    JACK GAINES
I love a quote you had about starting as a journalist and how they just drop you into some shitty situation. You got to quickly figure it out and then explain to others what's going on.

00:00:21    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, I mean, when I graduated from college, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And all I knew was that I didn't want to be in school anymore. All of my professors were recommending that I go in the master's or PhD program and become a professor. And I knew I didn't want to do more school. And the only things that I really liked were traveling and writing and researching. And so somebody was like, well, why don't you try journalism? And I was like, oh, OK, that sounds like a good idea. And for years, I literally thought that journalism was something you did when you couldn't think of anything else to do. I didn't even know there were like Columbia University and a prestigious school for it. But what I've realized and appreciated. Since leaving the industry and moving into other sectors in the information space and the research space is that it really trained me for a lot of things. I can write quickly. I can respond. That capacity to be dropped into somewhere and quickly figure it out. And there is a methodology. And particularly working for the Associated Press, we were drilled on the methodology of... rigorously assessing what the most important points are and putting them first and going from the most important point down to the lesser important points because literally stories get cut from the bottom. And unless they're big features that are meant to take 8 ,000 words or something, but bot news gets cut from the bottom. And I'm old enough that the first newspaper I worked for still laid it out with... gluing the copy to the page and then mimeographing it. And so they literally would say, we have to take two inches off your story. It would have to be written so the bottom could just be cut. Then I moved into doing broadcast, radio and television, where you usually have to explain your story in a minute 40 or less, sometimes 45 seconds. And so that really gives you a rigorous training. in boiling something that can be quite complicated, especially in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, down to a very, very basic thing. Once I moved into working as a consultant to the government, several of the military commanders I worked for would always have me be the one that would brief high -level policy. I first thought that that was just because they wanted to tell that they had a woman on their team. But I actually realized that it was because I was accustomed to and trained in explaining something in really simplified terms in a minute and a half. And that was often all we had time for. If you're trying to brief a four -star or an assistant secretary, you're not going to get much time. Right.

00:03:11    JACK GAINES
And when you're in the back of the room and you're watching somebody struggle to get to the point, I'm sure you're gritting your teeth going, you're dying here.

00:03:17    GRETCHEN PETERS
Oh, yeah. They're reading their PowerPoint painful. And so I really realized later on that those skills that I learned as a journalist were actually very, very useful. And I wasn't intimidated by being dropped into some place that I knew nothing about. When you work for the AP, it's just a really good training for explaining what's going on. And then that kind of led you to writing a book,

00:03:41    JACK GAINES
then that kind of led you to writing a book, Seeds of Terror, back in 2009. Terrific book, by the way. And it's funny because I worked in 2013 at the Kabul embassy running the Taliban counter -influence program. And one of my complaints was that they were producing as much income through illicit trade as what the U .S. coalition was bringing in to fight them. We had a gap in our understanding of how powerful and capable this force was because we were not accepting that they had money. And they had access and they were using it against us.

00:04:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
So one of the things that I learned when I worked for DOD, and I worked mainly with the intelligence folks, is that military intelligence traditionally is trained to try and figure out where the artillery is coming from. And things like, what is the physical terrain? What is the physical terrain and where is our enemy positioned? They don't look at money. They don't look at how their adversary is financed because traditionally the United States has fought other states. And so the adversary is financed by the other state. And so in these irregular warfare situations, there was kind of this broad acceptance that the Taliban was being funded by donations. Pakistan, but also donations from the Muslim faithful in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That was widely accepted. And it was true. But from my research, that money represented a fraction of their earnings. And the vast majority of it came from drugs and extortion and timber smuggling and artisanal mining and all sorts of schemes. And what's also interesting is that if you got down to the company level intelligence officer, that guy or occasionally that woman knew all of that. They knew what the local commanders were doing around them to earn money, but they would never report on it. It was in their heads. And so I would go and meet with them and say, how are they making money locally? And they would sit there and explain it all. And I would say, why am I not seeing this in your intelligence reports? And they'd be like, do you think that's important? They'd never been told to report on it. And so it was just something that was happening in kind of in plain sight all around them. And there was kind of a total strategic failure. to try and understand how the adversary was financing himself, to try and disrupt that financing. And it's funny because it's one of the main dictums in Sun Tzu's teaching. I'm a big fan of Sun Tzu, but one of his main dictums is it's much better to destroy his donkey cart than to shoot a soldier. You'll have much more impact because they won't be able to supply themselves. They won't have the funds to mount an army. And it's something we just didn't work on. in that case. And there was a recent story that we talked about before agreeing to do this podcast, this recent story about the Russian smuggler that was supplying goods to Ukraine.

00:06:43    JACK GAINES
That was Maxim Marchenko?

00:06:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah. There was still a failure to break down his donkey carts. And this is the blind spot that I felt like I was banging my head against the wall to explain for years. You can go and arrest Chapo Guzman or the commercial equivalent that I always give is that we could go and fire a drone strike at the CEO of Toyota and it wouldn't stop them from putting out cars. So what is it in Toyota's supply chain that if you disrupted it would grind their supply chain to a halt? The reason I use the Toyota example is that there was a fire in a Toyota plant that produced a certain valve that went into every single Toyota model. And it destroyed that plant. They didn't have an alternative source for that valve. And it cost the company, I forget what it was, but something like 20 % of GDP that year because they couldn't replace it. And so it ground everything to a halt. And so when I've worked as an advisor on these projects, I've tried to help my clients and partners. understand, to map the supply chain from soup to nuts and to look for that moment, that part where there's no resiliency in the supply chain. Because what tends to happen with U .S. government interventions or interdiction efforts, law enforcement tends to hit them over and over and over in the places where their activities are the most visible. The reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras.

00:08:12    JACK GAINES
reason they focus on big drug busts, then they drag it all out in front of the cameras. it's easier for them to show that in Congress, a call for funding, than it is to spend two, three years on a network and maybe get it to collapse.

00:08:27    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, with a very predictable result that they become more resilient at those levels. And yet in the fly chain, they're not resilient at all. They don't have a deep bench at all. And if you take one or two people out, arrest them, kill them, whatever's allowed under the rules of engagement, we'll throw the entire network into a disarray.

00:08:47    JACK GAINES
Right. And so we need to change the grading funding to focus on did you take the network out? Is this a recurring issue or not? And show that as success versus the big catch or the supply drugs.

00:08:59    GRETCHEN PETERS
100 percent. They're graded and funded and promoted. And those things have very little long term impact.

00:09:05    JACK GAINES
Matter of fact, drug cartels now kind of plan on getting a big shipment caught. They almost prep for it.

00:09:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Not just that. We had evidence when I was working with the DOD in Afghanistan that the Taliban were actually calling in tips to the coalition. They would send a drug shipment down one road, maybe a reasonably timey one by Taliban standards, and then they'd have a much bigger one going down another road. They'd tip off the coalition to the small one in order to provide cover for the much bigger shipment that was moving somewhere else.

00:09:36    JACK GAINES
A gold flag or a red herring.

00:09:38    GRETCHEN PETERS
False flag, yeah. I'm sure drug traffickers in other parts of the world do it too. Why wouldn't they?

00:09:43    JACK GAINES
Yeah, I'm sure they do. The cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures.

00:09:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
cost of doing business is that they're going to lose some percentage to seizures. But even organizations like the UNODC and the DEA acknowledge that at best, they tend to seize between 10 and 15 percent of the total supply. Even those numbers, I think, are optimistic.

00:10:02    JACK GAINES
I think they are too, because the market price of most of these drugs remain constant.

00:10:07    GRETCHEN PETERS
The main salt? Yeah, constant.

00:10:09    JACK GAINES
Yeah, that was a great point. You actually are one of the few people I know who's taken down networks. The one I remember is when I was at AFRICOM, you were in South Africa, and you worked with some partners and allies to take down a smuggling network on the east coast of Africa that was doing all kinds of trade along the coast and then shipping it up into Southeast Asia, correct?

00:10:30    GRETCHEN PETERS
The operation was run by the DEA Special Operations Division. A lot of people played a role in making it happen. But I had been hired with my colleague Kathleen Miles to map the supply chains that were moving elephant ivory and rhino horn from sub -Saharan East Africa to mainly consumer markets in East Asia, Vietnam, China, places like that, Malaysia. And what we found, there had been a very unfortunately misleading article that got a lot of attention about Joseph Kony. That was a cover article in National Geographic by one of Geographic's big, famous authors. And it basically had convinced the U .S. government and various other people, lots of conservation groups, that Joseph Kony was the big player in smuggling ivory, which was nonsense. Kony's army were doing all sorts of terrible things at the village level, but they were like 150 guys. They were mostly malarial most of the time. They'd moved. tiny amount of elephant ivory. And what we found when we started looking into the supply chains was that the big players that were moving multi -ton shipments of ivory off the coast of Africa were the same networks that were moving multi -ton shipments of drugs and timber and containers full of people off the continent. Those were the people that had the capacity to move illegal goods through ports. They had bought off senior customs officials. We were working on this project through my then NGO and we were funded by State Department, USA, the Elephant Crisis Fund, a few other groups. But I knew one of the DEA agents who was based in Kenya who had helped get members of this one network arrested that we believed were sort of the super facilitators for a lot of the ivory and drugs that were moving off the Swahili coast. not just from Kenya, but mainly from Mombasa, but also from Uganda and Tanzania and to some extent partnered with some other smugglers in Mozambique. And once we managed to team up with this DEA team and started looking into it, it was fascinating. I got to listen to some of the undercover recordings and Bhaktash Akasha, who was the head of this network out of Mombasa. was bragging to the DEA's confidential sources who he thought he was going to do this big drug deal with. He was bragging to them about how he had a route into various countries. He was like, we've got a route into Uganda. We've got a route into Tanzania. We've got several routes into Mozambique. And what I realized listening to him is that he was not talking about a physical route like a road or a airstrip. He had all of those things. He had access to all of those things. But he was talking about a corrupt pathway in each of those countries. Then he would start talking about which vice presidents were on his payroll and which customs directors were on his payroll. which logistics companies were secretly shadow -owned by him and his family or shadow -owned by the, it was always the president's brother, sort of like Afghanistan, and how they sort of had this vast underworld network that was hiding in plain sight. Having an inside view on how all of that worked really gave me a much better perception of the importance of really mapping these supply chains and all of the supporting. entities, the tiny airlines, the trucking companies, the freight forwarding companies, those guys did get arrested. Eventually, they got not extradited. They paid off the court system more than $2 million to make sure none of their extradition hearings ever went forward. So eventually, under pressure from the U .S. and various other things happened, the president of Kenya just handed them over. They were just sort of expelled from the country, and they're still in jail in the United States. And after that, there wasn't an ivory seizure of more than, I believe, a few kilos coming out of Mombasa for several years after their takedown. And so it was a case where taking out the kingpins did make a big difference because it disrupted those corrupt pathways.

00:14:46    JACK GAINES
But there were multiple people throughout the node that were picked up, not just the guy who was just bragging about his network, right?

00:14:54    GRETCHEN PETERS
Yeah, multiple people picked up and extradited, but also one of them flipped and started cooperating with the DOJ. And so there was a huge expose of their criminal network throughout Kenya and Uganda and Tanzania. And so that made it a lot harder for those entities to move illicit goods.

00:15:12    JACK GAINES
Right. That would be a great case study to show the example of how networks work and how to break them.

00:15:18    GRETCHEN PETERS
It was a great learning experience for me. I can say that.

00:15:22    JACK GAINES
We figured it out that time and we actually collapsed the network. How come we're not figuring it out now? What seems to be the lesson lost?

00:15:29    GRETCHEN PETERS
Well, I think the lesson lost, number one, is that simply taking out the Kinkin is usually not going to have much of a long -term impact. That you don't want to just arrest the Pablo Escobar or the Chapo Guzman. You need to map the network. from soup to nuts, to look at what happens at the procurement phase, what happens at the sort of production phase, the drug labs where it's mixed up. And that might happen in several phases. Who are the people that are able to move it both at the national level, say it moves around Africa first or South America first, and then who moves it transnationally and who receives it in the consumer markets and how it gets distributed at the consumer level. And once you understand all of that and the key players, you can start developing strategy to interdict key players at each point to really collapse the production. And you can look for places where there aren't a lot of redundancies, like the Toyota valve strike. So I used to talk about something called the martini glass model of the criminal supply chain, because normally what you find is that there are lots and lots of actors. at either end of the supply chain. So there'll be lots and lots of farmers growing opium in Afghanistan or lots and lots of farmers growing coca in Colombia or weed or whatever it is. There'll be lots and lots of poachers poaching elephants comparative to the exporters. Then there'll be lots and lots of people. who sell whatever the illicit good is on the retail end. The guys standing in the corner selling dime bags or the people selling pills on Snapchat today. But in the middle, in that stem of the martini glass, there's very, very few networks that have the capacity to move multi -ton shipments of illicit goods through transnational ports of entry. And those are harder to replace. So if you can get to that level and take them out of business, it's much harder for that to get reconstituted. And if you can expose at the same time the criminal patronage networks that make their business possible, then you really add bang to your buck.

00:17:40    JACK GAINES
Right, because then they can't just reform that network.

00:17:43    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. But either end of the supply chain, under Timit Waugh's model, those tend to be the people who are the most visible. The farmers that are growing the crops or the people that are selling drugs or selling whatever it is are much more visible. They have to be more visible. But they're also easily replaceable. And so another paper I wrote a few years ago called The Curse of the Shiny Object. talks about the fact that human beings intuitively tend to attack problems where we see them. But we can really have a lot more impact if you attack the problem where it's not as visible. As humans,

00:18:17    JACK GAINES
humans, we hide our most secretive, critical things. We don't put our most sensitive parts out in public. That makes sense.

00:18:24    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. But also the places where illicit activity is more visible has to be more resilient because the criminal networks know it's going to get. interdicted. And so it's sort of predictable that they'll make it easier for them to replace the guy that's driving drugs across a corner. But certainly in a lot of parts of the world, in the court systems, they really, really like to catch somebody with a trunk load of drugs or a trunk load of eyes. And then they like to catch them in flagrante. And it's much, much harder under certain judicial systems to prove a conspiracy. And I used to have this argument with U .S. government officials about Afghanistan. I would be trying to convince them that the Taliban was a major drug trafficking organization. They would want to hear The Intercept with Mullah Omar on the phone trying to trade a bag of heroin for a dirty bomb. He's not the guy that does that. He's the Tony Soprano. sitting in the back of whatever the Taliban's equivalent of the Bada Bing is, collecting envelopes of money from his guys who do that. He coordinates the network and he keeps the network together, which is also an incredibly difficult job because, again, we're talking about violent criminals. These guys are constantly getting into beefs with each other. So the person who's running the network, it is very much like a lot of those mafia movies where the New York mob is fighting the New Jersey mob all the time. That used to happen all the time in Afghanistan, and I saw it in Africa as well. And so the really powerful network commanders were not the ones that actually did the wheeling and dealing. They're like the conductor of the orchestra. Another one of my often repeated sayings is that a criminal supply chain, it's kind of like an old line about Gilda Radner doing everything as Fred Astaire, only backwards and in heel. We have all the same roles and functions and operational nodes as a commercial supply chain. And they're usually hiding in plain sight.

00:20:37    JACK GAINES
And my concern now is that with the success of the Taliban and Hezbollah in surviving attacks and conflict, it has become a playbook for upcoming emergent autocrats, kleptocrats, and also states that want to conduct state capture or neocolonialism as Russia is doing in Central Africa. It's their playbook now for creating chaos and disorder while then setting up an illicit network and then replacing the political sphere with people that support them so that they can lock that country up and then start reaping out all the resources.

00:21:11    GRETCHEN PETERS
Absolutely. I mean, we've seen that on Afghanistan, which has been handed back to essentially a narco -terror regime. We've seen it in Russia as probably the preeminent example of a really, really powerfully criminalized. society that's creating all sorts of havoc around the world. I don't know if you tracked even Dudley and Jeremy McDermott's website and publications called Inside Crime, but they've been doing some really fascinating reporting recently, both on state capture, but also cocaine production across Central and South America, which is just exploding and gross. And they're also tracking the formation of new multinational networks. that include Italian and Albanian crime networks that didn't used to function in Central and South America that are moving unprecedentedly huge amounts of cocaine into Europe. And they're also writing about the growing power of the narco insurgency in Mexico, where 60 percent of the states of Mexico are now really severely impacted by the narco presence. And these multifaceted networks are forming new and more complicated. global supply chains. And I just critical that our government and other partner governments understand how these are structured from end to end, how they work together from end to end. I just don't know that there's a lot of that kind of strategic analysis going on, but we can measure the impact. Colombia alone, according to some of the recent Inside Crime reporting, cocaine production increased by as much as a thousand tons just last year. That's yielding a supply that's over $66 billion. That's almost 20 % of Colombia's GDP. We're back to sort of 1980s level. And again, that's just Colombia. I could tell you similar stories about South Africa and Congo and some of the stuff that's going down in Burma. Ecuador is another place. Venezuela. So it kind of feels like everywhere I look, there's higher and higher levels of state capture going on. Even here in the United States, there's been some reporting about dark money behind some of the big crypto packs that are really going after politicians in this country who are just suggesting that crypto products should have the same regulations as other securities. And so pretty scary stuff. And I think the other thing. that is not anywhere near well enough understood, including by me, in part because we haven't had the resources to study it, is the extent to which illicit networks are financing disinformation and misinformation campaigns on social media. We know they're out there. We know that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, to some extent, are financing big and destructive misinformation campaigns. But I don't think there has been anywhere near a comprehensive enough effort to understand some of the illicit networks that seem to be financing this kind of stuff.

00:24:13    JACK GAINES
Is there state -sponsored criminal organizations leading the effort? Or is it that the criminal organizations are kind of running the PRC and Xi Jinping just happens to be the guy that's there as the leader on their behalf? Because Sam Cooper, the reporter, he had Christopher Mayer on. And Vera was talking about how the Macau criminal family is who supported Xi Jinping and actually helped him rise to president, which means that if they got him there, I like what mom used to say, you know, I brought you into this world. I could take you back out again.

00:24:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
Right. They're going to take a pound of flesh. That's for sure.

00:24:52    JACK GAINES
Yeah. So and so that makes me question, is PRC a criminal state or what?

00:24:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
Totally. John Casara has done some really interesting work on that, too. It's a big topic to get your arms around. But some of the money laundering efforts, TD Bank just went down for what was it like a two point something billion dollar fine. Just crazy amounts of cash being deposited into TD Bank accounts by mainly Chinese students studying in the United States and not Chinese American students, but actual. Chinese students here on student visas that were possibly being forced to do this, who knows, to pick up fentanyl money and deposit it into accounts. But when a foreign student attending college in Chicago is depositing millions of dollars in cash, a bank should flag that and stop it from happening and alert authorities. It's not a normal thing for college students to have millions of dollars in cash. Right.

00:25:54    JACK GAINES
I found it. $18 trillion in transactions. Right.

00:25:57    GRETCHEN PETERS
I mean, crazy.

00:25:58    JACK GAINES
So basically, almost the U .S. budget.

00:26:01    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not the only bank. Word on the street is there's a couple more banks about to go down in this investigation. So I'll be fascinated to hear what those supply chains look like. And I will be very interested to see what emerges from those court cases about the involvement of the Chinese government. And the way that they intersected both with criminal networks out of China, but also the way they intersected with criminal networks in Mexico.

00:26:27    JACK GAINES
Well, the reason that I suspect there's a playbook that's been built around these processes is that when Assad finally stabilized from the Civil War and it looked like he was going to stay in power, he immediately went to distributing narcotics in Italy. It seemed like someone had said, OK, now that you have some control, this is what you need to do. You need to start making money. You can do that by setting up a little circle of oligarchs. and then have them start doing narcotics chain, go send it to Italy. And that's when he started getting busted for selling drugs. I've thought, it seems like there's a pattern they're following. It's very similar to other patterns in other countries where a dictator will take control and suddenly trafficking is up, narcotics is up, and then they maintain this long -term instability in the country in order to do whatever they want, like in South Sudan.

00:27:13    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exactly. There's this sort of fantasy in our development space that we think that dictators in these countries want to stabilize things, but they don't. Because if they stabilize things and impose the rule of law, then they can't smuggle anymore. That's the source of income. So we mustn't go into these situations thinking that stability is the end goal of the government officials there. Another way to look at it is that if we want to try and stamp out that illicit activity, say there's drugs coming into the United States that we want to curtail, you have to look at ways to give those networks some sort of peace dividend. Maybe you can interdict and arrest some of them, but some of them you're going to have to convince as part of your end strategy to getting into something that's not illegal or at least not dangerous to the United States. And so I don't see that strategy happening either. It kind of has to be a lot more nuanced and holistic than what I view as sort of very blunt approaches, like we'll arrest this guy, we'll seize a couple tons of dope, and then we'll call it a victory, move on. And actually stabilizing a region, shifting their economy on a substantial level, if you're talking about a place like Afghanistan or Colombia, where a large percentage of GDP comes from drugs or other illicit activity. Shifting that is a massive investment. And what we've seen, again, in places like Colombia and Afghanistan is that we're not very good at imposing it. In fact, I'd say we suck at that.

00:28:49    JACK GAINES
Yeah, because we want them to make free choices. And free choices is that the gangster down the street is kind of pointing a gun at your head and say, hey, why don't you mule this drugs for me and I'll give you a little money. We don't give the opportunity for anything like that to be successful. If there is a criminal organization running a country, that you're able to freeze their assets and negotiate reforms in exchange for them recovering what they had hidden all those times. And what that does is after the reforms, then they have to get out of the country, and that reformed country then shifts back over to a representative government and economy. But it's going to take that type of reverse extortion, basically, to get these type of people. All you know is getting them out of the way.

00:29:28    GRETCHEN PETERS
All you know is getting them out of the way. and or working with them much more closely to help transition a government into some new economy. There's two examples of this, at least that I know of in Afghanistan. In 1980s, during the Muj period, and also post -2001, senior drug traffickers came to the United States and said, look, I'd love to get my community away from growing opium, but I need financial support to do it. We need to have our irrigation systems rebuilt. We need to have new markets developed for us. Afghanistan used to be, in the 70s, one of the world's number one exporters of raisins. It was one of the plans for Afghanistan was to reinvigorate their raisin industry. And the California raisin lobby got in the way of that. They didn't want to lose market share. So it's farmers in the United States and Europe would never survive without farm subsidies. And essentially what the drug traffickers are offering Afghan farmers, and the same is true in Mexico and South America, is a subsidy program. They come and they prepay their profits. They do it at a predatory rate. But effectively, these are farm subsidies. And if we don't come in and say, OK, we're going to help you guys grow wheat or pomegranate, but we're going to subsidize you to get back into that industry and we're going to consistently be there. That's what we never were able to prove to the Afghans. In the few places where there was real investment in it, people did shift, and they were able to make those economies work. But it was all at a very, very small scale, and it never lasted that long. Because before you knew what, we were ready to pull out again. The surge was over. We were done. We weren't going to keep troops in Helmandar. We weren't going to keep them in Kandahar. And so it all just collapsed. These are changes that aren't going to happen in six months' time. They're going to happen over the course of a decade. When we start to look at the investment that you have to make, I guess one of the biggest enemies to the kind of comprehensive reform that I'm talking about or that we're talking about is the short termism and the fact strategies generally only lasted a year or two in places like Afghanistan and administrations would change. And now we're in a situation between the Democrats and the Republicans where when you switch national security policy and foreign policy really changes course. And so if I were an Afghan farmer or Colombian farmer, I wouldn't listen to us either.

00:31:48    JACK GAINES
We're a little skittish.

00:31:49    GRETCHEN PETERS
skittish. We change our mind too much. So,

00:31:51    JACK GAINES
yeah. But I think part of that one year you're talking about is because people like me, I went in for one year to redesign the Taliban counter -influence program. I redesigned it. I relaunched it. And then I was out. And then the next person coming up is like, well, I don't know. You know, even though I was showing results, who knows what their thoughts were. So they may rewrite it in their own image. And so that's the difficulty of the one -year tour is there is nothing solid that can be created.

00:32:19    GRETCHEN PETERS
And it's not even one -year tours that are part of a five or 10 -year plan. You have a one -year tour, but you're trying to implement A, B, and C outcomes. And whoever follows you will be tasked with following those up with. the ENF. It was just sort of every year there was a completely different plan. That was to me one of the big failings in Afghanistan. And I think we're seeing some of the similar problems in Ukraine. I think the number issue is that there's this misconception among a lot of policymakers that you can just sanction an entity and that's the end of the story. That to me is one of the other big problems. The government will announce sanctions and then that's it. And they sort of assume that all sorts of things happen as a result. Another argument that I used to make when I was working in this space was to say that the sanction is kind of like an arrest warrant. Then you've actually got to resource Akeem to then go out and enforce those sanctions and try to put those businesses out of business and to go and arrest people who are sanctions busting. And if you don't, the sanctions are just a piece of paper.

00:33:26    JACK GAINES
Just create a workaround after you for anything that did happen. Yeah. Colin, what are you working on now?

00:33:31    GRETCHEN PETERS
So I had an NGO that was doing mapping work on transnational organized crime networks to actually do the sort of supply chain mapping that I was talking about. And we still do that work, but we rebranded ourselves as the Alliance to Counter Crime Online because we started discovering the extent to which a lot of illicit networks were shifting their activities into cyberspace. And in particular, onto social media platforms. If you had asked me years ago, where would you buy ivory or drugs online? I would have said the dark web, Silk Road, East West, one of those dark web marketplaces. But actually, a lot of it is on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram. Most people on the dark web, they're on social media. And so that's where the criminals are, too, at least at the retail level. And in many ways, illicit actors are also organizing on social media. They're using Facebook groups, so they're using WhatsApp groups or Telegram groups to organize and coordinate, put out hits on people. If you've never looked at narco Twitter or narco Instagram, it's just astounding the extent to which Mexican narco organizations use those platforms to recruit, to advertise about the gangster lifestyle, to put out hits on people in some cases, to announce hits on people. to coordinate strategy, all sorts of stuff. It's amazing the way that illicit networks are using social media. And so we've been working to try and get the laws changed, governing liability for hosting illicit content and conduct. And we have been also doing research and also doing advocacy work and public education.

00:35:11    JACK GAINES
It's spreading criminal networks even faster because it's instant and it's global.

00:35:16    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exponential. Any crime sector that we've looked at. Once it starts trending on social media, the rates of crime look like a hockey stick and is across every sector we've looked at. Human trafficking, the spread of child sex abuse content, drug trafficking, wildlife crime, animal abuse, kidney trafficking, things that I didn't even know were a thing, like the illegal tarantula trade and the illegal orchid trade. once it moves online and starts connecting buyers and sellers through the algorithms. And the algorithms play an important role in growing these crime sectors. But there's other tools, translation tools, embedded payment platforms. There's all sorts of ways in which social media is really reshaping criminal supply chains. And you can get to the point where quite a few steps of the criminal supply chain. will happen on social media platform. And really just producing the good and physically moving it is one of the only parts that doesn't happen online. And if the criminal good is, say, a video of a child getting raped, literally the entire thing can happen on social media. Literally the entire criminal supply chain can happen online.

00:36:35    JACK GAINES
Are we at a point where global criminality is going to start overcoming global governance? Or is it just... that it's just feeding off of us until everything collapses?

00:36:44    GRETCHEN PETERS
I hope not, but I think we could possibly be heading into an era sort of like a new dark ages where lots of parts of the world are basically ungoverned spaces or they're governed by illicit organizations. And we see a decline in both good governance, but also human rights. And we'll probably see all sorts of follow -on migration crises as a result of that.

00:37:10    JACK GAINES
Like an exploitation economy.

00:37:12    GRETCHEN PETERS
Exploitation economy. Exactly. That's the word I was looking for.

00:37:15    JACK GAINES
Well, thank you. Do you have any last thoughts, any projects beyond that that you want to talk about or meetings or public events that you want to pitch? I think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet

00:37:22    GRETCHEN PETERS
think what I'd like to pitch is that as we head into 2025, I hope that there is greater attention paid to both the high level of state capture that's happening in a lot of parts of the world and greater attention paid to the way that the internet is changing illicit supply chains and the way illicit actors operate and that we in the United States do more to address the laws that give tech companies immunity for that needs to come to an end, but also that we really start to rigorously enforce our very, very powerful anti-corruption laws and to really rigorously pay attention to the problem of state capture globally. Cool. Well, thank you, Gretchen, for your time.

00:38:08    JACK GAINES
This was awesome.

00:38:09    GRETCHEN PETERS
All right. Well, thank you so much. It was great to see you again.
 

216: Mic Mulroy: Fogbow and Veteran Humanitarian NGOs

Today, we welcome Mick Mulroy to discuss Fogbow, his new humanitarian NGO, and their work in Gaza, Sudan, and Syria. We also discuss the growing number of veteran humanitarian organizations getting involved in some of the most distressed places on Earth.

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

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Special Thanks to Businside for the sample of Upbeat Background Music - Dance and Electronic Music. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/1MzdQLTBPPo?si=6cJR4qPYoJUaohh3

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Rough transcript: 

00:00:05    Open
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail dot com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today, we welcome Mick Mulroy to discuss Fogbow, his new humanitarian NGO, and their work in Gaza, Sudan, and Syria. We also discuss the growing number of veteran humanitarian organizations getting involved in some of the most distressed places on Earth. So let's get started.

00:00:57    MIC MULROY
I've been to Syria several times, but I haven't been there recently and not since all of the Assad regime. So we are looking at the potential for what we as a group who supports humanitarian efforts can do in Syria.

00:01:11    JACK GAINES
I hope Syria straightens out. The new government actually does build out something representative for the population and the economy, that it becomes more centrist. I have a lot of hope. I think we all should,

00:01:21    MIC MULROY
have a lot of hope. I think we all should, right? It's a good thing, obviously, that Assad's... gone. I mean, hundreds of thousands of deaths are on his hands. So certainly a good thing. The question is whether the incoming crowd who took government control by force are going to be the reformers they say they are, or are they going to go back to their roots? I think the verdict is still out. We should all hope that's the case. I think the incoming or now the team that's in place is a bit more skeptical than the last. You can tell by whether they call them Jelani or Al -Shirar. That's the first indicator when I was doing my rounds on both the Hill Congress and the Trump team. I think there's criticism on just how inclusive they're going to be. But we should all hope that that is the case and that there's an election soon rather than the four years that I think they've been saying. But certainly when it comes to sections that are more related to Assad. They should be reconsidered, and we should look at what we're doing there long term. With the SDF during the defeat of ISIS, the crisis, if we pull out precipitously, both for our partners, the SDF and for the counterterrorism effort, but also our strategy against Iran and Russia to a certain extent, which right now, I think everybody would stay on their backside, especially when it comes to Syria. But when it comes to humanitarian assistance, there is a dire need, for sure. And I think that is something that a lot of groups are looking at, how they can contribute to the rebuilding of Syria and the promotion of a stable country that looks more inward. Their own people vice becoming a client state to actors don't have best interests Syrians like Russia.

00:03:10    JACK GAINES
And it's interesting that with their change of government and Lebanon being able to form a government because Hezbollah has their fingers out of the pie right now. I see it as a real strategic opportunity because if Lebanon can get on its foot, Syria can get on its feet, there could be a whole sea change of policy in that region to where Iran's behaviors are balanced, Russia's behavior are balanced, the nations down there can actually rebuild and have a more stable government and a healthier international relationship. I agree with you,

00:03:40    MIC MULROY
I agree with you, Derek. I think this is a very big opportunity for the United States. I use boxing analogies because I used to box. I used to coach boxing in the Marine Corps. This is a point where you see your opponent on the ropes, right? You don't back up. You go in and try to end the fight. I know we're not going to end the fight or the competition between us and Russia, but Ayoun is a partner, obviously the former commander of Lebanese Armed Forces. We have supported them for a long period of time. They were a very effective partner with us, and he was the head of it. So that's a huge opportunity right there. Iran, I think, has many strategic mistakes, and they realize that now, and they've seen it both in their major losses with leadership across the board, their capability, and of course in Syria. I mean, their corridor to fund and supply groups like Hamas and Hezbollah has been cut off, and they just don't have the platform that they have. And I think we should capitalize on that. Our policy should be... The promotion of U .S. interests, part of that, I believe, I don't know if we're going to today, is the promotion of democracy and human rights. But certainly, this is an opportunity to do both, our strategic interests and promotion of democratic values.

00:04:55    JACK GAINES
With Fog Bow, you have a pretty heady team. Some folks that I've recognized from other efforts, some new. Ambassador Smith is awesome. Roger Thompson, you've got a lot of great people here.

00:05:06    MIC MULROY
of great people here.

00:05:08    JACK GAINES
By name only.

00:05:08    MIC MULROY
name only.

00:05:10    JACK GAINES
Well, Chris, he'd be right there with him.

00:05:11    MIC MULROY
be right there with him. Yeah, so FABO is primarily veterans, but we have our humanitarian. And the skills that we have that I think are additive to the whole endeavor, which are air delivery. We've done that in Sudan. We've done maritime delivery in Gaza. We know Austere Logistics. We're a very small company, but we really focused on doing that. And that's why I said Roger's the MVP, right? So we have a lot of former SOF folks. We have a lot of... former special operations veterans, whose skill includes all the delivery and the planning and kind of figuring out hard problems where there's no easy solution. But Roger's done Marine Infantry, but he was also a Marine Logistics Officer. So that's why I say he's the MVP, because that's what we do essentially is logistics. Our mission accomplished, it's food delivered, people in need.

00:06:03    JACK GAINES
Right. I've had a couple people on talk about the Triton Pier. Some of the challenges with prepping in Cyprus for it, putting the peer out, getting as much aid as possible out, and how the thing broke up. But similar to that, Fogbo seems to be focused on some of the harder areas to reach with aid. It's not a typical aid organization. You go into very restrictive areas that have real security challenges, and you help make sure that humanitarian effort arrives. so that people can continue to survive until conflicts, until crisis or disasters are resolved. That's a tough space to work in. And that's why we get requested to come in.

00:06:42    MIC MULROY
to work in. And that's why we get requested to come in. When it comes to the pier, I would say this. We, Sam Mundy, Ricard General, you probably saw on the site, we briefed the last administration several times on the idea of bringing in aid. The Ameritimese, they came up with the JLOPS, the Joint Logistics on the Shore system. To be frank, we didn't think it was the best. Because of the sea states at the time, it could have been done a different way. But we're Americans, and by God, if the U .S. military is going to push up here from Virginia to Gaza, we're going to support it out of pocket. There's not a whole lot of countries that do something. In the United States, it did something, and it might not have been perfect, but it did still over 33 ,000 tons of food into Gaza when it's needed. So that's done, and we're still working to build facilities that can assist the storage of... Critical food aid, medical aid. For NGOs. The other point on how difficult, just to give you a highlight, in Sudan there was a very substantial population that got cut off from ground delivery of food because of that. Primarily the rainy season cut off the roads and the fighting, of course. They were out of food. And all it took was somebody who could come in there and deliver food via air in a very tightly controlled area because of the conflict. And that's where we fit in. That's de -conflicting battle space and airdrops, austere environments. That's what not just people in Fogbo, but that's what the U .S. military is pretty damn good at. So that's what we did for three months, and I think we did a lot of good. And now the situation has changed. It can get ground to leverage. But that's just an example of what we're doing. We're also looking to expand in others. And it's certainly not just about us. There's a lot of groups doing this out there. And if they see a need for our skill set, Give us a call.

00:08:35    JACK GAINES
And I'll put it on the show notes as well. I'm sure this must be an adrenaline rush for a lot of the veterans to actually be out in the mix delivering humanitarian supplies, which is a great reward for the skills that a lot of people have. What kind of feedback have you gotten from your logistics teams, your pilots, your air crew, about what it's like to work for the organization? It really comes down to a mission,

00:08:56    MIC MULROY
It really comes down to a mission, right? So we're all there because of mission, which is to enable humanitarian operations. We are a private company. That's why it's really incumbent on us to assist NGOs that are out there doing great work. I think the most feedback I've gotten is actually taking the skills that they learned over 20, sometimes 30 years, in our case, the U .S. military, a lot of it in conflict, and do something like this. So it's, and myself included, have really taken this mission on as important as any mission I've ever had. And that's what I hear. But of course, it isn't about us. I mean, there's other groups that are doing this, and there's certainly other groups that can do this, that get veterans that are really looking for something other than your standard jobs. This is an area where they can really have an impact really quick.

00:09:50    JACK GAINES
The reason I bring it up is that I had Scott Mann on, and one of the things he really challenged with, we're all cause -based in the military. We work to a cause. We have a bigger thing we're trying to reach. And people get out. Some go to church, some start a business, some start a pizzeria or a workout joint. But some just struggle with trying to find that sense of cause and how they place it, what they can do with it. And his challenge was it drove him to suicide because he couldn't find his place in life after getting out of the military. And so that's why he looked into other things like acting and writing books and lectures and veterans of care programs. Veterans Without Orders, who does water delivery, because I want to show veterans that there are opportunities out there. We can apply that sense of cause to make a difference so that they don't feel like they're alone in this world. When I was talking to the Veterans Without Orders folks, what they found is being on the ground, a lot of the NGOs were surprised at how fast and efficient they were. They went to Haiti and some of the World Food Program folks were like, wow, how long have you guys been working together? It seems like you've been friends for years. And he's like, no, actually, We had a phone call for 20 minutes, landed, met, got on it. But we just have a common language. We understand what each other's doing. We know we're both here for the right reasons. And you just build that instant trust in order to do a mission. And that's what I assume you guys are seeing there as well. I worked pretty closely with him on the Afghan evacuation.

00:11:15    MIC MULROY
I worked pretty closely with him on the Afghan evacuation. My group was called Dunkirk. We weren't a Team America Elite. We also did a lot with Scott. Because that was such a cause near and dear to their heart, that was the first. foray into humanitarian work. And I think that's stuck with a lot of them. And we're seeing a lot of that continue around the world where veterans say, oh, we can really do something here. I think that's great.

00:11:41    JACK GAINES
With Kabul on the midst of collapsing, I saw a lot of veterans rallying together to figure out how to get private logistics in there, getting buses, getting private planes. One thing that I bumped into was a lot of NGOs that were desperately trying to get help because they had people that were working with aid and with state and with the military that were not represented on those lists that needed to get out of there because they were part of the cigar report or they were part of distribution and the Taliban knew who they were and they were going to come after them. My part was just plugging those NGOs in with veterans who had logistics, who had access to help them get some of those folks out. But I did notice that... Once people got involved, it's just almost like there was a light came on and said, oh, I don't have to wait for the U .S. government to order me to do something. I can actually go make a difference. I can take my skills and help be a part of the whole foreign policy scheme and actually do stuff. I can do it without having to be a part of aid or state. I can just build an NGO and do it. So I'm glad to see that splintering because I think it's created a lot of opportunities for folks. Yeah,

00:12:47    MIC MULROY
Yeah, and it just doesn't need to be about... FIBO, we're just one group of many. My preference would be more about the need, and that is where we're going, right, where the need is. And then to the extent that there's a secondary is the fact that veterans can get involved. They can start their own. They can get involved with us. They can get involved with other groups. We do want to be the promoter of that concept. We get a lot of veterans out there. They need a purpose, I think. But there's also a need out there. It's on both sides of the equation. And I think... The skills that they bring to the table, they are very value -added into this arena. And we've heard that from many humanitarians, quite frankly, who have not been able to figure this out. This is something that we would have put in the too difficult category. So it doesn't need to be about our particular group. I think it should be about the need, which is growing. And on that side, there is massive crises around the world. People should care that they're starving kids in Sudan. And on top of that, the consequences. are going to be felt by everybody in the world if there is massive migration of their ability to feed themselves or their fling and conflict that make it untenable to even exist there. So these are issues that are very human issues that I think anybody, whether they're in Europe or the United States or Japan, should care about, but also because it could dramatically impact where they live because this is not something that's just going to stay contained. There are conflicts that are growing, that are perpetuated in existence. And there are, of course, climate issues. Climate's changing, and that's going to cause mass migration. And not people that are coming with their own means to support themselves. So not just taking care of the immediate need, which is food to people that are farming, but building up their ability to feed themselves has to be part of the long -term equation, or we're never going to get out of that cycle. And then we create these permanent IDK camps. and no chance of a future. So that needs to be done, but there needs to be long -term planning in the international community. I think from the U .S. perspective, I think we should lead it, but I don't think we should be it. This needs to be a joint effort by the international community. Actions are what count. So that should be a collective effort of the international community, which the United States would be a part. It'd certainly lead, in my opinion, but it needs to be much more of a collective effort. Some people... I'm just not used to seeing a lot of veterans in the humanitarians here. And there has been some like, wow, you guys are military. What are you guys doing here? And for the groups, the veterans that are out there doing it, if they're asking my opinion, I'd say just be clear. Don't worry about justifying your purpose in the humanitarian. There's never going to be too many people trying to help people around the world. So just drive on, do good work, and they'll either appreciate it or they won't. But I do hear that from other veterans that get into the area. To your point. Very few people serve in the United States, just the way it is. It's a very small group. Not to be corny, but it is a family. It's almost like there's characteristics that you just notice immediately across the services that you just have a commonality. So you talk to say, why would you think? Generally the same way, you're very mission -oriented, and that's something that's covering to a lot of people when they get with other veterans. In veteran suicide, it is a serious problem, and there are people addressing it, and I think they're doing great work. But one of the things I found, and you referenced it when it comes to Scott, is you don't have a purpose. From what I've seen, people can go downhill pretty quick. You go into a pit. And I live in Montana. I love Montana on a veterans here and coming. Some of the guys live in a pretty remote area. Some, like myself, live pretty close there. And when we do vet events, you basically send guys out to get other guys and say, yeah, I'll tell you no for an answer. They need to come in. They need to be around their people. They need to... shoot the shit and rib each other's and smoke a cigar or add a bourbon or whatever their thing is. But you got to go out there and find these guys. And some of them, they might appear to be okay, but next day they're not.

00:16:49    JACK GAINES
Let me know if I have this picture right. You've created the Lobos Institute, which is kind of a training and preparation for people who want to get out and work in the humanitarian space or do outreach or work with partner nations. Outreach. to enable people to either help you with your outreach and your programs or to create their own space. And then you have Fogbo, which is kind of your operational arm where you are focusing on humanitarian assistance through Fogbo as when a filter for people who come through the Lobos Institute or other volunteers, but it's also a way for you to get into helping support others in need around the world. Is that kind of a clear way that you align this? Lobos Institute,

00:17:30    MIC MULROY
Lobos Institute, three main components. One's like a think tank. where people learn and discuss issues of national security. The second part is tactical training here in Montana. So it's, as you might catch, mountain warfare, because everybody thinks winter warfare when I think of Montana. But the main effort is the enabling of humanitarian operations. And we've worked with the UN and Yemen, with the State Department in Afghanistan after withdrawal. And we're doing a lot of this with FABO in Sudan. As I mentioned, we don't do security sort of thing. It's important and there's groups to do it. That's cool. But it's not us. So my perspective, I would like to see more attention on some of these international and humanitarian crises. It's not something that exists simply on the other side of the world. And I'd like to see the extent that veterans are looking for something to do post -career, of course, military veterans, but State Department, the agency, et cetera. This is a place that I think they'll find meaning and purpose. And I think we all need that.

00:18:32    JACK GAINES
Right. Crisis and disasters also attracts opportunism. I think a lot of people realize that with Afghanistan, that we're just feeding the wrong animal in a lot of ways. And that we just have to understand that with our aid and our foreign policy, that anytime that we give something, every time we build something, we also attract opportunism. And we need to make sure that when we're handling the government's business, We're doing it in the right possible way with the right checks and balances so that we're not just passing off vaccines to someone who's going to just sell them on the black market so that they can go to London and party. There's a lot to be learned from the time we spent in Afghanistan on the military side and on the diplomatic side,

00:19:08    MIC MULROY
There's a lot to be learned from the time we spent in Afghanistan on the military side and on the diplomatic side, but certainly on the aid side and foreign assistance. When it comes to that, a lot of great work done by a lot of great people. But we need to take the lessons learned from that as well, because I think there's a growing concern that... The United States is the biggest donor around the world, which I think we should be proud of, but it's almost taken for granted. And a lot of it is not actually getting to the people whose it's intended to. Which my humble opinion doesn't mean we stop, it just means we get better at. That needs to be better explained to the American taxpayer who ultimately are the ones paying the bill. That's, I think it should go without saying, but I am saying it because I think there's a backlash and we don't want that to be the case. from the American people on what they view as just like an endless credit card for crises around the world from the American people without proper safeguards. And I think we need to get to a place where they feel more confident that's the case and where they feel it's aligned with our overall interest.

00:20:12    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. One CA Podcast.

 

215: Ismael Lopez on OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief (Part II)

Welcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock interviewed Ismael Lopez about OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief and his experiences as a Marine Civil Affairs Officer. 

Brian's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-j-hancock/

Ismael's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishrlopez/ 

Transcript available below.

---

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

---

Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

---

Special Thanks to the creators of Jazz & Bossa Cafe for the sample of Positive March Music. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHeCxa0rMQ4

---

Transcript:

00:00:10 BRIAN HANCOCK
Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Major Ishmael Lopez to discuss civil affairs and the ongoing relief effort in the Gaza Strip. Let's talk a little bit more about that training piece. Part of readiness is being able to do your job. The Marine is an expeditionary force, perhaps becoming even more expeditionary with the expeditionary advanced base operations. construct, the chief of the Navy signed off on. So very interesting training opportunities for the fleet right now. And you mentioned Balakatan and some of those other exercise type missions that you've done.

00:00:53 BRIAN HANCOCK
And I know you've probably done Marine Corps Warfighting exercise and mentioned JRTC. But what are some of these other missions you've done? You've talked about a dock up. A dock up is joined at the hip with humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, HADR. The Navy has a huge role in HADR for just a whole bunch of reasons. Has your detachment participated in any HADR missions? Is that another training opportunity that you have with your Marines in detachment?

00:01:21 ISMAEL LOPEZ
We as a detachment have not. However, I do have individual Marines who have participated in HADR missions. Not a whole lot of experience, but there's some resident within the detachment. And to your point, there is huge training opportunity there for understanding how to integrate into an HADR response specific to DOD's role in supporting the State Department. We do have the opportunities for training with USAID, but that's all classroom. And we try to get as much exposure to that as possible. But as far as real-world HADR scenarios where we're able to integrate with the State Department and even into a joint task force or a multinational task force, it is very limited. I know that that is being discussed for future iterations of Balakatan specifically to have a HADR response, which makes sense, right? Because Balakatan is becoming a massive multinational exercise that features activities across the spectrum of military operations. Once that piece of it is integrated, then it's truly a well -thought -out, deliberate exercise on how to integrate HADR, whereas right now it's sort of sprinkled on top. The Marines, sailors, and even the Army, civil affairs practitioners that are supporting, are supporting steady -state engineering projects. And I think that's a missed opportunity because there's so much more that we can provide than project management. And there are opportunities there, but... If I'm a commander sitting on top of a joint task force, that's not where I would place those assets because it's going to happen. They're not caught off guard and they understand, okay, where is the USAID person that I need to be linked up with? Who do I need to be syncing up with? Again, looking for those opportunities.

00:03:22 BRIAN HANCOCK
opportunities. I hear you. I know you've done a fair amount of work in South America with all the attention on ACOM and sometimes UCOM. I don't think we talk enough about, I think there are many opportunities in South America to do great things. And if we take a look at the Tierra del Fuego with all the earthquakes and the volcanoes and the things happening there and climate change and disasters, there seems to me more disasters, which is going to increase the chance that our government is temporarily overwhelmed and might have to issue a diplomatic cable and request assistance. For us in Title X, that's probably just some of our unique capabilities like rotary wing, pull up a nuclear ship and just start giving power to a large area. There's amazing things that we can do. And I know that there are disasters happening in South American countries, which tend to be a little more fragile. Do we have those opportunities? Is that something that we just haven't mapped out? How would we go about helping our South American brothers?

00:04:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ
struggle with this because like you, I see the opportunities that are down there and they're plentiful. I worked down at the embassy in Bogotá, Colombia for three years during my FAO tour. And while I was there, I was a counter -narcotics maritime operations planner. So really fancy title for managing Section 333 funding programming. But our partners in that region are all about working with us. training with us, opening up their countries for us to train. They want to fight with us. In Colombia, we were trying to organize an additional exercise outside of the standard unit toss that goes on in South America. So as we started trying to test, does this concept work? What are going to be some of the challenges? What does it look like for closing ship to shore in a contestant environment? Colombia has amazing terrain that is very similar to that that you will find in the first island chain, surprisingly. A lot of people wouldn't know that, but it's there. So when you consider distance and cost associated with being able to provide realistic training that mimics the future fight, you have it in the same hemisphere. The challenge is, the NDS calls out very specifically, services, your priority is... UCOM. Your priority is AFRICOM. Your priority is CENTCOM. Your priority is writ large is Indopaycom. We'll focus on that. And so that automatically causes the services to look elsewhere rather than looking down south. And so that means that resources, manpower, etc. are going to get pulled to support efforts down there because it's not called out specifically in the NDS. And now it's being focused on other parts of the world. Fortunately, Marine Forces Reserve has shifted from trying to compete with the active component to adding relevancy by focusing on developing those opportunities in Latin America. I know the Army does a lot with the TSOCs down there, but more can be done and should be done, in my opinion. I think the relevancy is there and transferable to other parts of the globe. It's just getting past the, hey, I understood that this document calls this out. but there are opportunities here that align to what we're trying to get after in the NDS. And the other piece of that too is when you consider if we're having assets down there, it reduces the number of available resources that can respond to contingencies. And I think that's part of that equation.

00:07:09 BRIAN HANCOCK
I think so. It's really not a bridge too far from our existing mental models. The energy may be in PayCon, but at the same time, you're still going to JRTC. Is that the Deep Pacific? No, not at all. But there's still value in that training. If you can go to Columbia and move through similar islands, have similar river problem sets, similar terrain problem sets, and get that experience at a fraction of the cost of going to the Deep Pacific, that's not something we should overlook. And we can't ignore the fact that there's increasing levels of adversary activity in South America, I don't think we should take that for granted. And doing these mill to mill and working together side by side on various projects, there's nothing but good stuff there. So I'm hopeful that we may in the future put a little bit more energy into that theater.

00:08:02 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Yeah. And the one last piece of it I think that we take for granted is the belief that our partners in the Western Hemisphere are going to stay aligned to us. because we have those shared values. But when you have our competitors knocking on the door and saying, hey, we want to train with you. We want to provide you money. We want to do all these things. And we're taking for granted that relationship. It's only going to last so much longer before the number of partners that we have on there are going to be very limited. Yeah.

00:08:33 BRIAN HANCOCK
You know, it kind of reminds me of the Sims game. I don't know if you've played this. But there's a relationship meter. And if you want to have positive relationships with another avatar in this simulation, you have to interact with them. You have to do that fairly regularly because over time, that relationship meter decays. Relationships aren't static like that. They're usually moving forward or they're sliding backwards. And if we're not in that game and we have hungry competitors, we can see where that could go. Let's talk about some of your work as a foreign area officer. That's a very coveted job for civil affairs and folks who think they may have a future intent to work for Department of State. A lot of folks don't get there. What did you do as a foreign area officer, and how do you get involved in that kind of work?

00:09:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ
For the Marine Corps, I was actually able to use my experience as a civil affairs officer to springboard. into becoming a Latin America FAO. So in the Marines, we have two different ways of becoming a foreign area officer. There is the experience track, which is the one I fell into. And then the other one is a study track. So either route, you have solicitation for candidates, individuals who have experiences overseas, working specifically on the civ. side of the house, not necessarily the mill -to -mill piece, right? Because we're looking at international relations, foreign relations, etc. And then you have the study track, which is you get selected, you get sent to Monterey to earn a master's degree in international relations. Then they send you to the language school, DLI, for a language, and you get assigned a region. And then you get sent either to combatant command to work as a desk officer. or you get sent to a country overseas and you're going to work out at the embassy. So for me, I was able to parlay my experiences as a civil affairs officer, and then the board selected me as a Latin America foreign area officer. And what that did was that it opened me up to that role in the embassy. So my wife's active duty Air Force, and she's also a Latin America foreign area officer. She got sent to Naval Postgraduate School, earned her master's. Didn't have to go to DLI because she already spoke Spanish. And then she got orders to the embassy in Columbia. Family and I obviously went along. And as we were doing our introduction with the scout chief, she mentions my husband's a civil affairs officer and a FAO. And his eyes just lit up. He's like, we haven't had a Marine sitting in the naval mission for the Section 333 program in quite some time because we just don't have them. Part of the challenge is the cost associated with bringing one down. But since I was already there, in his eyes, he was getting two fails for the price of one. So because I had that, I was able to meet the requirement for the billet. And then I was able to serve as the program manager for the Section 333 program for roughly three years.

00:11:38 BRIAN HANCOCK
Well done. And what an exciting mission. If I was younger, I'd want to run off there too and do something like that. I mean, my Spanish needs to be a little bit better, but I know I could brush it up. Hey, let's talk about the... Very difficult situation in Gaza right now. I don't think we can approach that with anything but sympathy for all involved. Certainly there's great suffering there by many different parties. And I know you were one of those folks who raised his hand and said, hey, I will help with some of that Gaza relief and did that mission, at least for some time. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience with the Gaza relief mission? And are you comfortable sharing any lessons learned from your time?

00:12:20 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Yeah, so it was very interesting when the Gaza relief mission kicked off for several reasons, right? The challenge there, very, very dynamic event, very tragic event. And then on one hand, we have to support our ally in Israel. But on the other hand, great suffering occurring to the people in Gaza as a result of the mission out there. So the struggle within DOD at the time was, what should we do from an ATA perspective to help those that are suffering in Gaza? So when we look at it from within DSCA, we were really waiting for inputs from OSD and even the NSC as to what is an appropriate humanitarian aid response. One that's not going to undermine our partner. But at the same time, sending a strong message to the people in Gaza and the international community that the United States is not going to sit idly by while people are suffering. So it's a very delicate balance that had to be found. So from an access property standpoint, I was looking into what could we do and how close could we get to provide items from the inventory that could provide life -saving support or even just support for those that are being displaced. into neighboring countries. What ended up happening was we, DSCA, specifically the humanitarian aid and the humanitarian demining division, was ordered to reallocate all the ODACA funding that had already been provided to the combative commands and used to support the Gaza relief missions, specifically the maritime bridge. So we had to deliver the bad news to the combative commands, like, hey, Any money that you have not obligated at this point, we have to pull. You were going to utilize that specifically for this mission. Concurrently, we had to assume risk. This was in the summer, right? Heading into the peak of hurricane season. So we had to decide what number were we comfortable with holding back in the event that a hurricane hit or earthquake hit and we knew it was coming and a partner was going to ask for assistance. And we wouldn't necessarily have the ability to ask Congress for additional funding. It was a fine balance there. At the end of the day, we ended up avoiding any major hurricanes in the Caribbean where a partner asked for support. So avoided that. We were able to support the Gaza Relief Mission, specifically the Maritime Pier, getting aid out there, providing those flight hours, the ship hours, getting aid as close as possible. But then we had to stop supporting that because the bridge was not as structurally sound as we all thought it was going to be. And we've been looking at other avenues of providing that support to the people of Gaza, primarily through our partners. The other challenge there is we can't actually enter an area of conflict for obvious reasons. So that added another layer of complexity to support the mission. But as we can and as we are allowed to, we continue to provide support. CENTCOM has been great identifying requirements and coordinating with the SCA to ensure that the folks that need that aid are getting that aid from us.

00:15:49 BRIAN HANCOCK
That's great. It's a tricky situation. It goes out to everyone involved, but I'm glad there are folks out there like yourself who are doing what we can do to try and provide some support. Looking after civilians in conflict is a core part of what we do in civil affairs, no matter what branch you happen to be in as a civil affairs officer. So that is fantastic. I'd like to talk a little bit about one of the differences in the Army and the Marine Corps for civil affairs officers, such as yourself, and I'm beside myself, is that as a Marine civil affairs officer,

00:16:19 ISMAEL LOPEZ
and I'm

00:16:22 BRIAN HANCOCK
a Marine civil affairs officer, you at some point have to return to your primary branch. Whereas I can continue as a... civil affairs officer for the rest of my career if I choose to. Do you see that changing? Clearly there is a need for career professionals such as yourself to be able to stay in that MOS. What are your thoughts on that?

00:16:41 ISMAEL LOPEZ
So this is the same thing with the foreign area officers, the Marine Corps. We have to go back and forth and because the primary mission of the Marine Corps is to support the infantry, right? I can make an argument for how Fayos and civil affairs does that too, but that's a harder conversation to have at the top. But I'm not sure if the, once the 17XX MOS is fully approved and implemented, how that's going to look for officers. Are they going to be able to just stay on that track? I've heard maybe it's going to happen. I've heard, no, it's not going to happen. So it's hard to say.

00:17:20 BRIAN HANCOCK
it's hard to say. I saw a pre -decisional slide on that, which showed a glide path moving between civil affairs and PSYOP and space operations,

00:17:33 BRIAN HANCOCK
operations, et cetera, all the way up to full kernel. That gave me the impression that it would become a career, though you would move around within that. But how things are rolled out, you know, the devil's in the details.

00:17:47 ISMAEL LOPEZ
in the details. We shouldn't be bouncing back and forth because then you lose credibility in the field on both sides of it, right? So I am, by trade, a tank officer.

00:17:47 BRIAN HANCOCK
in the details.

00:17:56 ISMAEL LOPEZ
I no longer have an MOS in the Marine Corps because we did away with tanks. But if I'm out of tanks for three years because I'm serving in a civil affairs capacity or as a foreign area officer, and to say I did my company command time and I come back in and now I'm vying for a staff job or vying for battalion command, me being gone hurts me. It doesn't help me.

00:18:19 BRIAN HANCOCK
Right. They see it like an additional duty. All of the Marine Corps civil affairs officers and NCOs I work with have been nothing but extremely professional and competent. So that is really a shame that that kind of stigma follows.

00:18:34 BRIAN HANCOCK
But I see the chain of logic there. If we are forced to flow through it, the Marine Corps is very agile, turns a little faster than the Army. You've stood up these meth information groups. Where are you going to get the professionals to fill those ranks? At some point, we want to fill them with Marines instead of Army contractors. Right.

00:18:52 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Right.

00:18:52 BRIAN HANCOCK
So this is a capability to do that if you can stay in that field and move through these MOSs. You get three MOSs for the price of one. I thought it was a great idea.

00:19:02 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Yeah. And I hope what you saw is correct. I think that's great. But I also see a challenge with civil affairs, psyops, MISO, very different capabilities. We all work within the information realm. You can't necessarily have a psyoper doing civil affairs and you can't have a civil affairs practitioner doing psyops because the way we approach that is not the same. And that in and of itself is challenging. So I think the Marine Corps really has to work and think through that because there is the influence Marine, which is a Marine that's trained in psyops, cyber and civil affairs. But it's going to take a level of maturity and professional understanding to do each one of those roles and stay in that lane without crossing over and potentially losing your credibility within one of those hats. I could totally see it in a civil engagement where all of a sudden now, because I am a PSYOP -er or because I have my PSYOP hat on, I'm thinking now through the threat lens. well, I'm supposed to be having this friendly conversation. Now it gets out of hand and the person I'm speaking to probably doesn't trust me as much as they initially did. That takes a lot of role -playing, a lot of training, a lot of reinforcing of this is what it is you're doing, vice the other. Yeah.

00:20:25 BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah. Well said. We're hitting the end of our time, so I'm going to ask you my last question, and that's next for Ishmael Lopez.

00:20:34 ISMAEL LOPEZ
So I'm actually rotating out of... first civil affairs group. And I'm going to be joining Six Anglico up in Seattle, Washington joint base. Louis McCord, actually. I'm going to be a salt leader and then potentially transitioning to be the executive officer there. And this is part of the, I have to go back to my primary MOS, even though I don't have one. So I'm not in civil affairs for too long as it hurts my career progression. On the DSCA side of things, We're adding the civil affairs liaison title responsibilities to me specific to humanitarian aid and ODACA. So I'm going to be working closely with the combatant commands, country teams, hopefully the civil affairs schoolhouses across the services to provide HA specific training for civil affairs. And this is just a capability gap that I identified a year ago. So DSCA, we provide training to security cooperation professionals. But what they do is very different than what civil affairs does. So tailoring the training for the civil affairs audience. So very excited about the new opportunity. That's outstanding.

00:21:48 BRIAN HANCOCK
outstanding. And I think you've identified a good opportunity there. I graduated from the civil military operations planners course there at Moss, and we didn't spend much time on this. It's a short course, of course, and you can't do everything. A little bit more robust opportunity for HADR and ODACA. Those are nothing but win -win missions, and you do them at every phase of conflict, including competition. So huge opportunity there. Whoever ends up getting you is going to be very lucky. You're an amazing Marine and a great person. So thank you for taking your time. If the audience has questions, feel free to write to One Civil Affairs Podcast, and we'll do our best to make a connection. Thanks again for your time, Ishmael, and have a good evening, Al.

00:22:39 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for the opportunity, and very kind.

214: Ismael Lopez on OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief (Part I)

Welcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, Brian Hancock interviewed Ismael Lopez about OHDACA and Humanitarian Relief and his experiences as a Marine Civil Affairs Officer. 

Brian's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-j-hancock/

Ismael's profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishrlopez/ 

Transcript available below.

---

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

---

Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

---

Special Thanks to the creators of Jazz & Bossa Cafe for the sample of Positive March Music. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHeCxa0rMQ4

---

Transcript:

00:00:05 BRIAN HANCOCK
Welcome to One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today we have with us Major Ismael Lopez to discuss civil affairs, special missions, and the ongoing relief effort in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Lopez is the Excess Property Program Manager for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. He's also a major in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. where he serves as the Latin American Foreign Area Officer and Detachment Commander with the 1st Civil Affairs Group. At DSCA, he oversees ODACA -funded Humanitarian Assistance, HA, supporting disaster relief and capacity -building efforts in over 28 countries, including the responses in the Afghanistan refugee crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, and humanitarian support to Gaza. In his expanded role, he acts as a liaison for civil affairs, focusing on training, project continuity, and aligning civil affairs efforts with strategic goals.

00:01:09 BRIAN HANCOCK
With over 15 years of experience in security cooperation, Mr. Lopez has supported humanitarian assistance operations globally, including key relief efforts following Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Iota. Major Lopez, welcome to the show.

00:01:25 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Thank you, Brian.

00:01:26 BRIAN HANCOCK
Boy, you've been busy.

00:01:27 ISMAEL LOPEZ
I certainly have. Unfortunately, I've been really busy to do the things that I love.

00:01:32 BRIAN HANCOCK
Now, let's talk a little bit about this mysterious full -time job that you do, the excess property manager for a defense security cooperation agency. Security cooperation being one of the three most important missions in the world, in my opinion. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do as the excess property manager? And if you're in the business of giving away property, how do I sign up for this?

00:01:54 ISMAEL LOPEZ
What's funny is that, as you mentioned that, There is a running joke down at the Southcom HA office where they say, if you need a new refrigerator, Ish is the guy to call. Basically, what I do in a nutshell is I work with the combat commands and all the way down to the country teams to identify partners, to provide them non -lethal excess property in an effort to achieve very specific objectives in the country. What the program does is it'll take items that are basically pretty much brand new to a little bit of wear and tear, which we can refurbish in our warehouses. And then we issue them out or we donate them to the partner with the intention of meeting a very specific objective in that country. So aside from that, I also support DOD humanitarian aid efforts for any initiatives that are... utilizing the overseas humanitarian disaster and civic aid. So in a nutshell, that's pretty much what I do. And yeah, if you need a fridge, if you need a microwave, if there is an effect that could be achieved by me donating it to you, sure.

00:03:06 BRIAN HANCOCK
We're expanding NATO a little bit. And many of the NATO countries, about 32 of them, they're putting a little bit more money into defense these days for a wide variety of reasons. And if they decide they want to send up a new office somewhere in Poland or something like that, How would they go about saying, hey, all those esks and chairs and things that you have in Dermo, we'd like some of that. And who pays the shipping?

00:03:29 ISMAEL LOPEZ
The folks sitting in NATO would have to work with ODC and Poland first. They will validate that requirement, then submit it on up to UCOM. UCOM will have their lawyers look at it. And then from there, it will make its way up to DSCA for execution. Now, what pays for all this is the Odaka appropriations that gets earmarked from the Odaka budget that provides transportation for this program. So the program comes at no cost. It's all funded exclusively through the Odaka appropriation.

00:04:05 BRIAN HANCOCK
Awesome. Let me talk a little bit more about that and ask you a few questions. Odaka is kind of a hidden gem that a number of us in the civil affairs community know about. Many other people don't, and you can definitely achieve effects with this, especially in competition, which is something that we're, I think, as a joint combined army, really struggling with, is how we get after having those influence and deterrence effects in the competition phase. ODACA is one of those tools that's available to us. It's the Overseas Humanitarian Disaster and Civic Aid Fund. Now, I have very limited experience with that program. Can you tell the audience a little bit more about the ODACA creation, how large it is, what it usually funds?

00:04:54 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Yeah, absolutely. I'm able to see it from two perspectives, right? I'm able to see this from my seat at DSCA and then my seat in the reserve component as a civil affairs officer, where to your earlier point, ODACA is a bit of this hidden gem and it could be leveraged to help. achieving effects in the competition phase, but where there are issues is the lack of understanding of what you can and cannot do with the appropriation or how you can actually link it to creating those effects. And I get that because rewind the clock back to 2013 when I first delved into civil affairs, one of the metrics that are utilized to determine our success in country is How many projects can you nominate or how many projects did you complete? So then when you're aiming to achieve or hit that metric, you're not necessarily looking at the linkage. You're almost betting on that someone will create that linkage for you that you're providing the activity in support of. So Odaka, generally speaking, we're looking at about $26 to $30 million a year. But then that money... gets divvied up across the combatant commands and is prioritized based off of national defense strategy. So if it's called out very specifically country X or region Y is the priority when it comes to DoD humanitarian aid efforts, then preponderance of that money will be earmarked for that country or that region globally. Once you pull the thread on that, then there's different tiers. for the countries that are located in that combatant command or in that region of the world, and we're able to allocate money for those countries as well. Where it gets tricky is that what will factor into it is how proactive and how thorough the ODCs and the SCOs are with executing those HA projects and then the end -use monitoring piece of it. So their requirements are tied to these project nominations. The country team, the HA managers, the civil affairs teams that are assigned to or are deployed in that country are not providing the feedback necessary to determine the return on investment. Then the following year, what could end up happening is this country is a priority, but what we're not able to tell Congress is, are we actually achieving the effects that we're desiring in that country or in that region? And if we can't answer that with tangible metrics, then that will factor into a reduction of ODACA funding for the following year. Recently, in Indo -PACOM, the focus has been very heavy on the mill -to -mill engagement piece. What is starting to catch up now is the sieve mill piece. And so we have money allocated, but they're sort of playing catch up with the rest of the COCOMs as it pertains to. getting those funds and then executing projects and us being able to sustain them over an extended period of time.

00:08:01 BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, it is a challenging problem set. One of the taskers that we get annually here in our command is to measure the strategic effect of DACA projects, which are largely tactical, in a bunch of different countries. and were given one week. Now you've got a rotational force here of about 15 civil affairs folks of various persuasions. Maybe a couple of them can be dedicated to that task. They had nothing to do with the inception of these projects. They were not part of the construction. They saw none of the... assessment or staff estimate documents related to them. All they saw was probably, if they're lucky, the proposal that went into the website to get them. And they don't have time to do extensive interviews or measurement. And it's pretty tricky to take something very tactical and then indicate not as an MOP you completed the project, but as an MOE it actually influenced the local populace towards U .S. and NATO objectives. That is a very tough thing to do mathematically, especially without the data, documents, and time to be able to do that.

00:09:18 ISMAEL LOPEZ
is a

00:09:28 BRIAN HANCOCK
What is the standard that is accepted by the panel who's controlling those funding and appropriations? What realistically do you have to prove?

00:09:39 ISMAEL LOPEZ
So this has been a challenge for several years now. I saw it firsthand. As a civil affairs team leader in the South Com AOR, where I deployed to support a very specific commander, but as a, hey, by the way, while you're down there, there's these products that were funded several years ago. Do you mind taking a look? No context behind it. I can't do pre and post surveys on the local populace because I don't know what it was or what the baseline was prior to the construction or the completion. And then now. So it was very arbitrary. It was very much, yeah, it's good. Is the government still funding it? Sure. Are they employing people that are maintaining it? Sure. And I think back then, 2013, 2014 timeframe, I think the blanket answer to all that was, we're countering Russia, China. And so as long as you were saying that, then it was all gravy. And we've obviously have evolved from that to we're now tying these very tactical actions. to operational objectives, right? So are we supporting CoCom LOEs? And if we're supporting CoCom LOEs at the minimum, we understand that we should be integrated into strategic objectives, right? Because the LOEs are derived from those strategic documents. And we've gotten to that point, but now where we are able or unable to get that data or the metrics. really falls on the lack of funding to do it. So the easy button is, well, you have your security cooperation professionals that are assigned to the embassies. They should be. They can do that. Yeah. But the reality is all embassies, regardless of the size, they are overextended and under -resourced. So they're always dealing with VIP visitors. They're dealing with taskings from the State Department. They have their steady state activities they have to be supporting, and they're falling in on, let's just say, 30 projects over the last three years. And, oh, by the way, all these assessments need to be done, but your TDY funds are X. And there's no way of doing it. So then it trickles down to, hey, do we have any civil affairs teams coming downrange? Can they support? And I think we've gotten to a bit of a sweet spot. is this mutual understanding that civil affairs teams in country, as long as they're not being detracted from their main mission, are able to provide some sort of support in conducting those surveys and assessments. However, it's still not the right answer because they're falling in on rudimentary information, background information, and it's still very much from their perspective. At DSCA, we have increased our budget for AM &E purposes to help country teams that are in the red, so to speak, when it comes to conducting these assessments, especially countries that are a priority where we understand, hey, we need to continue engaging on the HA side of things and not the MIL side of things. So we need to get as close to valid or reality as we can. So we have contractors now that are assigned to the combat commands, folks within my office that can. be requested to go out and support. And again, we're working across the command and commands to see as appropriate where we can support. So a lot of work still has to be done there. But again, looking back to 10 years ago, even five years ago, I think across the board, DOD has gotten significantly better at providing metrics to validate activities vice. simply stating we're countering Russia and China and we're going to call it good.

00:13:35 BRIAN HANCOCK
As they should. All of these projects should be tied to a line of effort, tied to a strategic effect that's in line both with the COCOM and the chief of mission. And then you would need a way to measure them at a granular level and then aggregate them to measure progress against a line of effort aligned to strategic intent. I don't think that framework has been built. I hope we eventually get there. If you ask some of the SCAs in the embassy, at best, they're going to give you anecdotal information. So there's a lot of things that we would have to do. And if we send a civil affairs team, depending on their training and background, that can be more or less successful. Now, you're probably tracking that in the Army side of civil affairs, we've built that 38 golf program where I can have an engineer with 20 years of experience. It seems to me that's the guy we should be attaching. to a civil affairs team to go do one of these assessments. What do you think?

00:14:33 ISMAEL LOPEZ
I completely agree with that. And that's 100 % a step in the right direction. On the Marine side of the house, we sell the capability for civil affairs to do engineering assessments, bridge assessments. And I'm like, who here is an engineer? Who amongst us realistically do that? I mean, one example is I got asked to do a port assessment in Panama. And if you look at the J -SIMS form, It's very, very specific, very detailed, talking depth of water. And how am I supposed to do that? But A, because you're in the environment and you're there, you claim as a capability that you're able to do that, then go on and do great things. And I think one of two things need to happen. Either one, we need to re -wicker the capability to a more realistic set or... Very similar to the 38 golf program is start incorporating or cross -training those specialized folks that can actually bring that capability to bear and then have that as part of the team. And then now we're being more honest with what it is that we can do in our assessments and the information that we're providing to hire. Right.

00:15:41 BRIAN HANCOCK
I appreciate that. I watched as the Navy discontinued its civil affairs program. Obviously, the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy, so I don't want to. miscommunicate that. But the Navy had its own civil affairs for a while. And when we as the Army Civil Affairs came out and were asked to do port assessments in Rim of the Pacific, quite frankly, we couldn't do it. And we had functional specialists because there's quite a bit of difference between a great engineer who's used to large infrastructure and other things go out and assess the full range of capabilities of a port, especially after a major disaster. We had to bridge that gap. We had to go to German portmasters, which is great when you're working with combined partners. I think that's an opportunity. And they knew this business, soup and nails. They went out there and everything on the Jason and more they did and could even do follow -ups to see the progress as repair work was going on. That was fantastic that we had a joint partner. I don't think we have an organic capability in DOD to do things like that. And when we're talking having to project power to your port of debarkation, that seems like a gap that we need to fill right now.

00:16:59 ISMAEL LOPEZ
Yeah, I agree. And I have some good news for you. The Navy is reconstituting their civil affairs program. When we were out at Balakatan in the Philippines last spring, we had a full -up Navy civil affairs team. I was the first of its kind in this reconstituted form, but I was part of a combined Marine Navy team in the Philippines. So Big Navy has realized that understanding where we're going as DOD, that they're bringing it back. And hopefully that's part of the equation there. I hope so. One of the reasons it was closed down is because the way they scoped their mission for Naval Civil Affairs.

00:17:34 BRIAN HANCOCK
of the reasons it was closed down is because the way they scoped their mission for Naval Civil Affairs. was somewhat redundant with what the Army and the Marine Corps were already doing. So instead of focusing on those things where they have almost unique capabilities, such as assessing aquaculture and water -based commerce and those effects and the port stuff, they were doing a lot of land -based types of assessments and other things. And I think they became a victim of budget shortfall if they were seen as a redundant capability. both in the Army and the Marine Corps, you and I both have responsibility since we both need naval partners to do our job to help shape their burgeoning program and make sure as it's resetting that it doesn't make some of the mistakes that were made previously and help them be a vibrant addition to our larger civil affairs community because I think we really need them.

00:18:32 ISMAEL LOPEZ
I wholeheartedly agree. There are fortunate scenarios. When you look at the reserve component where you can have these very uniquely trained individuals that can come in. I had a ship captain as a corporal, so he could speak to that. But that is luck, right? I shouldn't be planning on, I'm going to have these uniquely talented and experienced folks that are going to be able to pour a mission set. Now,

00:19:01 BRIAN HANCOCK
you're a major in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. and you serve as commander of Detachment 3, the first civil affairs group. What is that like? What's a day look like on that job for you?

00:19:15 ISMAEL LOPEZ
So at first, it's been the funnest job that I've had. I was a civil affairs team leader before, but as a commander, it's been more fulfilling because I'm able to... lead and mentor Marines who are interested in this space or really want to make a difference and have a better understanding of how their actions support operational and strategic objectives. I think that's often missed by the less experienced civil affairs Marines. My typical day as a commander is just dealing with admin, to be honest. It's making sure that my Marines are able and ready to deploy, enabling them to be able to go and execute the mission. is really what I spend a majority of my time doing.

00:20:01 BRIAN HANCOCK
Let's talk a little bit more about that training piece. I know you kind of build it. A lot of things you do as admin, but part of readiness is being able to do your job. The Marine is an expeditionary force, perhaps becoming even more expeditionary with the expeditionary advanced base operations construct the chief of the Navy signed off on. So very interesting training opportunities for the fleet right now. And you mentioned Balakatan and some of those other exercise -type missions that you've done. And I know you've probably done Marine Corps Warfighting exercise and mentioned JRTC. But what are some of these other missions you've done? You've talked about a dock -up. A dock -up is joined at the hip with Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief, HADR. The Navy has a huge role in HADR for just a whole bunch of reasons. Has your detachment participated in any HADR missions? Is that another training opportunity that you have with your Marines and detachment?

213: Colleen Ryan on OSCE and European Border Security

Today, we welcome Colleen Ryan from OSCE, border training and management. We brought her on today to discuss the current challenges of border security in Europe. 

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

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Special thanks to the site "Rockstar Beats" for the sample of Taylor Seift "Midnight."
Retrieved from: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXyd0iAdUYUWN7ifYYoqymNqJsaE0vEDC&si=-Vp6gUuRpqpHq66D

 

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Transcript:

00:00:04    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. Or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassos.org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:39    Colleen Ryan
My name is Colleen Ryan. I'm currently the Border Advisor to the OSC in Vienna. I'm seconded by the United States. So I do need to make it clear that I'm not speaking on behalf of the OSC or on the broader political or organizational context right now. I'm specifically focusing on my work and my experiences. Wow. You're seconded? What does that mean? Yeah, I'm essentially loaned out by the U .S. to the OSCE to serve in this role. They pay my salary.

00:01:13    Jack
Nice. How did you get nominated? Where do you normally work?

00:01:15    COLLEEN RYAN
In a past life, I was a police officer back in the U .S. before transitioning to working internationally. So I came to find out about OSCE and opportunities while I was doing my master's back in the States. And then I just ended up applying for the special monitoring mission to Ukraine. So I was out there as a monitoring officer up until Russia's full -scale invasion. And then went back during the war with a non -governmental organization working on humanitarian protection in the South. And then made my way to this current role. That's great. So you've been part of living history in a way. Yeah, to be out in Donetsk up until a couple days before the invasion. Working with border guards all across Europe and the changing security landscape has been an interesting role so far.

00:02:04    JACK GAINES
So you've lived what soldiers call the moment before. There's a feel in the air, and it makes you edgy, it makes you a little twitchy, because you know that you're about to go down with an enemy. And so did you get that sense? Did you get that feel that things were coming close in Donetsk?

00:02:23    COLLEEN RYAN
We were there at the time to monitor the Minsk agreements, which was a ceasefire at the time. It wasn't until when the U .S. evacuated all U .S. personnel that you started to realize that, you know, it may actually happen.

00:02:36    JACK GAINES
Right. And so your current position is now training the border guards of Ukraine.

00:02:44    COLLEEN RYAN
Yes, I manage a project that trains border guards across the OSCE, specifically on detecting porch documents and imposters. So if it's a forged passport presented at the airport or at the road crossing or for the train, we train the border guards, whether it's from Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Albania. So it really depends on the needs of OSC participating states in this realm. It's obviously a field that requires recurrent training because travel documents like passports are constantly updated. that national authorities can stay ahead of forgers. So it is something that we have to continue training on. And with the current war against Ukraine, they have the most need. They're one of the bigger border services in Europe. And then just the need in terms of half their border guard is currently engaged in combat operations, while you have the rest who are working to secure their western and southern borders and the surge in western and southern border crossings with the closure of Ukraine's airspace. You know, all of that contributes to an ongoing need for these skills and updated training on detecting passport forgeries and detecting imposters. And then you see that on the flip side with Moldova, they've seen a surge in the border crossings because a lot evacuated from Ukraine into Moldova. A lot of humanitarian NGOs and other people now fly into Kijanel to go to Ukraine. And so they've seen just a huge... spike in terms of the number of travel documents and also diversity in terms of different countries, different types of documents. And so that's why we've also been training Moldovan border police as well.

00:04:29    JACK GAINES
Sure. So you're there to teach them how to spot forged documents, but is there also a follow on either by that nation's foreign affairs office or their law enforcement that tries to find the forger and remove them?

00:04:43    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, there is very likely follow on. in terms of criminal investigations when they find forged documents or if they identify an imposter. But our project primarily focuses on those who are working on the first line and second line document checks to just spot the person posing as someone else. And then we do some work with the forensic experts after the fact to make sure that they've got that next level of training as part of their investigations. But primarily it's focusing on the first and second line officers.

00:05:14    JACK GAINES
I'm sure they see all kinds of crazy stuff. Everything from the amateur glue stick to people who actually have passport printer creating forged documents.

00:05:24    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, it's sad and it's also really interesting, the surge in the use of artificial intelligence and seeing the ways that they're incorporating things like morphing into the passport to their forgeries where two people can now travel on one passport using morphing images and things like that. It really just shows how quickly this field in terms of document forgeries is evolving and how much border services are struggling to keep up and to maintain their training so they can spot these techniques. Right, which is why they're starting to put chips and other special films that have a radio signature and stuff like that.

00:05:53    JACK GAINES
they're starting to put chips and other special films that have a radio signature and stuff like that. You could print it, but to actually find those films or chips that have that radio signature has got to be a lot tougher.

00:06:08    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, and a lot of it is just down to, like, Order guards are under a lot of stress and pressure and they don't have much time to spot the fakes. They're getting crushed by people. Yeah. So a lot of it is just making sure that they can spot some of these easier to identify orgery trends and to make a quicker decision before it gets to the point of really having to do an in -depth examination of the document.

00:06:32    JACK GAINES
Yeah, I would imagine that you would see forgery trends because people would be going to the same forger and they would be doing similar patterns until that turned away.

00:06:41    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah.

00:06:41    JACK GAINES
And what's it like working with all these different border guards from different countries? I mean, everyone has got to be a little different, but the same.

00:06:49    COLLEEN RYAN
For me, it's interesting because I'm one of the few who has worked in policing, worked in this operational arena, kind of understands a lot of what they've done. And so you kind of speak the same language. It's interesting to hear from them, like what they view as their biggest security challenges and what their biggest day -to -day challenges are in terms of their work life. Because you see common trends across a lot of the services. A lot of them can be underpaid and that contributes to staff turnover. And so then that means you go back to a country to do more training because you have new staffs. But then to see how a country's security... You know, their perspective in terms of their biggest border security threats in Albania, where I trained in June, might be different from Bulgaria, where I trained last month. But, you know, it's still the commonalities of document forgeries, imposters, making sure your airports are secure and things like that. So I like talking with the border guards, such a different perspective across each country. Right.

00:07:51    JACK GAINES
I think that's really helpful that you have a law enforcement background. helps break that ice.

00:07:58    COLLEEN RYAN
I understand the perspective, but we're really just there to help and to fill the gaps that their service might not have the time or the funding to provide additional training because they've got the whole spectrum of border security issues to deal with within their service. And so that's where our organization or other international organizations doing these types of projects come in is just fill the gaps and help them develop their capacity. Especially with some other countries we train for where Frontex, maybe they're not working in that country. So then we can help supplement other EU or Frontex or IOM or UN initiatives and help to harmonize border security standards across Europe, South Caucasus, Central Asia.

00:08:45    JACK GAINES
I don't want to just keep circling around Ukraine. Is there any stories you have from some of the other countries you worked with? What's your favorite beer hall story on those?

00:08:53    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, I mean, most of my stories are with Ukraine because I've trained Ukraine so much. So I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah, I feel very fortunate so far in the last year and a half to have trained almost 50 Ukraine border guards. And I was able to go to meet with their administration and their main forensic center in June to do a needs assessment to see how we could keep supporting. to make sure we weren't duplicating efforts from other international organizations or other bilateral initiatives there because we do know it's a crowded space there.

00:09:28    JACK GAINES
I'm sure talking to them, you could figure out pretty quickly what those border guards needed, even if they were getting training from two or three organizations, if they weren't hitting it on the head. Yeah. And what was nice for us is we were able to actually shadow them on their train from out west as entered from.

00:09:38    COLLEEN RYAN
was nice for us is we were able to actually shadow them on their train from out west as entered from. Shamashil, Poland, and went to Lviv. And so we got to board on the Ukrainian side and just seeing what they're dealing with in terms of doing document checks aboard the trains now and the different challenges they have with that as opposed to what it would be like to check a document at the airport. It's a very different perspective and it gives you insights on things like lighting and being able to see different security features in the passport. With the lighting on the train and the time of day when they're doing the document check, the technical equipment that they have aboard and that may not be connecting to the cell tower or have service as the train moves. And so it gives you a different perspective to actually be there and see it instead of just hearing about it over a Zoom call or in a sterile training environment. And so then building on that. We've been able to take some of those lessons learned and put them into our training where we're encouraging them and reminding them to say, hey, how would you see this in different types of light settings, running different types of simulations, so it more accurately reflects the conditions that they'll be doing the document checks in. So what's coming up next?

00:10:57    JACK GAINES
What's the future of training? Do you have anything interesting coming up that you want to promote?

00:11:02    COLLEEN RYAN
Yes, through the rest of the year, we have a couple more study visits. And these are important because they help the border guards to learn from other counterparts. They will look through how this country that they're visiting manages their forgery desk at an airport or in their border service. And it really helps with networking and sharing more information in terms of what they're seeing in terms of detecting trends or alerts on forged documents. We've got a couple of study visits coming up next week. I'll be in Madrid with another group from Ukraine. The following week, I'll be with Albania and Milan. And then a week after that, I'll be in Dublin, Ireland with forensic experts from Ukraine's border service to round out the year. So it's a busy stretch right now. That's very cool.

00:11:50    JACK GAINES
Do these multinational engagements, do they ever end up with countries with border guards doing a bilateral agreement on border protection? Or do they ever work on... building something like Eurogest, where if they find a forger from multiple countries, they'll work together to try to find out where the route is. Is that multinational cooperation starting to build, or have you seen it?

00:12:14    COLLEEN RYAN
On a smaller level with us, we do see that. So at the operational level with these border guards, even in -country, being able to message colleagues around their own country. Or the experts that do our trainings are active document experts serving in their border service. So now they've got another resource, say, if we're using experts from Spain or the Netherlands or UK or Italy, then these trainees now have another resource to flag potential trends and forge documents or to ask questions if they're unsure. And then, you know, moving ahead, we'll be looking to do some more joint training between two or three countries. Especially if we do it with bordering countries, it will really help that collaboration to, say, connect the two participating states. And now they've got operational contacts to ping across the border to say, hey, we're seeing this. What are you seeing? Things like that. So it's a good opportunity for us to foster that collaboration and increase the information sharing with us through the training or study visits. Right. Because it's so important to have that contact.

00:13:23    JACK GAINES
to have that contact. It's one thing when you see an issue and you want to reach out and you have to make that cold call and figure out who's the right person. It's better if you've made a contact, you know someone from training, you can just say, hey, what's this and what's going on? And they can just plug you in with the right person and then Zoom. You know, a problem's fixed versus making it a whole, oh, you have to talk to our embassy and our embassy has to write our embassy. And so it's great that those kind of cross -border contacts are being made because. Even though so much of Europe is dominated by the Schengen, there's still issues with legal immigration and criminal movement that each country still monitors what's going on and partners. And then those that are outside the Schengen zone, it's just as important for them to actually have that contact so they can partner and work on things to quickly spot forgeries, theft, criminal activity, then stop it before it becomes rampant. So that's awesome.

00:14:22    COLLEEN RYAN
And it's just it's it's the first building block of really increasing that cooperation, especially with your neighboring state and contributing towards that angle of integrated border management and jointly managed VCP. So even being able to have frontline document inspectors from two neighboring countries being able to reach out, that's just your first building block to building that relationship. So, yeah, it's always useful to have those contacts. Must be fun to be in the middle of it. Yeah. And it's really rewarding. To get your group of border officers on day one, you've got 20 to 30 border officers from all across their country, wherever we're training, they're virtual strangers, and to see them learn to open up and engage and to learn from our experts and then start to share some of their challenges with me and to build those relationships, whether it's in a group or with our experts or with OSCE, it's super rewarding because then you just get to keep building from there and asking, okay, what's next? What do you need next in addition to these document trainings? What do your forensic experts need or what do your border control officers need? So, yeah, it's really rewarding to be able to deliver when you've got the funding and you've got the interest of participating states and to help them manage their borders better.

00:15:37    JACK GAINES
You know, we kind of forgot to talk about who OSCE is, Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe. You want to give me a brief overview of what the organization is? Yes. But it does.

00:15:50    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah. So the OSCE is world's largest regional security organization, the state of 57 participating states. And we operate on a consensus -based approach where all participating states have to agree. And we utilize an approach of comprehensive security. And so this really helps us to support our participating states in developing. their security sector and to enhance resilience and to develop capacity to address transnational threats. So my border security management unit is situated within the Transnational Threats Department. So that's our goal is to help participating states build their capacity to confront a wide array of transnational threats that can harm their national security and pan security more broadly. Right. Now, when I think security, I think of NATO.

00:16:38    JACK GAINES
I think of NATO. So you've got to be a little different. NATO is, of course, a military organization that deals with security from conflict, either deterrence or response to conflict or crisis, disaster. What is it that OSCE does in terms of security?

00:16:55    COLLEEN RYAN
Our three dimensions are political, military, economic and environmental, and human dimension. So what you would traditionally think of as human rights. And so being able to take that comprehensive approach opens up. a library of opportunities for us in terms of what we can provide support on. And so my unit's mandate stems from our border security management concept that the OSC Ministerial Council adopted in 2005. So our mandate in terms of border security is pretty broad. And I think our bread and butter really is helping to develop capacity of our participating states and providing technical assistance. I mean, our unique added value is that we can provide this tailored approach and we're pretty responsive when participating states do approach us with needs. So it's a bit different from NATO since we're not providing military support. We're looking at long -term institutional capacity buildings, whether it's in border security, policing, security sector agencies. That's the core of our work. And can you talk about what the application process was like to get involved? It's different for each job. So OSC, you either have secondments, like when I am on, where your national authority nominates you, or you have the professional contract where OSC directly hires you. So for mine, I had to apply through my seconding authority in the U .S., and I was competing amongst the Americans who wanted to be nominated. And so then once I got past that, then the U .S. put my name forward in the process, and then it was straight into the OSC hiring process. It's a written exam, and then it was an oral interview, and then it's shortlisted, and you go from there. But if it's a contracted offer, obviously you skip the secondment stage of it, and it's applying straight to OSC in the typical HR process. So it's a little different. You just have to look at the job posting and if it's a secondment or not.

00:19:01    JACK GAINES
They give you a salary.

00:19:02    COLLEEN RYAN
Do they give you a housing allowance?

00:19:02    JACK GAINES
give you a housing allowance?

00:19:04    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, it's about when I was paying in the U .S. The really fun expense was moving my cats over. So that it's a week in a housing allowance. But it's different for contracted. So it really just depends on which job you're going for, contracted or second.

00:19:22    JACK GAINES
Had you traveled internationally before you joined this position?

00:19:26    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, I had traveled quite a bit. Back when I was still a police officer, I liked to take my leave time to go over to Europe. So I did travel a bit. But never officially. It was always first travel. It was always tourist travel. Yeah, no, I had very, very little duty travel as a cop.

00:19:43    JACK GAINES
But I bet that travel helped with your application to say, yeah, I've been to Europe and I've toured around, even though I was a tourist.

00:19:50    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah, and travel is just a great educator. And I know it's expensive and not everyone can do it. Travel just gives you good life experience, especially if you're doing it solo and traveling in Europe and interacting with different cultures and just finding your way and being able to navigate and step outside of your American comfort zone. If you're looking to work internationally, in addition, obviously, to the job experience and language and whatnot, travel is just such a good educator and a good way to end your horizons. Right. And I'll tell you what, traveling and living someplace,

00:20:23    JACK GAINES
living someplace, It's a whole new experience because you learned the trains when you traveled, but now you got to find out, get a lease and what that takes.

00:20:32    COLLEEN RYAN
Yeah. And then if you don't speak German or you don't speak the local English, that adds another layer of complexity. So yeah, you're absolutely right. The difference between living somewhere and traveling is huge.

00:20:43    JACK GAINES
But it's fun. And actually, once you've lived overseas, you start to do quirky things, I find. Like, I'll travel and I'll go to a grocery store just to see how they do their business there. Yeah. You know, you go to restaurants, but see how laundry is done or, you know, just how the public services are done because you think, man, if I had to live here, I'd have to drag my trash to the backyard this time. Or over here, they take it on the street or the Germans, they have to have a lockbox.

00:21:12    COLLEEN RYAN
What's been really interesting for me is my American friends hear me speak now and they think I'm starting to lose my accent and I can't tell where I'm from or I'll... interact with Europeans over here and they can't quite pick up on my American accent and I think I'm from the UK or Ireland or Australia. So that's been a really interesting experience because I don't think about it. I just talk and just the little things that come when you're living abroad.

00:21:37    SPEAKER_00
Okay. I think we got everything we wanted. Is there anything left that you want to draw on the table?

00:21:44    COLLEEN RYAN
As I've mentioned, I firmly believe that any type of security cooperation, defense cooperation is built on relationships and trust. And so there's two of the Ukrainians in particular that I've become close with because they joined our training last year. And then this year they served as trainers for us and they've joined a few study visits. And so through that, we've developed trust and become friends. So now it's gotten to a point where they know I'm a huge Swifty. Oh, no.

00:22:14    SPEAKER_01
no.

00:22:16    COLLEEN RYAN
You're a Swifty? Yeah.

00:22:16    SPEAKER_01
a Swifty?

00:22:19    COLLEEN RYAN
So they'll ask, oh, what's the Taylor Swift song we should listen to for this trip? Or what's your favorite Taylor Swift song these days? And it's just a funny example of how this all starts with just building those relationships and getting people's trust when you're working with your partner nations. Sure.

00:22:38    SPEAKER_01
I thought maybe you brought Taylor Swift to the border and you couldn't get her across.

00:22:44    COLLEEN RYAN
No, but I did give them Taylor Swift friendship bracelets when I was in Ukraine in June.

00:22:50    SPEAKER_01
Oh my gosh. I was going to say, next time you see them, they'll be like, hey, still have my Taylor Swift. They had them in London last week, so they still have them.

00:22:57    COLLEEN RYAN
week, so they

00:23:02    SPEAKER_01
They probably feel obligated, like I can't take it off. She'll think less of me.

00:23:10    SPEAKER_01
It was quite funny. Cool.

00:23:14    SPEAKER_01
But yeah, you're right. It's those relationships, right? You build them and then you can reach out and the people are there. It's so much easier than a cold call. So much easier. That's half the job.

00:23:25    COLLEEN RYAN
On one hand, you can joke about Taylor Swift, but then on the other, they can come to you with more training needs or more requests for specific areas of engagement.

00:23:34    SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they know they're safe to do it. Yeah, exactly. By just talking to you. Yeah.

00:23:39    SPEAKER_01
Well, cool. Okay. Well, I got it. And I will say just one more thing that I should mention.

00:23:43    COLLEEN RYAN
I will say just one more thing that I should mention. I'm able to do all this work because I'm very lucky that the U .S. mission has fully funded my project and recognize the importance of OSCE as a multilateral line of effort to strengthen international security and broaden our engagement. Honestly, the amount of funding they've given me has been a huge boost and really made this work possible. So I feel like I have to give them a shout out here.

00:24:11    SPEAKER_01
Cool. All right, Coley. Well, thanks a bunch. All right.

212: Christopher Meyer on PRC strategic corruption and political warfare (Part II)

Today, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. 

In this the second of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. 

Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/
Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/
---

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

---

Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

---

Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ

---

Today, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. 

In this the first of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. 

Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/
Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/
---

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

---

Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ

---

Transcript

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U.S.

00:00:44    SAM COOPER
official and China expert during the Bush I and II administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the first of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started.

00:01:07    SAM COOPER
Today I'm excited to introduce Chris Myers. Chris is a longtime China expert and former U .S. government diplomatic and economic issues officer, and he explains how military intelligence and influence networks embedded deeply with organized crime are a central feature of the global strategy employed by the families that really are running communist China. And when I say that, we're going to discuss your research on the family of Xi Jinping, the Xi family, and you call it the Yezi clique. But first, tell our viewers your background in getting into China and your career.

00:01:46    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Thank you very much, Sam. I started a keen interest in China when I was 16. And I read the history of the opium wars and I was outraged. And I decided I wanted a career to be involved in business and diplomacy between the U .S. and China. And then as an undergrad student, I did research on the special economic zones. This was in the early 80s and the special economic zones were just announced. And my research led me to see the geopolitical aspects. There were some. across from Macau, across from Hong Kong, and across from Taiwan. So I sort of had an eye to that. And then I did business. I was, for five years, I was with a Fortune 500 company. And I had the opportunity to do some business in Xiaomon. And I saw some things that set off alarm bells in my mind. And I kind of filed that. And I had some experiences that informed my research later. I worked in the government in Bush 1 and Bush 2. I was involved in Indo -Pacific affairs. really helping American companies do business in the region, and then became a consultant to part of the government that administered our territories in the Pacific. So I saw some things there that, again, set off alarm bells in my mind. And in 2016, I happened to cross an old colleague who kind of gave me some more information. And basically from 2016 until 2022, I conducted a lot of independent research. I decided I wanted to know exactly what was going on because proxies in the region seemed emboldened to take on the U .S. And they didn't have a government portfolio, but they acted like they did. And so my research sort of started in Micronesia. I had the great opportunity to come across your book. You totally informed. parts of what I was looking at and kind of put the spotlight on what happened in Canada. And I kind of worked the two sides to the middle and conducted most recently research that kind of takes us from Mao Zedong's death until the 90s. And I believe that there was a click. I call it the yes, she click. There were scores to settle. There were powerful families that were on the cusp of greatness or recognition for all their good work, and they were purged. And it led some individuals to become extremely militant in their conduct of political warfare against the U .S. So that sort of sets the table for what we might be talking about.

00:04:28    SAM COOPER
Yeah. So to get into this, let's start with the Ye family. They're mysterious, but for experts, they're very clearly a clan that has tremendous kingmaking power in China. So maybe let's start with who they are and then bridge into how they connect with Xi's father.

00:04:46    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So the patriarch, Lie Jianying, was literally the kingmaker of Mao Zedong. He came from Guangdong province, and he was involved in the very earliest movements of the Communist Party in China. And he fled one of those, I think it was the Guangzhou uprising, with Zhou Enlai, and they escaped to Hong Kong. So Ye Jianying is one of the original revolutionaries in China, and he had the title of Marshal Ye. And when he crossed paths with Mao Zedong, he was actually the aide -de -camp to a very powerful Communist Party operator out of Beijing who had an army of tens of thousands. And he rolled up to Mao and his very small group of long marchers and said, follow us, we're going to Sichuan province. And Mao was like, no, I don't think that's a safe bet. The locals are going to tear you up. And Ye Jianying kind of heard a truth in Mao and he deserted this powerful general and with him brought the code books. So Mao gets Ye Jianying and the code books and he's able to communicate with the Comintern. And lo and behold, that general did get wiped out in Sichuan. He returned to Mao's base. With a few thousand troops from then, Mao became the most powerful leader in the communist ecosystem. So Ye Jianying had a very high regard for Mao. Mao called him the savior of the Communist Party and the Communist Revolution. And so fast forward it right through the revolution. Ye gets a very top position as the party secretary for Guangdong province, the largest and economically most powerful province in the country. And Mao wants to conduct his land reform in Guangdong, just as he does everywhere. And it's a violent thing where landowners are hunted down and put to death. Yeah, because he was a native Cantonese, understood that the landowners in Guangdong were not of the same ilk as those throughout China. They actually worked the lands. They had a very cooperative relationship with labor. And he tried to resist. But Mao forced Lin Biao into Guangdong. And Ye lost his government role. And if he hadn't been in the military, he would have been completely out of power. But because he had a military portfolio, he was able to stay on the peripheries. And he was actually part of the small group that brought down the Gang of Four and ended the Cultural Revolution. So Ye Jianying went through the Mao Zedong grinder, but he did it so early in the 50s that he was able to... maintain power and have it going forward. Another Long March hero was Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhong Chun. And his claim to fame in the Communist Party was he maintained security over the area where Mao was camped in Yan 'an. And he was able to provide Mao and his group with enough security that they could camp there through a winter and survive. Not only that, but he negotiated and he conducted diplomacy with the tribesmen in the Northwest, in Qinghai, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. And he was loved. And he got a lot of rebels and insurgents among these minority populations to join the Communist Party. And Mao gave him great profs for that and referred to him as one of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period. brilliant statesman who was able to ingratiate with the minorities and make them part of the Chinese nation. Unfortunately, though, Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongchun, he was purged, but he was purged later. He was purged in 1962. And from Xi Jinping's age nine until he was 25, Xi Jinping's father was under arrest. Without trial, it was just the culture revolution. He was under arrest because his office published a book that was deemed not flattering to Mao Zedong. Basically, he was promoting some thought within the Communist Party that Mao didn't like. So Xi's father is in jail from 62 to 78. And because Ye Senior and Xi Zhongchun had a relationship, Ye Jianying kind of became a godfather of sorts for Xi Jinping. Xi was sent to work in the countryside and he escaped and he tried to get back to Beijing and it wasn't safe for him to be reunited with his family. And Ye intervened. And Ye made sure that Xi joined the Communist Party, even though these tragedies were all around him, and made sure that he got the semblance of an education, although he really never did. He was a guide for Xi Jinping throughout his younger years. in place of his father.

00:10:02    Sam Cooper
Before we continue how those families dovetail together, can you describe in China's political economy, what is the power of Marshal Ye?

00:10:13    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So in the 50s, he was jettisoned out of the political arena. His main work was in the PLA. He was a marshal and he became minister of defense in China. And he was responsible for procurement. And to sort of give you a sense, when the Korean War started, the United Nations put a blockade on trade with China because they were arming the North Korean army. Marshal Yeh was responsible for making sure that supplies got to North Korea. And that was a big role that he fulfilled. And his sons kind of brought that along. So it's curious because Marshal Yeh was one of the most powerful stars in the communist lineup, but he was also a minority. He was from Guangdong and he was a Haka Chinese. So some people would say that Haka Chinese within China, there's a lid sometimes on their ability to move up. And so perhaps he was never considered for the echelon, but he did arise very high. But in some ways, and his sons adopted this even more so, they had to become very combative. in their political dealings. But no doubt about it, Marshal Yeh had a chance to handle huge volumes of military supplies, and there was an opportunity to skim and generate great wealth, which probably was the case. The way that Marshal Yeh fulfilled the supply chains for the North Korean army was through organized crime. And it just happened that two of The individuals, Henry Falk and Stanley Ho, were also Hakka Chinese. And they became the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Both of them are on record as saying they made their fortunes supplying the Korean War.

00:12:15    SAM COOPER
Right. So people that read my book are very familiar with Stanley Ho, according to U .S. government intelligence. the absolute king of Chinese international mafia with connectivity to casinos, banking, political influence operations in Canada, triad leadership in Canada. So I think we've set the table for the 90s in Guangdong, Fujian. Xi Jinping is now starting to come on the scene politically there. The Ye family, who were partners essentially of Xi's father. had a little bit of a godfather eye on Xi's movements within the party. We can say that they're the power behind a throne that they want to see continue to rise. So can you take us into the 90s, the sort of Stanley Ho connectivity to Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and how that combines the Hong Kong tycoons slash triad leaders with the communist powers in Fujian?

00:13:21    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yes. Mao passed away in 78. Deng Xiaoping came to power. And Deng was all about economic reform and catching up to the West. So in southern China, Fujian and Guangdong province, Deng looked to Ye Jenying and his sons. His sons were in their 30s now. And he also looked to Xi Zhongshan. Xi Zhongshan became party secretary for Guangdong province. in the early 80s. And Deng kind of put together this group. The Ye's and the Xi's were family friends. They celebrated Chinese holidays together. The Xi's were northern Chinese, but they kind of encamped in Guangdong province after a certain amount of time. And that's where Xi's father retired. But in Guangdong, the son of Ye, his name was Ye Xuanping. Basically, he was mayor of Guangzhou and the governor of Guangdong. And very quickly, he was referred to as the emperor of the south. So in the 80s, he was running Guangdong province. And he became so powerful that the CCP sought to have him step down. And he actually threatened to withhold tax to Beijing from the province of Guangdong unless they negotiated with him. He wanted a vice chair of the CPPCC, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee. And he wants to be a vice governor of the CPPCC. And he wanted to be allowed to maintain his power base in Guangdong. And this is a rare case where the CCP actually deferred to these wishes. Just to get him out of running the most powerful province in China, they said okay. So he goes over the CPPCC. And he takes with him the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Stanley Ho never had a position, but Henry Falk and the other top lieutenants in these organized crime entities all wound up on the CPPCC. And to give you a sense of like, what was some of the magic Stanley Ho had when he won the monopoly on gaming in Macau? He devised this VIP room concept where... He owned the casino, but the VIP rooms were run by basically triads and junkets, powerful friends from mainland China and triads. And the triads conducted all kinds of crime that the Vancouver model got in a very big dose. So it was racketeering and prostitution and all kinds of things, but also collections. So Stanley Ho didn't have to work on collections because his muscle did it for him. But the strongest of these triad operators wound up in the CPPCC, as long as they were effective in what they were doing for the government. And 14K is dominated by Hakka Chinese. Most of the most powerful triads have a very strong Hakka element to it. And I don't mean to suggest that this wonderful race of Chinese called Hakkas is all bad. Lee Kuan Yew, the premier of Singapore, was Hakka Chinese. phenomenal Chinese, but there were also some very nefarious and very effective in their criminal activities that were Haka Chinese. So the Ye's were in the middle of this. And Chinese language social media accounts in Hong Kong will talk about the Ye's dominance over these gaming operators in Macau.

00:17:07    SAM COOPER
Let's get into that and explore that more. I just want to ask a side question. As I'm aware of a very important figure, in what we call the Hoag Commission in Canada. I'm just going to leave it at that. This is our inquiry into foreign interference that stemmed from my investigative reporting. And there is a politician at the center of that that my sources close to them said went off to a haka conference in China for weeks or something like that, you know, while being an elected politician in Canada. Knowing what you know, and I'm just coming out of the blue with this question, is there anything good for Canada that they could be doing on that trip?

00:17:45    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
There could be a lot of normal cultural activity, but I'll say one thing, that the powers that are doing the kinds of things that I'm concerned with are definitely represented in those groups. There might be a wink and a nod and things look very normal on the surface, but there's no free lunch in China. Everybody has to pay the piper, and the piper is the communist party of China.

00:18:11    SAM COOPER
So let me ask you this. Viewers of the Bureau know that I've pressed away in journalism in explaining that the United Front Work Department and international money laundering and organized crime are synonymous. They're one and the same. The CIA says the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference is really the core unit of the United Front. So what you're getting at... I think the Ye family, these power brokers that are behind Xi and his power in southern China, you're saying they essentially formed this United Front and organized crime compact as sort of a political tool, a smuggling tool, a military tool?

00:18:55    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yes. And I want to say that the United Front was an early Communist Party creation. And the thing about the Communist Party... They infiltrated the Kuomintang. When the Kuomintang had more power and they were the power base in China, the communists used political warfare to infiltrate them and really become their undoing. And the United Front is basically one way to get all parts of society under the control of the CCP. So within the United Front, the CPPCC is sort of the big leagues. And all the other organizations are the feeder groups. So if you get in a small united front group and you deliver in a big way, you can get promoted all the way to this PCC. And Ong Lapsung is an example of that. So the whole idea of the united front is to harness and control all the resources from academia, the private sector. from all aspects of society and to make them work for the Communist Party. And I feel that any united front operation, and there's so many in Canada and the U .S., they should just be called assets of the Chinese government. That's one way for the Chinese to increase their headcount of diplomatic officers within any given country.

00:20:26    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U.S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes of One CA Podcast.

 

Episode 2

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U .S.

00:00:44    Introduction
official and China expert during the Bush 1 and 2 administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U .S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the second of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started.

00:01:08    SAM COOPER
I feel that any United Front operation, and there's so many in Canada and the U .S., they should just be called assets of the Chinese government. That's one way for the Chinese to increase their headcount of diplomatic officers within any given country. And they should be labeled that way and they should be treated that way. And they're conducting operations for China. So to get back to the Ye family, I just want to say very briefly, so Deng Xiaoping taps the older brother, Ye, and he's in the government and he has a nine, 10 -year run in Guangdong. The younger brother, his name is Ye Xuanning. He's the dangerous one. He's a real interesting cat. So, yeah. was in college during the Cultural Revolution. And just to give you an idea of the thin ice that you could be skating on in China, he graduated from college and he was thrown in jail. And he was thrown in jail because, you know, Mao wanted to send a signal to the Ye family, I'm in control here. You're not in control. He got out of jail and he had a job in a radio factory or something like that. And he must have been so distraught, he lost his arm in an accident. throwing boxes into a crusher and he lost his arm. So he became a calligrapher with his left hand. And if you know Chinese, like every time you write calligraphy, your hand is going across what you're writing. If you're left -handed, I don't know how he did it. I'm left -handed. And he became an accomplished calligrapher with his left hand. So it just gives you a sense of the spirit of this guy. He's not your normal. person. I think he was a genius. I think he was extremely hardworking. And one of his first positions, he was involved in a small United Front operation in Beijing. Then he became secretary for Kang Xian, who was sort of the head of the oil faction in China. And he was a very powerful individual. And then he found himself in Guangdong. And when his brother was appointed head of the province and the city of Guangzhou, He got into Espionade, and he became the spymaster for the PLA, working in the GDP. And he really had it. He sort of hit his stride there, and that's how he ended his career. The spymaster for the PLA. I think any other rival couldn't even hold a candle to him. He was totally gifted. And his brother and he were able to leverage all of their... contacts with organized crime because he used them in operations around the world. And I think he's the one who weaponized it to the point where, number one, organized crime figures were making money for the military, a lot of it. And number two, they were almost pre -trained in operations. They were bold. They would go anywhere and do anything. And Aung La Pseung is a good example of that.

00:04:11    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
I was going to say, because not everyone knows these names like you and I do, but Enlap Sang, nominally a real estate developer from Macau. My Files, he's a huge international organized crime figure known for the so -called Clinton Gate or White House visits. He's the guy that got next to the Clinton White House or got inside, you know, maybe five to ten times. He ends up getting done, as they say, in a United Nations corruption case, which of course connects to a very important guy in Australia that successfully sued my colleague, John Garneau, and yet is at the top of Chinese organized crime funding Australian politics. He was involved in that FBI case. So to bring it back, what I've picked up in my book and in my repeated reporting efforts at the Bureau is these international Chinese businessmen in real estate and casinos, tech these days, they go around the world, they get next to our politicians, and that's their job. They're being tasked by whoever the Ye family spymaster of today is, is sending them abroad to do that. At some point, Xi Jinping comes into this and says it's okay.

00:05:30    SAM COOPER
okay. And it's still evolving. I mean, I came on to this. When I read your book and I saw your story of Lai Changxin, I said, holy shit, I have to get into this. You see the level of danger that it brings to a country like Canada and North America. But I think that Ye Xuen Ning created the mechanism for the CCP to use and leverage organized crime to,

00:05:51    SAM COOPER
mechanism for the CCP to use and leverage organized crime to, number one, fund military operations. and other things, and to extend influence operations. Like the United Front is all about influence operations. But if you introduce organized crime elements into parts of the United Front, you can weaponize it and you can get a lot more bang for your buck using these nefarious creatures that you're managing, you're controlling them. And I want to mention something. How does the CCP have control over organized crimes? So I want to say, In the late 90s, Macau No. 1 was about to be returned from Portuguese administration to Chinese. And 2, the kind of monopoly of the casinos license was coming up in 2002. And what happened was these triad operators were starting to push back against Stanley Ho. Stanley Ho's right -hand man was shot in the face in Victoria Park during this period. And the Portuguese sent an official to try to calm down the situation. And that individual was shot when he arrived. And the Communist Party kind of went in and took control. When the monopoly came up, Stanley Ho and his family, they got the coverage. But that's because he's completely loyal to the CCP. And so the CCP has so much leverage over these entities. Completely, he devised the strategy to integrate organized crime. And then he passed away in 2016. And then the institutional steps took place after that. They had to transfer from sort of a control of one man to the government running it. And you can see examples around 2016 of a lot of large -scale Chinese operations having disruption during this period. One of the reasons they were able to do this for so long was that Ye Xuanning was completely secretive. I mean, he managed these operations in a very keen and brilliant way, and he was never identified. Xi Jinping's role is interesting. Ye Xuanning told his brothers to help Xi Jinping. And you can kind of see like an increase in their efforts when Xi's father... He was in Beijing, and he had a very high role. He pulled a bureau standing committee, and he was sent down because of Tiananmen. He was on the reformer side, and he publicly admitted it. He was a very admirable individual, and he said he was supporting Hua Guofeng. So he faced early retirement in 1993, and the Ye brothers were so upset about this, and probably Xi too. They sort of doubled down on their efforts on behalf of this political warfare. It's almost as if they were pissed off at the Communist Party, but they took it out on North America. It's like they had to become more radical in what they were doing because in order to get power in China, you had to outflank Li Peng and the hardliners. So there's an interesting element there.

00:09:13    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
You talk about this combination of military intelligence and organized crime. and political warfare and global influence operations. Trade is obviously involved. Explain what you mean by radicalization of that tool in operations.

00:09:31    SAM COOPER
So there were about 10 operations in the 1990s that I believe were masterminded by the Yeshi Clay and primarily Yeshi Ning. The most outrageous, there was one and probably several. smuggling of military -grade machine guns into the U .S. from China. And one of the groups that was set up, helped finance the military, was the Poly Group. And the Poly Group, they were on the bill of lading for these. They were labeled as something else, but they came into the port of Oakland. And the interesting thing was the CEO of Poly Group, who was a princeling himself, was meeting in the White House and had his photo taken with President Clinton. At the time, these machine guns were on the water. That's bold. Yes. And when I ponder this, it's like I know how much the Chinese love photographs. That photo shown by Xi Jinping to all the cronies in Beijing would get him a lot of brownie points. And these machine guns were being distributed to gangs in the area. Street gangs in California. So this kind of thing, right? Right. And so that one was uncovered. But how many others slipped by? And there have been cases similar magnitude in Tennessee and Florida.

00:10:57    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yeah, and this is where it gets into the leaked Sidewinder report that I touched on in the book. But yeah, that report refers to Pauley Group laundering 2 ,000 AK -47s into California. You're saying you believe that not only is Xi Jinping supported by this Ye family intelligence, who I have no problem believing are behind the United Front organized crime nexus. You're saying you think Xi Jinping is a mind involved in this kind of thing as well.

00:11:30    SAM COOPER
Originally, as I was doing my research, I thought Xi was the mastermind. But as I did a deep dive to what his contemporaries said of him, The big knock on Xi was that he wasn't educated. Like age nine to age 25, his dad has been persecuted and locked up without trial. And he's forced to work in the countryside and he's not happy about it. I mean, he wasn't educated. And that's the biggest knock on Xi Jinping. And when you look at the history of Xi in Fujian, first of all, he goes to the Ministry of Defense and then doesn't do... anything of note there as a young man. But then he goes into Hebei province and he's working in Hebei province as a middle level provincial official. And he's not doing much. I mean, his big contribution was suggesting that they film a TV show in that province and kind of burned out. He wasn't favored by the Communist Party officials there. You know, he's brought to Fujian. Communist Party officials bounce around provinces and each time they have an increasing role. Well, he stays in Fujian for 17 years. And it's almost like he's being babysat by the Yehs. And I mean, the Yeh family compound was a two and a half hour drive from where she was in Fujian. And so I don't think he was the mastermind, but he was definitely the beneficiary. And I think that it was a long term project. And the Yeh brothers. put the pieces on the table to help promote Xi Jinping. And here's an interesting thing. In 1997, there was a big Central Party conclave, the 15th Central Party plenary meeting. And Ye wasn't even named as an alternate delegate. So you've got hundreds of delegates coming from all over the country. And he's a princeling. And he's been in provincial government for 12 years. And he's not even named. Somebody forced him onto the list of alternate delegates. There were 150. He was the 151st alternate delegate. He didn't receive one vote. He was pushed on. And I think somebody in the realm said, you know what? We're running all these operations and we're doing it so secretively. Nobody knows that this is for Xi Jinping. So they started gradually to kind of promote Xi as. the mastermind of this. And the years were okay with that. But Xi Jinping was on his way to becoming the leader of China by 2002.

00:14:08    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
And I was over in Taiwan, invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over a year ago with international journalists. And we had kind of a dinner talk where their political intelligence expert was going to talk about some of this Klan details and things like that. And they said, yeah, within the princelings, Xi Jinping was the least likely, the least talented to reach chairman.

00:14:37    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
And so, OK, you know, I'm not the expert. If someone from Taiwan is telling me that, you're saying that. So if true, and you're saying the power behind the throne is this Ye family that boosts him. And they're the ones you're saying that are the masterminds of what I'm going to call modern political Chinese communist warfare using proxies, organized crime, dirty tycoons. So this is where we're going.

00:15:06    SAM COOPER
Yep, this is where we're going. And let me just touch on a few of the operations in the 1990s, just to give you a sense for what was going on and the fact that the Chinese were never completely called out on the carpet for it. Just let them continue doing it. And one of the themes of my research is it's time to call the Chinese out. And to do that, you have to be very specific. I think there needs to be a large group of countries that has their research done and they call out Xi Jinping for this political warfare that absolutely is hyper -destructive.

00:15:41    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So you're saying this is an intelligence operation? Yeah. For the last 10 minutes or so, In direct relationship to this network you're talking about, the 90s, 2000, aggressive combination of international organized crime, Hong Kong tycoons, Macau tycoons, in Chinese military influence operations, also people smuggling, also drug smuggling, illegal migration and, you know, fentanyl. There is a basis that Chinese triads and Mexican cartels are working together on those things and that Canada is a, you could call it, if this is a company, the controlling minds of a lot of this are in Vancouver and Toronto. Canadian ports are very deeply infiltrated by China, along with some Iranian mafia and intelligence. It's a fact. So where do we go from there? I myself, as a Canadian, the good countries of the world need to get together to combat this approaching, if not already into early stages of the access of China, Iran, Russia, North Korea. We're at loggerheads and they're using Canada, I believe, unfortunately.

00:17:01    SAM COOPER
Right. And I do believe that Yeshua Ning is a genius and he looked at North America and he wants to inflict pain on the U .S. When he set up these plans in the early 90s, the Chinese GDP was a fraction of the U .S. So he had a lot of ground to make up. And he chose Vancouver because the resources to combat his efforts were probably deemed to be significantly less than the resources in the U .S. So I feel that the attack on Canada, the Vancouver model. if you will, which spread right across to Toronto and then down into Queens and across to LA and permeates everything. I believe that the US and Canada should try to get on the same page about this and to the extent possible, Mexico as well. And then the UK and Australia haven't been unaffected by this. There should be a big effort to get on the same page with the West because this is a totalitarian regime doing its level best to take us out.

00:18:07    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
The controlling mind, I'm saying, of the Mexican cartels, I think it's Chinese triads. That's the real power there.

00:18:15    SAM COOPER
I think we're both in agreement. If you want to draw a word picture that says what this is, picture that there's a really bad actor and he's throwing a really illegal party and selling drugs and he's bringing it all in. And the U .S. is going after the people who own the land where all of this took place. You have to go after China. And I believe that China is making 98 % of the precursors for fentanyl, and then they're laundering the money. That's the other piece. They're laundering it. They're operating this massive money laundering operation for the cartels. So I say the gloves do come off, but I would love to see them come off in unison. And all of these, at least in North America, Mexico, Canada, and the U .S., we're all on the same page. And we speak with one voice. And I'll add to this. Xi Jinping has been as painful towards his own population as he has been externally and internationally. So he's inflicted pain on the Chinese and he's about to go down. I mean, he's got his wings clipped in the last few months and he may not be in power very long. There's some serious movement in China.

00:19:30    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
You sound like my friend Harry Tsang, the ambassador for Taiwan and Ottawa. He's bearish on Xi Jinping in a big way.

00:19:38    SAM COOPER
Yeah. Well, I think it's a good time for the West to approach China and say, look, we got off on the wrong foot. Let's reboot. And by the way, there's some reparations needed here. 70 ,000 people have been dying a year from this, and it's a Chinese operation. You know, the cartels are definitely part of it, but... I think there's good reason for the West to get on the same page.

00:20:02    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Absolutely. So we will end it there for a first great chat. And I think next time we'll get into the juicy story of Lai Cheng Zing, the bigot China's supposed most wanted. Or what was he? So I'll leave it at that and we'll pick it up next time. You have to say,

00:20:21    SAM COOPER
have to say, I'm sitting there doing my research. I get your book. And all of a sudden, within 50 pages, the lights are going off because you wrote about Lai Changxin and it just completed some thoughts that I was mulling over. And yeah, we're going to have an interesting conversation about Lai Changxin.

00:20:40    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
That touches my heart because I've always been a brother of the United States and I've felt so disheartened that bad people have gotten in between us and we have to stop that. And as you say, we need to get together on this. I've reached some good thinkers in the US and there's now things brewing. So let's keep it going. You got it.

00:21:01    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, One CA Podcast.

211: Christopher Meyer on PRC strategic corruption and political warfare (Part I)

Today, Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, guest hosts Christopher Meyer, a former U.S. official and China expert during the Bush One and Two Administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and founded Wide Fountain, a platform for in-depth geopolitical analysis. 

In this the first of a two-part episode, Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So, let's get started. 

Sam Cooper's The Bureau: https://www.thebureau.news/
Christopher Meyer's Wide Fountain platform: https://widefountain.substack.com/
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association a

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

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Special thanks to Cozy Ambience for a sample of "February Cafe Jazz - Instrumental Bossa Nova Music for Work, Study and Relax - Background Music" retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmq8Ht-sNwQ

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Transcript

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U.S.

00:00:44    SAM COOPER
official and China expert during the Bush I and II administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U.S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the first of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started.

00:01:07    SAM COOPER
Today I'm excited to introduce Chris Myers. Chris is a longtime China expert and former U .S. government diplomatic and economic issues officer, and he explains how military intelligence and influence networks embedded deeply with organized crime are a central feature of the global strategy employed by the families that really are running communist China. And when I say that, we're going to discuss your research on the family of Xi Jinping, the Xi family, and you call it the Yezi clique. But first, tell our viewers your background in getting into China and your career.

00:01:46    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Thank you very much, Sam. I started a keen interest in China when I was 16. And I read the history of the opium wars and I was outraged. And I decided I wanted a career to be involved in business and diplomacy between the U .S. and China. And then as an undergrad student, I did research on the special economic zones. This was in the early 80s and the special economic zones were just announced. And my research led me to see the geopolitical aspects. There were some. across from Macau, across from Hong Kong, and across from Taiwan. So I sort of had an eye to that. And then I did business. I was, for five years, I was with a Fortune 500 company. And I had the opportunity to do some business in Xiaomon. And I saw some things that set off alarm bells in my mind. And I kind of filed that. And I had some experiences that informed my research later. I worked in the government in Bush 1 and Bush 2. I was involved in Indo -Pacific affairs. really helping American companies do business in the region, and then became a consultant to part of the government that administered our territories in the Pacific. So I saw some things there that, again, set off alarm bells in my mind. And in 2016, I happened to cross an old colleague who kind of gave me some more information. And basically from 2016 until 2022, I conducted a lot of independent research. I decided I wanted to know exactly what was going on because proxies in the region seemed emboldened to take on the U .S. And they didn't have a government portfolio, but they acted like they did. And so my research sort of started in Micronesia. I had the great opportunity to come across your book. You totally informed. parts of what I was looking at and kind of put the spotlight on what happened in Canada. And I kind of worked the two sides to the middle and conducted most recently research that kind of takes us from Mao Zedong's death until the 90s. And I believe that there was a click. I call it the yes, she click. There were scores to settle. There were powerful families that were on the cusp of greatness or recognition for all their good work, and they were purged. And it led some individuals to become extremely militant in their conduct of political warfare against the U .S. So that sort of sets the table for what we might be talking about.

00:04:28    SAM COOPER
Yeah. So to get into this, let's start with the Ye family. They're mysterious, but for experts, they're very clearly a clan that has tremendous kingmaking power in China. So maybe let's start with who they are and then bridge into how they connect with Xi's father.

00:04:46    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So the patriarch, Lie Jianying, was literally the kingmaker of Mao Zedong. He came from Guangdong province, and he was involved in the very earliest movements of the Communist Party in China. And he fled one of those, I think it was the Guangzhou uprising, with Zhou Enlai, and they escaped to Hong Kong. So Ye Jianying is one of the original revolutionaries in China, and he had the title of Marshal Ye. And when he crossed paths with Mao Zedong, he was actually the aide -de -camp to a very powerful Communist Party operator out of Beijing who had an army of tens of thousands. And he rolled up to Mao and his very small group of long marchers and said, follow us, we're going to Sichuan province. And Mao was like, no, I don't think that's a safe bet. The locals are going to tear you up. And Ye Jianying kind of heard a truth in Mao and he deserted this powerful general and with him brought the code books. So Mao gets Ye Jianying and the code books and he's able to communicate with the Comintern. And lo and behold, that general did get wiped out in Sichuan. He returned to Mao's base. With a few thousand troops from then, Mao became the most powerful leader in the communist ecosystem. So Ye Jianying had a very high regard for Mao. Mao called him the savior of the Communist Party and the Communist Revolution. And so fast forward it right through the revolution. Ye gets a very top position as the party secretary for Guangdong province, the largest and economically most powerful province in the country. And Mao wants to conduct his land reform in Guangdong, just as he does everywhere. And it's a violent thing where landowners are hunted down and put to death. Yeah, because he was a native Cantonese, understood that the landowners in Guangdong were not of the same ilk as those throughout China. They actually worked the lands. They had a very cooperative relationship with labor. And he tried to resist. But Mao forced Lin Biao into Guangdong. And Ye lost his government role. And if he hadn't been in the military, he would have been completely out of power. But because he had a military portfolio, he was able to stay on the peripheries. And he was actually part of the small group that brought down the Gang of Four and ended the Cultural Revolution. So Ye Jianying went through the Mao Zedong grinder, but he did it so early in the 50s that he was able to... maintain power and have it going forward. Another Long March hero was Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhong Chun. And his claim to fame in the Communist Party was he maintained security over the area where Mao was camped in Yan 'an. And he was able to provide Mao and his group with enough security that they could camp there through a winter and survive. Not only that, but he negotiated and he conducted diplomacy with the tribesmen in the Northwest, in Qinghai, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. And he was loved. And he got a lot of rebels and insurgents among these minority populations to join the Communist Party. And Mao gave him great profs for that and referred to him as one of the heroes of the Three Kingdoms period. brilliant statesman who was able to ingratiate with the minorities and make them part of the Chinese nation. Unfortunately, though, Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongchun, he was purged, but he was purged later. He was purged in 1962. And from Xi Jinping's age nine until he was 25, Xi Jinping's father was under arrest. Without trial, it was just the culture revolution. He was under arrest because his office published a book that was deemed not flattering to Mao Zedong. Basically, he was promoting some thought within the Communist Party that Mao didn't like. So Xi's father is in jail from 62 to 78. And because Ye Senior and Xi Zhongchun had a relationship, Ye Jianying kind of became a godfather of sorts for Xi Jinping. Xi was sent to work in the countryside and he escaped and he tried to get back to Beijing and it wasn't safe for him to be reunited with his family. And Ye intervened. And Ye made sure that Xi joined the Communist Party, even though these tragedies were all around him, and made sure that he got the semblance of an education, although he really never did. He was a guide for Xi Jinping throughout his younger years. in place of his father.

00:10:02    Sam Cooper
Before we continue how those families dovetail together, can you describe in China's political economy, what is the power of Marshal Ye?

00:10:13    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So in the 50s, he was jettisoned out of the political arena. His main work was in the PLA. He was a marshal and he became minister of defense in China. And he was responsible for procurement. And to sort of give you a sense, when the Korean War started, the United Nations put a blockade on trade with China because they were arming the North Korean army. Marshal Yeh was responsible for making sure that supplies got to North Korea. And that was a big role that he fulfilled. And his sons kind of brought that along. So it's curious because Marshal Yeh was one of the most powerful stars in the communist lineup, but he was also a minority. He was from Guangdong and he was a Haka Chinese. So some people would say that Haka Chinese within China, there's a lid sometimes on their ability to move up. And so perhaps he was never considered for the echelon, but he did arise very high. But in some ways, and his sons adopted this even more so, they had to become very combative. in their political dealings. But no doubt about it, Marshal Yeh had a chance to handle huge volumes of military supplies, and there was an opportunity to skim and generate great wealth, which probably was the case. The way that Marshal Yeh fulfilled the supply chains for the North Korean army was through organized crime. And it just happened that two of The individuals, Henry Falk and Stanley Ho, were also Hakka Chinese. And they became the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Both of them are on record as saying they made their fortunes supplying the Korean War.

00:12:15    SAM COOPER
Right. So people that read my book are very familiar with Stanley Ho, according to U .S. government intelligence. the absolute king of Chinese international mafia with connectivity to casinos, banking, political influence operations in Canada, triad leadership in Canada. So I think we've set the table for the 90s in Guangdong, Fujian. Xi Jinping is now starting to come on the scene politically there. The Ye family, who were partners essentially of Xi's father. had a little bit of a godfather eye on Xi's movements within the party. We can say that they're the power behind a throne that they want to see continue to rise. So can you take us into the 90s, the sort of Stanley Ho connectivity to Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and how that combines the Hong Kong tycoons slash triad leaders with the communist powers in Fujian?

00:13:21    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yes. Mao passed away in 78. Deng Xiaoping came to power. And Deng was all about economic reform and catching up to the West. So in southern China, Fujian and Guangdong province, Deng looked to Ye Jenying and his sons. His sons were in their 30s now. And he also looked to Xi Zhongshan. Xi Zhongshan became party secretary for Guangdong province. in the early 80s. And Deng kind of put together this group. The Ye's and the Xi's were family friends. They celebrated Chinese holidays together. The Xi's were northern Chinese, but they kind of encamped in Guangdong province after a certain amount of time. And that's where Xi's father retired. But in Guangdong, the son of Ye, his name was Ye Xuanping. Basically, he was mayor of Guangzhou and the governor of Guangdong. And very quickly, he was referred to as the emperor of the south. So in the 80s, he was running Guangdong province. And he became so powerful that the CCP sought to have him step down. And he actually threatened to withhold tax to Beijing from the province of Guangdong unless they negotiated with him. He wanted a vice chair of the CPPCC, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee. And he wants to be a vice governor of the CPPCC. And he wanted to be allowed to maintain his power base in Guangdong. And this is a rare case where the CCP actually deferred to these wishes. Just to get him out of running the most powerful province in China, they said okay. So he goes over the CPPCC. And he takes with him the kingpins of organized crime in Hong Kong and Macau. Stanley Ho never had a position, but Henry Falk and the other top lieutenants in these organized crime entities all wound up on the CPPCC. And to give you a sense of like, what was some of the magic Stanley Ho had when he won the monopoly on gaming in Macau? He devised this VIP room concept where... He owned the casino, but the VIP rooms were run by basically triads and junkets, powerful friends from mainland China and triads. And the triads conducted all kinds of crime that the Vancouver model got in a very big dose. So it was racketeering and prostitution and all kinds of things, but also collections. So Stanley Ho didn't have to work on collections because his muscle did it for him. But the strongest of these triad operators wound up in the CPPCC, as long as they were effective in what they were doing for the government. And 14K is dominated by Hakka Chinese. Most of the most powerful triads have a very strong Hakka element to it. And I don't mean to suggest that this wonderful race of Chinese called Hakkas is all bad. Lee Kuan Yew, the premier of Singapore, was Hakka Chinese. phenomenal Chinese, but there were also some very nefarious and very effective in their criminal activities that were Haka Chinese. So the Ye's were in the middle of this. And Chinese language social media accounts in Hong Kong will talk about the Ye's dominance over these gaming operators in Macau.

00:17:07    SAM COOPER
Let's get into that and explore that more. I just want to ask a side question. As I'm aware of a very important figure, in what we call the Hoag Commission in Canada. I'm just going to leave it at that. This is our inquiry into foreign interference that stemmed from my investigative reporting. And there is a politician at the center of that that my sources close to them said went off to a haka conference in China for weeks or something like that, you know, while being an elected politician in Canada. Knowing what you know, and I'm just coming out of the blue with this question, is there anything good for Canada that they could be doing on that trip?

00:17:45    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
There could be a lot of normal cultural activity, but I'll say one thing, that the powers that are doing the kinds of things that I'm concerned with are definitely represented in those groups. There might be a wink and a nod and things look very normal on the surface, but there's no free lunch in China. Everybody has to pay the piper, and the piper is the communist party of China.

00:18:11    SAM COOPER
So let me ask you this. Viewers of the Bureau know that I've pressed away in journalism in explaining that the United Front Work Department and international money laundering and organized crime are synonymous. They're one and the same. The CIA says the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference is really the core unit of the United Front. So what you're getting at... I think the Ye family, these power brokers that are behind Xi and his power in southern China, you're saying they essentially formed this United Front and organized crime compact as sort of a political tool, a smuggling tool, a military tool?

00:18:55    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yes. And I want to say that the United Front was an early Communist Party creation. And the thing about the Communist Party... They infiltrated the Kuomintang. When the Kuomintang had more power and they were the power base in China, the communists used political warfare to infiltrate them and really become their undoing. And the United Front is basically one way to get all parts of society under the control of the CCP. So within the United Front, the CPPCC is sort of the big leagues. And all the other organizations are the feeder groups. So if you get in a small united front group and you deliver in a big way, you can get promoted all the way to this PCC. And Ong Lapsung is an example of that. So the whole idea of the united front is to harness and control all the resources from academia, the private sector. from all aspects of society and to make them work for the Communist Party. And I feel that any united front operation, and there's so many in Canada and the U .S., they should just be called assets of the Chinese government. That's one way for the Chinese to increase their headcount of diplomatic officers within any given country.

00:20:26    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U.S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes of One CA Podcast.

 

Episode 2

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today we welcome Sam Cooper, founder of the news outlet The Bureau, as he interviews Christopher Meyer, a former U .S.

00:00:44    Introduction
official and China expert during the Bush 1 and 2 administrations. Meyer currently serves as the head of the U .S. Micronesia Council and is the founder of Wide Fountain. a platform for in -depth geopolitical analysis. This is the second of a two -part episode. Sam and Christopher discuss PRC strategic corruption and political warfare. So let's get started.

00:01:08    SAM COOPER
I feel that any United Front operation, and there's so many in Canada and the U .S., they should just be called assets of the Chinese government. That's one way for the Chinese to increase their headcount of diplomatic officers within any given country. And they should be labeled that way and they should be treated that way. And they're conducting operations for China. So to get back to the Ye family, I just want to say very briefly, so Deng Xiaoping taps the older brother, Ye, and he's in the government and he has a nine, 10 -year run in Guangdong. The younger brother, his name is Ye Xuanning. He's the dangerous one. He's a real interesting cat. So, yeah. was in college during the Cultural Revolution. And just to give you an idea of the thin ice that you could be skating on in China, he graduated from college and he was thrown in jail. And he was thrown in jail because, you know, Mao wanted to send a signal to the Ye family, I'm in control here. You're not in control. He got out of jail and he had a job in a radio factory or something like that. And he must have been so distraught, he lost his arm in an accident. throwing boxes into a crusher and he lost his arm. So he became a calligrapher with his left hand. And if you know Chinese, like every time you write calligraphy, your hand is going across what you're writing. If you're left -handed, I don't know how he did it. I'm left -handed. And he became an accomplished calligrapher with his left hand. So it just gives you a sense of the spirit of this guy. He's not your normal. person. I think he was a genius. I think he was extremely hardworking. And one of his first positions, he was involved in a small United Front operation in Beijing. Then he became secretary for Kang Xian, who was sort of the head of the oil faction in China. And he was a very powerful individual. And then he found himself in Guangdong. And when his brother was appointed head of the province and the city of Guangzhou, He got into Espionade, and he became the spymaster for the PLA, working in the GDP. And he really had it. He sort of hit his stride there, and that's how he ended his career. The spymaster for the PLA. I think any other rival couldn't even hold a candle to him. He was totally gifted. And his brother and he were able to leverage all of their... contacts with organized crime because he used them in operations around the world. And I think he's the one who weaponized it to the point where, number one, organized crime figures were making money for the military, a lot of it. And number two, they were almost pre -trained in operations. They were bold. They would go anywhere and do anything. And Aung La Pseung is a good example of that.

00:04:11    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
I was going to say, because not everyone knows these names like you and I do, but Enlap Sang, nominally a real estate developer from Macau. My Files, he's a huge international organized crime figure known for the so -called Clinton Gate or White House visits. He's the guy that got next to the Clinton White House or got inside, you know, maybe five to ten times. He ends up getting done, as they say, in a United Nations corruption case, which of course connects to a very important guy in Australia that successfully sued my colleague, John Garneau, and yet is at the top of Chinese organized crime funding Australian politics. He was involved in that FBI case. So to bring it back, what I've picked up in my book and in my repeated reporting efforts at the Bureau is these international Chinese businessmen in real estate and casinos, tech these days, they go around the world, they get next to our politicians, and that's their job. They're being tasked by whoever the Ye family spymaster of today is, is sending them abroad to do that. At some point, Xi Jinping comes into this and says it's okay.

00:05:30    SAM COOPER
okay. And it's still evolving. I mean, I came on to this. When I read your book and I saw your story of Lai Changxin, I said, holy shit, I have to get into this. You see the level of danger that it brings to a country like Canada and North America. But I think that Ye Xuen Ning created the mechanism for the CCP to use and leverage organized crime to,

00:05:51    SAM COOPER
mechanism for the CCP to use and leverage organized crime to, number one, fund military operations. and other things, and to extend influence operations. Like the United Front is all about influence operations. But if you introduce organized crime elements into parts of the United Front, you can weaponize it and you can get a lot more bang for your buck using these nefarious creatures that you're managing, you're controlling them. And I want to mention something. How does the CCP have control over organized crimes? So I want to say, In the late 90s, Macau No. 1 was about to be returned from Portuguese administration to Chinese. And 2, the kind of monopoly of the casinos license was coming up in 2002. And what happened was these triad operators were starting to push back against Stanley Ho. Stanley Ho's right -hand man was shot in the face in Victoria Park during this period. And the Portuguese sent an official to try to calm down the situation. And that individual was shot when he arrived. And the Communist Party kind of went in and took control. When the monopoly came up, Stanley Ho and his family, they got the coverage. But that's because he's completely loyal to the CCP. And so the CCP has so much leverage over these entities. Completely, he devised the strategy to integrate organized crime. And then he passed away in 2016. And then the institutional steps took place after that. They had to transfer from sort of a control of one man to the government running it. And you can see examples around 2016 of a lot of large -scale Chinese operations having disruption during this period. One of the reasons they were able to do this for so long was that Ye Xuanning was completely secretive. I mean, he managed these operations in a very keen and brilliant way, and he was never identified. Xi Jinping's role is interesting. Ye Xuanning told his brothers to help Xi Jinping. And you can kind of see like an increase in their efforts when Xi's father... He was in Beijing, and he had a very high role. He pulled a bureau standing committee, and he was sent down because of Tiananmen. He was on the reformer side, and he publicly admitted it. He was a very admirable individual, and he said he was supporting Hua Guofeng. So he faced early retirement in 1993, and the Ye brothers were so upset about this, and probably Xi too. They sort of doubled down on their efforts on behalf of this political warfare. It's almost as if they were pissed off at the Communist Party, but they took it out on North America. It's like they had to become more radical in what they were doing because in order to get power in China, you had to outflank Li Peng and the hardliners. So there's an interesting element there.

00:09:13    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
You talk about this combination of military intelligence and organized crime. and political warfare and global influence operations. Trade is obviously involved. Explain what you mean by radicalization of that tool in operations.

00:09:31    SAM COOPER
So there were about 10 operations in the 1990s that I believe were masterminded by the Yeshi Clay and primarily Yeshi Ning. The most outrageous, there was one and probably several. smuggling of military -grade machine guns into the U .S. from China. And one of the groups that was set up, helped finance the military, was the Poly Group. And the Poly Group, they were on the bill of lading for these. They were labeled as something else, but they came into the port of Oakland. And the interesting thing was the CEO of Poly Group, who was a princeling himself, was meeting in the White House and had his photo taken with President Clinton. At the time, these machine guns were on the water. That's bold. Yes. And when I ponder this, it's like I know how much the Chinese love photographs. That photo shown by Xi Jinping to all the cronies in Beijing would get him a lot of brownie points. And these machine guns were being distributed to gangs in the area. Street gangs in California. So this kind of thing, right? Right. And so that one was uncovered. But how many others slipped by? And there have been cases similar magnitude in Tennessee and Florida.

00:10:57    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Yeah, and this is where it gets into the leaked Sidewinder report that I touched on in the book. But yeah, that report refers to Pauley Group laundering 2 ,000 AK -47s into California. You're saying you believe that not only is Xi Jinping supported by this Ye family intelligence, who I have no problem believing are behind the United Front organized crime nexus. You're saying you think Xi Jinping is a mind involved in this kind of thing as well.

00:11:30    SAM COOPER
Originally, as I was doing my research, I thought Xi was the mastermind. But as I did a deep dive to what his contemporaries said of him, The big knock on Xi was that he wasn't educated. Like age nine to age 25, his dad has been persecuted and locked up without trial. And he's forced to work in the countryside and he's not happy about it. I mean, he wasn't educated. And that's the biggest knock on Xi Jinping. And when you look at the history of Xi in Fujian, first of all, he goes to the Ministry of Defense and then doesn't do... anything of note there as a young man. But then he goes into Hebei province and he's working in Hebei province as a middle level provincial official. And he's not doing much. I mean, his big contribution was suggesting that they film a TV show in that province and kind of burned out. He wasn't favored by the Communist Party officials there. You know, he's brought to Fujian. Communist Party officials bounce around provinces and each time they have an increasing role. Well, he stays in Fujian for 17 years. And it's almost like he's being babysat by the Yehs. And I mean, the Yeh family compound was a two and a half hour drive from where she was in Fujian. And so I don't think he was the mastermind, but he was definitely the beneficiary. And I think that it was a long term project. And the Yeh brothers. put the pieces on the table to help promote Xi Jinping. And here's an interesting thing. In 1997, there was a big Central Party conclave, the 15th Central Party plenary meeting. And Ye wasn't even named as an alternate delegate. So you've got hundreds of delegates coming from all over the country. And he's a princeling. And he's been in provincial government for 12 years. And he's not even named. Somebody forced him onto the list of alternate delegates. There were 150. He was the 151st alternate delegate. He didn't receive one vote. He was pushed on. And I think somebody in the realm said, you know what? We're running all these operations and we're doing it so secretively. Nobody knows that this is for Xi Jinping. So they started gradually to kind of promote Xi as. the mastermind of this. And the years were okay with that. But Xi Jinping was on his way to becoming the leader of China by 2002.

00:14:08    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
And I was over in Taiwan, invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over a year ago with international journalists. And we had kind of a dinner talk where their political intelligence expert was going to talk about some of this Klan details and things like that. And they said, yeah, within the princelings, Xi Jinping was the least likely, the least talented to reach chairman.

00:14:37    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
And so, OK, you know, I'm not the expert. If someone from Taiwan is telling me that, you're saying that. So if true, and you're saying the power behind the throne is this Ye family that boosts him. And they're the ones you're saying that are the masterminds of what I'm going to call modern political Chinese communist warfare using proxies, organized crime, dirty tycoons. So this is where we're going.

00:15:06    SAM COOPER
Yep, this is where we're going. And let me just touch on a few of the operations in the 1990s, just to give you a sense for what was going on and the fact that the Chinese were never completely called out on the carpet for it. Just let them continue doing it. And one of the themes of my research is it's time to call the Chinese out. And to do that, you have to be very specific. I think there needs to be a large group of countries that has their research done and they call out Xi Jinping for this political warfare that absolutely is hyper -destructive.

00:15:41    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
So you're saying this is an intelligence operation? Yeah. For the last 10 minutes or so, In direct relationship to this network you're talking about, the 90s, 2000, aggressive combination of international organized crime, Hong Kong tycoons, Macau tycoons, in Chinese military influence operations, also people smuggling, also drug smuggling, illegal migration and, you know, fentanyl. There is a basis that Chinese triads and Mexican cartels are working together on those things and that Canada is a, you could call it, if this is a company, the controlling minds of a lot of this are in Vancouver and Toronto. Canadian ports are very deeply infiltrated by China, along with some Iranian mafia and intelligence. It's a fact. So where do we go from there? I myself, as a Canadian, the good countries of the world need to get together to combat this approaching, if not already into early stages of the access of China, Iran, Russia, North Korea. We're at loggerheads and they're using Canada, I believe, unfortunately.

00:17:01    SAM COOPER
Right. And I do believe that Yeshua Ning is a genius and he looked at North America and he wants to inflict pain on the U .S. When he set up these plans in the early 90s, the Chinese GDP was a fraction of the U .S. So he had a lot of ground to make up. And he chose Vancouver because the resources to combat his efforts were probably deemed to be significantly less than the resources in the U .S. So I feel that the attack on Canada, the Vancouver model. if you will, which spread right across to Toronto and then down into Queens and across to LA and permeates everything. I believe that the US and Canada should try to get on the same page about this and to the extent possible, Mexico as well. And then the UK and Australia haven't been unaffected by this. There should be a big effort to get on the same page with the West because this is a totalitarian regime doing its level best to take us out.

00:18:07    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
The controlling mind, I'm saying, of the Mexican cartels, I think it's Chinese triads. That's the real power there.

00:18:15    SAM COOPER
I think we're both in agreement. If you want to draw a word picture that says what this is, picture that there's a really bad actor and he's throwing a really illegal party and selling drugs and he's bringing it all in. And the U .S. is going after the people who own the land where all of this took place. You have to go after China. And I believe that China is making 98 % of the precursors for fentanyl, and then they're laundering the money. That's the other piece. They're laundering it. They're operating this massive money laundering operation for the cartels. So I say the gloves do come off, but I would love to see them come off in unison. And all of these, at least in North America, Mexico, Canada, and the U .S., we're all on the same page. And we speak with one voice. And I'll add to this. Xi Jinping has been as painful towards his own population as he has been externally and internationally. So he's inflicted pain on the Chinese and he's about to go down. I mean, he's got his wings clipped in the last few months and he may not be in power very long. There's some serious movement in China.

00:19:30    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
You sound like my friend Harry Tsang, the ambassador for Taiwan and Ottawa. He's bearish on Xi Jinping in a big way.

00:19:38    SAM COOPER
Yeah. Well, I think it's a good time for the West to approach China and say, look, we got off on the wrong foot. Let's reboot. And by the way, there's some reparations needed here. 70 ,000 people have been dying a year from this, and it's a Chinese operation. You know, the cartels are definitely part of it, but... I think there's good reason for the West to get on the same page.

00:20:02    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
Absolutely. So we will end it there for a first great chat. And I think next time we'll get into the juicy story of Lai Cheng Zing, the bigot China's supposed most wanted. Or what was he? So I'll leave it at that and we'll pick it up next time. You have to say,

00:20:21    SAM COOPER
have to say, I'm sitting there doing my research. I get your book. And all of a sudden, within 50 pages, the lights are going off because you wrote about Lai Changxin and it just completed some thoughts that I was mulling over. And yeah, we're going to have an interesting conversation about Lai Changxin.

00:20:40    CHRISTOPHER MEYER
That touches my heart because I've always been a brother of the United States and I've felt so disheartened that bad people have gotten in between us and we have to stop that. And as you say, we need to get together on this. I've reached some good thinkers in the US and there's now things brewing. So let's keep it going. You got it.

00:21:01    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, One CA Podcast.

210: Andreas Eckel on NATO Civil Military Cooperation

Welcome to the One CA Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Gaines. 

Today, Colonel Andreas Eckel, commander of the NATO CIMIC Center of Excellence, joins us to discuss the center's work to prepare the alliance for future crises or disasters.   
So, let's get started. 

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

---

Special thanks to Jan Křtitel Novák, Jimmy McHugh, and Dorothy Fields for the original version of Diga Diga Do, which aired in 1928 and was then performed by Duke Ellington. 
Ellington's version can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aJ_9IAIjQ&t=1s

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Transcript

00:00:05 JACK GAINES
Welcome to the One CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. Today, Colonel Andreas Echel, commander of the NATO Civic Center of Excellence, joins us to discuss the center's work to prepare the alliance for future crisis and disasters. So let's get started.

00:00:19 ANDREAS ECKEL
What we need to understand a little bit better, and I think that was a very brutal lesson we identified in Afghanistan and in Mali as well, is that military functions in different societies. very, very differently. We have an idea how military looks like and how it works. It might work more the Italian style or the German style or the US style. But basically, I think we have a common set of ideas how military works. And military works completely different in Mali than in Afghanistan than in Germany. And that is based on different societies. So how do we figure that out? It's a very good question. If I had a quick and sharp answer to that one, I think I would be the winner of the $1 million question. There are some ingredients to tackle that problem. And one of the ingredients is to understand the environment a little bit better. And that leads to civil military cooperation. The one centerpiece of civil military cooperation is to understand the environment better. to nest military activities in the civil environment in a better way. It creates more converging effects and creates less harm to the civil population. And I think the next thing is you need to have long -lasting relationships. Relationship that is built up, that's great. If it lasts one year, that's great. And if you just end it then, Basically, you have achieved almost nothing. So long -lasting relationships and to understand the civil environment better. And we have to understand that we are not the ivory tower of knowledge. What do we know? What does the military know about Mali and Afghanistan? Basically nothing. We have to be more and better in contact with the civil organizations, with academia, with knowledge centers. that are engaged in those areas since 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And we have to be in a dialogue with them and have to extract their knowledge about the key civil factors and have to integrate that better in military considerations.

00:02:32 JACK GAINES
So you have to be a diplomat in two directions because you've got to be reaching out to the partner nation like Mali, working with her counterparts there. You have to be a diplomat with partner agencies within the government and academia, as you were saying, or else you're going to miss a step. So you really have to work your way across the spectrum.

00:02:52 ANDREAS ECKEL
Yeah, I like your picture of being a diplomat because exactly as you mentioned, it's a diplomat in both ways, but you have to be a translator as well. So civil environment, civil actors, civil counterparts speak a different language than we. And we really have to make sure that what they say. is understood by the military and what the military means properly translated in how the civilians understand it.

00:03:17 JACK GAINES
You know, and that's a good point because I've seen civil affairs civic officers come in and try to brief leadership on certain issues. And if it wasn't absolutely clear and in the language that that matter knew, they usually were dismissed and it wasn't as effective an operation because of it.

00:03:34 ANDREAS ECKEL
And by the way, at the beginning of my career in the military function of CIMIC, it happened to me too. So one of my first appearance of the stage briefing the commander about some civil factors was a complete disaster because I underestimated how many minutes I only have to bring over some key messages to the commander. So I talked too long and did not come to the point. And I think that's the point where the CCOE is really in a responsibility. We have to provide in our courses the overview, the background, and we provide expertise and challenge them with tasks to apply the expertise. But at the very end of every course, we tell them, hey, CIMIC is important, and it is important to understand the environment, and it is important to integrate civil factors and military considerations. However, when you are confronted with decision makers, Your product needs to be crisp and sharp. If you provide a product to your commander, which exceeds three pages, then you can throw it in the dustbin. By the way, one page is better than three pages. And I think simakers have the tendency, and I include myself specifically into that one, to speak too long and to explain too long and not to come to the point. And if at the end of your statement there is no so what and what's next, well, then don't say anything. That's better.

00:05:08 JACK GAINES
Well, for this podcast, I appreciate you speaking too much. That's a good thing. But I also understand it's a challenge, but once you get used to it, I think it's super, super helpful.

00:05:19 ANDREAS ECKEL
helpful. What we both concluded coming to the point should not be mixed up with not doing your analysis. Only because you have two minutes to brief your commander about a major actor that will impact his operation. doesn't mean that your analysis should only be two minutes. So you have to provide the analysis for an in -depth briefing, if required, to integrate that knowledge and your assessment in the staff work of the other branches. So it needs to be both a very in -depth, precise analysis and assessment. And then it is your time on the stage. The light will shine on you for two minutes. That's it.

00:05:59 JACK GAINES
That brings up a story on my side. sent one of my pitch decks to a former boss. And he took it, he read it, and then he read all of the sources that I had put in the back. And so he knew the subject just as well as I did when we met. And I was like, holy cow. Yes, it's important to do good research before you put together your summary because you never know how deep somebody's going to dive into an issue. And if you've done bad research and they catch it, you're done. So one of the things that... Being that diplomat, both to the military and to other government bodies. One thing that I found at the Strategic Foresight Conference, and it was in your report as well, is that SIMIC needs clarification of capabilities in peace and crisis. And what feedback I got from meetings was that not all militaries have a strong relationship with their public. That's a big concern because if a military doesn't have the trust. When you get to a crisis or a disaster, you've got to really overcome a lot in order just to provide aid and support.

00:07:07 ANDREAS ECKEL
Yeah, that's a crucial point. I have two takes on that. The first one is we have nations that do allow, on the very lowest tactical level, the interaction between military and the civil world. But it is a question of being honest to ourselves. That is not applicable in all countries. Our countries in the alliance are very restrictive interaction with civil environment, with civil authorities, at least on the lower tactical level. And that brings me to my second point. It's a national responsibility. So when we talk about CIMIC as a military function, then we have to look at it from two sides. One is NATO CIMIC is embedded in a NATO command structure, NATO force structure. However, NATO is operating. on the soil of sovereign nations. So we promote and stimulate that nations build up, maintain, and integrate a kind of simic capability. We call that domestic simic. We made a proposal for what domestic simic is. However, nations are completely free to fill that skeleton with their structures. They can call it a domestic simic. They can call it territorial forces. They can call it Homeland Defense Forces. It doesn't matter how they fill in that skeleton as long as they do provide civil factor integration, as long as they execute civil -military interaction. And for the Alliance as a whole to plan and prepare and conduct successful operations, we need to plug in to the national simic domains and the domestic simic domains. And we have to do that. via the national military structures. So what we do in deterrence and defense -related scenarios is a little bit differing from what we have done in international crisis management in the past. When CIMIC teams from the alliance or whatever security force was implemented in that, we very often did the civil -military interaction with civil partners on the ground by ourselves without using any layer in between us. But when we do that now as NATO in Germany and Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and we have to plug into their military structures and via them with the civil actors on the ground. And nations consider that very differently. So there are nations that say, hey, great that you're in. Please feel free to speak to our civil organizations by yourself. It would be nice if you inform us afterwards. Everything's great. The nations are more restrictive and say, hey, guys. a ministry, whenever you talk to an organization, whenever you talk to civil partners, please do that via us and ask us first. So there is a variety of how nations would like to have that executed, and we as Symmakers have to adapt.

00:10:08 JACK GAINES
Right. What I've seen is that disaster relief and crisis coordination between the military and the civil governments is fairly good, but I'm not seeing the emotional side as much. What I mean is, We just had the Marine Corps Marathon. And people all crossed D .C. and around the country came. They ran their 24 miles. These kind of military events where people go, they see some type of form of patriotism, honor guards at sporting events or marathons or the military band performing on the park plots. Those things make a difference. And I don't know if that was also included in your... Have you seen anything like that?

00:10:55 ANDREAS ECKEL
In the last years, when we talked about the use of military assets in our nations, it was to overcome disasters. It was to provide military assistance to civil organizations to overcome flooding, fires, or whatever. But the situation has changed a little bit. And now it is not so much about military assistance in case of man -made big disasters. It's more about civil defense. It's more about stimulating the civil support to military operations and the mutual support in case of crisis and war. And I think that notion is quite new to many European countries. In Germany, it was... support of the military to the civil authorities in case of disasters. But when you look into Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they have since decades a kind of total defense strategy. They have a DNA about that the whole of the nation needs to be ready to defend the nation. And that starts already when you go into your cellar. Is there water? Is there food? Are there batteries? And when you do that in Finland, Sweden, Norway, the answer is yes, there is food and there is water. And I was quite astonished. A couple of years ago, I had a NATO course in Helsinki. At that time, when Helsinki was still a NATO partner and not a NATO nation. And it was an exported course from NATO School of Ammergau. And during the weekend, we had the opportunity to visit Helsinki. And we... came across a protection infrastructure was located to protect the civilians. And the lady asked us, do you have an idea for how many citizens of Helsinki we have shelter? And I said, well, 50%. And she was smiling and she was collecting all the numbers. And then she came up and said, for every citizen in Helsinki, there is shelter. And that's the difference. A regularly trained system of civil defense. And military defense working hand in hand. I think that makes a difference. And I see that coming up in Europe. And again, I would like to use the example of Germany. Since the last couple of years, a lot of more effort has been put into the training and the exchange of information and the exercising of those structures. And I think we are getting there. The point is... When you have dismantled those structures, those strategies since 1990, because our enemy was disappearing, never disappeared. He was just dormant and has been woken up a couple of years ago. But to reinstall that, reactivate that, revitalize that, that takes years and years. So we are at the beginning. I'm a very optimistic person. I strongly hope that we are getting to a point quick enough that when The Russian beer is looking again to Europe when he has solved his problem in Ukraine, that we are ready at that point. And there are substantial measurements that we need to be ready latest in four to five years. And CIMIC plays a role in that because your armed forces can be as good as possible when the civil environment is vulnerable and stays vulnerable and is not able to absorb shocks and to compensate the shocks at a better level after the shock. then you will lose the conflict. That's crystal clear. Even in that time in 2023, where it seemed, at least for some time, that the Ukrainians have regained the initiative, the Russians did attack the civil infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, the transport infrastructure, the health infrastructure. And they were still winning at that battlefield, although they had massive casualties on the fighting battlefield. And I think where Ukraine will run into massive problems this year is that the Russians may not have the big tactical victory. They may not have the breakthrough through the Ukrainian defense lines. But what they will do is they will seriously damage the Ukrainian energy infrastructure, health infrastructure, transport infrastructure. Third year in a row. And I'm not sure if the Ukrainians will be really able to compensate that this time.

00:15:40 JACK GAINES
It's a real challenge. The thing that I see with Ukraine is that there's also a recruiting issue. They're struggling to keep up with manpower. And there's some international volunteers coming in, but probably not enough compared to what the Russians are bringing in. So it's a challenge of numbers in a lot of ways. They do build that trust and that familiarity with the military. So having the military band come out and play on the Konigstrasse makes a difference. Or like they did in Poland, having American and Polish troops go with a vehicle and park in the middle of a Platz and take photos with kids, it makes a difference.

00:16:24 ANDREAS ECKEL
You're right. Your argument is good. And it connects pretty well with the... decisions we have to make in Europe right now. And that decision is that we have to nest the military better into the societies. But what needs to be installed, reactivated, and built up is a whole of society approach for resilience and civil defense.

00:16:52 JACK GAINES
Okay. The biggest challenge right now is sabotage, which has been happening. in and around Europe, the Chinese ship that cut the communication lines, the water poisoning in Germany. So there seems to be already challenges in security.

00:17:09 ANDREAS ECKEL
SIMIC plays, first of all, a vital role in understanding the impact of such events, as we do not only look at the impact on military infrastructure and military organizations and units, but it's our task to look how those events impact the civil actors in the civil environment. And that will have definitely a result on the capability of a civil environment to provide support to military activities. So it's a kind of circle. And we are pushing that constantly to have a permanent assessment cycle on what we do, what happens to us, how does that impact the civil environment and the impacted civil environment? How is that still able? to provide the support to the military. And I think as we are in that position to have those connections to the other organizations and to provide a holistic assessment about the civil environment, that plays a vital role in that one. Absolutely.

00:18:11 JACK GAINES
So do you see that as the future of CIMIC from now going forward is to build that more holistic partner nation?

00:18:17 ANDREAS ECKEL
I would like to use the... definition of multi -domain operations as it is currently used in NATO, and that is the orchestration of all military activities to achieve converging effects. And I see the future role of CIMIC very much in that synchronization effort. So military capabilities are much, much less available than in the past. So when we think about what we need about capacities and resources to achieve our military strategic objectives, when we go into the details, 60, 70, partly 80 % of what we need as resource is not generated within the military. It needs to be contracted and provided by a civil environment. And that means that there needs to be a constant assessment process about the availability of those 60, 70, 80 % civil support. And it needs to be thoroughly assessed because that has a pushing out effect on the civil environment. When we use the trains for military equipment, then those trains cannot be used to support and supply the civil environment. So I think the future of CIMEC is in that synchronization bit with the non -military activities to reach those converging effects. And that pretty much fits into the whole of government, whole of society approach of defense.

00:19:49 JACK GAINES
Interesting. So CIMIC is in multi -domain operations, has its own multi -domain operation because it's coordinating the civil, government, NGOs, whoever is not formal military. in cooperation or in conjunction with the military's multi -domain operations. So you've got a multi -tiered coordination process.

00:20:12 ANDREAS ECKEL
process. I think we do not run our own multi -domain operations. A multi -tiered task, I think that that captures it quite well. But I personally prefer to speak more about cooperation because coordination is a very tricky expression, especially in Europe. as coordination requires someone who allows to be coordinated and someone who has a coordinating authority. And in the interaction with our civil partners, it's more cooperation, ranging from we do exist beside each other to full integrated planning and operations. There's a continuum of that area of cooperation. So I do really prefer to speak more about cooperation than coordination.

00:21:04 JACK GAINES
Is there any other topics or thoughts that you want to add to the conversation?

00:21:11 ANDREAS ECKEL
For me, it's really important to highlight the future concepts like multi -domain operations and to establish and maintain the connection with the current concepts. So it is important to keep the future world of NATO connected to the current operational world of NATO. That is exactly why we run the annual Simic Foresight Conference, is to connect the here and now with the time period of one to two years to the future concepts, 10, 20 years. And secondly, the closer connection and the better synchronization of the national efforts with the alliance efforts. That is really, I think, a key centerpiece of our future success. So in my understanding, it is ongoing. It is happening in the alliance as we speak right now. So alliance, joint headquarters, strategic headquarters have established contacts to national military authorities and do exchange information. But I think that needs to become more intensive, more regularly and more information flow to both sides. And that needs to be not only... foreseen conceptually and structurally, it needs to be trained and exerciseda reagularly. And I think that's really a clear measurement of success if we are able to exercise it in the future massively. And thirdly, I think the aspect of human security and protection of civilians, that is something which creates a dilemma for every military leader because he would like to achieve his military objectives. That is either to defeat the enemy or to force him to do something or to force him to stay away from something, which means the application of massive violence to the enemy. However, when we learn something from the recent international crisis or from the war in Ukraine, then what we have learned is the battlefield is full of civilians that have requirements, that have needs. The battlefield is full of organizations, non -governmental governmental organizations that try to provide a certain amount of services to the civilians. And it doesn't matter if it is a war zone or the rear area or the area behind the rear area. We have to realize that it is and will remain full of civilians. To evacuate a city like Kiev is nonsense. That will never happen. 23 million people. Yeah, good luck with that one. And even if you try, the majority of the capabilities will be provided by the civilian world. So human security, protection of civilians are concepts which are mandatory for NATO. NATO has adhered to it. We have adopted it in our strategies, in our plans, into our operations. But what does that really mean? How do we really translate protection of civilian and human security? into operations on the operational and even on the tactical level. And I think that needs some assistance, how to operationalize it, how to conduct, how to do it. This assistance, in my understanding, is called mindset and SIMIC. Terrific. It's good to do SIMIC, but you have to talk about it. It's good to increase the awareness, but you have to publish it. So I am very grateful and very thankful to have the opportunity to talk with you. Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much and have a good day.

00:25:00 JACK GAINES
working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U.S. relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, One CA Podcast.

209: Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikart on joining Civil Affairs

In this episode Brian Hancock talks with Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikart to discuss the 38 Golf Program, the Functional Specialty Team Construct, and the recent Functional Specialty Team Symposium. Major Dykstra and Captain Weikert, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Wonderful to be here.
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in current or former military personnel, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with the people and leadership of a partner nation.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Great news!

Feedspot, the podcast industry ranking system rated One CA Podcast as one of the top 10 shows on foreign policy. Check it out at:

https://podcast.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/

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Special thanks to Art Music for a sample from the song "January | Instrumental Background Music."
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0orz_C33I

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Transcript

00:00:03 INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:39 BRIAN HANCOCK
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we have with us Major Kurt Dykstra and Joshua Weikert  and  Joshua Weikert  and Captain Joshua Weikert to discuss the 38 golf program and the recent Functional Specialty Team Symposium. Major Dykstra and Captain Weikert, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. Wonderful to be here. Thank you, sir.

00:01:26 BRIAN HANCOCK
A quick disclaimer while we're here that the remarks of myself and the participants are solely ours. All right, gentlemen, let's jump into it. From the beginning, what attracted you to U.S. Army civil affairs? Well, I can start that answer. So I'm a bit older, as you might have gathered from my bio.

00:01:43 KURT DYKSTRA
a bit older, as you might have gathered from my bio. And at various points in my adult life, I had thought about entering into military service. And for one reason or another, It just didn't happen. And it was always a great regret in my life that I had not served and saw it as something that I wish I would have done. And then about four or so years ago, I got a call from a friend of a friend who at the time was a major who was recruiting for this new golf program. And we really didn't know each other, but we sort of had moved in similar circles and knew the same people and those sorts of things. And my wife and I were hiking the Appalachian Trail and I was having breakfast one morning and got a phone call from Colonel Koinga, as he retells the story, I think within an hour or two, I said something like, sounds good to me, let's do it. Of course, I did talk with my wife and those sorts of things, but that's my pathway in and a bit unique perhaps, but I think a story that has some resonance with many of the other gulfs, particularly those who were not prior service, that this was fulfilling an opportunity that they had, that they had wished that they had taken earlier, which was to serve the country through the military.

00:02:51 BRIAN HANCOCK
the country through the military. Well, first of all, Kurt, you're not that old. You look very young and healthy to me. And so you're doing something right. So good for you. I'm thrilled that you have chosen to give both the Army and civil affairs a chance. We definitely need the type of skills that you bring to the table. Now, let me turn to you, Captain Weicker. Tell me a little bit about your journey getting here. Well, I was a prior service soldier.

00:03:16 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
prior service soldier. Also being the pre -law advisor at my university, I had a pre -law student who was interested in the Army JAG program. And she had asked me to look into direct commissioning programs in the Army in general, knowing that I was a veteran and had some experience in this area. And I stumbled across the 38 Gulf page on the Army Talent Management website. And it was such an immediately obvious fit because I teach politics, but I also do politics. I work for the House of Representatives. And for that matter, when I go out looking for faculty members to hire, I like looking for people who are practitioners as well as being scholars. And this really dovetailed very nicely into that model. And it struck me as something with a very clear need. It also struck me as something that, especially as we think about lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan and 20 years of deployments, that this was an area where the Army could really bone up its skills and get more into capacity building both within our formations and also the places where we operate. So it struck me as something that was both important and extremely interesting.

00:04:13 BRIAN HANCOCK
Well, very glad that you're here. The background that you both have in politics and helping. do governance on an almost daily basis. It makes me wonder, how would we train something like transitional governance? This is one of our core capabilities. I don't know if the program does things like that. I think there's a big future for us in this area. And both of you have the background to help us move in that direction. Well, in the early 2000s,

00:04:44 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
the DOD had... conducted a review of all the civil administration and civil affairs tasks that were out there that the Army engages in. And they came up with a list of something like 1 ,400 different tasks. And they combed through this list and started identifying things that are not currently met. So where are the areas where the Army needs help? And out of that derived these 18 skill identifiers within the 38 Gulf program, covering a broad range of civil skills. And these include things like... finance, education, and border security, and law, regulation, and policy, and this cultural heritage and property protection. And the goal of the program is essentially to enhance a commander's ability to operate in a stable civil environment, to foresee and address any likely challenges that should crop up, so that commanders can focus on accomplishing their primary image.

00:05:33 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Yeah, if I might jump in a little bit on that as well, either read the book or see the movie Monuments Men, then that gives you a little bit of a sense. In World War II, The U .S. were heading across Western Europe. They needed help to identify certain things, whether it's art, whether it's the significance of structures. And those are skills that the Army just didn't have. So the George Clooney's of the world, who at the time were art historians and museum curators, were brought into the Army's orbit to assist in those tasks. And that's kind of the history of the program that goes way back when, and then it was recently restarted in many ways and broadened as Captain Weigert. has been describing. So in some ways, I describe our role as consultants with specific civilian side expertise that the Army simply does not have to assist the Army to be able to do things that it otherwise might not be able to do. So we get called upon to assist in some of those areas that are more specialized than what the Army generally might have. And in other ways, like other civil affairs officers, you know, we're kind of the Army's diplomatic corps. So it's really those combinations, but the Gulf program specifically brings a very specific and in -depth civilian skill set to be used for Army purposes.

00:06:47 BRIAN HANCOCK
set to be used for Army purposes. It sounds a little bit similar to some of the specialists we have with surgeons and lawyers, but also different at the same time. When we were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we definitely could have used these capabilities in all of these special functional areas. The Department of State tries their best to fill that gap, but the reality is that they're a relatively small organization that isn't necessarily equipped to go to non -permissive environments for extended periods of time. So for transitional governments, I think the heavy lift tends to fall on the military, and you really can't rebuild a government without trying to rebuild the economy and those other threads that tie into that tapestry. I'm very excited for the future with you guys on board. One of the initial challenges is that there wasn't necessarily a clear career progression through every rank for these soldiers. They couldn't follow the 38 Alpha career progression. Has that been relooked at? We do have a quasi -path through your military education.

00:07:57 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
a quasi -path through your military education. We do not yet have a basic officer leadership course, though we are currently piggybacking on Medical Services Bullock down here at Fort Sam. which is actually where they both are right now. But my understanding is that a 38 golf at CA Bullock course is in development, and I volunteered some of my time doing some of the course materials for that. And of course, we do have the civil affairs captain's course as well as an option. Beyond that, I'm not certain at all. But for Major Dykstra, if he has more information on that.

00:08:26 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Much of this has been like jazz. There's been a certain underlying beat that's there, and there's a lot of improvisation that happens along the way. And Captain Weikert is exactly correct that we do DCC largely with the JAG DCC. And then we sort of peg on BOLIC, either AG or AMED, and AMED seems to be the preferred course right now. And to me, this is an area for improvement. We've gone through two school experiences without having any sort of direct training for what it is that we do. And that feels to me like an area that we can improve upon. And I think that is in process, as Captain Weikert mentioned with. With large organizations, particularly the U.S. Army, all that sort of thing takes time. Yeah, it does. But I do think that as the program matures, as there are more people within it for longer periods of time, a lot of the questions about career path and specifics along those lines, frankly, either be worked out by doctrine or they'll be worked out by the process of having people going through these programs and through the ranks and getting OERs and those kinds of things. So I'm not as concerned about that. A ladder piece is what I think that it would be beneficial for the golf program to have better formal education laid out sooner as we see with most other MOCs.

00:09:37 BRIAN HANCOCK
other MOCs. It makes sense to me. It is clever, though, to piggyback on a professional MOS. Many reservists have a similar challenge who aren't 38 golfs because a lot of the professional military education that we funnel through. is geared towards combat arms. And of course, for reserve soldiers, what we do is largely support. But in terms of professional military education, understanding some of these other professions like medicine and pieces of logistics and information operations, professional military education historically has not been geared to advance the tradecraft of those individuals. So I think there's a larger movement within the Army at large, though, to create more specialized training. Unlike the Marine Corps, where they have fewer MOSs and folks have to be a little bit more of a generalist, the fact that we have so many specialty MOSs in the Army, I think, lends itself to the ability to stand up individual branches that can run its own training. And within the functional specialties of the 38 golf program, you might even need an entire course dedicated. to each of those functional areas because they're really quite different. 38 golfs are contained within the functional specialty team construct, like the building where they live within a civil affairs unit. Some folks tend to conflate the 38 golf program with the functional specialty team, not the same. But let's take it a step further. Since the functional specialty team which houses the 38 golf program is a military unit, It, of course, has non -commissioned officers in it as well as officers. Three of us happen to be officers, but non -commissioned officers are very important for us to get things done in the Army. What right now is the role of the non -commissioned officer within functional specialty teams? And gentlemen, where do you see that going? Go ahead, Captain Martin. I think that's exactly right.

00:11:40 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
right. And in addition, the just traditional roles that NCOs play in almost any unit in formation in terms of like training plan development and... upward input and things like that. I think the role of NCOs is all the more valuable and important in an FXFB section that includes a significant number of direct commission officers. You need that reinforcing experience even more in that set. And also, as we found out at the symposium in April, many of we had NCOs in attendance, and many of these NCOs are themselves fairly accomplished within their careers on the civilian side. So they have SI. contributions to make as well. So they're an essential part of this formation.

00:12:19 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Yeah. One of our NCOs was a lawyer of 35 plus years, had done really remarkable things in the civilian side. So the idea that I, as a newly commissioned officer, would come in as the experienced person on the civilian side and he was more experienced on the Army side was true on the one hand, but it also was so much more than that because his civilian expertise was also first rate and really quite impressive.

00:12:41 BRIAN HANCOCK
first rate and really quite impressive. That's amazing. And I don't know if the functional specialty teams will select for that type of talent. It certainly exists, at least within the Army Reserve. We're very skill -rich. That is exciting to me. Now, prior to the establishment of the 38 golf program, who was manning the functional specialty teams?

00:13:03 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
There is great talent in our formations already. So we had, for example, veterinarians. We had public health practitioners. and people that have civil affairs and what we now think of as sort of 38 Gulf skill sets. With the 38 Gulf program, you have subject matter experts who can get a little further into the weeds in areas where we don't have as much expertise. If someone came up to a practicing JAG lawyer and said, look, we need to design a judiciary system because we're about to massively disrupt the civil administration of this country, they're going to be in the ballpark. They understand courts and civil and criminal procedure and things like that. but they might clearly consider things that I would think of in terms of governmental engineering around separation of powers, how those are selected. And that is what I think 38 Gulfs add to that functional specialty. It lets us accomplish a lot more within the same formation. That makes sense to me.

00:13:51 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Yeah, I completely agree with that. And clearly the civil affairs units and the FXSPs in particular were doing tremendous work prior to the visioning of the 38 Gulf program. In many cases, it seems as though it might be because of the particular and unique skill sets of those officers and NCOs. I think the Gulf program is trying to actually more systematically identify and bring into the Army persons who have depth to skill.

00:14:17 BRIAN HANCOCK
to skill. What I'm hearing is that 38 Gulfs bring out more capability and apply it to the often very complex civil social problems that we work on in the civil affairs community. I read a fair amount of peer -reviewed literature, and I can tell you from that standpoint, since the 38 Gulfs have entered the community, I've seen a lot more peer -reviewed literature coming out. So I think there definitely is some effect from this program, and I'm really excited to see where it's going to lead. Now, at the end of April, the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade, which is commanded by Colonel Toby Humphries, convened the first -ever functional specialty team symposium. How did that come about? What's the history there? Colonel Daniel Fletcher is the FXSP chief of the drill fourth.

00:15:03 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
chief of the drill fourth. So I was as green as they come. And Colonel Fletcher, he was incredibly helpful and kind to me to help me figure out some things. And through that, he learned that there was an onboarding and utility gap of how are we supposed to use these golfs? And he asked around up and down the chain in other units and found out that lots of people were having the same kind of question. So this, I think, was the impetus that he had then to say, well, let's get some people together to talk about some of these issues and see if we can't find solutions to some of these challenges. And then he and our CEO, Colonel Humphreys, talked. And Colonel Humphreys was, as I'm told, immediately enthusiastically on board for this effort. And then through lots of laboring hours and the work of many good officers and NCOs, we put together this symposium. It was a really rich learning experience, let alone a great networking opportunity.

00:16:01 BRIAN HANCOCK
That sounds amazing. I almost wish I had been there. I know one of my mentors, Colonel Bradford Hughes, was there, and probably some of his team as well. What were some of the topics you guys discussed, and did you come to any conclusions or lessons learned that you'd like to share with the community? We had essentially three large chunks.

00:16:19 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
three large chunks. One was around organization and operations of 38 golfs and ethics SP sections. One was around training and doctrine. And then we specifically also discussed recruitment and personnel and lengthy discussions around accessions and initial onboarding. And we covered a lot of ground in three days. The white paper that is just about ready to be disseminated details the findings and does make some recommendations. But I think far more important than any particular recommendation that came out of it was the fact that we were able to draw all these discussions into one place and one location at one time. I have to believe, greatly increases the likelihood that they are ultimately acted upon because we were able to draw from everyone's best practices and identify where our collective gaps were. And as we sort of pass this up to USKPOC and the command level, this is something that is going to be a little more valuable simply because we were able to reach consensus on even just our concerns.

00:17:17 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Exactly. It was a tremendously rich experience and a breadth of topics. And you mentioned Colonel Hughes. And he and his team have, I think, sort of set the pace for many of the KCOMs in terms of how they're using gulps in particular. And so I was a bit familiar with him through the literature and through various email types of things, but I'd never really talked with him before. Unfortunately, he couldn't be there in person, so he was presented by a team. But then got the chance to meet him this summer in Madison, Wisconsin, at a training event at the University of Wisconsin. And you want to talk about officers who are... just stellar in terms of their knowledge, but also stellar in terms of character and quality of person. Carl Hughes is right up there as well. So it was just an incredible experience to learn from other KCOMs and to understand history and some of the doctrine issues that arise and to identify road bumps or landmines and avoid them or fix them. But a really great experience that I think was appreciated by all who attended.

00:18:17 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
all who attended. One of the things that came out of the symposium for me in terms of like genuinely new things that I learned, is that at one point there was the establishment of this Institute for Military Support to Governance, which was formed specifically to identify and support reservists with civilian acquired skills that were applicable to these functional areas. And it sounds like it was a forerunner in many ways to what we think of as the 38 Gulf program today. And it still exists, at least as far as we can tell, absolutely unclear what current status is. But this is something that came up several times during the symposium, is that that could be something that could function as a vehicle to address some of the coordinating. challenges we face and maybe even some of the accessions on board be challenged. And it will just remain to be seen if that's something we can vitalize or revitalize. I love the way you're thinking.

00:19:01 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
Sir, this is part of the benefit of having an academic like Captain Weikert in the planning team. He thinks institutionally and thinks strategically in terms of the doctrine aspect of things. It's not just operational or tactical. The other thing I would mention is Captain Weikert mentioned The white paper from the symposium is soon to be published, but there was an article in the latest edition of The Shield that gives a more thinner or more popular description of what the symposium did and what it accomplished and who was there. So I would encourage any listener who is at least somewhat curious about the symposium to check out The Shield article and then be able to look out for the upcoming white paper.

00:19:40 BRIAN HANCOCK
Let me ask you, gentlemen, a test question now that I've got you both warmed up and unsuspecting here. Field manual, three -tack, five -step, civil affairs operations, our Bible, recently updated. It added this new task of civil network development and engagement, or CNDE, which in itself is pretty complicated because we're talking about mapping and engaging interrelated complex adaptive systems. Okay, so mathematically, at least, it's already very complicated. Now, considering how deep the expertise is, within the 38 Gulf community, I would suspect that those folks with those credentials in those communities are probably in a very good position to advance civil network development engagement within their specialty areas. Now let's talk about that concept within the broader Army concept. We're all professionals at this level of our career. How are we as an institution, in your opinion, measuring the strength of the professional networks that we are bringing with us, which are an asset for both civilian and the military? How could we include the strength of someone's network as, say, part of their promotion or board packages? Do you have any thoughts how the Army as an institution could take a better measure? of our professional networks and ability to leverage them to achieve commander's effects. I can say that it did come up at the symposium among that group of 38 Golfs and FXSP members in attendance that this was an essential part of just understanding what our own capabilities were and how do we track and map where everyone lands in terms of their skill sets.

00:21:13 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
that it did come up at the symposium among that group of 38 Golfs and FXSP members in attendance that this was an essential part of just understanding what our own capabilities were and how do we track and map where everyone lands in terms of their skill sets. So it was something of general interest at the symposium, and it also came up in the context of how we developed training. for 38 golfs and for civil affairs units more generally. And those efforts are likely to be ongoing. But in terms of how to do it, I think it should be relatively straightforward because we already have some of these things sort of populated in the soldier talent profile at HRC, for example. And if we simply adapt that and augment it to specifically identify for civil skills and civil networks, it shouldn't be too challenging to at least get that on paper. Now, how you operationalize that and put it to work is a more challenging question, obviously.

00:22:03 KURT DYKSTRA
But it does seem to me as though there is a lot of ad hoc -ness to the way this is happening so far. The point and purpose of the Gulf program is to really get into uniform persons with skills that the Army was lacking. And if we simply have them but don't know about them and don't utilize them and leverage them and execute on them, then maybe to put it in a more concrete way, if we're simply relying upon, I know a guy or I know a gal who has that experience and they happen to be over there. in the 352, well, that's better than not having that information. But it's not really how you want to be running a program like this. Better to have a much more institutionalized, formalized means of understanding networks so that we can affect the broad array of a civil society. Because as we all understand, if a civil society breaks down, it's not just one thing that needs to be addressed. It's about 175 things that need to be addressed. in order for civil society to work. So there's still work to be done there, but I am heartened by the fact that the Gulf community is a robust one intrapersonally and continuing to be more so. And these topics of more institutionalizing that kind of knowledge is absolutely on the topic of conversation for many people who are thinking more seriously about how to do that.

00:23:18 BRIAN HANCOCK
people who are thinking more seriously about how to do that. I love the fact that this community is actually thinking about these difficult questions that not only affect the army, but... affect the force as a whole and strategically affect our ability to compete and deter, ideally avoiding conflict altogether. And these are things that we have to understand. What networks, how do we invest in them? How do we, if necessary, appropriate them to steer the world away from costly conflict? That is something that needs more attention,

00:23:49 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
more attention, is there is a very, very, very robust peace mission for 38 Gulf. And I think it's important to remember, too, as we think about how we exploit these talents. For example, the same way our conservationists and cultural property protection folks have a partnership with the Smithsonian, we would want to see that within every skill identifier, that institutional partner becomes a potential warehouse of understanding what their aside people can do and how they can contribute as well. So I think at present, it is very interpersonal, and it's great that we do have that network of folks. But I also think that that is something that will get augmented once we have everything built out to its fullest expression. Carty, do you have a thought on that?

00:24:26 KURT DYKSTRA 
I was just going to say that we want to be in a spot to have those networks built out and an understanding of the places in which we operate before any hostilities break out. These things are happening and they're happening because of the good work of a whole lot of people, but the program is still pretty young. So we're still gaining our legs and still building it out. And with the kind of caliber of people we have in uniform now through this program, I have no doubt that the future is really,

00:24:50 BRIAN HANCOCK
have no doubt that the future is really, really bright. That's wonderful to hear. The Army has done conflict for a long time, right? This idea of competition is still somewhat new to us, so we're not going to expect overnight our doctrine and schooling to change to be able to help us secure that win in competition. But I'm seeing encouraging signs, and I know we're going to head in that direction, and I really believe the 38 Golfs are going to have a very big role as we look to maximize our return on investment and competition, ideally avoiding conflict altogether. Now, at the symposium, I imagine maybe behind closed doors, a very professional and upfront group who's not afraid to talk about challenges. Within those conversations, what... at present, do you see as the single greatest challenge that needs to be overcome within the 38 Golf community? And what are your suggestions to do so? I'll say one thing.

00:25:52 KURT DYKSTRA 
To a person who was there, yes, there were some frustrations or constructive criticism ideas, but there was not a person in that room who was not enthusiastic about the program and grateful to be a part of it. So I think part of the challenge in a twofold piece, and both of these things have to do with the program being relatively new. The first one I would say is the accession process and the identification process. How does someone go from never having worn a uniform in the history of their life to commissioning? And how does that process work? And how long does it take for that to happen? Part of the challenge that we see, and I think it's getting better, I was maybe second class of Gulfs that came in, is that it was an on -again, off -again process for close to two years. And if we are trying to identify highly skilled, highly talented, highly experienced civilian personnel to come into uniform, a two -year process is problematic.

00:26:51 BRIAN HANCOCK
is problematic. It's strange to me because my recruiter had me in boots before I left his office. And that was actually part of the discussion.

00:26:59 KURT DYKSTRA AND 
that was actually part of the discussion. In so many other areas, Army recruiting is really, really strong, and there's a clearly established path that you do. And because of the newness and kind of quirkiness of this program, there's less of that, and we're sort of building the ship as we're sailing. Yesterday in the hotel here at Fort Sam, I met a thoracic surgeon who was newly commissioned. And some of those areas that maybe have experience with highly skilled civilian practitioners. coming newly into the Army that have paths that are a bit more developed than what the golf program is. So again, I think it has gotten much better, but it takes time.

00:27:36 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
time. I think as the program grows and we sort of meet our staffing benchmarks and as we get more practice and more reps in the process, I do believe a lot of this will hire. I think it will as well. The other thing I would say is having the ability for a civil affairs bullet to come into play.

00:27:49 KURT DYKSTRA 
having the ability for a civil affairs bullet to come into play. We latched on with mainly the JAG officers for GCC and there's... a lot that's great about that, especially as a lawyer. It was very strange. So there were about 100 of us in our Bolick class. All but five of us, I think, were JAG officers. But I was the lawyer who wasn't the JAG. And I was the old guy. So it was really, it was a fascinating couple of months and a lot of fun. But we were sort of sitting along the side as they were talking lots of things about JAG school and what happened next for them. And then to be at AMED Bolick, again, it's a similar sort of thing. And there's, especially for someone new to the Army like me, being around people in the Army is invaluable, regardless of whether it's directly related to my MOS or not. But at some point, it would be helpful to get some specialized training about what it is that the Army expects me to do, apart from the civilian experience that I bring to the table.

00:28:45 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
In terms of challenges within 38 Gulf, I also find that, organizationally speaking, is how we connect 38 Gulfs with commanders and missions. Because at present, we are relying on these informal networks to pass information along about we need six Delta to go to Poland in two weeks. Who's available? You know, things like that. That's always going to be inefficient, for one thing. We realize a little too much on that ad hoc communications network. And it also means that commanders can't go looking for 38 Gulfs either. So what I think will have to happen sooner or later is having some kind of centralized. repository of mission and or task information that 38 Gulfs can go to and look at ongoing missions or missions in planning. And at the same time, some kind of searchable database where commanders can go find those people. And there are institutions and organizations that have this set up in existence. So it's not something we need to reinvent. It's just something we need to consolidate because it is just very unlikely that every formation in a civil affairs unit will happen to have the right people for their region and their missions. We need to be better to get good information down to every individual 38 golf and up to every commander. And that's just going to take time and awareness to them.

00:29:51 BRIAN HANCOCK
time and awareness to them. That makes perfect sense. So that would help you grow in your skill set and mature your capability as well for everyone's benefit. Totally sold on that. And I think in time, as you mentioned, that's probably going to be developed and roll out. We've talked a lot about the 38 golf program today. Very exciting. I think certainly the best thing that's happened to civil affairs in decades. And I believe over time it'll be one of the best things that's ever happened to the Army and to the military at large. Very exciting. Those in the audience who are listening, who are interested in learning more and perhaps going through that application process, which will shrink in time, of course, what are those steps they need to take? If someone raised their hand and says, sign me up to 38 Golf, what do they do?

00:30:44 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
the Army and Hound Management website. If you just Google 38 Gulf Army, I believe the first tip that you'll see. And it's been built out over the past three years, adding more context, more information about the steps. But it essentially begins with laying out the basic requirements for the program, which is at least a master's degree in a relevant SI field, and at least professional experience in that as well. Once you've cleared those hurdles, you're then looking at developing your packet, and it does provide good guidance on that. I have already fielded some inquiries from interested NCOs and officers, and there are also some groups that you find on LinkedIn and Signal as well that are very active in discussing this process and how it's going.

00:31:18 BRIAN HANCOCK
it's going. Professional football teams don't just recruit from their neighborhood. They go all over the place to get the right specialties, to put them together in the right combination for the right missions and matchups. I love the way you're thinking about putting something together like that. I've honestly felt that... As an institution, one of the things that we should do a little bit better job with in general is knowledge management within the military. If you have deep subject matter expertise, if it's in a very tight area like tech support, they have knowledge bases that you can search. We don't have a lot of tools like that, and we spend a lot of our money on human capital who are producing intellectual property, some of which is lost when a unit rips out or when there isn't a good continuity plan. And of course, the deep knowledge that you're describing, we definitely need a better way to collect, analyze, maintain, and make that accessible. So thinking about 38 Gulfs, and it was described as a consultancy within the Army.

00:32:12 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
it was described as a consultancy within the Army. So essentially, a staff officer or commander pauses and says, wait, how do I fill in the blank? That should trigger a call at an RFI down to some kind of 38 Gulf to fill that need. Yeah, and two more comments on that. One, this isn't unique to the Army.

00:32:29 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
to the Army. Any organization of any size will sort of talk about knowledge walking out the door. So this is not a unique situation to the Army, though, of course, it's magnified given the size, scale, and scope of what the U .S. Army does. The second thing I would say is, and this was part of the discussion at the symposium, the Colonel Hughes panel, what the 351st does is they house all of their goals at the KCOM level, as opposed to embedding them in brigades or battalions. And that way... Whether it's the ultimate solution or whether it's a matter of a way to actually get their arms around it, they have a sense as to what their capacity is within the 351st because they're all at the KCOM level and can understand that, oh, we have this issue of an agricultural thing happening in the Philippines. Wonderful. We know who we can send to help out on that mission. As things continue to get better, and they clearly have gotten better. But as this program is longer and more experienced and has more people in it and more knowledge shared through it, I fully expect that the process will get better and the knowledge that we're able to share in social life.

00:33:31 BRIAN HANCOCK
I definitely think it will. We're approaching our time for the show. I wanted to give you a few last minutes for each of you. Do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share with the community? First of all, thanks for having us on,

00:33:46 KURT DYKSTRA AND  JOSHUA WEIKERT 
on, sir. It's been a real treat to be able to talk with you. In addition to the great resources that Captain Weikert mentioned, feel free to reach out to us if you have questions on the golf program. We may not have all the answers, but we can probably be a good conduit into the network to help get you the answers, or at least the right people who would have the answers. So happy to field any phone calls or emails about the golf program. Awesome.

00:34:07 JOSHUA WEIKERT 
And I would just say to anyone who's currently in the pipeline or is thinking about applying or has recently commissioned and is very sort of new to the process, patience is the key. I know it seems like it's taking forever. It has gotten better with every iteration. It seems like the sort of processing time is getting smaller and smaller and all these things. So just hang in there and it does reach a conclusion eventually.

00:34:26 BRIAN HANCOCK
a conclusion eventually. Well, thank you both very much, Major Dijkstra and Captain Weikert for coming on the show. That concludes this issue of 1CA Podcast.

00:34:37 Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting@gmail.com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field, working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U.S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. One CA Podcast.