1243: Christopher Whitcomb | A Life Among Spies Part Two

1243: Christopher Whitcomb | A Life Among Spies Part Two

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks.

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today, part two with Chris Whitcomb. If you haven't heard part one yet, definitely go back and check it out. Former FBI Hostage Rescue Team sniper who has been shot at, hunted, stranded in war zones, a lot of [00:01:00] crazy tales here on the show.

Great conversation so far. So let's keep it going. Here's part two with Chris Whitcomb. Tell me about East Timor. 'cause you, you start this security company, not contractor. Yeah. It's not a contractor. You start the security company. But it sounds kind of like the Wild West meets mafia extortion racket meets like typical Africa, except it's not in Africa.

Yeah. Kind of stuff. Yeah. This place sounds like it's the Somalia of South Asia. I, I mean it's just like Yeah, that's true. It's

Christopher Whitcomb: true. It really sounds like that. Yeah. So

in 2006 I came back from Somalia and uh, I had this buddy at a bookstore on Abba Kinney in Venice. Great place. It was a crazy clubhouse.

Really fun. And he said, uh, you gotta stop being a pussy. I said, what do you mean? He said, you gotta stop trying to get 14-year-old guys to kill you because you have some death fantasy. 'cause you're like, Hemingway, right? Mm-hmm. And I said, well, you got a good point there. So I said, I need a war I can, that I could manage.

So as it turned out, I had two things. One, I had some money that I had made contracting through intelligence agencies was [00:02:00] oddly enough, hard to spend sometimes because of the nature of how those things pay out. Okay. And then I had a friend who was an entrepreneur, who was a member of another intelligence agency in another country.

And we had a conversation in New York and he had an idea, and it involved this country called East Timor. East Timor is half of an island that's north of Darwin, Australia and east of Bali. What's the other half of the island? Srilanka? Arizona. West Timor. West Timor. Oh really? I've never heard of West Timor.

Yeah. I mean it's, I should guess that a little tiny island. So Ha. They divided it in half and they seceded from Indonesia. It was part of Indonesia. Okay. When East Timor said we're out, Indonesia came in and they killed a third of the population. Oh. Massacred men, women and children. And I don't know the number, you'll have to Google it, but I think it's between two and 300,000 people.

Yuck. It's. Staggering number of people. So West Timor's part of Indonesia, then? It still is. Yeah. Okay. So as a matter of Yes, that's another story. So I said, alright, what's going on in East Timor? They have, it's one of the most remarkable places [00:03:00] on earth because they have massive gas reserves, oil and natural gas, including literally pools of oil that look like ponds.

But they're just oil bubbling outta the ground. Sounds like

Jordan Harbinger: some dinosaur

Christopher Whitcomb: shit. Dinosaur. It's dinosaur shit. Yeah. It's like the LaBrea Tars, but it's real. Exactly. But it's still active. Right? Except you can

Jordan Harbinger: put it in your

Christopher Whitcomb: lawnmower. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's crazy. And they have natural gas, which is wild.

But it comes outta the ground and it will light on fire. And you'll see these hillsides that look like a giant. Barbecue grill.

Jordan Harbinger: That's really cool though. It's so cool. As long as it doesn't kill anyone.

Christopher Whitcomb: And I always said it's five of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life. 'cause they have red coral beaches.

I mean red coral, red sand. Yeah. No Red coral that takes over that. But they have black sand. Oh wow. So that's really cool. And they had Jumanji jungle. I mean, just the most beautiful primeval jungle with everything that you would find in those jungles. What is

Jordan Harbinger: it with any place that's that beautiful is always a complete shit.

Dangerous. Right. Crazy thing because they're going

Christopher Whitcomb: to hack you up with a, a shit. Right. Like they,

Jordan Harbinger: they can't just sit and enjoy the sand and the coral and the, and the natural resources. They gotta kill everybody over it. [00:04:00] Right, right. And

Christopher Whitcomb: listen, I don't want to say anything bad about the team mare because I have great, great, great respect for the leaders of the country and the team.

Maiz. I had a wonderful time there within the parameters of my insanity. But getting killed with a gun is one thing. Getting killed with a rock or stone to death or getting cut up with a machete is not, it's not that much more pleasant. Yeah. A machete. Yeah, exactly right. So anyway, so I said, alright, what are we gonna do?

And they had this plan that was closely aligned with the fact that it was strategically important to major five eyes countries, including the United

Jordan Harbinger: States. Here's a question that probably just above both of our pay grades potentially, but when that country secedes Indonesia's, like you're not leaving.

Why? Because of the resources or because it sets a bad precedent to let everybody who wants to leave,

Christopher Whitcomb: leave your country. I think so. I mean, there are, I don't know how many UN studies, and, I mean this is very, very broadly written about documentaries. When I went from Somalia, which was stood up as a country and fell down a very short period of time afterwards, I went to Timor, which at the time was the newest country in the world.

I

Jordan Harbinger: remember reading about it was great fanfare that this is the newest [00:05:00] country and backpackers were like, I'm gonna go check it out. Yeah. The newest country. Yeah. And after hearing your stories, I'm like. Did any of those backpackers ever come back?

Christopher Whitcomb: I knew a lot of those backpackers. Okay. I mean, technically I was one of those backpackers.

I mean, I flew to Timor with a suitcase and a one-way ticket.

Jordan Harbinger: You maybe knew a little bit more about what you were getting into Yeah. Than the people from Lonely Planet.

Christopher Whitcomb: Fair. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. I did know a little bit more and I did have a little bit more of a mechanism. Yeah. But, um, it is a stunningly beautiful place.

When the Indonesians killed a third of the population, they also raised the country. They took the phone lines, they blew up the roads. They burned the buildings. They killed anybody who wasn't either on their side or was too old or too young to care about. Yeah. So it was decimated. So into that vacuum came the United Nations, they stood up what they call a mission.

So it would be the United Nations mission in Timor Unmet. And they restored some kind of livability and got the country back on its feet a little bit when they pulled out. All of a sudden you had a civil war. [00:06:00] Sure. Yeah. Because everybody wants whatever shit's left over, right? Mm-hmm. So the military got in a big gunfight with the police and it went downhill from there.

So I went in during the Civil War, not during the secession from Indonesia. Gotcha. And, but when I went in, there were tanks in the streets. The Australians were there. They had an international defense force, which was Portuguese, that had started out as a Portuguese colony. Oh, that was,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: Okay. That makes sense.

And uh, plus all the guys that you see in the blue helmets from the United Nations, they were in there. So anywhere you go. There were tanks and helicopters and guys with machine guns walking up and down the dirt roads that were supposed to be streets. It was wild. Absolutely wild. And there was no government per se, really?

Why did I get confused and think it was Sri Lanka? Is there another, did

Jordan Harbinger: Sri Lanka have, you might be

Christopher Whitcomb: talking about Myanmar. Myanmar was a big backpack place until that went down. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: no, I was thinking about, for some reason I had it at pegged as Sri Lanka because with the Tamil Tigers, the terrorist group was, I think they're partially

Christopher Whitcomb: there, but, uh, but that

Jordan Harbinger: was another island.

I just got the name. I don't know. I don't know. I got confused. 'cause you're right, it's in Indonesia. So it's in Asia. I [00:07:00] didn't clock that. Indonesia

Christopher Whitcomb: is a fascinating country 'cause it's so big. It's the largest Muslim population in the world, isn't

Jordan Harbinger: it? Like a thousand different islands? Something like that.

Or hundreds and hundreds.

Christopher Whitcomb: 3,600. Oh, so it's

Jordan Harbinger: more

Christopher Whitcomb: than It's thousands of thousands. Yeah. And thousands of dialects. So Timor for example, spoke Teran. The local language, the local dialect, they spoke Indonesian. 'cause it was an Indonesian country basically. It was part of Indonesia. They spoke English because that's what the United Nations requires.

And they spoke all the languages. If a United Nations country came in and they wanted to work in the house, they would learn that. So anytime you find these colonized, impoverished, marginalized countries around the world, whatever terminology, third world, a developing nation, whatever, whatever terminology, and you actually live it.

I mean, I was there off and on for seven years and when you see how those things actually work, it's pretty, uh, disillusioning about the world and charity. Anyway, that's another story. But I ended up there, I started this company and I brought in a couple expats. I hired the Prime Minister's son, [00:08:00] who was a remarkable guy in his own right.

It was the third company that I'd started. So entrepreneurially, I looked at it as entrepreneurial, not like I just wanted to start an army on my own. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In a jungle. That's what it turned out to be. But that's not where I started. But anyway, they had no currency. So they use US dollars, but the US dollars came from China pallet loaded on cargo planes.

Okay. And my buddy, the backup guitar player in my band was the president of a NZ bank. And he would have three to $7 million at any given time, like in the tele counter because there was no credit. There was no checks. No credit cards. Right. Everything was cash. All they real dollars.

Jordan Harbinger: Real dollars. But they came from China.

China. Why? So you could

Christopher Whitcomb: just wipe the ink off with your thumb. It was all counterfeit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's what I mean. So they weren't real dollars. No, they weren't real dos. Yeah. Okay. But they

Christopher Whitcomb: operated, I mean, this was Monopoly money in a country that had nothing. What was it like

Jordan Harbinger: Poland and uh, the, during the Cold War, they would use like Kent cigarettes as Yeah.

And so you'd be passing this pack of cigarettes. That was right. You know, uns smoke [00:09:00] destroyed. But it was like, now it's still a pack. It's still counts. 'cause it was just currency. It didn't matter what

Christopher Whitcomb: it looked like. Well, people talk about money and cash. We don't use cash anymore. You go to Starbucks, they look at you, you're nuts.

If you try to give 'em a five, $5.

Jordan Harbinger: There are places around where I live up in NorCal and it says cash free if you show up with cash. Yeah, yeah. You're washing dishes. You have you. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: When I built that company, I built that company with no safety net at all. And as it grew bigger and bigger, you needed a safety net.

Because if you don't make, if billing doesn't match up with receipts at the end of the month, you got all the guys that you hire as henchman to burn everybody else down. They're coming after you. So they'd line up 4,000 people all over the country and they'd show up to get paid in cash and we'd go to the bank and get two and a half million dollars in twenties.

On a Friday morning, and then you line up and we'd have our own guys, like the inner guys who would be ready to go after the other guys. Anything could happen. Yeah. 'cause it

Jordan Harbinger: seems like an

Christopher Whitcomb: invitation

Jordan Harbinger: to

Christopher Whitcomb: get

Jordan Harbinger: robbed, but then again, you are robbing the security company for the whole country, so maybe no one's gonna steal.

Yeah. But

Christopher Whitcomb: they are at war too. There's also, [00:10:00] it was not easy starting that company, but it's somehow it worked like, you know, really extraordinary people.

Yeah.

And the team, Maurice, by and large, are remarkable people in their own way. Just the culture of the island itself. Now remember they started out as a Portuguese colony in the 16th century.

I didn't know that. Okay. 17th century. So they were Catholic, but they were also animists. So they would go to church on Sundays in these big cathedrals that had been built in the 18 hundreds, and then they would go out, or I would go out with 'em and we'd go to these cemeteries that were all totems, you know, like water buffalo skulls, and we'd have cast spells.

That's cool. It was wild because for somehow, I don't know how somehow they being the people in the company and the people that I interacted with thought that I had black magic that was stronger than everybody else. They

Jordan Harbinger: thought you had black magic.

Christopher Whitcomb: Me personally.

Jordan Harbinger: What gave them that idea? I

Christopher Whitcomb: have no

Jordan Harbinger: idea.

Just, you're like a tall white guy, so they're like, he must be magical.

Christopher Whitcomb: I don't know what happened, but I can tell you that that's why I survived and that's why I thrive there. Really? I don't know why. I don't know why, but [00:11:00] I can tell you endless stories about what that means. Chicken sacrifices and Yeah.

And uh, you know, all the different stuff. Exercising. There was the ghost in a, well, that story that, that I wrote about before. Yeah. So they

Jordan Harbinger: would call you and be like, Hey man, I got evil spirit, so you come over. Well, I had this guy

Christopher Whitcomb: named Johnny, and Johnny is like J-A-U-G-H-N-N-Y-I-E. Like it was phonetic of whatever his tattoo name was.

Right, right. But Johnny was a stud. Johnny was the greatest. He was one of the senior local executives in the company. And he came up one day and he said, boss, I I, you know, I need Thursday off. And I said, okay, cool. What's going on? Yeah. And he said, my aunt died. And I go, Johnny, didn't your sister die yesterday and somebody else died the day before?

What's going on with your family? Yeah. And he said, well, you know, I've got a really good job. My uncle's really jealous. So he's cast all these spells on my family to kill them. And he goes, I really need your help. And he wanted me to come over on his day off to put together some spells that we stronger than his uncles.

So you don't anticipate those types of [00:12:00] tasking requests, a CEO of a company?

Jordan Harbinger: No,

Christopher Whitcomb: but that's Tuesday.

Jordan Harbinger: But it's also better than him telling you to come over so you can go kill his uncle. Right. It's like

Christopher Whitcomb: there's no, there's plenty of that too. There's plenty of that too. There's plenty of that too. Okay.

Because plenty of

Jordan Harbinger: that. That's kind of where I saw the story going. Yeah. Yeah. And that it just made a hard right into No, you never know what you're getting. Exactly. That's,

Christopher Whitcomb: I mean, violence that you're exposed to day to day. Awful.

Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like a life is cheap kind of country. Is that

Christopher Whitcomb: accurate? You know, that's a really great question.

I don't know that because the people that I, the team race that I knew and worked with and I had enormous respect for, they were beautiful in a lot of ways. But something would snap, like I had this guy one time, he was a guard outside his, it was not a supermarket, but it was like a place where you'd buy expired canned goods from China.

Okay. That's how you'd survive, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and bald eagle. That was a delicacy too.

Jordan Harbinger: Actual bald eagle. Yeah. But

Christopher Whitcomb: that's another story.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, it's really bad. You should start a podcast that's called, it's another story because it, yeah, it's another story. And if you're playing the drinking game at home where you drink every time, he says, that's another story.

I'm not paying for your hospitals. I mean, we, we only have so much time. It's probably already

Christopher Whitcomb: running out of this time, right? That's right. We got another hour, man. Alright. [00:13:00] Don't worry. Well, j just, we'll play a game where you go. Tell me one of those other stories. This story is important because when the Indonesians started the war and when it went from there, most of the weapons were taken out of the general population.

So you'd have some in the army, some in the mil, in the, in the police. Most of them were taken out of society. So you would have. Bows and arrows, poison darts, machetes, which were mostly often handmade. It was like being in prison, right? Yeah. Everything was manufactured.

Jordan Harbinger: I'd rather get shot. I think y yeah.

If I had to choose between poison Bow and arrow and shot.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. Than choose shot. Every time. I think you, you're a smart guy, Jordan. You got a lot going on. But anyway, so this guy's garden, that's supermarket. Let me back up. You needed a private security company to guard whatever you had as a westerner. If you wanted to go and live there and work there, you had to hire my company or my competitor, because if not, they would burn you out.

Take your women and kill your whatever else. Geez.

It was that bad. Just civil war situation where everybody's die, it's,

well, the Civil War didn't last that long. It wasn't really the Civil War. It [00:14:00] was that when you take that much from a culture, it creates a vacuum. In that vacuum, you pour in human nature and human nature says, I want what's left.

You have a complete lack of order in ways that we take it for granted. So people are gonna say, well, maybe I could take his refrigerator. I'm gonna go find out, and you go take his refrigerator. You know, that's, it goes downhill fast from there. So there was a lot of that. It wasn't necessarily the Civil War, it was everything that came around.

They had this, uh, gorilla leader named Renato, who was gonna come in and take over. The government actually tried, we had a coup ta. Oh, really? Yeah. He came down with his rebels outta the mountains. I mean, literally like came down out of the jungles, attacked the President's house and attacked the Prime Minister's house.

They shot the President Ramos Hoda, who won it was a Nobel Prize winner. They shot him, I think seven times. And he survived. Oh, he survived. He survived. Wow. No, the guy's a stud. That's, that's unbelievable. Why's getting shot and instead of the machete. Okay. Wouldn't survived the machete. That's right.

Because now we're gonna talk about the machete. That's right. So somebody calls up and says, Hey, Jimmy Joe just chopped off somebody's [00:15:00] head at the supermarket. You know, it's like a cave with some dead stuff out front that you could buy to eat. So we, we go over there and I go up and there's this guy sitting on a bucket turned over and I go up to him and there's a guy with his head chopped off and I go, dude, what's going on?

You know, you're supposed to protect him. Why'd you chop his head off? And he just looks up at me and he looks back down at his feet. So things would happen that you would try to intellectualize. There's no intellectualizing. Some behaviors. Yeah. It's just he didn't know why he did it. Just chopped the guy head off.

Geez. Anyways, you learn a lot about human nature traveling in different cultures, and I've been in a lot of different cultures.

It would be exhausting to live that way. It was exhausting.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like when you leave, you don't miss it, I assume. I mean, maybe some. I missed it. I always missed it. You missed it bad.

What do you miss? I feel like the hyper vigilance would get old fast. 'cause

Christopher Whitcomb: every day, every moment of every day was every single possible thing you could expect outta life. It was so intense. It was like a 24 hour, seven year gunfight. [00:16:00] Sometimes it was, you know, those things. But I think that some people get to a point, and you, you probably find this with professional athletes.

You've interviewed everybody. Remarkable people. Extraordinary people. And I think many of those people probably told you, you're the perfect example. You're not there yet, but you're gonna be there someday. When you look back and you're gonna miss the vig, you're gonna look back and you're gonna miss the action, whatever it is.

So many professional athletes hang on as long as they can because when it's over, it's over. Get used to it. And you accept that you've moved on to something else in life. And that sucks. My life has been a scale down of those things. Going from combat to whatever, to business. 'cause business can get that too, when you gotta make a payroll.

Yeah.

Every month in fake dollars. Yeah. Yeah. In fake dollars. But it doesn't matter what it is. When you live a life intensely and you realize it's starting to become less intense. Many people don't like that. I didn't like

Jordan Harbinger: it. I could see that. I mean, it could just be my midlife crisis talking, but I feel like I could taste a little bit of that.

By the way, where do you buy [00:17:00] millions of dollars in counterfeit US money from China asking for a friend.

Christopher Whitcomb: What people don't realize, in my opinion, like I've worked with many of the primary intelligence agencies, the Five Eyes, you know the five i's are the The Ally, yeah. Intelligence agencies,

Jordan Harbinger: US, uk, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Yes,

Christopher Whitcomb: exactly right.

Am I, am I missing one?

No, no, that's it. But then you have Mossad, or let me say you have the Israelis, you have Mossad should bet all those organizations. But then we have favored nation status with some countries and work well with them, like the French and the Italian sometimes. But I was working like with Mozambique in South Africa.

Yeah, sure. I've spent a great deal of time in Africa, and some of these organizations have a whole different set of rules and your interaction with them creates a lot of problems for the five eyes countries that you're working with. It becomes very, very complex. Very complex.

Jordan Harbinger: What sort of rules conflict with the.

Like you'd go to

Christopher Whitcomb: jail for talking improperly to a foreign intelligence agency. Here's the thing that, that I learned about the Chinese that I think people need to know. When I went to Timor, [00:18:00] I was the largest employer in the country, and I was an American, and I went to the United States Embassy in Timor in seven years.

I went there one time, it was 4th of July, and it was a pool party, and I talked to nobody, the U-S-A-I-D, it was disbanded basically by Trump. So many, many people wouldn't have known about U-S-A-I-D unless that had happened. But U-S-A-I-D is very big in certain countries, and they were very big in Timor.

But here's the difference, and here's where we're going to this story. The Chinese came in and their model would be the Chinese would come in and they would go to the government and they would say, we're gonna give you literally did, this is not hypothetical. They brought in 12 BMW SUVs on a boat. They gave them to the 12 ministers in charge of the departments that they wanted to influence.

Then they say, we're gonna build you a new government building that's gonna cost $2.5 million. They brought in the concrete, they brought in the architects, they brought in the laborers. They brought in all the materials, and all the money went back. On paper, they gave Timor two and a half [00:19:00] million dollars.

Yeah. 2.45 went back to China. Sure. But they leave the laborers behind. You go anywhere in Central America, south America. Africa, many developing nations, you're gonna see the same model. So they have been brilliant in colonizing the world with a business model where they bring in foreign aid, but they leave people behind to integrate within the culture.

The Chinese has been doing that for thousands of years. Yeah. And it's genius. Yeah, it's brilliant. So the Chinese came and did this and uh, a buddy of mine ran, uh, Manitoba Hydro Electric. They literally, Timor was powered by a bunch of gas diesel generators in Conex boxes. You'd never had power. I mean, living there was really rough.

Yeah, I bet. But the government finally had enough money held in what they called a Stockholm trust because they weren't allowed to spend the money, the UN would appropriate a portion money. So the government came out and went to tender with a new power grid system for the entire country. And I don't remember, so I'm gonna get it wrong, but I know it was more than a billion dollars.

It might've been 1 5, [00:20:00] 1 6. I know this because my buddy ran the power company or ran the power grid. Right. The government opened the contract at. 11 o'clock at night. Another exaggeration. They opened it for a very, very brief time period, like midnight to eight in the morning. They had one bid and it was the Chinese company that had put the whole thing together.

They got the contract and they did very, very poorly on the, on the job, but the all the money went back. So the Chinese come in with $2.5 million for government building and 12 BM BMW SUVs, and they leave with a billion dollars and they leave their people behind to integrate with the culture and you now have an infrastructure that gives you any information that you want.

And that's what they've done around the world, including the United States of America. That's their model. The United States model at the time, this is not an exaggeration, this is specifically the United States came in with $12,500 to buy T-shirts that said Support Timor by local. There were these ugly brown T-shirts [00:21:00] with gold lettering, and that was the contribution the United States government made.

To one of the potentially primary important sites near the nuclear highway and with this oil and natural gas, and you take those two models together and you realize how we've been asleep at the wheel for quite some time. Yeah, it's over. I mean, that's a very small metaphor that I would use to explain where we are in the world right now.

Yeah. Russia doesn't do that. Iran doesn't do that. North Korea doesn't do that. China has done it, and I've seen these things living in those environments. Yeah. How they work on a day-to-day basis.

Jordan Harbinger: So he's sitting there doing the math like 12 guys, two of us, no guns, four hours to the safe house. That is a word problem they don't give you on the SATs.

Speaking of math, let's run the numbers on keeping the show going. Here's a quick word from the people who make it possible. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by BiOptimizers. It's Black Friday saving season. This is huge. You know the BiOptimizers products, I [00:22:00] always talk about the ones that are science-backed and lab tested, like Magnesium Breakthrough for sleep support, Masszymes for digestive support.

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And I would love to share the well, the Safe For Work stuff with you all and do it for free, not shenanigans. Six Minute Networking dot com is about inspiring other people to create a relationship with you, doing it in systematic way that really only takes a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course.

Come on and join us. You'll be in smart slash dangerous company where you belong. You can find the course again all free at Six Minute Networking dot com. Now back to Chris Whitcomb. I was in Laos about this time last year, and uh, not in the touristy areas. Uh, generally just kind of driving around. Front and around in the country, hiking, stuff like that.

And you see this big dam and you're like, wow, that's outta place. And looks really new. And there's Chinese riding on it. It's all Chinese. And you go, this is a really nice highway. What is this? Looks pretty new. Yeah. Yeah. It's brand new. It's built by the Chinese. Alright, we're gonna take the train. And I'm like, oh nice.

What's a Lauch and train gonna look like? Am I right guys? Let's hope the thing stays on the tracks. And you go, and it's a brand new station. There's a Chinese police officer in the corner. All the [00:25:00] writing is in Chinese. There's a video playing in Chinese. They're selling Chinese snacks at the train station and a bullet train arrives and I'm like, what country am I in?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I thought I was a lot, I just got out of the jungle. Swatting away bugs that probably have some kind of venom that rots your skin away. And I'm getting on a bullet train with air conditioning where the, where even the, the writing and all the parts are in Chinese and the bathroom signs are in Chinese.

They didn't even bother making it readable to the local population. They were just like, nah. To all the Chinese nationals watching

Christopher Whitcomb: this podcast right now. Yeah. You're the best.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, I speak Mandarin and a part of it is just because, look, they're so smart. I need to be able to talk to the rest, and they're so committed.

Christopher Whitcomb: They're smart, they're committed. Yeah. I'm not saying that that it's good. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying the gig is over. I don't even know how we could try to catch up at this point. It's like an insurmountable test. That's that's true. Yeah. Listen, I'm a patriot. Well, yeah.

I've lived and died from my country. You are right. Haven't died. I, I, I make these statements out of the reality of the life that I've lived in those worlds. I'm not saying I want it to be the [00:26:00] case. I'm not saying I have an answer of how it happened or where we go from here. I'm just saying people need to realize when you're watching all these stories about what's happening in the world right now, you may be looking in the wrong direction.

The Chinese are really committed.

Jordan Harbinger: The only way that I can see us getting ahead is either AI or quantum supremacy that allows us to just have a crazy edge. Which is they're investing in that as much or more than we are. There's some economic bubble or something that bursts in China that just sets them back 20 years and gives us a chance to seize that advantage instead of just going, oh, look at that guy tripped over his own shoes and then continuing to pick our nose and, and you know, watch television, which is anyway, like you said, another conversation.

Can we talk about Waco and Ruby Ridge and the FBI?

Christopher Whitcomb: I'll talk about it only because you're a great guy and because, uh, people are gonna ask, right. People are gonna ask. Yeah. But, but I'll say it this, there's no way to sugarcoat this. Waco. People know what Waco is. Some people know what Ruby Ridge is. I don't know if people know what Waco, I mean, we're old.

You gotta realize like some people, well, [00:27:00] well only because, well, it's become a folk thing. It's become like the Kennedy assassination and because that's true. A friend of mine named Tiller Russell, who's a brilliant movie director, did a big Netflix show called Waco American Apocalypse. It popularized it.

If it wasn't popularized enough, he brought four people in to talk about it. And FBI, hostage Rescue Team Sniper, which is. A negotiator who tried to talk the thing out, which is a guy named Gary Nener.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: And uh, the guy that ran it and then a Branch Davidian and he talked to Dick DeGuerin a little bit, who was an attorney that was, came in for David Crush.

Bottom line was a shootout with the A TF. A lot of people died, both sides. The government didn't really have anything, any backstop to take over. Once the firefight ended and it was war, and that was us, that we were the final backstop, the hush rescue team, we flew in. 51 days later, the building burned down and 80 something people died.

Mm-hmm. Now, this is 30 years ago and 30. I remember watching it on TV two years ago. Many people that would watch don't even know what we're talking about. However, it's become a very, very big [00:28:00] controversy because people have very strong things to say about the government, about the FBI, about how these things happen.

I was involved in it, so people ask, it was not an issue in my life for 30 years because. I've lived such a broad life. It was a very, very small event. It was a tragic event where 80 something people died. I'm not, I'm not belittling the impact, but I'm saying imagine what happened to your life, not 30 years ago, but like two thirds of your life.

Got my learning permit two thirds of life ago. Something happens. Yeah. And it did. So people always ask me about it. I respect that. Uh, and I'll answer specific questions that you have about

Jordan Harbinger: it. Sure. I think most people forgot what it was. And I'm, I'm going off memory here, but wasn't it, so David Koresh started a cult.

They built a compound in Waco, Texas, and then they decided we're gonna buy a bunch of guns. Yes. And stockpile weapons and ammunition. A TF got wind of it and said. You probably don't need this unless you're gonna be up to something and then I assume there's licenses required for the amount of weapons in ammo they had.

They were kind of preparing for

Christopher Whitcomb: an apocalyptic situation, right? Yeah. [00:29:00] But just really quickly, you hit all the major points. Uh, a guy named Vernon Howell changed his name to David Koresh because it was prophetic and he became the second coming of Christ. This isn't me, this is widely written about. He said it in his own words.

You can watch it on YouTube a thousand times, right? When he did that, he built this compound. People came to stay there to worship with him. He took all their stuff, took their women. None of which anybody really cares about. It's people doing America. Yeah. However, what happened was there's no license to buy a bunch of guns or to buy a bunch of ammo.

But if you put fully automatic trigger seers converting a regular gun to fully automatic, you do need a license for that. He didn't have those and he was buying hand grenade husks. He was putting the components back together to build hand grenades. So at the time there's always some kind of terrorism.

There's always some topic du jo that people are worried about. At the time, it was a Christian national white supremacy, domestic terrorism thing wrapped around this thing called the Turner Diaries, [00:30:00] which was the government's coming to get you, and Zog was the Zionist occupational government. It was a big thing at that time, and agencies looking for something to do, sought out people.

It was like a crime with a scene wait to happen. Right. Okay. And, uh, so a TF went in with a search warrant to look for those guns and to look for those grenades. The people in the compound led by David Caress said no. And they had a hellacious gunfight. So that's what it was. I'm not saying it was right or wrong.

I'm not saying they couldn't have picked him up in town. All of these things are widely debated. People are gonna yell at me and say, whatever, call me all these names. But the reality is this went on for 51 days. At the 51st day, Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States said Is enough is enough.

We inserted tear gas into the building with tanks because they were shooting the shit out of us. I remember watching a video of this like

Jordan Harbinger: tank with a, without a canon, it had like a, I don't know, a wall pusher ringer, whatever you call it. Yeah. Battery round. It had a boom on it.

Christopher Whitcomb: It looked like a gun. Yeah.

But it was like it looked bad. Right. And boom, he knocks a wall in [00:31:00] and he shoots tear gas and we were shooting tear gas in it. Um, but they were hosing us, man. I mean, they shot the Branch Davidians inside that compound shot so many bullets, so many rounds. They had to weigh them. They picked him up with a front end loader and they had to weigh them.

He had millions of rounds of ammo and they shot a lot of them at us. Um, so there's not a lot to say except that I now have come to terms with the fact that it's an American story. Yeah, a bad one. Yeah, it's a very

Jordan Harbinger: bad one. Do you feel like you carry moral weight when this mission go? Like a mission like that goes, becomes so tragic and shitty?

Why? No. Not, not like it's your fault, but I just mean like you were like, oh man, maybe I wish I wasn't part of that, or anything along those lines. Well, nobody

Christopher Whitcomb: wants to be part of something like that. I mean, you know, you join the military and you storm the beaches of wherever and you save the world for democracy.

That's what you want. Yeah. Yeah. You ask military law enforcement people writ large over the last 200 years. You ask 'em how many actually got that? Not many, right? No. You sign up waving the flag saying Send [00:32:00] me. You get a politician involved. It doesn't go well. We just came off the longest two wars in American history, Iraq and Afghanistan, and you look the countless heroes, heroes.

I said, I'll go after nine 11. And you look at what came back, war is always bad in my experience, and I've been a shitload of it. It's always bad.

Jordan Harbinger: I wonder what sort of psychological toll

Christopher Whitcomb: that stuff takes on you

Jordan Harbinger: emotionally, even like spiritually. I know you think about that more

Christopher Whitcomb: now than you used to. I went down hard, man.

I, I think I've done well in my life. Now I'm happy and I have a good life. Uh, that was not the case for a long time.

Jordan Harbinger: You were drinking a lot is evident. I mean, the book mentions alcohol several times. Yeah. Those people who drink moderately don't have that many alcohol references in one publication. Well,

Christopher Whitcomb: that's probably true, but I think many people that live life experiences wouldn't write as intimately as I did you read that thing?

Yeah.

How many people have you ever known that said, I did this and I did that? That book didn't do me any good in terms of being a paradigm or virtue in the world, right? No, but the [00:33:00] reason I wrote that book was because I feel that the people that do take my path and there aren't many and that have the ability to write it down, need to do that because somebody's gotta tell that story.

Not everybody wants to admit that story exists. They can take aim at me for a lot of different things, but it's the truth about that world in a way that I felt that I could write down that would make sense to people. Good, bad, or otherwise. I should have a little bit of context, but I, I wanted to be a writer, so I was a, I came to California.

I wrote for Orange Coast Magazine, trying to be a rock star. Lived in Orange County, didn't go well. I went back and was a, an English teacher at a boarding school. Then I went and worked for a newspaper. Then I got hired to be a speech writer in dc. Then I ended up in the FBI, so there's the media side, the government side.

Then on nine 11, my first book came out September 12th, 2001. So I'd already resigned from the FBI to go into writing. I said, well, I've done all I can in the FBI. I'm gonna go after this now. NBC hired [00:34:00] me, so I went to work for NBC, so I was on air, I was at talking head talking about all this stuff. Yeah. So I was on the Today Show and Nightly News.

My first book signing was September 12th, 2001 at a Borders in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. So September 11th. Wow. I was supposed to go to New York for a book signing on the next morning in, uh, I was in my FBI office when the towers went down and I'd already been scheduled because the, it was a big press tour.

My first, uh, show was Larry King Live. Do you remember Larry King?

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. I used to have Larry.

Christopher Whitcomb: Really? Yeah. Is that right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: That was the first show I ever did. And then it went from Larry to, uh, all the other shows and NBC and, uh, ended up getting a show on NBC with Martha McCallum who went to Fox A daily show.

Yeah. And so I worked in TV for five years. GQ excerpted my first book, and I had the inside cover. Of GQ Magazine, which yeah, was wide ridicule, hatred from guys I worked with. Too Fluffy. It was absurd. Too soft. It was so bad. Yeah, it was so stupid. It was so idiotic. But they [00:35:00] excerpted a book and they put me on their masted, so I wrote for them, and then the New York Times hired me to write op-ed.

So I was writing for the New York Times gq, and I was on NBC, but I went out to Langley and set up a thing where I could work using those covers for elements within the intelligence committee. That's how I got into the intelligence side of things.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So basically you were a journalist and then you were like, Hey, I could use this to be a spy and a journalist.

That's right. Yeah,

Christopher Whitcomb: that's right. I didn't necessarily do s spies stuff. I worked with spies, but I had specific skills that worked in those environments in support of spies, if that makes sense. It

Jordan Harbinger: does. There was one. Part in the book. You said you were selling technology to intelligence organizations or something like that.

Yeah, that's

Christopher Whitcomb: another element of it. That was much, much later because when I grew up, I grew up with this guy named Harold Janine, who was one of the world's first multi nationalists. And he, this is also widely written about because I know you get the bullshit fact like, shut this guy up. He's just bullshit.

But it's all documented. When Random House bought this book, they made me prove everything. Photographs really?

Jordan Harbinger: I'm surprised that [00:36:00] publisher gave a shit, honestly, because I read stuff and I go, there's no way any of this is true. And the publisher's like, yeah, that's what they said. We don't really care.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah, no, they said they cared. They cared. So they wanted to see the plane ticket from Somalia. They wanted to contracts from the United Nations, which

Jordan Harbinger: publisher?

Christopher Whitcomb: Random House

Jordan Harbinger: props to them for giving you shit. I swear I, a lot of the books I read, I go, I'll call Penguin and go. Guys.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Come on. Yeah, yeah.

Ask anybody who's ever worked in this industry and they will. I, I got, let me introduce you to somebody who will tell you that this isn't even possible.

Christopher Whitcomb: I gotta give a shout out to the legal department at, at Random House, because I've done two books with 'em. I did this book and I've got another one, a true crime book that's coming out shortly, um, both with them and they're, they're the best.

I mean, I think the world of those guys, yeah, they're remarkable. My previous publisher was Tom Warner. They were fantastic. And now I'm at Harbor Collins. They're good. But anyway, they verified absolutely everything. But, um, going back to the, uh, the intelligence side of things, my Uncle Harold was, he started ITT, which is now community colleges or something like that, but in the day was the world's first multinational corporation.

He was a [00:37:00] Time Magazine Man of the year. He was the highest paid executive for a decade. He was a remarkable guy, but he was a private money financeer for the CIA. He would use his money or the company's money to finance CIA operations, one of which was in Chile. He paid cash money to overthrow the government of Salvador Ande and Chile in 1970 or 71, something like that.

What's in it for him to use his own money to do that? Because ITT was International Telephone and Telegraph.

Okay.

They used copper for the wires. Copper was produced. A lot of copper was produced in Chile. They had a general strike. Chile nationalized the companies and they put ITT outta business to a certain extent.

The company of ITT had an interest in getting copper from Chile. The US government had a, a vested interest in keeping communications, so the government needed phones and telegraphs and everything else, which were produced by ITT. So it was an interface, and there is, to this day, people don't realize that much of, almost the [00:38:00] vast majority of what the US government buys and uses is produced by private corporations.

Sure. Electric Boat General Dynamics, Raytheon, et cetera, et cetera. Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, I believe that's what it. And I've done a lot of stuff with them. A lot of stuff like an invisible suit. We made this invisible sniper suit using light fiber optic and

that's awesome.

Oh, they did.

They do crazy stuff. Does it work? It worked pretty well, but I don't know what happened. I mean that, you know, I don't know where it is right now. Yeah, current. They, they do crazy stuff. You can't see it. That that was kind of a, could be a guy sitting generic sitting in the corner like now. Yeah, like a Monsanto Gili suit, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. It's just going on. You step on the carpet and you're like, what the hell? Exactly. There's a person under, I mean, it seems possible. It was kind of like

Christopher Whitcomb: that thing in Predator, you know when Predators got the Cloy thing. Yeah. It was very much like that. It had sensors that would read what's around you and it would feed it to the fiber optics.

Yeah, it was. It was actually very, very good. Just projects. What's

behind it to the front.

Yeah. Here's another thing that's incredible. I remember I had this project one time, and if you shoot from a helicopter at something, it's hard [00:39:00] 'cause the helicopter's moving. If you're shooting at a boat, the boat's moving, the helicopter and the boat's moving.

The odds are hitting something are small.

Yeah, it's

bad.

Yeah.

Yeah. So a buddy of mine in Hollywood, a movie director, was whatever. I called him up and I said, how do you stabilize the cameras?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good idea.

Christopher Whitcomb: In a helicopter. And he said, go see this guy in the valley. I fly from Quantico, Virginia out to la.

Go over the 4 0 5 and I end up in this guy's place. It's the same guy that invented the jet pack, the guy flying around in the jet pack. Uh, the water one, I don't know if it was water. I think it was air. Really. The first one was air. It became, now it's like you go to Cancun and you drink two margaritas and go for a ride.

Yeah. Back in the day. But anyways, fascinating guy. So we pioneered a sniper platform based on what was the steady cam concept, which generates artificial mass with inertia. It just spins a wheel and it stabilizes. Wow. Anyway, the point of the story is that, uh, going back to all these organizations that, uh, many of them are private, they produce money, and the interface between the application [00:40:00] from the federal government and the private industry behind them, that interface is massive, massive, massive money.

That's what I wanted a piece of.

Jordan Harbinger: Who's the guy that overthrow the go paid to overthrow the government at China? His name was

Christopher Whitcomb: Harold Janine, Google. Him. Harold Janine. It's, uh, widely written about. But anyway, they killed, I think it was Salvador and they killed, but they sent, they being the Chilean government sent a hit team after him and they blew up their offices building in, uh, New York.

And he went to hide out in an estate that he had in Northern New Hampshire. Geez. So I grew up, he hired a guy named Jack McCone, who I call Jack. It was John a McCone, I think, but he was the acting director of the CIA. Harold Janine hired him to come to work and made him a board member at ITT. So I grew up with these guys, spies and the money behind them just hanging out in this house in New Hampshire.

And it was an interesting interface as my life moved forward because I had that perspective in youth.

Jordan Harbinger: So he pays to overthrow the government in Chile and in return he gets access to copper. And the CIA gets to overthrow the government of [00:41:00] Chile.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. But the CIA per se did not have an interest in overthrowing the government of Chile.

Okay. The US government had a strategic national security interest in having communications at the time. I see. In order to have communications, you needed to have wires. In order to have wires, you needed copper. And where do you get the copper? You get it in chili. They needed to make that friendly enough to buy the copper.

Basically, they shut the copper off. They nationalized the interest.

Jordan Harbinger: I just mean they wanted to undo that.

Christopher Whitcomb: The government. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Right. So who's the mechanism for the federal government at that time? Right? The ccia A you're not gonna send the postal service after 'em, right? You're not gonna send a AL service after 'em.

So the CIA put it together, but the money in these things, Jordan, we can't talk about this in one conversation, but the money is fascinating.

Jordan Harbinger: The dumb question is, why doesn't the CIA just pay to have the government overthrown? Why do they need Harold's money?

Christopher Whitcomb: Because the way you spend it, remember here is a perfect example.

Remember the Oliver North thing with the birthday cake? Yeah. And the, I was

Jordan Harbinger: sandinistas, I was just gonna bring that up. 'cause I had Oliver North on the show and I asked him about this and he gave me the most [00:42:00] ridiculously like upside down answer ever.

Christopher Whitcomb: Well, he's not gonna say it, but I am. Yeah. I'm gonna tell you.

Not that anybody cares. 'cause this is ancient history. Does it still go on? Of course it does. Of course it still goes on. I mean, ask anybody, ask a private first class who is in interlink Air Force base, uh, or whatever, the joint base about pallets of a hundred dollars bills flying into Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years.

The world operates in cash. We buy stuff. It's so much easier to pay money for something than it is to blow it up. Sometimes. You gotta do both. But the world, my exposure to how the world of money interface with a government world of intelligence operations was the most fascinating thing I've done in my life.

And finding out how to work in that world and how complex that world is. And on a very really pedestrian level, you could see in Timor, 'cause it was, the money was coming in from China and it was, you know, and a UN guy from Africa would take his money back to Africa. He'd take all those fake dollars back to [00:43:00] Africa.

But my Uncle Harold growing up was bigger money with bigger operations. And today the money and the bigger operations are astronomically, exponentially larger. Private money in the government intelligence community around the world. In my life, that's the most fascinating thing I've ever been involved with.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Look, gimme another example of this. 'cause I think, I mean, is there another sort of common example that everybody knows about? Okay, well I'll, I'll

Christopher Whitcomb: give you, I'll give you an example that I'll try not to get in trouble with, but I, I helped build a company that had a technology and it was a very cool technology and it appealed to intelligence agencies.

So vague continue, but I, I, I don't want to be, because, because I really, I love the guys. Yeah. The, the company still exist to a certain extent. Okay. And I don't want to step on a, a bunch of cranks, but I'll just talk conceptually about how it goes. Let's say you come up with a phone and this phone could. It could count to 10.

Okay. So, uh, you find all the intelligence agencies in the world that want to count to 10 and you label them. And [00:44:00] because of my connections, I could get ahold of them. So I would go to Mozambique, I would go to Israel, I would go to, uh, Lebanon. I would go, well, maybe not Lebanon. 'cause there were exclusion lists.

There were countries that you can't talk to. Yeah. Iran or whatever. I never talked to Iran, but did I talk to elements within Iraq? Yes. Did I talk to countries that did not necessarily have great relationships with Israel? Yes. Because they all want it and it's business. That's the way business works. I mean, if you think that Raytheon is not selling missiles to other places, you're outta your mind, right?

I mean, that's the way it is. It has to be approved on some levels. Anyways, uh, I've got some crazy arm steel stories for you.

Yeah.

So I have this watch and a watch sell can count to 10. What people don't know about the watch that can count to 10 that I'm gonna sell to you. Let's say pick a country, you're the intelligence agency for Turkey.

Mm-hmm. Let's go to Turkey. So I had, I was a former FBI agent who had worked for intelligence community including the CIA and it was fairly widely known 'cause I had talked about it on [00:45:00] CNN or CNBC and, and NBC. And I did it for about five years. So it's not like I was a secret. I'm not saying I was famous, but I was not a secret.

Right? So I end up in this office in Anura, not, I didn't end up there. I went there all the time. I was an anchor all the time. Anchor Turkey was just like Santa Monica. So I end up in this, in this office with this guy. Who was a retired, uh, military officer. I'm not gonna say his ranked 'cause I don't want to get him in trouble.

'Cause you can get in real trouble dealing with these guys. So we're in this place. It's on the second floor of a beach house in Santa Monica. So I'm sitting there with a buddy of mine who was crazy out there guy. He's a full on arms merchant who's dead now, so we can talk about him. Okay. But he was very high up in the Republican party of the United States government.

He was married to a woman who was a name. Okay. So we're on the couch and this military officer who's retired, who's putting the whole thing together, is over here. French doors that open this nice sunny day, Santa Monica. These two guys come in and this one guy looks like something straight out of a Van Dom [00:46:00] movie.

Right. Like Chuck Norris movie. Right. He's got the chest hair, he's got a cheap suit, he's got gold chains, he's got like food crumbs, tur, Turkish odd job. Basically. He's got crumbs in his chest hair. Oh God. And he's got a walleye like. I say walleye. My dad is a walleye, so I like, I'm not trying to piss off.

Is that like off a lazy eye? Yeah. Yeah. So he's looking at me like this, but the other guy's hook, the other guy's looking over here and I'm trying to figure out what he is looking at because I know he is loaded. Right? I know he's carrying a gun. Sure. And I'm thinking, I'm not sure how this thing is gonna go.

And I was going to their organization, the organization they called it. Right. There's, there's an intelligence component. So I'm there selling this thing, the watch that counts to 10 with this guy and then this little tiny guy that's with him is the money guy and he's doing all the talking while. Odd job is staring at me with this, you know, one of his eyes, with one of his eyes.

And I, and I, I'm not trying to make fun of this. It was hysterical. It was funny. I mean, I was trying not to laugh the whole time because it was so stupid. But it was so real. He was bad. So anyways, I'm there to sell the [00:47:00] watch counts to 10. All of a sudden, my buddy over here, who's a real guy in government, all of a sudden they start talking about buying this very specific brand of machine guns and proximity fuses for projectable ordinance.

And at some point in that thing, I go, wait a minute, we're not selling watches. We're here. We're selling proximity fuses for ordinance and various types of machine gun. Then they stopped talk, whatever else they were going to Sudan. So they're talking about delivery to a certain place. This big arms deal is going down at the Nice Look and Alice in Santa Monica.

That's in Ra, Turkey. And so we do this deal and we say, okay, then we go to, to this, the meeting that I was really there for, to sell the watch at accounts to 10. Is this making sense still? It's so far so good. Okay, good. So I know this meeting that we're going to is with Erdogan's Intelligence Organization.

I know that they know I'm coming, I walk in the room and there's a conference table, 10 chairs. Any conference room in the world could be wherever. Yeah. There's a [00:48:00] board and I'm gonna make my presentation on the board. I walk in, there's three guys at the table sitting down and there's a guy standing over on the side looking out the window, nefarious looking.

Mm-hmm. Dope. Right? You make these assessments very simple, one very quickly. There's nothing, I mean, anybody could, you know the game. So the guys turn around and uh, one of 'em stands up and shakes my hand. The other two just stare at me. It is all posturing. And so we go through the whole thing and I'm making my pitch and, uh.

This guy from the window turns around like 45 minutes into this conversation. The guy at the window turns around and looks at me and he goes in perfect English almost on accent in English, says, why would I listen to a former FBI agent who works for the CIA who talked about all this stuff on NBC? Come in here and sell me this watch that counts to 10.

And I said, because all your enemies already have. Yeah, he has to. What he didn't know is that the watch that counts to 10 as a back door in the service agreement that downloads [00:49:00] me. Everything he does, right? Yeah, sure. Just a Trojan horse. So does that happen constantly in private industry? Yes, of course it does.

You buy a phone and you know, Nokia or a iPhone wants to listen, whatever else. Tim

Cook's

listening to our conversation right now. Exactly. But that that's a world we live in. Yeah. But what happens is that you get in these situations where somebody decides that it's not a good thing that they're doing with that, and then private industry decides to go in a certain direction that does not jive with the Biden administration going to the Trump administration because all of the intelligence objectives change.

Or a general gets fired and another one gets hired and things change. It becomes outrageously complex because it's very difficult to tell what the common denominator is at any given time. So you see that in business all the time. Mm-hmm. You start a hotel, it goes outta fashion. Another one comes up a new shoe, a podcast is up, a podcast is down.

It's the world. But when you do it, and the consequence is. [00:50:00] You lose a lot of money in investments. That's one thing when the consequences, you just don't come home. That's a little different. And I like that. I like that consequence.

Jordan Harbinger: You'd like that consequence?

Christopher Whitcomb: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Like it's more exciting to you?

Christopher Whitcomb: I don't know if it's exciting.

It's more complex. I like the problem solving mechanism that goes along with it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So what are you doing now to scratch that itch now that you don't live in East Timor,

Christopher Whitcomb: write books. And uh, is that

Jordan Harbinger: doing

Christopher Whitcomb: it for you? It's not doing it in the same way. Yeah, I can imagine. But here's, uh, I'm not pitching a new book, but I gotta say this, you know that story?

The, uh, the Brian Berger case in Idaho. Oh, is he the one, the guy who killed the college kids in the house? Yes. Pled guilty to killing four college kids in Idaho.

Yeah.

Horrible crime, tragedy in every imaginable way. And it is not what you think. Say more about that. I gotta be careful what I say. It's widely talked about.

It's probably the most widely true crime case in quite some time. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And the police department, meaning the Moscow Police Department, the Idaho State Police, [00:51:00] um, various organizations have given out a lot of information. But under a 1964 Supreme Court case, Brady versus Maryland, the prosecution has to give all of their information to the defense, meaning everything, exculpatory information and everything.

The defense has to farm that out to get experts interpreted. Like we all know about the DNA on a knife sheath. We know about the cell phone tower pings. We know about the white car that was supported. We know Bill Thompson's case, the prosecutor. We know about his case because he said at the hearing, the plea changed, hearing what those things were.

So a lot of this information is out there. What people don't know is that file about 59,000 separate items comprising hundreds of thousands. Well, I don't want to exaggerate. Over 200,000 bits of information. Geez. Data points in this thing.

Yeah.

And hypothetically speaking, if somebody looked at that and had six months to analyze that, it is astonishing what people don't know and what actually happened.

I find the consequence extraordinary because you have [00:52:00] the murders of four young people and you have a guy in prison for the rest of his life who pleaded guilty to this. And when people find out what happened, it'd be shocking.

Yeah.

I have no theories. I don't speculate anything. All I do is line up documents as they were found and presented.

I don't know how to explain it except that's baffling.

Jordan Harbinger: Only at Gimo do you find McDonald's and moral crisis in the same zip code? That is a weird combo meal. Speaking of mixed feelings, here's a quick word from the fine folks helping us keep the lights on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Quince Cold Mornings holiday plans.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Chris Whitcomb, it seems like a wide departure from setting up a security company in East Timor or meeting landlords in Afghanistan. You're. Next stop True Crime podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's uh, it's, no, it's not a podcast, it's book. I'm just, I know, I'm kidding. But it's like, yeah. In a similar vein, right? Yeah. You stay busy, man.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. You gotta find something. So the complexity of that is what appeals to you? The [00:56:00] complexity appeals to me, and I did another one. I did another, another book that's coming out before or after that, I don't know, a cold case, 3-year-old cold case in Springfield, Missouri, and found the guy in solve the crime.

And that was the same thing. Putin, you

found the guy in solve a crime?

Yes. Really? Yeah. In writing the book?

Yes.

Can you speak to that a little bit? That's actually kind crazy. Yeah. Okay. 19 92, 3 women disappear from a house in Springfield, Missouri. It's called the Springfield three, Google it. There, uh, very large number of blogs, podcasts, documentaries.

It's been everything, 48 hours. The Oprah Winfrey Show was a very, very widely known case. 33 years after the fact, I was looking, I was saying, what am I gonna do now? And I got access to the entire file. The case has never been closed in 33 years. The police department kept it open so they would not have to disclose information.

If a case is open, it's not discoverable under freedom of information laws for your request.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. That's what journalists like us used to go, you have to tell me this. And they go, no, I don't. And then we say, I'm gonna compel you to do it. So they, the way [00:57:00] around that is to go, sorry, this is a, this is no investigation.

I'm ongoing investigation. Cant talk about it. Exactly. Well, that was

Christopher Whitcomb: the case for 33 years. Yeah. But I was friends with people that did the initial investigation. One of them took a bootleg file of the entire case and had it in his garage for 33 years. Wow. And he says, go get 'em, kid. Wow. So I started going through it and it was very obvious, very quickly what happened.

And it's taken all this time to get the police department, they're fully engaged with it right now. It was a mother, her daughter and her daughter's friend disappeared after graduation on a Saturday into Sunday morning, disappeared. And, um, they've ne no clue has ever been found nothing until now. You can't tell us who, uh, what, what happened or did it, I, I don't want to tell you right now because that would blow the book and I don't have the publication date on it.

Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: it's not out yet. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. You did say that. You did say that. No, but I, but

Christopher Whitcomb: I will say this, the case is not that far behind JonBenet Ramsey in terms of people that know the case. Yeah, sure. And it's really fascinating, compelling and the solution, what actually happened, I, I went out and interviewed one of the two guys that were involved in it.

And the truth [00:58:00] about what happened in this case is stunning.

Jordan Harbinger: I gotta get handed to you whenever I see these complex investigations, I just think, man, somebody's looking at all these grains of sand and just arranging them into a picture. They don't, I don't have the patience.

Christopher Whitcomb: They don't Oh yeah. That's what I'm trying to do.

Yeah.

I don't have patience, but I'm disciplined. Like I, I don't have any patience, but if I've got a, a matter of hand. I can be very focused on it. This is so funny, right? 'cause

Jordan Harbinger: it's like, ah, what are you gonna do when you retire? Oh, I'm gonna do jigsaw puzzle. You see these old people doing jigsaw puzzles?

Yeah. Yeah. Right? And you're like, yeah, me too. But what you're doing, you should take picture. But I want

Christopher Whitcomb: 200,000 pieces, right? Yes. And no

Jordan Harbinger: picture. And no picture on the front, right? Just white. That's right. And then you're gonna make a page. So it's, you're like the, the Chris Whitcomb version of the little old lady doing a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.

Yeah. I, I don't know what,

Christopher Whitcomb: I don't know what Chris Whitcomb is a version of anything. I have no clue. Right? Yeah, yeah. No. People come on and they're a rapper or they're a sports star. Yeah, they're a celebrity, whatever else, and their life makes sense. Mine doesn't make sense. No,

Jordan Harbinger: it doesn't. That's true, man. I have a question [00:59:00] for you.

You mentioned in the book, so you started doing those extraordinary renditions, and first of all. Tell us what that means. 'cause a lot of people will think, oh, I've heard of that, but I don't know what that is.

Christopher Whitcomb: Well, there were two laws under the Reagan administration, 180 4, 19 84 and 1986. I think one was like the Diplomatic Security Act or something.

They're very obscure laws, but you can Google them and I, I talked about 'em, I cite them in the book. Okay. But at that time, the government looked for terrorists as a, they wanted to arrest them and prosecute them. And prior to nine 11, there were a lot of them. When I left the FBI, the entity that I worked in, the FBI, we classified 66 different organizations as terrorist organizations.

Okay. In including, I talked to somebody the other day about what's going on in Gaza with Israel. I've been to PLO headquarters in Gaza with the Ossa Arafat with a machine gun under my jacket pocket. I'll show you a picture of it after this. Yeah, sure. If you're interested in

Definitely.

So, I, I had a lot of exposure doing these really out there things.

But when the US government decided somebody was [01:00:00] bad and they needed to come back for justice. They would usually be hiding in a country that did not want to give them back. Yeah, they're So we'd have to go get them. So you don't just walk up, knock on the door and show 'em an FBI badge and say, could you come with me, sir?

Doesn't work that way. So I'll just use this as an example. There's a very famous case that people can Google where I think it was 12 CIA employees were indicted in Italy for an operation that went bad and that was very, very widely publicized. So it would be that type of an operation you put together a surreptitious entry into a reasonably denied area with the objective of arresting somebody, bringing them back to the United States and trying them and putting 'em in jail.

That's the idea. When you go into a country like that. You just don't show up and stay at a Marriott. Sure. Well, actually you do show up at Stay at a Marriott. Okay, good. But you're selling, uh, you're selling like tripods for cameras or something, right? Sure, yeah. And, uh, got that titanium status. So that rendition means the [01:01:00] extraction of someone charged under US law at the time, charged on the US law to be brought back without the, necessarily without the consent of the government, of the country.

You need to go in to get 'em.

Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha. Okay. And you say in the book, if you want someone tortured you send them to Syria. If you want 'em disappeared, you send 'em to Egypt. If you want 'em interrogated, you send him to Jordan. The uncomfortable question is who gets tortured, who gets disappeared and who just gets interrogated?

What kind of people get put in each place? Well, they're all bad. Well, I would hope so.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. Well, actually that's not true because look, I've been to Guantanamo Bay Yeah. And I've seen a lot of people that I didn't necessarily think were bad. And I could tell you this doesn't matter who I thought was bad, somebody else made that decision.

Yeah. And a whole lot of the time, they were wrong. We all know about enhanced interrogation. Yeah. And the compliance gestures and sick A Doberman pinch on somebody with a win women's underwear on their head. The abuses are widely written about. I was never the person who made that decision.

Jordan Harbinger: Wasn't there a 13-year-old kid at Guantanamo Bay?

Yes. I mean,

Christopher Whitcomb: how

Jordan Harbinger: can [01:02:00] that guy be

Christopher Whitcomb: bad that there's no scenario in which that case, well, you know, I wrote about this. I wrote about most of these stories I read about in the book, but when I went to Guantanamo Bay, it was surreal. When I was a little kid, there was this thing called, uh uh, it was a TV show, and this person was trapped on an island and they were trying to escape, and this bubble would come over and like wrap him up every time to escape a surreal island when nothing made sense.

That was Guantanamo pay. And I went down there and I saw how these prisoners were being held, who they were, what their process was like. And it would take five of these episodes just to explain that, because a lot of the people doing these interrogations, I had trained. I taught interrogation for the FBI and to the CIA for short period of time.

But anyways, looking around this thing with a government minder, they'd show you, now we do this and they have a balanced meal. Right? And they get a Bible and or they get a Koran and this is, you know, there's an arrow pointing to Mecca. Yeah. And then you go out there at night and you hear 'em screaming.

Yeah. I mean, it sounded like it was hell on earth in certain ways. Right? [01:03:00] And everybody that's walking around would greet each other not by saying, Hey, how you doing this morning? Good morning. They would say, fair firm and impartial. It was this mantra, everybody that's creepy, somehow creep. You just walk around and everybody you see goes fair, firm and impartial.

And you go, what? It's like a 1984. Yeah. Scene. It was just, the whole thing was surreal. Those were stupid examples. Writ large. It was bizarre. However, they had one little compound set off to the side. I think they called it Camp Iguana, but it was a house and a building and it was completely surrounded by, it looked like a tennis court.

You know, the, the 10 foot fence with a green cloth that you have around tennis courts. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. Yeah. It's like a green tarp. Yeah. So that you couldn't see in, but they wouldn't admit at the time that it was a 13-year-old, but they had three at the time. They had three kids that were 13 and younger.

That's there. Why? But listen to this story. So the guy that, uh, ran Guantanamo Bay when I was there, his name was General Jeffrey Miller, and he [01:04:00] left Guantanamo Bay to take over Abrey Prison where they had the dogs. Right on guys. Same guy.

Yeah.

And he had kids of his own. I don't know this, I talked to him, but I didn't ask him this question.

But I was told by one of the people that worked for him that he was upset that these kids were being held in this, on Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. So he cut a big square out of the green cloth in the 10 foot high concertina wall where they were imprisoned. 12,000 miles from home so that they could look out into the ocean so it would make 'em feel better.

That's just so, it's such a, it's so horrible. Somehow you just see things that in those situations, in my experience, in my experience, you see so many things that don't make sense. So they don't end up in the New York Times and they don't end up on CNNI mean, they do brilliant jobs. I'm not knocking those news agencies.

I'm saying that the craziest shit that you see living in a life like mine eventually, it all [01:05:00] just seems like a few silly Jerry Universe. You know? It all seems nonsensical. That's true,

Jordan Harbinger: man. Uh, your book will, the one I read, uh, will be linked in the show notes and then the new one's coming out sometime.

Maybe one of 'em

Christopher Whitcomb: is coming out in February and one, I think is coming out in April. Okay. Those two books. So we, we'll, we won't link you, but Anonymous Mail is the one here. That's the one out. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I really, I wanted to come and talk to you and you gotta write a book to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: You are about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with geopolitics analyst, Peter Zeihan.

JHS Trailer: We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident the US is going to intervene or not. And I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what's allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model. Less than 1% of that shipping happens on land, and that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict in competition.

Countries are increasingly find it in, in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it, and [01:06:00] then producing more locally. We were moving this way before the Ukraine war before the Chinese started to break down and before the German industrial model started to implode.

This has just sped everything up, so we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year. Which should suggest that we are gonna have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow. I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it.

The biggest loser by far is China. Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed. I think we're in the final decade of the European Union because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model. And without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence.

The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around. We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never gonna last and it's, it's gonna be a rough ride. So [01:07:00] anyone who thinks that this is gonna be easy is wrong in every possible way.

Jordan Harbinger: For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade.

Check out episode 781 of The Jordan Harbinger Show, man. What a ride from FBI, standoffs and warlords in Afghanistan. A black magic in East Timor and a full-blown identity crisis somewhere between God and a surfboard in Indonesia. Man, Chris Whitcomb. Life is proof that you can run a hundred covert ops, dodge death a dozen times and still wake up one morning realizing the real battle is the one going on in your own head.

Some people are just built different. All things Chris Whitcomb will indeed be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser.

We've revamped this a little bit. It's a two minute read. It's very practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships every Wednesday just about. [01:08:00] And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come and check it out. It is a great companion to the show.

Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Six Minute Networking. Don't forget about that as well on Six Minute Networking dot com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

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