00:04:09.360So I think you were talking about the life was what you expected it to be and even more because you had a lot of different things on what the life was like.
00:04:17.000So, Gary, let's just say if we were in high school together, okay?
00:04:37.440And I had a great family, great friends.
00:04:41.000You know, in high school at that age, I was on the track in cross-country teams.
00:04:46.560I, you know, would surf, which was kind of a new sport that was evolving.
00:04:53.340And, you know, I lived two blocks from the ocean, so I'd carry my surfboard up there and go surf.
00:04:57.180And, yeah, it was a great time to be raised as a kid and a time where, as a child, you had perhaps a great deal more freedom than kids do today or certainly than my kids have because there just wasn't the perception of any risk.
00:05:11.020You know, the whole kind of community would pretty much call your parents if you were misbehaving.
00:05:15.740And that certainly happened with me a couple of times.
00:05:17.720But, yeah, it was a, you know, I think I was a pretty average kid.
00:06:54.240You can tell they came up with a lot of pressure.
00:06:56.220So comedy was a form of them calming their lives on.
00:06:58.780Sometimes mediators, personalities, the household is with a lot of friction where they have to naturally learn from a young age to get parents to be on the same page.
00:07:06.780Having been in a business yourself for a while and been the chief of FBI crisis negotiation unit, I mean, you're not just one of them.
00:08:39.040And if you're being the voice of reason and you're calm and your tone and demeanor are proper, you're far more likely to achieve the outcome that you want.
00:08:49.260Is there a certain protocol or approach to building rapport?
00:08:53.300Like, have you noticed something that works very well?
00:08:55.280I mean, obviously, you know, I've been in business for a while, so I've read a lot of the books on building rapport.
00:09:00.600Is there anything unconventional that's worked for you over the years or is it the same thing that we've read about?
00:09:05.220Well, I'm not sure what you've read or what you would consider conventional or not, but the bread and butter of negotiations is active listening skills.
00:09:14.260And the premise being that for you to be successful in any sort of interaction, you need to get information and cooperation from somebody.
00:09:24.860You don't want to spend the entire time telling them how you think and how you feel.
00:09:29.820By actively listening, you set yourself up to, number one, get the information you need, number two, to project your sincere and genuine interest in what they have to say.
00:09:42.180Those are powerful interpersonal communication skills.
00:09:45.980We call them active listening because many people believe listening is a passive endeavor, and in reality, it's not.
00:09:52.520Active listening is when you hear someone's emotion, you say, boy, you know, Patrick, you sound really confused by what's going on.
00:10:02.040You know, and if that's an accurate reflection of how you feel, then I've scored some big points.
00:10:07.340You are saying in your mind, yes, Gary understands me.
00:10:10.280Or you may correct me and say, no, I'm not confused.
00:10:50.940No one has paid attention to their point of view.
00:10:53.760So when I all of a sudden take the time and effort to sincerely and genuinely reflect back what I'm hearing from them and how they feel about it,
00:11:02.700those are the powerful communication tools that create a relationship of trust, not necessarily a lifelong friendship.
00:11:10.380But in the time frame we're talking about, it creates the opposite of confrontation.
00:11:17.460It calms things down and helps us move forward in gaining cooperation.
00:11:23.820Who's the most unreasonable person you negotiated with?
00:13:11.420So, you know, those are sort of the parameters.
00:13:14.700So when we dealt with the David Koresh, we knew we'd responded to an incident that resulted in a terrible shootout between the ATF, a different agency,
00:13:24.820and the Branch Davidians that Koresh led.
00:13:26.940And we knew that there were dead people, there was wounded people, there was great emotion, there was, you know, a great bit of anger and frustration, one side versus the other.
00:13:39.740We had to, we, the FBI, negotiation team, we had to come in and sort of separate ourselves and try to project that we were sort of a neutral, mediating entity, you know, that, hey, we're not the ATF, and we don't pretend to understand all the issues that are important to you.
00:13:56.880But we want to learn, we want to see if we can work with you so that we can avoid further bloodshed, and we can get this resolved peacefully.
00:14:22.340So, yeah, I think we were well prepared to deal with David Koresh.
00:14:25.560But we had other internal disagreements in the FBI that I'm sure we'll talk about in this interview and certainly discussed in my book.
00:14:33.120I guess the biggest thing is, you know, prior to negotiating with David Koresh, who was, did you have a scenario like one that's, you know, like, for example, you talk to a Michael Jordan, or you talk to a delayed Kobe Bryant, or you talk to a Brady or some of these guys in sports, you'll say, so tell me the toughest opponent you ever faced.
00:14:55.260And they'll say, well, you know, I hated playing against, you know, Joe Dumars, or I hated defending against this guy.
00:15:00.020But who was the toughest person you faced off pre-David Koresh that you were both, you know, excited with the results that you got?
00:15:11.400Or one where you said, I wish I wouldn't have taken that approach in a negotiation?
00:15:15.040Were there any on both sides that you remember?
00:15:21.260One was a case in the 80s in Virginia, where a guy had kidnapped his former common law wife and child and from Connecticut and drove them to Virginia.
00:15:30.260And we located them in a remote farmhouse.
00:15:34.720And I ended up negotiating with him for some 10 hours.
00:15:40.900There were times where we communicated quite effectively.
00:15:44.280But his controlling nature over his former ex-wife and child made him a high potential for lethality.
00:15:55.440We were pretty certain he was going to kill her and possibly himself and the child.
00:15:59.980Suicide often follows a homicidal act.
00:16:03.340So it was a huge challenge connecting with him.
00:16:06.620So he was one of the toughest cases I've ever worked with.
00:16:09.280And in fact, we ended up, I had to negotiate him out of the house on his hopes of getting to a helicopter where an FBI marksman took his life.
00:16:30.820And he ended up having an argument with her and shooting and killing her.
00:16:34.280The train was, the cars were detached in Raleigh and negotiations set forward.
00:16:39.540This was extremely challenging because he only spoke Spanish.
00:16:43.260He was one of those who was almost afraid to communicate with us for fear that we would hear the fear in his voice, that we would psychologically get into his head or whatever it was.
00:16:53.800And at the same time, we had children dying of dehydration, and one of them did die.
00:16:59.280So we had that clock ticking against us on the one hand.
00:17:03.820And on the other hand, we had this challenge of an effective communication channel.
00:17:09.640You know, it ultimately worked out that he did surrender.
00:17:11.740We saved one of the two children, but it was an extremely difficult case.
00:17:17.520But those two stand out, I think, in the area you talked about, Patrick, as being extraordinarily challenging ones that I dealt with, you know, well prior to Waco.
00:17:30.000Did I overhear Clarksville, like there was something going on with Clarksville?
00:17:34.220I heard the city Clarksville, and I was in Clarksville for two years.
00:17:37.420Did you have something that happened in Clarksville?
00:17:39.000Because it was in the Waco series where the character, you know, Michael Corbett says something in Clarksville.
00:21:22.560So I think it's often a mistake that we attribute in them too much calculated activity.
00:21:28.960I think David Koresh, as calculating as he could be, even fell into that category.
00:21:34.860He basically didn't want to come out and go to jail the rest of his life.
00:21:38.580And, you know, he would have loved us to go away, but he just made no decision.
00:21:43.540They just stayed in there and refused to come out.
00:21:45.360And it's something you have to recognize that people often are shooting from the hip and they don't have a clear plan.
00:21:54.440That's very interesting because I remember in the scene of the movie where you're going out there and you're negotiating with Bo.
00:22:02.320And there's a scene where you're going to Bo and saying, you know, people tend to do things based on fear.
00:22:08.500If you can get to find out people's most highest thing they fear, then you can get motive.
00:22:15.520And then you said his fear is this, Wood Weaver.
00:22:17.960And then he said your fear is having to live with the rest of your life that if the other kid dies that you could have done something about it.
00:22:24.660Is fear a big idea that you try to get as a negotiator?
00:22:29.740No, I think that might have been overplayed a little bit.
00:22:42.340But the actor that played me in the Waco six-part series was Michael Shannon, a great, great actor, a great guy.
00:22:49.280And the producers and directors needed to get him into that first episode.
00:22:54.020So they put me at a place I really wasn't.
00:22:56.800Now, those things happened, but it wasn't me that did them.
00:23:00.360And I wasn't happy about that, but that's the way it went.
00:23:03.440But, yeah, I mean, I think I remember watching that scene, and they had a variation of it.
00:23:08.540And I suggested to the director, I said, why don't we turn that fear thing into putting pressure on the guy that was playing Bo Grice to say, hey, how are you going to feel when you know you could have done something and you didn't?
00:23:24.240And they ended up incorporating that into the dialogue, and I think it was quite effective in that scene.
00:23:30.840So that was a very effective scene when he talked about the fear and his negotiating, when Michael was doing it, the actor, when he was going through that with Bo.
00:23:40.280So, but what are some of the most valuable currencies that you guys try to get, you know, in your world?
00:23:45.500Meaning, if you're going against a hostage that you're negotiating, what are your currencies?
00:23:50.500Meaning, is, because everything's, I'm assuming it's about leverage.
00:23:54.360It's about listening to them and active listening, seeing what they want, building rapport, getting some kind of a trust, which David Koresh, you were one of the people that he trusted the most when he was going back and forth.
00:24:04.140He actually seemed like he enjoyed talking to you based on some of the things you read about.
00:24:09.500But what are some important currencies that you try to get?
00:24:11.940I know there's the milk scene, I know there's the fear topic, you know, there is the patient side where you're saying 51 days is, you know, the Waco siege, 120 days was the one with Japan, 85 days, Montana siege.
00:24:27.980What are some currencies you used to have leverage when you negotiate with the hostage?
00:24:32.920I think the biggest goal that you try to achieve is a level of trust.
00:24:37.060People will not surrender, they won't cooperate, they won't agree to something, unless they have a certain level of trust.
00:24:45.960Now, it takes a little bit of time to build that, and there's various levels of trust.
00:24:52.100But that's what we're really striving for.
00:24:55.080The other thing I should say, based on your question, we really have to look at what negotiators do in kind of two categories.
00:25:01.600One is an actual hostage taking, and you have to understand, this is more like business.
00:25:06.040Because in a hostage taking, the person has a clear-cut goal in mind.
00:25:11.060They want something they can't get on their own.
00:25:13.000Maybe it's escape, maybe it's money, maybe it's a release from prison, whatever it might be.
00:25:18.240They can't do it on their own, so they hold the hostage and threaten to harm the hostage unless the authorities give them what they want.
00:25:24.660The good news on that story is they need us, the police, to do what they want.
00:25:31.020So it sets up a scenario for quid pro quo bargaining.
00:25:34.840Well, we can do this, but you have to do that.
00:25:37.520And if you keep in mind that the person is there primarily to get their demands met and not to kill, that gives us a powerful advantage.
00:25:44.740And usually with the passage of time, they hold the hostage, they feel initially empowered and in control.
00:25:50.840And then when time passes and they don't get us to jump every time they snap their fingers, and we don't roll over and give them everything they want without them giving us something,
00:26:01.060they finally come to the point of view of saying, well, I guess I'm not going to get what I want.
00:26:05.240You know, there's an old story about a hijacking in New York, you know, way back in the 70s, and the guy wanted to fly to Europe.
00:26:13.500And in part of his discussions with the negotiators, he said, I want, next time you come out here, bring me a hot cup of coffee with cream and two sugars.
00:26:21.520You know, an hour later, the coffee comes out, and it's cold, and there's no sugar, and there's no cream.
00:26:26.960And the guy surrenders about 20 minutes later.
00:26:29.260And they said, well, what was it that made you surrender?
00:26:31.480And he said, well, I figured if I couldn't get a decent cup of coffee, this other stuff wasn't going to work out.
00:26:37.220You know, and it's sort of a humorous way to look at kind of how the expectations got lowered and the reality set in that, hey, you're not the big kahuna.
00:26:46.860You don't just say you want something and it's going to happen.
00:26:51.040Now, those incidents that I just described, it's only about 10%, really, of what we do.
00:26:56.120Most police officers will never work a legitimate hostage situation.
00:27:00.120What they're working, 90%, is emotionally driven situations where the victim, not really a hostage, the victim and the person holding them, you know, have a preexisting relationship.
00:27:15.980It's a boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, you know, neighbor-neighbor, whatever it might be.
00:27:21.760They have a history that is tense, problematic, and confrontational that has erupted into this event.
00:27:30.820And those are the cases where the person really doesn't know how to get out of what they got into.
00:27:36.460They just are expressing their emotions.
00:27:38.740And our job in those cases is not so much to make a deal, but to lower their emotional levels, get them to a point where they're thinking a little more clearly and a little more rationally, and realizing that anything violent that they do is just self-defeating and self-destructive.
00:27:55.860And we're pretty successful at those as well.
00:27:58.180But I will tell you, when there is loss of life, it's in those situations, not a hostage situation.
00:28:04.080Interesting. Interesting. How do you disconnect?
00:28:08.820One time I brought the former director of CIA to my office, and I was running a Vistage meeting.
00:28:13.020It's a business group that get together with different CEOs.
00:28:16.080And, you know, he came and he was telling us different stories of what it was like to be a director of CIA.
00:28:21.240And one of the questions everybody was asking is, how do you disconnect when you go home?
00:28:25.200Because you're going through all these other stories.
00:28:27.200How did you not let these stories psychologically get to you, or did they ever get to you where you were emotionally burned out?
00:28:34.080Yes and yes. I mean, certainly, in my life, you have to understand that the FBI has 350 negotiators, and they're spread all over the United States.
00:28:46.240And they reported to me, you know, through my supervisors and under me, but indirectly to me.
00:28:52.980We also had, at any given time, FBI negotiators deployed overseas working kidnapping cases.
00:29:00.640So whether it was from the West Coast, late at night their time, which was very early in the morning my time, or from the Philippines or from Columbia, South America, it was not at all unusual for me to get calls, you know, several times a week where I would have to get up in the middle of the night.
00:29:16.400So in many respects, you couldn't let it go altogether, but I guess I developed some skills to compartmentalize it, and to deal with the problem as effectively as I could, and then try to get some sleep before I went back into work the next day, whatever it might be.
00:29:32.420So it's like a surgeon operating, you know, there's been a terrible accident, and they've got a family, and they've got children, and somebody's died, and somebody else has to have a leg amputated.
00:29:44.620Well, don't tell me that the surgeon isn't impacted by that, but they compartmentalize it.
00:29:49.400They put it aside and say, you know, I can't bring back that child that died.
00:29:53.340So my energy devoted towards grieving for that is not going to help me save the other lives in the balance.
00:30:00.420So I have to put that aside momentarily.
00:30:03.940Now, when they get home later on and their wife says, how was your day, you know, maybe things come out and so forth.
00:30:10.480But I would typically find, and my wife would do that for a while.
00:30:13.560She said, you know, how'd that go today?
00:30:15.400And sometimes I would say, you know, much to my discredit, I would say, you know, I just lived it for 12 hours.
00:30:21.820I don't want to sit down and go through it again.
00:30:25.400That's not really healthy, but sometimes you just, you can only deal with so much, you know.
00:30:30.120But I found that I used to tell negotiators to think about the serenity prayer.
00:30:37.940And if you're familiar with that, it basically says, you know, it'd grant you the power to understand what you can do, what you can't do.
00:31:04.220He's a criminal, a thug, an asshole, whatever.
00:31:06.660But when you're talking to a nice lady whose husband's left her and she has no family and she's depressed and she kills herself while you're talking to her on the phone, it is natural for a negotiator to say, what could I have said differently?
00:31:26.620Those would be the cases that would be the most impactful.
00:31:29.660So I would, getting involved in those cases, I would tell the negotiator, listen, you need to put yourself in the right frame of mind right now.
00:31:37.360You're not, anything you say is not going to make this happen.
00:31:40.900You can try to stop it from happening.
00:31:43.160But if she decides to kill herself, that's her decision.
00:31:46.400It's not because you said something wrong.
00:31:50.920Do the best you can to help this woman find a reason to live.
00:31:55.500But if she doesn't, it's not your fault.
00:31:58.620And the other thing we did in negotiations, you know, Patrick, that I think was so powerful, we always had a philosophy when we typically work as a team of negotiators, we don't have one person making all the decisions or deciding.
00:32:13.920I might on this occasion be the person on the phone.
00:32:16.700But there's five or six people saying, how do we all assess this situation?
00:32:44.240And if it's a failure, you know, well, I'm not going to take it all on my shoulders because I was the voice, but the team agreed with what we were doing.
00:32:52.320So those are, and I think that would apply in a lot of business context as well.
00:32:58.040So very interesting to mentally shape the FBI agents mindset, the 350 that reported to you through their managers or directors, supervisors, to go in.
00:33:07.700If you're dealing with somebody that's suicidal, do your best.
00:33:10.520But if they do kill themselves, you're going to have to live on and not have to rehash that in your mind over and over and over again.
00:33:16.960Is that almost what I'm thinking based on what you just said?
00:34:43.160You know, in the business world, we say you can't help somebody who doesn't want to help themselves, right?
00:34:47.600You'll say, oh, look, this is all we can do.
00:34:50.020You can't help this person anymore than you can.
00:34:52.080If they don't want to help themselves, there's nothing you can do for them.
00:34:54.760Is there anybody you ever, is there a criteria of people you negotiated that whether there was a name you called or qualified this or was there a scoring system to say,
00:35:06.060there is nothing you can say with this person for them to be reasonable?
00:35:11.120Or is the mindset always, no, I think there is another angle.
00:35:24.020But what we try to do is when a negotiation team opens up communication, we immediately and continually begin to track the indicators of progress or the indicators of potential violence.
00:35:59.820So we try to see, are we headed in the right path?
00:36:03.840Sometimes we'll say we're going to switch negotiators because we're sort of at a stalemate.
00:36:08.620Let's try a different voice, a different approach.
00:36:11.500It's not that the other negotiator was bad, but, you know, maybe we need to play it up, change it up a little bit.
00:36:19.360So we're constantly doing an evaluation, a re-evaluation, a reassessment between each phone call, and it's usually on the phone.
00:36:29.300The team, before they do anything, before they go have a cigarette or get a lunch break or go to the bathroom, we analyze the last call before we do anything.
00:36:57.320It's very methodical and very planned out.
00:36:59.820Then, and when we're ready for that next call, which might come in unexpectedly, then we can go take a break and stretch our legs because now we have a plan for moving forward.
00:37:11.220If the guy calls up without warning, we've got up on a situation board what it is we're going to say.
00:37:16.140What are the two or three key points we want to make in this next conversation?
00:37:21.680And Gary, is there a lot of like, there's a handful of you guys that let you say it's a bigger case you're dealing with.
00:37:26.700Is it a handful of you sitting there saying, so John, what was your biggest takeaway?
00:37:35.360And, and, you know, as it came, you know, it was a challenge for me later in my career because I had done this so long and I held a certain position where I had to be careful.
00:37:46.260If I spoke up too soon, here's what we need to do.
00:37:49.080Then everybody's going to say, okay, this is what Gary wants to do.
00:37:52.240So I had to really restrain myself and say, what, what do you think?
00:37:55.800You know, does anybody have any ideas?
00:37:57.140You know, you may know where we're going to go, but you have to make your team feel comfortable that their inputs could be listened to and appreciated and incorporated.
00:38:08.280And frankly, there were some great ideas in some of the cases I worked that came up from very inexperienced to new negotiators.
00:38:15.300And you say, I'm sure glad we had this chat because that's a great idea.
00:38:40.900Then we'd send somebody else in there to take a different angle.
00:38:43.300And many times you would close the deal because they're hearing it from a different person that it can connect with.
00:38:47.580That's very interesting when you're saying that.
00:38:48.700And so if you don't mind, let's just get right into the whole Waco situation with David Koresh, because a part of what you just said took me back to the part in the episode where I think Steve Schneider is talking to you on the phone.
00:39:01.780And he says, look, I have my own opinion on a personal level, but dot, dot, dot.
00:39:08.140And then you got off and you told him, said, did you hear how he said personal level?
00:39:11.480That was your opportunity to go in to have two different personalities to get Steve in his mind because he was getting some control.
00:39:17.420But prior to going into that, let's just go through the whole experience here.
00:39:22.760When did you get a call when they said, hey, Gary, we need your help on this case taking place in Waco, Texas?
00:39:29.540And how was that approach when you heard it?
00:40:52.980So when you got that call on a Sunday, I think it's February 28, 1993, and you went across the street to the Burger King, when you got that call, did you already know what was going on there or you had no idea?
00:41:04.840This was like a sudden news and event that took place.
00:41:08.940I mean, I just knew that it was a religious cult and that the ATF had attempted a raid to arrest the leader and search the premises for illegally converted weapons and that a shootout had unfolded and there was a loss of life on both sides.
00:41:30.240And, you know, there was a ceasefire was being attempted or had already been attempted.
00:41:54.240And how are you doing your own due diligence?
00:41:56.520Yeah, my boss was giving me a briefing.
00:41:58.640Now, when I flew out on the airplane, an FBI plane, you know, additional information had come in and was shared with me.
00:42:08.940But, you know, the truth be told, when I was feet on the ground in Waco, I mean, what I knew about the branch Davidians and what had occurred was pretty basic.
00:42:19.840You know, it normally takes a while to to get all that intelligence.
00:42:23.960And it's hard to do that when you're in a travel mode.
00:42:26.640But when I first got there, I sat down with the ATF people.
00:42:30.260There was ongoing negotiations already with Koresh.
00:42:32.700And there was an FBI colleague of mine there.
00:42:36.380And there was a sheriff's department negotiator.
00:42:38.520So I sat down immediately with them and tried to ask the questions and gather the information that would prove essential to me.
00:42:46.760From the outside, for those of us that we watch a lot of movies, you know, movies have done a very good job showing that a lot of these units and, you know, different organizations, they don't do well together, working together.
00:42:57.900Is there any kind of animosity between the FBI and the ATF or any of those organizations?
00:43:03.120Or do you guys pretty much work well together?
00:43:05.000Because it seems like there's a lot of power trips going on.
00:44:57.680But, you know, you got to understand there was a lot of anger.
00:45:01.180The ATF people that I ran into that, that when I arrived, looked like they'd just come off a battlefield.
00:45:07.560I mean, some of them still had blood on their clothes and from taking care of wounded comrades, they almost look shell-shocked, for lack of a better term.
00:45:17.300Now, by the way, why do they call themselves ATF?
00:45:20.160I mean, don't they just need to change to F?
00:45:51.480You know, people were illegally transporting cigarettes across state lines and all that stuff.
00:45:56.320And they have regulatory people that do that now more than law enforcement people.
00:46:00.040But their survival has basically, in the last, you know, 20 or 30 years, has depended on their investigations of firearms violations.
00:46:08.340Yeah, it's a weird name to put ATF because I don't think they're going to have anything to do with that the last, you know, like you said, couple of 22 decades.
00:49:02.080And they bought my book for a look of what the authorities were looking at, looking in.
00:49:08.080I think the part about the FBI, despite the arguments and the disagreements that were projected, which were essentially, unfortunately, correct, I think is fairly realistic, and I stand by it.
00:49:18.180And I think where the producer-director has failed, I think they painted a little bit too positive a picture of David Koresh.
00:49:27.100He was too sympathetic of a character in the TV show.
00:49:31.000In reality, he was a lot more sinister, manipulative, dark, self-serving.
00:49:36.560You've got to understand, he was really a total demagogue inside there, and people did whatever he said.
01:17:30.600But the tear gas itself did not start the fire.
01:17:33.920And the FBI, I mean, there's people out in the country that think, well, the FBI said, let's go burn this place down and kill all these people.
01:17:41.120You know, David Koresh, ultimately, at the end, you know, decided that, you know, it was better to take his followers with him than to peacefully surrender.
01:17:49.660You know, while I have always been very candid about the FBI's mistakes, and there were many bad decisions made, in my opinion, I've always said that the ultimate responsibility for what happened was on the shoulders of David Koresh.
01:18:03.220Every single day, we gave him the opportunity to peacefully lead his people out.
01:18:11.840One time he asked, if I come out and I go to jail, will I be able to meet with our followers?
01:18:15.960We sent him in written commitment to do that.
01:18:19.960So we did a lot of things like that to convince him to come out, yet he chose not to.
01:18:24.520So, you know, I think it's a bit unfair to characterize, you know, and again, I'm the FBI's biggest internal critic, but to suggest that anybody, even the commander and the tactical guy who I disagreed with, I mean, they didn't want to see that ending.
01:19:04.940Gary, any modern day calls that keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger that could potentially end up being a threat or not really anything taking place today?
01:19:16.780Any modern day cults like what these guys did?
01:19:19.860Any modern day cults you look at that's growing?
01:19:23.840You know, I haven't, I'll be honest with you, I haven't, I don't devote much time to looking into what current cults are.
01:19:30.620However, you know, if you listen to what the FBI is saying, you know, we have a major problem with anti-government militias.
01:19:39.420Again, you know, we dealt with them before the Oklahoma City bombing.
01:19:44.980They were gaining a lot of strength, anti-government people, and during the Clinton years particularly.
01:19:50.100And then after Oklahoma City bombing, where a lot of kids were killed, some of those people dropped off and they said, this is not what I'm into.
01:19:58.080But now it's built up again, started to build up again under Obama.
01:20:01.500So there's a lot of people angry at the government and ready to take up arms and do things.
01:20:08.840We see it in some of the demonstrations that are going on.
01:20:11.220Somebody got shot the other day in what, Arizona, trying to pull down a statue.
01:20:15.620You know, and I think we're going to have to reckon with that in this society.
01:20:18.500I mean, I was appalled when I saw armed gunmen go into the Michigan State House.
01:20:25.080And, you know, and I'm sorry, I don't think it's unfair to say if 100 or 200 black protesters took automatic weapons in there, I suspect it would have been handled quite differently.
01:20:36.060And, you know, we have to think about how much, where do we go beyond peaceful protest and the right of assembly and the right of people to express their grievances?
01:20:46.120And then where do we get into terrorism and intimidation?
01:20:48.980And so I worry about those kind of groups more than I worry about Antifa.
01:20:54.680You know, that's a political sort of a tool thrown about now, you know, and I'm not saying they don't exist, but I don't see the impact they're having versus, you know, some of the far right groups right now.
01:21:08.360And, you know, when I was a young FBI agent, the Ku Klux Klan was pretty strong.
01:21:13.320And it's an unheralded story for the FBI, but there came a point, and I was working in South Carolina at the time, there came a point where the Ku Klux Klan almost ceased to exist because the only reason they would meet was for various FBI informants to get together.
01:21:28.340So there'd be 20 guys in a meeting and, you know, 18 of them were on our payroll.
01:21:32.120And the only reason they were getting together is to report back what was going on.
01:21:35.260I mean, we knew what they were thinking and doing, and we were able to thwart a lot of terrorism to the point where they just sort of folded.
01:21:43.300But now there's a huge resurgence in that.
01:21:45.380And I find it concerning and something that policymakers are going to have to make some decisions on if these people are, you know, don't get out of control.
01:21:54.960Are there informants on a lot of these organizations that we're not aware of?
01:21:59.240Like, is the FBI already on the inside knowing exactly, like the city of, the country of Chaz or Antifa or white supremacists or any of this stuff?
01:22:08.620Are there many informants involved from the FBI?
01:22:15.960I hope they are legally gathering information.
01:22:19.580I think the FBI has learned a lot through the years that they're not there to thwart political expression but to stop acts of violence.
01:22:28.300But I don't know how prepared they are in that instance or what level of penetration.
01:22:34.340In some cases you find that they don't have the information.
01:22:37.700In other cases they've got it covered quite well.
01:22:39.500But it's a challenging job for law enforcement today.
01:22:42.520I mean, you know, we have to contend with so much that gets stirred up in the, you know, through the news too.
01:22:48.920And I'm not necessarily a critic of the news, but, you know, we've got to watch what we do.
01:22:53.380And there's a lot of discussion about law enforcement behavior now.
01:22:56.000I mean, I was watching some of the demonstrations and I was aghast at some of the, I mean, obviously I don't like looters or arsonists and anarchists and they have to be dealt with effectively by the police.