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The Protectors® Podcast
Welcome to The Protectors® Podcast, where the valor meets the storyteller. Hosted by Jason Piccolo, a seasoned veteran and retired special agent, this series is a must-listen for anyone intrigued by the courage and tales of those who pledge to protect us. Beyond the front-line stories of bravery and dedication, this podcast goes a step further, weaving in the perspectives of those who bolster and narrate the protector's journey—featuring a remarkable lineup including New York Times Best Sellers and acclaimed Hollywood actors.
The Protectors® Podcast offers a diverse array of voices, from those who wear the uniform to the authors and entertainers who amplify their stories. It's a unique blend that highlights not only the raw realities faced by our protectors but also how their sacrifices inspire the narratives we cherish in literature and film. Each episode is a testament to the interconnected worlds of service and support, bringing listeners an unmatched depth of insight.
Dr. Jason Piccolo is a retired federal agent, former U.S. Army Infantry Captain (Iraq 2006), and author.
Past Guests Include:- Sean Patrick Flanery - Andrews & Wilson- Mark Greaney- Stephen Hunter- Remi Adeleke - Florent Groberg - Clint Emerson - Travis Mills
The Protectors® Podcast
#482 | Jack Treadway | Uncovering the Shadows: Insights into the Air Force's Office Of Special Investigations a
Step inside the clandestine world of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations with a seasoned ex-agent who unveils a landscape where civilian and military sleuths unravel crimes from serious offenses to counterintelligence mysteries. This episode promises an unprecedented look at the merging of different expertises, from cyber whizzes to former special ops warriors, all united under the OSI's banner.
The Book: Insurgent Hunter: Memoirs of a Navy SEAL Turned Counterinsurgent Agent in Iraq (Knox Press; February 20 2024), Jack Treadway and Stephen Templin take readers deep into the shadows of covert warfare and Treadway’s time as a Navy SEAL and an Air Force OSI counterintelligence agent taking out over 100 insurgents. But when a high-ranking Iraqi ally—who secretly works for Iran—kills three members of Treadway’s team, he and his team must race against time to get their revenge.
Make sure to check out Jason on IG @drjasonpiccolo
Hey, welcome to the protectors Interesting guest today. Today we're going to get behind the lines of the OSI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, kind of like the Jack Reacher of the Air Force. Right, what's going on, jack? How you doing.
Speaker 2:Pretty good. Yeah, a little similar. Yeah, I think he was CID, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he was CID of the Special Investigations Unit, which is probably some made up type of army type unit. But yeah, that's pretty cool man. How long were you in OSI for?
Speaker 2:About a dozen years.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people have any clue what OSI does. I mean, I worked with them a little bit when I worked with SIDF in OSI and the Criminal Investigations Task Force here in DC area. But I don't think a lot of people understand the wide parameters of the OSI mission and they don't understand civilians and active duty are both agents. So, let's get into that brother.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah. So before I went to OSI, the only thing I knew about it was the $6 million man was an OSI agent. That's how old I am. But OSI basically the Air Force Office, Special Investigations, similar to the Navy's NCIS, but the NCIS is made up of all civilian agents. Osi can be a combination of active duty officers, enlisted and civilian agents, and our responsibilities are primarily to protect anybody to do with the Department of Defense, where we're operating out of and we investigate death investigations, sexual assaults, rapes, espionage, counterintelligence the whole gamut. And we have all kinds of resources with people of different backgrounds and different specialties, anything from languages to cyber guys to former special operations guys Just if when I went through the Academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and Glencoe, georgia, all right, what we commonly refer to as fleetech.
Speaker 1:Fleetech, okay, oh, fleetech. All the outliers there and the civilians around are like you go to fleetech and that's like, oh my God.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you class up and you start talking to all the folks that you're in there with, you understand why they were recruited for their different specialties. But yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the cool thing about sending the military like branches of stuff through keep on a call fleetech, but through Fletsy, through the criminal security training program, because you build these networks too, you're actually not there. Just a lot of times you're not there as like a sole class, like half your class, can be made up of other specialty or other areas. So it's kind of cool that the branch on kind of got an idea what's out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you wind up working with a lot of those folks in some capacity later on down the road. So, yeah, it was a fun job. Nobody really knows who the active duty and who the civilians are. That's purposely done, except for us, of course. Within our detachments that we're working, we know who's who.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that aspect too, of like, especially, you know, when you're working with the military branches. A lot of times when you're rolling, a lot of people don't understand like you could be a special agent and be in a military branches.
Speaker 1:I mean, what's CID, a CID agent, et cetera like that, yeah, when you're rolling into a branch and you're rolling in and you're talking with, let's say, ranking officers, a lot of times they don't want to respect or understand what you do. So I think sometimes you might like when you're rolling there as a civilian or with whatever your ID card may be at the time, you kind of have to be like look, I'm here to investigate the crime. You know, we're taking over the jurisdiction for it, blah, blah, blah. So I mean I can imagine it's a whole new animal when you're investigating crimes internally.
Speaker 2:Sure, and the big thing we have behind us is, you know, all the commanders that we may have to go talk to, they understand that our chain of command goes directly to the Inspector General of the Air Force. So there's, you know. We don't have to worry about being pushed to go one way or the other when we're investigating or have to answer to anybody except who needs the information. So, and it can work the other way too. Say, for instance, if you have a captain and he's doing a criminal interview of an E3, you know he could sense that he's being coerced in some way just because of rank.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly, so it works both ways.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool and a lot of people understand like, listen, I love the Air Force. Some of the best chow I've ever had was in the Air Force. But when you start looking at the OSI aspect of it, you know there's different areas of the Air Force that are really outside the wire and that's kind of one of the reasons I want to talk to you about your book, the Surgeon Hunter is you're actually outside the wire. You know, a lot of times people like you know when you're doing counterintelligence, when you're doing counter-surgency, it's hard to do it when you're inside the wire. So let's talk about how, like let's talk about the how you got into this line of work. Like, how did you get? Like, hey, how did you from.8, how did people get into OSI for one? And then how do you get from OSI to? You know, all of a sudden you're outside the wire. You're doing you're in a combat.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so. So in my case I was a naval special warfare operator in the SEAL teams for the first half of my military career. Injuries led me to be an instructor While I was there. I'd say probably 19 out of 20 of us in our dive phase were all going to college at night knocking out our degrees and a lot of guys were putting in. There was no war going on any place at the time, so a lot of guys were getting their degrees and using their background and going into some kind of law enforcement, whether it be a local PD, fbi, dss, ncis. A lot of guys were going that route. I was told about OSI by a war officer in the teams who had worked with OSI agents. I wanted to do something federal law enforcement and this was a way where I could continue with my pension in a career in the military. So applied for a commission was selected. Later on you have to do another selection for OSI itself. They do a pretty deep background investigation.
Speaker 2:Once you go that route you do your time at FLETC. You live at the federal law enforcement training center there in Glencoe, georgia for six months. You live on the campus. It's kind of like, and it was like a playground of me. People asked me hey, why do you say you enjoyed FLETC? It was awesome man. You learned about the Fourth Amendment and you fought, shot and drove cars fast and PT'd every day. I mean, what was there not to like? The food wasn't half bad.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, let's get back to that food. Back then it was, like you know, because the first time I went through was 2000 with a Border Patrol, and I was like, ok, then I went late 2002 for CITP and then Customs Follow On, but it was like there's only so much chicken breast and I don't even know what they're doing with that chicken breast. They put it in a thing of water. It's the same food now as it was like 30 years ago. But, like you know, that's one thing I wanted to get into was like so you do the CITP and for everybody out there, citp is a criminal medicine training program.
Speaker 1:It's pretty much carte blanche for 90% of 1811s, unless you're, like you know, the quote unquote elite like the FBI and D Correct. But most people go to Georgia and they go through CITP. But it's a very basic overview of law enforcement. It's very basic criminal and segregated course. And when you're dealing with such a broad spectrum of things that you need to investigate, like with OSI, you're not, you're doing all the. You know the bread and butter investigations. Like you know, you're doing the murder investigations, you're doing assaults, you're doing this, you're doing that, but you're also terrorism, you're also counterinsurgency Right. So what do you do for your follow on? Is your following there at Fletsey or somewhere else? So even have follow ons.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah. So after after Fletsey you go to, I went. I was stationed at Hurlbert Field, the Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida, and my unit there I showed up doing the you know you're doing the new guy thing. I did the death investigations. I did the sexual assaults, had an interesting sexual assault we had a guy with like 23 victims. He's still in Leavenworth doing about 55 years right now. And then I wanted to do the downrange mission. So the bosses I had there were like listen, the downrange mission is running confidential informants, so you need to get a narcotics and start running some confidential informants. So I did that for a while. You grew my hair out your beard, rode my Harley, more flannels and genes to work, and I have informants buying ecstasy and stuff like that for me. And you know you're learning. You're learning how to work with your informants. So when you get overseas it's kind of the same thing. It's kind of the same thing.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool, man. Now you know you're. You're like me. You were in like the the 90s era, the Cold War. Then all of a sudden you're into this, like you know the GWOT. So what was your first tour like? Were you doing the GWOT stuff or were you doing like, hey, you know what, we need someone to go over there and just be like the on base investigator or something like that.
Speaker 2:No, no, I was. I was actually in Iraq for that tour and as soon as I landed, I want to say within two days, I was on my first mission, going outside the wire trying to meet up with an informant who had disappeared on us. And you're doing the thing that you never want to do you're going to their house in their neighborhood to check on them. That just lets everybody know like hey, he's working with these guys. So yeah, we're doing that right out of the gate, and how we had it set up is out there to protect the base. We had to target insurgents that were laying IEDs or rocketing or mortaring the base, and I don't know if you recall, but when I got there in 2007, we were being mortared or rocketed. I think it was an average of like 40 times a week.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, because you were in. I forgot you were in Belod too, so it was like, yeah, more to read a bill.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly that's what they called it Yep more to read a bill. So when I got there, the agents were writing a lot of reports. But I'm like, um, hey, that's awesome, but how are you affecting the battle space? Like what do you mean? I'm like it doesn't do any good to have all this intel if we don't have any targets to get rid of to keep us from getting bombed every day.
Speaker 2:So we sat down and there was a total of 10 of us agents One was a commander and one was a senior NCO and there was eight of us and kind of like what we called the bullpen, and we were in two man teams and what we did is we took the AO outside of the Belod, the sector about 12 to 15 miles out, and we divided it into eight different sections and anytime something, some kind of activity, happened in that area and you know the mortars of the rockets you're able to get a point of origin all the time. Anytime something like that happened from those areas, you could go to those two agents and say hey that's your area, man, you better figure that out.
Speaker 2:And we got to shut it down and that's, and that's what we did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny because I was there in 06 and it was the same thing and it was like a lot of the pickup trucks, a lot of these small that you know they're driving around dropping them orders. You get the, you know where they're shooting it from, but it's stopping it. It's like it's like you never stop it. So I guess that's where we get into the book, right, and if everybody out there the book's the surgeon Hunter memoirs of a Navy Seal to encounter a surgeon counter, a surgeon agent in Iraq by Jack Treadway and Stephen Templin, and that release date is coming up, so I really want people to get out there and read this book because, especially for everybody like you know, it's been in that area, that area of operations and stuff it's kind of an it's behind the scenes. I like that. So how did the book come about? And, like you know, obviously, that we always want to write books not just for ourselves but for the legacy of those that we served.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, like I said, we had a 10 man team when I was there. We had some interpreters and we had a couple analysts, but when I arrived we had just lost a tactical support element. The army used to be attached to us and those would be the guys that would escort in a convoy two agents and interpreter out to go meet our informants. You know, in spots, you know away from everybody kind of clandestine. We lost those elements before I got there. So OSI is like look, we're just going to conduct these missions on our own, so we have to take all 10 agents and we had to have a minimum of three convoy, three truck convoy, which meant three Humvees with crew-serve weapons to go out and meet these guys in these areas. We were doing a pretty good job. We shut it down pretty good. It was primarily because of agents. Like we lost in our 10 man team was three guys. It was Tom Crow, david Weigar and Nathan Schollheis. These guys were really good at what they did. They were good OSI agents. You typically didn't get deployed unless you were a really competent operator at home.
Speaker 2:We were targeting a lot of high value targets out there and we were caught in the middle of the Sunni Shia problem too, because those guys were fighting each other as well. So it's hard to trust either side. We, nathan, had got intelligence on kind of like a double agent Iraqi captain who was also working for a Shia militia supported by the Iranians. One of the Sunni informants that Nathan had was giving us that information we weren't sure about. We didn't have all that yet, he hadn't told us that yet, but the Iraqi captain was aware of our Sunni informant and he didn't like him. He winds up wrapping them up and putting them in his jail. Nathan wants them back and we can't understand why a guy who's on our side is having a problem with the Iraqi army. Nathan was getting close to that type of information. We wound up pulling some strings and getting that informant back to us.
Speaker 2:We had another informant in that Iraqi captain's area and I think he was worried about information we might have been collecting on him which we weren't yet. At that point we didn't know that he was up to no good. We had a mission that was canceled one night and I had two other agents that came to me and said, hey, we've got information on one of our EOD guys that was killed. We have an informant that wants to meet us tonight and give us this information. He couldn't say no to that. He had to go get this information to go after the guys that killed one of our own. We wound up being a setup and there was a pressure activated an IED. Our three buddies were in the first truck, I was in the second one. That's how we lost them.
Speaker 1:When the publicist reached out to me they were like oh, Surgeon Hunter, it must be a fiction book. Then I started reading them. The toughest thing to do is talk about people you've lost. That's the thing we talked about. You write these books not for your own self-glorification, but they keep the memory alive. Obviously you're getting on to show what happened afterwards, Dealing with that loss. But then what happens after that loss? You still have to operate, You're still in the war zone, you still have to keep the mission going. A lot of people don't realize. It's not like hey, you know what, we lost some buddies, we're going home now. No, you lost buddies. Now you have to continue on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Something like that happens at home. The whole place shuts down and everybody has the opportunity to mourn Not so much there. Agents came from all across the theater. The Army guys were pretty inspirational because they had just lost a couple of guys a couple of weeks before Actually, probably about a month before from some guys that planted an IED in front of one of their patrols. We actually supported them and brought them the intel.
Speaker 2:We went out and executed the capture of two of those guys one night. They were right back at it. That's what I had to tell my guys. I was like look, these were our first Cav artillery guys that were out doing urban warfare. Basically, they got pretty good at it. That's who we worked with.
Speaker 2:A lot I had to tell them hey look, it's not like they could stop going on the patrols. Guys, we're down a truck, We've got to get another one, get it back up. We still have to go out there and collect intel and some of these targets were followed up on. One thing we made sure of is a lot of guys might go into combat and like okay, they're bad guys, we're good guys, they're wearing this uniform, we're wearing this one. You really don't know the face or the person behind that gun on the other side.
Speaker 2:In this case, after we did our investigation, which took us a couple of weeks, and we were able to bring a lot of resources to bear on it from different parts of the theater and synergize a lot of our intel. That's how we found out about the Iraqi captain and some of his other folks. Part of getting back out there was getting after the guys that did this to us. We were able to pull one of them in before I got back. He wound up being such a big target that he was connected more strategically than we thought.
Speaker 1:We thought it was just a tactical thing, so yeah, the human element of all this as well, as people don't realize that when you're in, when you're working counter-insurgency and when you're working these type of you know the GWAT, the GWAT is no uniforms there. There is. You have no idea who is who and what is what, and now you're out there. You have to develop like human intelligence. You have to bring in these like get exorcist. You have to get real people that like put everything on the line in order to get targets yeah, in a and you.
Speaker 2:What you really had to find out is what motivated them to want to help you in the first place. Mm-hmm you know, and then you had to, you had to vet them, you know, and test them and make sure you could trust them, which you could never fully trust them, and that was a Exactly what is it?
Speaker 1:It's a was it revenge money and like a Couple other things why people become informants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like, and good luck vetting that right, right, I would say a good amount of what we had were the good ones were just tired of the the bad guys in their villages bringing the wrath of the US Army on them all the time. They were just tired of it and they didn't want to be a part of it and they didn't believe in what those guys were doing in the first place. So they would tell us about it.
Speaker 1:Now, how do you transition out of this? You know you go to war, you lose buddies and then you got to come back and like, did you, did you stay on the CT mission, counter-surgery mission when you got back? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I kind of did. I Went back and I was put with a unit. That that was the primary job. I Was a I've almost got set down. I got spun up to go to Columbia not long after I got back for those American hostages that we that were being held down there there was a couple of them during that time and they spun me up, put me in isolation, but those guys were. Those guys were picked up and found while I was being I'm seeing a body and shipped out. So so, yeah, I went back and I did the same kind of work. We had other guys that were Overseas and other places like Pakistan. We got a couple guys out of there right before the hotel they were staying in and got we got blown up. But, yeah, I did that kind of work for a while and then I you mentioned Columbia, man, I'm ready to go.
Speaker 1:You know it's not the drug, it's not like, it's not what people think. I'm always like you know everything I've heard about Columbia is not this like drug mecca, it's like it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'd like to. I'd rather be in Columbia than Balad. How about that?
Speaker 2:I Could understand you there, yeah yeah, the funny thing about it was is Not long after I got back. So while I was, while I was in Iraq Tom One of our agents on that we lost he talked to me in to put in a package for To go to Naval postgraduate school To promote my career a little bit. It was a master's degree program and you had to get selected for it and I was like, yeah, I'm not much into going back to school, tom, I'm sick of school as it is. He's like no, no, it'd be good for you. So I went ahead and put in for it. Since I was downrange, I got last pick of what languages and what part of the world I was gonna specialize in and I got. I got selected for security studies and then to study Korean.
Speaker 1:So the guys are laughing at me about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd rather go back to Balad than to go Korea for a year man.
Speaker 1:You know that. So back in the 90s I always tell people the stories like I I took the D lab because I was gonna branch transfer what I was enlisted. Yeah and I took the D lab. I wanted to go to Spanish. I was like Monterey California.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah six months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm like hell. Yeah, so I go and take the D lab and then they am I branch manager guy, whoever's, whatever, I don't know what they call him for enlisted. But he was like Sorry, but Spanish, how about Arabic? And this is the 90s. I'm like what the hell am I gonna do with Arabic?
Speaker 2:I'm like no thanks.
Speaker 1:Yeah but, yeah, naval postgrad, like so if you're fed a lot of people don't realize this too Like when you're a civilian fed, you can put in for a lot of these programs, like your masters, and they have the East Coast and the West Coast cohorts and some of the cohorts you get to go to our like Monterey and stuff like that. I'm like hell, yeah, I'll go to Monterey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty nice. So, yeah, it's funny because when I was an enlisted team guy, they sent me for Spanish and I stink at both languages, by the way but they sent me to Spanish and we had a DA agent in class with us. So, yeah, there's, there's a federal guys that went there yeah.
Speaker 1:I know it's got to be better than like border patrol. Spanish People are like now like I hardly knows any Spanish anymore, but you know, that must be kind of a cool thing Now. It was like so, when you're? So, if you're, did you now, did you go officer OSI, or like you said. I did, I did, yeah, so so you still wear the trident, like when you're no, so you don't wear a uniform at all.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, you're in OSI you know, I mean not just like in general, but like for a dress, uniform or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the Air Force instruction says In their branch, any, any insignia or badge that you earned in another, another branch, you can wear it. So I would wear the trident, but I would only wear it on my service dress. I wouldn't wear it, you know, if I was, say, out of school or something where I had to be in uniform. I wouldn't wear it on that most, most of time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool, man. It sounds like an interesting career. So I mean, you know it's got to be, you know it's a lot. I can't believe it's 2024, man. It's like when you talk about 2007, to me it seems like some days, it seems like yesterday, you know, but now it's like geez man, it's like 15 years post.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So you asked earlier. You know, the reason behind the book to it was, uh, I, honestly, I at the time, I could care if the books all the light of day. I was just more or less. It was a cathartic exercise for me. You know, because you know when you, when you stop working, well, that's, that's, that's when all the bad memories bubble up. You know, and you realize like, okay, I never really took the time to get over this.
Speaker 1:You need to take the time, brother, and I tell people you gotta, you have to. In writing is like it's therapy, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's different for everybody, Fortunately for me. Stephen Templin, you know he's pretty well, pretty well published author. Um, he's had a New York Times bestseller. We actually went to Bud's together so we talked and he says man, you, you got to put this out there. And I go well, I don't know nothing about how to do any of that, so I'll let you control that if you want to. And one thing you know when you started talking to publicist is a you know they wanted to get it out that I'm like I can't do that. Yet they're like why I'm like I'm not letting this go anywhere, so like it's vetted through DoD and and I can understand why a lot of people don't do that it took about a year and a half, you know, oh yeah, it takes forever, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but like I said, I could care less if it.
Speaker 2:Came off the shelf or not, you know. So I had all the patients in the world and they're pretty cool about. It was mostly with Secretary of the Air Force office in a So-com. I think it was a So-com, probably the longest. So well, I'm gonna tell you that right now is the hardest thing to do is coming off of.
Speaker 1:Life and this and that, and trying to get into marketing and and trying to get people Like, hey, look at this book over here, but you know it's it's tough because that's not in our, it's not in green in us, no, it's not in green, as to be like, oh look, how great I am. I mean it is for some people. You'll see that on social media, the fed pros and stuff like that, but the majority of us are just like, hey look, this is a story I want to tell. I want you to understand what's going on with this. Point a, point B, point C this is the facts as I know them, so you could be more Educated. Right, rather than self-clarification, I'm gonna pick the book up myself. Usually I get.
Speaker 1:You know the PDFs and stuff like that. But actually I get a lot of the information about the. You know the PDFs and stuff like that. But I actually like a physical book, sometimes a level audio books, but just having that physical book and be able to read it. And now when I read it, for me it's gonna be personal because like I was in that area and just be able to see it and like everybody.
Speaker 2:Right, right, it'll take you back. There's a couple people who reviewed it for us and they're like holy mackerel. It's like I was right back there with you.
Speaker 1:So I'm looking forward to it, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the guys that I had experience out there really related to it.
Speaker 1:We'll have some good feedback For us, so and I'm excited for you, bro, I'm excited to see you get on to this, I mean the next path.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't know what the next path really is because you know I'm using a pseudonym. Like I keep All my buddies names in there are still working. I keep their names as pseudonyms and Just recognize the, the folks that we lost. You know that made the ultimate sacrifice. But um, I, you know I don't don't need my name out there, Don't don't need my picture taken, I've got no social media footprint. Anybody wants to know anything more about it? They can contact Stephen Templin. He's got all kinds of social media since he's a published author out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, if I didn't have this podcast and Non-profits, I would be off social media man.
Speaker 2:It's tough, man. I don't know if I'd be able to handle it. You guys, uh, you guys decide to take it on and take, take whatever comes, left and right. I just yeah, yeah, I couldn't do it. Yeah, I couldn't do it.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it, brother and everybody, make sure you pick up insurgent hunter coming out February 20th you.
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