David McCloskey

Why?

I had a quote from the Jack Ryan Amazon series about Venezuela that you hacked out of our notes.

Yeah, exactly.

Been ruined by reality.

No, but it was a great, it was a very illustrative John Krasinski quote for the Jack Ryan series.

They called it, Gordon, five years ago, six years ago, I think, maybe when they ran the second season of Jack Ryan and it was all set in Venezuela.

And I actually distinctly remember watching it

with my wife and commenting that there's no way that the agency would just be able to fly helicopters sort of willy-nilly through Venezuela, because they're just sort of taken off and landing and, you know, violating Venezuelan airspace at will.

And then look, you know, six, seven years later, I'm totally wrong.

But you're right, Gordon, we do have some updates, I guess, some things that have come in over the past 12 to 15 hours on the raid that I think

don't materially change the story from the first episode in the series about exactly how Operation Absolute Resolve went down, but do add some detail to it that I think puts a point on really the incredible intelligence picture that the White House, the CIA, Delta Force, all of the different agencies involved in planning and participating in this operation

had at their fingertips.

So some of the things that have come out, I do want to actually hat tip, there's a great journalist named Jack Murphy, who's got a sub stack called the high side, what he has revealed in an update to some of the stuff he was putting out as the operation was going on, is that CIA ground branch officers, and we talked in the first episode, Gordon, about that team that was on the ground.

They were on the ground in August in Venezuela,

The planning for the operation didn't really start in full force until September.

One of the things that does seem to be more and more clear, and again, I think we'll get more information on this in the coming days, but the role that recent defectors play

really high level defectors from Venezuela played in helping build source networks on the ground that the agency and Delta Force were able to leverage.

Because it seems like there was a defector, a guy who had actually run one of Venezuela's intelligence agencies,

Someone who would run a state-run oil company.

And again, they played a role in kind of activating local source networks that played a role in the operation.