Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
No, no, no. I'll get to Eric. I'll get to Eric. Eric had no idea. As a matter of fact, he's never been in Reddit and everything we did. So I'm right into the project, and my job is to develop access for purposes of weaponized technology. Again, think offensively. This is before 9-11, and we're tasked to go kill al-Qaeda before 9-11.
Think about the... Now, this is the problem with the whole thing we're talking about.
Bingo. Yes. This is why they want to distract with the chart constantly, Pat. We... This is why they were upset with me testifying. You remember the Israeli op, the pager op, Pat? Of course. They weren't the first ones to think about that. Just saying. I have to be careful about where I'm going because I'm still trying to get permission from the Pentagon to talk about my role.
My role in Able Danger, to this day... It's never been disclosed. I've been said to be the coordinator. I've been a reservist. My role was so highly classified, he probably remembers this, I was waived in closed hearings with Kurt. I was waived off by the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee because I couldn't talk about my role.
He was literally in the back of the room saying, don't say that. You can't say that. So to this day, we have never talked about, and I'm still trying to get permission to talk about it. Anyway, suffice it to say, that what I was doing in my civilian job was what we wanted to introduce to the Able Danger Operation as one of the offensive options. And this is the key.
This wasn't about waiting until something happened. This was about us, Pete Schumacher, putting together a team, the best and the brightest, to put together options for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, to go do something before 9-11. And that was the whole project. That was the concept. The idea was, Pat, we knew they were coming.
We put together a team that would be invested in doing things that have never been done before. And oh, by the way, how do you target something that's never been targeted? How do you do something relating to a non-geographic target, a transnational target? Data mining. At the time, nobody knew about it. Remember, this is before anybody understood the power of the internet.
So when I'm tasked to help them figure out how do we go about targeting all the ranch, Pete Schumacher called it the ranch, the Special Operations Command ranch. That includes the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Delta, you know, Rangers. It's the options that were available for us to do something.
And, oh, by the way, the other thing key about this, this was – Able Danger was the first time Special Operations Command was ever the supported SYNC. This is important because that means they were the lead. They were the ones asking the other regional syncs to help them. It was huge. This was groundbreaking.
That's it. So I got this task, and it's like, what do I do? I knew Lewa was experimenting with data mining. And I'll let Eric Tocque take over here because we had no way to map al-Qaeda. So this is a long way to answering your question, I know, Pat, but— You need to understand the picture of what got us into the room.
The Senate. So DOD leadership, Army leadership said you can't go in.
That morning. You can pull up pictures of the hearing. I'm in uniform standing right next to the charts. Right. If you if you if you bring up if you Google able danger Senate hearing 2005, it should come up with a number of time life pictures that show all of us together where I'm in the back row next to J.D. Smith, who's going to become. Yeah, here we go. Right there. See, I'm right there.
I see you. There's Russ Caso, there's Kurt, there's J.D. Smith, and I think you're there somewhere, right? I'm heading behind one of the maps. So we were going to lay out, everything I'm laying out to you right now, we were going to lay out in great detail. So this is where, to answer your question,
What I was going to do is build a case of why—and by the way, Pat, one key thing to remember, we weren't supposed to find what we found. We were off the books. We were looking at al-Qaeda from a fresh perspective. None of us were experts on this issue.
I would argue that we became a dangling participle, an inconvenient organization that saw what the deep state was doing, and that's why they came after us.
No, no. No. Let me explain.
I think wise people understood what was forming because we were told by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to go look at this. And one of the notable things about this, now, full disclosure, I know President Trump. I was a national security adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign. So I do have, you know, and I did meet him way later in 20, I think, 15.
But I think he had a sense, like many of us, that something was brewing. And to continue your point to answer your question. When I was the coordinator of trying to pull the team together behind the scenes, I took the ABLE Danger Team to land information warfare activity at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And that's where Eric comes into it.
They were doing an extraordinary job of, again, look at the time frame, 98, 99, 2000. Pat, nobody knew the power of big data. And so we were the first operational unit to actually use a combination of open source, closed source. Part of my job was to actually combine the top secret piece. One of my deputies, Theresa McSwain, Lieutenant Colonel McSwain,
brought the NSA database down to Garland, Texas, to combine them together to do this overall targeting, to basically combine things. This was a major effort.
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