>> there's a small archive and not many people have looked at it at all it is a kind of gold mine of information. >> the author of this among other books about dale carnegie thanks for being on booktv. >> he discusses his book relentless strike that provides the history of the special operations command interviewed by the investigative reporter dana. welcome, sean. it's great to have you here. this is an amazing book.

it's at this point a definitive history of the secret organization and its so thick i want to start with this one because if you are a normal reader you might think that it's easier to get information and get you say -- i want to quote you here because it is pretty succinct that i began the project that research and writing a book that the secret organization that controlled other secret organizations was going to be a challenge and so it proved several people who figure prominently in the events described in this book to requests to be interviewed. so how hard is it or how hard was it and how long did it take? >> guest: it took three years of research and writing. that's not counting my two decades plus as a reporter on the security issues prior to

that in the previous books and just by osmosis it's also not counting the time spent in the editing process after the three years were up. it was very difficult but obviously not impossible to find the people and the other published words or unpublished works that were the extraordinary stories of the organization from its roots in 1980 to the present day against the islamic state. >> host: let's start from the basics. >> guest: that conducted the united states military's most sensitive secrets special operations missions, it was

formed in 1980 as a result of the failure of the operation eagle claw which was the attempt to bury the marry the hostages in tehran and in the wake of that failure, the pentagon put together a blue-chip board of half a dozen active and retired military officers, and one of the recommendations was the creation of a prominent counterterrorism joint task force with a permanent staff and with unit assigned to the task force permanently because the rescue attempt had been kind of did buy sort of an ad hock pickup team staff and units that were not used to working together. >> and it's called choice because it has units for each of

the services. can you talk about those? >> certainly. it has the special missions unit of the so-called services underneath it. the better known of those are the army's delta force operational detachment and the navy seal turned them to because the sixth seal team six organization with most of its recent history known as the special tactics squadron through the series of name changes but before all that there is a unit that i referred to because that was the nickname and the joint special operations command, and it joined the special operations command in the 2004 timeframe because it existed for a couple of decades before that and in addition to those units they

call on the regimen which is a sort of elite infantry airborne light infantry unit to pick and the the army army is one 60th special operations aviation regiment in the niche organizations. >> host: it also has the national designation so what is the importance of that command? >> guest: it is is the command operationally is normally depending on what part of the world operating and for instance if it is in iraq, it would report to the u.s. central command who is the combatant

commander for that part of the world. obviously from him it goes up to the pentagon and to the white house in very short order but it really works for the secretary of defense and for the present. >> and the difference between what jsoc to does and the paramilitary division does what's the difference? >> there is an overlap between the organizations now and you will find the members of that organization in the battlefield as it were in the same embassy doing some of the same work. the obvious difference is that

the command is a lot bigger and has a lot more firepower. the special activities division you would expect to be working in battlefields in which the united states is not at war with perhaps the slightly shadier characters than the military and with different legal authorities than the military. but increasingly, especially in the last few years the special operations command and special missions unit have expanded the human intelligence gathering apparatus are increasingly encroaching on the difference. >> host: it might sound and arcane question that it's the

difference between what is covert versus what the cia does versus clandestine which is supposed to be. they said that emerged two. >> the difference between clandestine as it has been explained to me is the clandestine operation is something that the united states doesn't want anyone to find out about ever so if you for instance send an operative into the country to the group. if you gave the mujahedin the missiles to shoot the soviet planes out of the sky in

afghanistan, the soviet helicopters and the fact that they've been shot out of the sky isn't a secret once it happened but you are trying to do is hide the u.s. thinker prince on the operation so it's ayn rand portend legal distinction. i think in the information age it's getting harder and harder to keep those things separate. >> host: as you described jsoc has pushed forward and the limits of what might have been seen as the limits before. >> guest: that is true. jsoc sends people to the facility facility with a heavy operated training course and it

has expanded the number of people that are operating under cover and it's so getting into the intelligence side of things, the cyber warfare side of things, so increasingly the sort of behemoth is increasing on the territory that we would have thought was the arena in which the intelligence surveillance agency -- >> another strange fact is that the cia is a known organization or acknowledged organization that that testified occasionally to congress. their status is still not at college, true? if you look at the official there isn't really a website somewhere that says training and equipping, you had written a

book about an organization that the united states actually says doesn't exist and it wants to keep secret but you decided to shouldn't be a secret, talk about that. why do you think it's important -- i think it's important for a couple of reasons but the main one is that in the wake of 9/11, the joint special operations command has become i would argue the main effort in the united states war on terror so while it was conceived as an organization that had very narrowly defined mission counterterrorism hostage rescue missions expanded through the 80s and 90s but was

always viewed as an organization that would be a thought on the sidelines sort of on the fringes of a major war the country has been at war now for more than 14 years as the special operations command has been the main effort in that war. i think the public is owed for more information about an organization they are paid to expand and that is fighting the war with their money with their sons and daughters in their name van a small secret organization that is chasing the loose nukes around. >> host: and exciting in a particular way. can you talk about the development of that because before it really didn't happen to capability that it's grown to

have. >> guest: i think that while the general who took over and took command of the joint special operations command in late 2003 certainly revolutionized in scope and speed the manhunt capability and we can all talk about that. there are those that would argue that the groundwork has already been made in the pre- 9/11 era. in december of 1989, jsoc not only spearheaded the invasion of panama, but then when the dictator went to ground in the immediate aftermath of that, it was the forces that were hunting

him around until he took refuge and eventually standard. following on from that in the early '90s, it was the jsoc forces that conducted or helped in the first case conducting pablo escobar the drug lord that ended with his death and then mohammed, the warlord hunt that didn't go as successfully and functionally ended with the october battle that became memorialized in black hawk down. >> host: they wanted to jsoc to do the war criminal hunt and they did so but it was i think the chamber of the joint chiefs that set up a time we don't do

manhunts. >> guest: they may have said that, that they did a lot of hunting, and in fact the balkan stuffer persons indicted for war crimes. the hunt was considered the crucible in which at least on the personal level much tighter bonds without putting the cia special activities and the special mission units personnel from delta, seal team six and others. >> host: talkative about the difference between a adult hot ... and the different types of things they do and their division on the battlefield.

>> guest: that i would argue has slowly been eroded now. d-delta was the first organization to come into being created in the late 1970s under the command of the legendary special forces officer called charlie beckwith and it was still a largely modeled on the british special air services as a counterterrorist unit and it was the first of what is at the center of the eagle claw in the attempt to rescue the hostages in tehran and shortly thereafter, 1988 and the timeframe, seal team six was created under the command of an officer, and the initial concept

i think in the eyes of those that created it was to conduct the sort of missions that word typically conduct in the maritime environment so if a plane got hijacked me be the first choice to rescue the passengers at the airport in the third world would be the be the delta force and of a cruise liner got hijacked in the first choice would be seal team six. although they famously said something like if the canteen has water in it as a matter of time for that effect. in the post-9/11 era in particular, those distinctions have started that they have

operated basically since october of 2001 in afghanistan because the landlocked country. mcchrystal in the middle of the last decade invited the various theaters in which the forces were operating up and put different units in charge of them and in particular seal team six dot afghanistan while delta was focused on iraq and the sort of larger purpose the middle east. a little later, mcchrystal put a seal team six and operations and put the rangers in charge in afghanistan. now there were units from all of

those organizations in the other theaters so it wasn't exclusive one to the other but that is largely how to put down. >> host: and you talk in the middle of the book about the chapter called jsoc on steroids and it talks about maturing in iraq and using a the mohawks that were the iraqis. and in one passage he wrote that in essence if it was possible they would send >> it was risky for such missions sometimes the camera cars which were local vehicles in which units had hidden cameras in such a way that an auto manufacturing disguised

backup cameras in the vehicles so and the vehicles they were designed to do what? >> guest: i'm just giving a hypothetical that if the bill to force -- d-delta force was used by the insurgents by al qaeda in iraq and they wanted to case the joint back prior to an assault but they didn't want to take the risk they could put an iraqi wretch riveted and drive it passed in the stream of traffic. they got the objective they want to assault at night. >> host: what is the track record working with the iraqis? i think they were rather controversial because they did somethings that might not have been approved or that sort of

thing. >> guest: the track record working with them in my understanding was very positive. people spoke very highly of them and they were taking major risks of course as the iraqis were doing this and several of them got captured and killed. jsoc also has worked very closely with the iraqi kurds and their intelligence organizations to develop the targets both within iraq and iran to the best of my knowledge. so i think that is considered as a fairly successful set of relationships. >> host: you mention at some point of the new campaign against an old enemy and you say

that the invasion of the occupation of iraq gave more opportunities to penetrate iran and that they were keen to get their own people in iran so at this time when we know the relationships, how are they getting their own people in and what were they doing there? >> guest: there's two ways to do that. >> host: not so obvious. >> guest: one is to pay them on americans to do it, spies basically so they might have a legitimate reason to go into iraq to the countries where there's a lot of training as and so forth going on and then do it that way and the other is to send americans undercover, and it took them a while to figure out how to do that and it could

be that they overestimated how difficult it was going to be. at one point they were amazed to find out that they showed up with an american passport and had a border crossing david geddes visa stamped and just walk into the planned it for about a year coming into the missions were changed. at first they wanted to attract some of the al qaeda folks who have been sent with taken refuge that they had under the various forms of arrest, and at a certain point in the planning of how to get folks into iran they changed back into see if it's possible to monitor some of the nuclear activities may be a taking soil samples and that sort of thing and sending them in. so they sent with the military would call a proof of concept.

they send a couple of folks and they drove around, came back out. they have a very forcible cover reason for being in iran and that gave them the proof. obviously the fact that the united states also was an occupied power in afghanistan at the same time which has a border with iran as well it gave them two routes. >> host: and what did they learn? >> guest: i could tell you in greater detail. certainly they learn how to get around. but i'm not sure how much of a

focus that has been because they obviously had other to invest time and money is a classic example that they figured out ways to penetrate with their own people and especially with allies. >> host: the book is filled with anecdotes about technology that they are developing along the way and obviously one of the most important and probably one of your scoops in the book. can you talk about that? >> guest: the xbox is a reverse engineered and provides explosive device basically a bomb that was developed by the

delta force and seal team 6% now who are basically taking apart the ied that had been found on the battlefield to see how they were manufactured in at a certain point in time the lights went on and we now know enough about these that we could build one ourselves and we could build one out of locally secure routing and materials so that there would be no way for anyone who found it to trace it back to the united states, and adult forced used the xbox against targets that were very politically sensitive to strike in iraq and the premier nouri al

maliki was happy to have jsoc conduct a withering campaign against the sunni insurgents and al qaeda in iraq but was far less enthusiastic of the permissions for targeted shiite militants even though they were supported by iran were killing 11 americans so this was the work around in a few cases to kill those crates without knowing that that was the americans that did it and it's important to say that these were not ied's ~ for people that the restrictions placed but the restrictions placed on the use of them meant that usually the delta force operator would have to have eyes on the target. it had to be detonated at a time

that code of the targeted individual but not a whole bunch of civilians. >> host: and usa in you say in the book the political restrictions those imposed actually hobbled the task force operations and that's one of the reasons they decided to take this on to work around it but they also worked at the fbi. this was something designed so that if the fbi went and investigated they couldn't figure out who did it, which sounds borderline legal. >> host: this is my understanding of that and i've gone back because a couple of newspapers publications have picked up on that and i wanted to see exactly how i think the way that i wrote is correct but maybe i wasn't clear enough and it's been misinterpreted. my understanding of what i was told is that that was a hypothetical that they wanted to

reach. it wasn't that the fbi was investigating these things and jsoc was trying to hide from it. one thing the fbi had liaisons and personnel task force is. that was the standard that the folks designing the xbox wanted to reach. if this ever got handed to the fbi's center that does the sort of forensics this sort of forensics on these things, they wouldn't be able to tell that it came from americans. they would think that it was a locally designed militant. i don't think that it was we were hiding from the fbi. that's just the technological bar they set for themselves. >> host: nonetheless, as the

u.s. government has said many times it's criticized the use and set up task force to figure a task force to figure out how to mitigate them and get they end up using the same technique although more carefully as you say word they are debates about whether this was ethical or correct? >> guest: there were debates about it because one of the sources told the ahead and been involved in the genesis they had decided not to use it because as you imply that i'm on the same level as the folk that they were fighting. and suppose the counter argument for that is if you're using an

explosive to kill a terrorist leader or militant leader and nobody else, how is that any different morally or ethically than an airstrike was putting a bullet in his head booby traps have been a form of warfare for as long as they have been explosives i suspect. so there's two sides to that argument. >> host: you do point out out in the book this was used when predators were not available and appropriate methods were -- >> guest: certainly if you want to keep the american fingerprint on the backs.

what is the magnitude of what they did? >> guest: at the height of the war let's say august, 2006, they were launching more than 300 missions in a 24 hour period in iraq. i've never seen or even been told if one exists but how many folks feel it's important to note that in a lot of these raids like iraq and afghanistan, there were no bullets fired at all. jsoc would descend on the target and people would surrender or they wouldn't be there in the first place. >> host: i thought you said they had a 50% success rate.

>> guest: but that co but that is the success rate of capturing or killing what they would call the jackpot rate which means the target is in that house and you descend on the house and sure enough he's there and either captured or killed them and that is the jackpot. i think a conservative analyst as would have to put it at several thousand especially when you add in the amount of targets that were struck from the air or especially by the 130 gunship. >> host: what is the mix of the close combat versus other things? >> guest: i think it's changed. in iraq particularly around the 2005 timeframe, there were a series of episodes in which they

were told by what became known as house borne so these were anti-your houses that were rigged to explode with insurgents inside of them often who knew they were going to die but they wanted to wear the jsoc operators into the house and the rate of independent of the whole place up a. once that happened on a number of occasions, jsoc became more reluctant obviously to conduct this sort of raids and resorted to just blowing up the house using aerial fires. the downside of that of course is that you don't get anybody to interrogate him and it's much harder to find in tax laptops and that sort of thing. >> host: and most of these are happening at nighttime but at a

certain point as i recall, the general puts a hold on the night operations because of some of the mistakes that were made. is that part of -- >> guest: i think that might be more in afghanistan began when he was the commander. certainly in iraq during the tenure there was a shift is particularly on the operations against the vehicle interdiction operations simply because the insurgents had worked out they preferred to work at night and they shifted to the daytime movement. but i don't recall during the tenure hearing as a commander.

>> host: but then jsoc complained. >> host: that is as they like to say they own the night and so they would certainly have preferred continued doing that. there are push backs against reactions to that as an insurgent force in afghanistan as well revising how useful the fact that insurgents used cell phone communications to jsoc the insurgents actually had forced the cell phone companies to shut down at night in southern afghanistan so that nobody could get a bead on their cell phone. >> host: and some of the cell phone tracking technology is some of the most sophisticated

stuff, things that really cracked open and created a new ability to go after people. >> guest: yes and he had as he sort of reform to the revolution in the joint special operations command he made in efforts to tire his headquarters much more closely with the intelligence agencies and that included the national security agency. jsoc has its own tactical intelligence capabilities as well and they used that as it was absolutely key in the operations that that eviscerate al qaeda in iraq as the ability to use the cell phone tracking technology. sometimes that would involve flying planes around. sometimes that involved getting

folks into the iraq he cell phone companies and the towers and so forth. but it was a key weapon at that stage of the war. >> host: outside of iraq and afghanistan, some of the other countries that they've operated in, give us a couple of highlights. >> host: they are the most obvious are the ones that they have had personal now based in and of the highlights would include in somalia the rescue of captain phillips which later became a tom hanks movie which was one of the missions that started to put them on the map

in the post-9/11 era. you have perhaps the even more extraordinary mission to rescue jessica buchanan the american hostage and the danish hostage in january, 2012 from the somali pirates but this was on land and i think that was one of the more extraordinary missions i described in the book where seal team six conducted eight high altitude opening for evil so that means you are flying at a high altitude of 2,025,000 feet, jumping from the plane in a freefall parachute jump, opening the parachute at high altitude ceiling from the bandwidth gps

devices so you know exactly where you are and in that case there was so much fog on the ground that they have to in mid air switch from their primary drop zones which they are able to do perfectly, sneak up on the pirates camp where they were being held, shoot all nine and rescue the hostages unharmed without taking any casualties themselves and then getting them out of the country on special operations aircraft. that became what i was told was the gold standard of the hostage rescues and jsoc. so they've been at work off and on for most of the post-9/11 period.

cnn was the same way. >> host: there's a rivalry that is developing between the cia and the jsoc over who will do what? >> guest: i believe so. i mean in the end, they conducted cross-border missions into pakistan. they had others they wanted to do but were not approved of missions that got called off at the last moment but they conducted a number of direct action missions to kill or capture personnel and some airstrikes but i talk in the book about one airstrike by the f-15 jet that was aimed at once suspected to be an al qaeda safe house in the dispute to how important the people are in the

operation. and then of course as everybody knows there was the 2011 mission against the compound that ended up killing osama bin laden. i think interestingly one of the things i reveal in the book is that they had actually kept the unit in afghanistan and prepared to do a freefall mission into the pakistani tribal areas to kill bin laden and even though he turned up far from the tribal areas, there were some who still would have preferred to do a freefall jump rather than use the stealth helicopters that were employed. >> host: lebanon. that is an interesting story.

and the relationship with the israelis. >> guest: i talk about an operative who was in the task force which is and army special operations intelligence unit that had joined jsoc after and at the direction of the defense secretary. and this operative had been transiting lebanon. the actual mission wasn't in lebanon. the assessment i was told later was that they would probably be criminals of some kind rather than hezbollah.

i don't know whether that has ever been definitively confirmed but in the processes shot and he ends up going back to his hotel and selling himself up and tried to cover his tracks as he has been trained to do all of a gunshot wound that has received no other medical attention and i believe that he flew back to the united kingdom before he was back into the bubble as they would call it to receive the coca. but all around them things go better. at some point are people reflecting on the political or

the lack of political advances while they are making these tactical advances that the strategic mission is not going so well and did they get involved in the discussions about this? >> guest: i am sure at the military and the defense department level, they have been put into what course the united states would take and the commanders during the timeframe were raised from to start a three-star commander probably the most powerful three-star in the united states military i would think. >> host: and even he says to question what -- the missions that he had done and how effective they were overall to the fight.

>> guest: i think that it is an obvious question that needs to be asked, and i -- my take is that jsoc is a brilliant tactical media and operational tool in a policymaker's toolbox, but it is not a substitute for a strategy. it needs to be employed to get the most bang for the buck for the united states as part of a coherent strategy that involves the rest of the united states government. i don't think that it works necessarily to be given a difficult strategic problem and for policymakers to put their hands up in the air and say just throw jsoc added.

they have the ability to hold the enemy at arms length for an indefinite length of time. the challenges of al qaeda and the islamic state and even that is sometimes called the iranian threat network that the united states faces are challenges that jsoc may play a very important role in solving or bringing to a resolution but it can't be the only tool that is used. >> host: you do talk about them coming to washington. it's a task force that it's a task force of the national capital region and it's a maturing point in their evolution, correct and some people in washington didn't like it very much so explain why they come here and how how big of a presence they have and what they do. >> host: they wanted to be much closer i think to the

intelligence agencies and to the other arms of government that are state orders and east challenges and they they thought it was more felt it was more advantageous to locate a center here staffed with the same sort of folks they've had at the other headquarters, task force headquarters with tracking. they have had the ability supposedly to track individuals around the globe and to target the borders for them together but also to get one of the things that make crystal and make graven were very keen on was leveraging other government agencies authorities budgets and

capabilities to go after targets that many jsoc had a hard time going after on its own. >> host: and they have to do it politically. they can take their personnel. they have to convince them. >> guest: it became very dependent on the human relations. mcchrystal understood this very early and in 2004, once he realized that a couple of things haven't gone the way he expected them to because he didn't know enough about what was going on in his this headquarters with the headquarters, he invited a lot of organizations to put the a's on in his headquarters and at the same time he pushed a lot of people out at one point i knew they had about 175 personnel functioning in other headquarters to represent and keep them apprised of what was going on in this headquarters.

>> host: and they were the most well-rounded. >> guest: they were very highly regarded individuals. this wasn't the people .-full-stop we don't really need this. and he would keep them there for only four months at a time so that they didn't lose it touch with what was going on and they didn't become divorced from battlefield. >> host: someone is explaining what they got outside of the national capital region about a man hunting mission. >> host: he's told her that he gets on a plane and you get all his travel documents immediately appear on the screen. now they give you the manifest of every flight he took over the last six months. you get the complete manifest of

all five flights and you find out five others were on the same five flights and then you cross-referenced than him somehow find out three of the five are from the same village and two or more were imprisoned together. it's multiple agencies feeding him information and this person is telling you i was fascinated that jsoc was able to be in the lead because 80% of what they were putting up there with domestic stuff. so that is so interesting because the military is supposed to be outwardly focused. so how were they convincing them and under what authority is can the domestic agencies get this military organizations that sort of information? >> guest: i'm hesitant to say how legal that is or not. my sense is that simply sharing the information is different

than acting in the united states on that information. i think if they felt that that guy is back in the united states and we need to sweep them up before he does damage, then you give that to the fbi or some other domestic law enforcement organization. i don't think it's good to be seal team six but someone at logan airport. but if he goes back to morocco then you were possibly with media give a special operations mission perhaps with or not with the local government more likely that as an ally country that is friendly to the united states before their security forces. >> host: during this period of time the united states also

stands up to northern command which is focused on the united states as well as canada. did you pick up any hint that they actually did have plans to operate under certain circumstances within the united states? >> guest: i think jsoc has always had as part of its sort of 0,400th mission of the counter proliferation mission based on the weapons of mass distraction it's always had certain responsibilities in the washington area with a call for national capital region in particular is if there was literally sort of a ticking timebomb for some kind of a nuclear weapons they have because of their expertise in that area they have some responsibilities. i am unaware of any sort of other authorities that they have

to conduct any direct action missions. there are highly trained law enforcement organizations that have the responsibility to do that as i understand. >> host: you right here at the end of the book about the black squadron and the growth of that. so talk about that. >> guest: seal team six is a sort of a constant squadron that grew out of a smaller element that was largely modeled on but don't force durational support troop as it was called at the time and again that as well got turned into a squadron as big as the troop, and it is one of

those organizations i was discussing earlier that people undercover and conducts low visibility missions and in countries that the united states is not at war so they've been operating in talia and gavin and other places and it has become as i understand it the largest squadron so it is a larger squadron now and even more prestigious some people would say to the command for instance then the assault squadron, the red squadron, blue, yellow and gold. >> host: and its mission is to collect intelligence. >> guest: yes. >> host: so how is that different than what the cia would be doing, plus you also

describe some of the black squadron participants are in for the long term in a place. they are under deep cover which not all cia operatives are. can you describe both of those things? >> guest: the way that the pentagon has gotten around with some people would think would be the legal restrictions is to call that operational preparation of the battlefield which another phrase that you hear is traditional military activities. we may have to send the military in here and we need to conduct the sort of reconnaissance if you like in case we do that and that's what they are doing. >> host: said against small

numbers of people -- >> guest: we may have to someday conduct a counterterrorism mission so we are going to set up the requirement and the maybe renting facilities where we can store vehicles and we may be doing all sorts of things that they somehow groupies into the rubric of the traditional military activities. that falls under the title ten of the u.s. code which is the part of the code that governs the military. title 50 covers espionage and sometimes there will be the title 50 missions. ..

>> >> i think, yes.

that can be anything from the state house in northern somalia to pretending to be a businessman in yemen. >> host: what about the fight against isis? >> i know there are. there is a task force operating data of courtesy and that largely targets the hispanic state beaters using all sources of intelligence to do that and interviewing people at of the islamic state territory and it has

its own to conduct not only that surveillance so when you hear the islamic state meter was killed in a drumstick - - a drove strike that was the case. >> what about syria? >> guest: going into that it is happening in syria. i talked in the book through the height of the iraq war some of the most dramatic missions that are single individuals undercover missions into syria to keep tabs on the fighter flow into iraq to beef up the

organization. >> any indication those are operating in europe as well? >> i have not been told that but a lot of what is happening al is beyond the scope of the book but it is difficult to imagine at least to didn't have some people working with the intelligence and with their counterparts with the security forces. >> do you think this is the force we will continue as much as we have with great targeted operations?

>> i don't see you going top down in size anytime soon. because it is much easier to grow the organization but also administration's have come to rely on the command of things that our difficult or too sensitive for other organizations to do. perhaps you can see a change of the resources and i mentioned already the intelligence squadrons are becoming more important than the assault squadrons.

i think you will see more cyberwarfare conducted and perhaps in different geographic locations. clearly if u.s. forces have pulled out of iraq county bid to read 3,000 with the iraqi military in iraq and kurdistan with a shrinking presence in afghanistan and the question is still open open, you will not have the size of the task force at the height of the of war there. but that would probably lead

to a border defused presence around the world. >> what did you learn of the effectiveness, i did you learn any political lessons from what you discovered? >> i did not approach the book looking for political lessons certainly there is some to be learned and how to reorganize itself and a large part of the book tells a story however of the organization w