Delta Force Operator and CIA Officer | Gary Harrington (throwback episode)
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2025
⏱️ 193 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I spent most of my career working in the shadows. While some of my service was spent with large groups, such as the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit, serving in Beirut in 1982, I spent most of my career working on small teams or alone. We often lived and worked with foreign military units like a Kuwaiti tank unit in the northern desert in 1996. In 1998, I worked alone in Yemen. Trouble spots on my own became my specialty. After 9/11, I launched to Uzbekistan in the vanguard for 5th Special Forces Group and served on several teams in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, participating in major combat operations alongside Afghan indigenous forces. Often, my mission was to enter a country to determine if other special operations forces could safely follow and operate. If so, I would develop the situation and make ready for them to arrive. In 2002, after departing Afghanistan, I moved to a mid-Eastern location to prepare the way for the next conflict. Working independently and conducting successful, often classified missions on several continents taught me the power of prudence…and the skills that must accompany it.
Find Gary here:⬇️
https://powerofprudence.com/
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0:00 - Intro
00:51 - Origin story
7:01 - USMC
16:10 - FBI recruitment
18:05 - Enlisting in Special Forces
21:49 - 7th Group SF
25:00 - Hearing about Delta Force
27:22 - Delta Selection & OTC
34:00 - Invitation to leave & the aftermath in the Army
41:03 - Highly Qualified
43:38 - 5th SF Group
1:06:40 - Picked to work in a classified cell in 5th Group
1:08:22 - 9/11 & getting ready for the GWOT
1:14:50 - Setting the stage in Uzbekistan
1:23:10 - Infilling to Bagram and Tora Bora
1:34:00 - Bin Laden getting away
1:50:00 - Standing up FOB Orgun
2:09:47 - AFO in Iraq
2:13:45 - Making the jump from Army to the CIA & CIA ops
2:37:39 - Viewer questions
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Special operations. |
| 0:07.3 | Cobert Ops. |
| 0:09.9 | Espionage. |
| 0:12.0 | The Team House. |
| 0:14.0 | With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. |
| 0:23.9 | Hey, folks. |
| 0:24.8 | Welcome to episode 197 of the team house. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm Jack Murphy, here with our guest today, Gary Harrington. |
| 0:31.7 | Gary had a really incredible career stretching from the Marine Corps to special forces to Delta Force to the CIA. |
| 0:40.0 | We're really excited to have him on the show today. And Gary, thank you for joining us on a Monday evening. |
| 0:46.5 | Hey, thanks. It's an honor. |
| 0:49.2 | You know, I'll start from the top like we do with most of our guests. I'm going to ask you a little bit about, you know, your upbringing and sort of that path that took you towards military service, |
| 0:58.8 | if you could kind of lay on your origins. My parents were the first of their families to ever |
| 1:07.3 | graduate high school. So my grandparents, none of them ever made it out of elementary school. |
| 1:14.1 | I had one grandfather that was a hobo for a while. So when I grew up, it was poor, it were poor |
| 1:20.1 | farmers. And my parents were that generation that, hey, we've got to leave the farm and do something different. |
| 1:28.4 | My dad had served a couple years in the Air Force, and that was the time he met my mom when he was home on leave. |
| 1:37.9 | And I grew up, you know, it was western North Carolina. |
| 1:41.8 | As a matter of fact, when I was young, we still borrowed my grandfather's mule to plow our garden. |
| 1:51.2 | So, you know, it was, it's funny because those skills, you know, I still had relatives with |
| 1:57.0 | an outhouse. |
| 1:58.1 | Those skills came back to serve me well in SF, you know, when you go |
... |
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