Inside the CIA’s Most Covert and Dangerous Branch: The Special Activities Center

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

It’s SpyCast 20th year, and we start off 2026 with Brian Carbaugh. He served in the CIA for about two decades, retiring as the director of this Special Activities Center . The agency's arm for covert action, where some of the most bold and dangerous work happens with authorization from the president. It's a world few know about firsthand and even fewer can discuss.Brian gave me an inside look into the job, which he held from 2017 to 2021 pivotal years in the United States and the world.

Sasha Ingber: Brian, welcome to SpyCast. Thank you for coming.

Brian Carbaugh: Thanks so much for the invitation, Sasha.

Sasha Ingber: So this is not a therapy session, but you are sitting in a chair and I'm going to ask you about your childhood.

What did you wanna be as a kid?

Brian Carbaugh: I was a kid growing up in upstate New York, small town. I grew up watching special operations movies, war movies, and I was really attracted to one serving our country. I wanted to serve. I went to a military service academy, but two, I just really had this desire to see the world.

And when I joined the Marines, I had a chance, um, when I was a captain in the Marine Corps to be a part of a special purpose marine air ground task force, which was my first real exposure to different countries, different cultures, different languages, different types of food, different ways of thinking, but all in the pursuit of like having friends and partners in, in my case, in the special operations units in those countries.

And it was awesome. And for me, you know, as that kid that grew up in a small town in upstate New York, wanted to see the world, dabbled in it a little bit and then having had that experience in the Marine Corps, in my mind is like, I know where I wanna go, and it was towards the CIA. I wasn't exactly sure at the time of CIA, but it was my really sort of what emerged to be my number one choice.

Sasha Ingber: And how'd you go from the Marines to CIA.

Brian Carbaugh: My first stop on that, uh, journey that sort of transitioned from active duty military to CIA was in graduate school. So as I said, the last year that I was in the Marine Corps is when I went to South America, loved it. Um, came back, started reading a ton about the intelligence community, about the CIA, about the craft of human intelligence.

I loved being in sort of small, really sort of specialized team in the military and I enjoyed that teaming aspect, like sort of unified behind one cause. And I wanted to try to recreate that and, and find that in my next step. And I wanted to stay operational. I was still a pretty young guy. I didn't wanna be the person putting thumbtacks in a map and sort of being sedentary.

I wanted to be active. I wanted to deploy and travel. And I had been developing an interest in counter-terrorism stuff when I was a kid. I was one of those dudes who watched the news all the time. So I literally have like report cards from my elementary school teachers who were saying like, wow, Brian is very aware of current events, you know, for, for a sixth grader.

So I obviously had like, somehow, or for some reason had that, that part of me that was interested in global things. So I came to DC and went to grad school at Georgetown. So I was at the School of Foreign Service, but I really wasn't sure what I was getting into and I felt like, come to DC, go to a graduate school, a program that will give me an opportunity to be exposed to different elements of the community, the national security community, sort of broadly defined.

Uh, and it was when I was at Georgetown, I decided to apply to CIA.

Sasha Ingber: And tell me about your first days at CIA before I fast forward us into the latter part of your career.

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah. Look truthfully, um, telling you my first few days at CIA, um, huge sense that like I probably wasn't good enough to be here. I, you know, I was proud of myself and what I had done.

But as I got recruited to come into what was then referred to as Ground Branch , which is ground department now, um, I looked at myself and I compare myself to some of the other people in that unit. I was like, dude, I, you know, like, is this a mistake? Like, did they, do they know that I'm not, you know, I'm not that good.

Like I, I'm, I'm thrilled to be here. But it was a little bit of a confidence thing, right? So I was nervous, but, um, I will say this, I was heartened my first day there. I walked in and ran into Mike Spann and he was my former teammate in the Marine Corps. We had been at Second Angle Co together a, a Marine unit.

Um, and I had known Mike for a few years. I lost track of him when he left active duty Marine Corps, and there he was in Ground Branch  on my first day. And you know, Mike became the first casualty in the war on terror. 

Sasha Ingber: He’s a star on the wall in agency headquarters. 

Brian Carbaugh: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I saw Mike, my former teammate.

So there I was my first week, my first day literally on the job with a lot of uncertainty. You know, am I the right guy? Am I qualified? And there's Mike who had been there before me. He is like, dude, you're the, you're the right one. And I had great people there who I was very lucky to become friends with and served as mentors of mine as well.

Sasha Ingber: That sort of imposter syndrome is surprising because from the outside there are so many people, especially men here in the US who lionize people who come from the ground department. 

Brian Carbaugh: I think it's probably pretty common, right? Uh, I, you know, I look at myself and say, fear is a very powerful motivator for me, right?

And, and over time, whether in that circumstance, my first week in Ground Branch . It's like, okay, am I gonna be good enough? And, and like someone who goes through any type of crucible type training, you can either use that fear and it's gonna immobilize you and you're gonna, you're gonna buckle at the wrong time, or you're gonna cavitate and either miss the shot, uh, perform poorly on the jump or whatever the task at hand is.

Or you can use that fear of something that's gonna drive you and, and really sort of motivate you. And I choose the latter in that case. Trust the process and trust yourself and push through that, which I'm grateful I did. 

Sasha Ingber: So at one point in your career you met Greg Vogle, who is considered a living legend, and he is well known now for having saved the life of Hamid Karzai, who was going to become president of Afghanistan from an accidental, uh, US bomb drop.

You guys worked on a major operation, operation Anaconda to go into Afghanistan in 2002. Uh, take out members of Al-Qaeda. What did he teach you? 

Brian Carbaugh: How much time do we have? Right? I mean, Greg, is that that football coach you, you wanted to impress? He's that father figure you wanna do right by. Greg was the chief of Ground Branch  when I first started.

So himself, a very accomplished Marine before he joined Ground Branch . 

Sasha Ingber: And Ground Branch  is one. There's also air, maritime, weapons?

Brian Carbaugh: Correct. Yeah. Sasha with you sort of falling under the rubric of the CIA Special Activities Center , SAC organizational construct changes a little bit over time, but yeah, ground department now is one of the maneuver departments.

And as you said, there's, there are others there. So Greg at the time was the, the director, the chief of the ground, um, maneuver unit and had already been seen. And for the new person, new guy checking in, you just knew that Greg is, is that guy, like, he's, he's the person you'd expect to be in that job sort of right outta central casting.

Confident but not arrogant, humble. You know, very transparent, you know, where you stand with someone like Greg. And I think there's, there's a lot of power in that leadership model to, it was never negative. It was, Hey, this is where you need to be. This is the standard and to all of us. So you knew what the standard was and Greg embodied it, lived it.

So I'll be forever grateful that I was able to team with and learn from work for Greg and for people who know me. He also has this amazing sense of humor, and as I got more senior inside CIA, you realize one of the things you really do look for in people over time is a sense of humor because it can get s****y pretty fast and you can always find a reason to hang your head or be pissed about something.

But keeping a positive attitude, find a humor in, in pretty much everything you can is a good way to keep yourself focused on what matters and give yourself a little bit of resilience. And Greg embodies that too. So yeah, he's, it was, it's been amazing. 

Sasha Ingber: You ultimately spend 24 years at the CIA. Take us back to the moment that Vogel offered you the job to lead the special activities center, which is one of the most important and covert jobs inside the agency.

Brian Carbaugh: Thanks Sasha. Yeah, that's a great question. It was a very special moment for me. So as we've talked about, Greg is, is a legendary paramilitary officer leader. At the time he was serving as the deputy director of operations, so the senior clandestine service leader inside CIA. And I was serving as chief of staff to the director of CIA at the time, and the director's lead scheduler tapped on the window in my office and said that I had a visitor. That visitor is Greg Vogel, the DDO. So he needn’t announce his arrival, but he was standing in the lobby of the director's office and she said, he wants to see you. So he came in and closed the door to my office and said that.

He was, uh, very excited to, to tell me that I was the next director of the Special Activities Center. It's really not a kind of job that you send in an application for, it's a job that you're picked for. So that meant an immense amount to me that Greg would walk down, see me in my little office, in the director's suite, someone who I and the rest of us all looked up to. For him to come down.

And for me to see the look on his face where he was, he was really excited and sort of proud to share that moment with me and, and tell me that he had selected me for that job. Um, but I also recognized the significance and the sort of weight of that responsibility. I was very grateful for the trust and confidence he had in me, but he also shared to me, kind of turned around and looked at me on the way out the door and he, you know, I won't use the expletive, but he said, don't f it up.

Like, don't get it wrong. The, the people down there deserve leadership and you're gonna give it to 'em. It was just a very cool moment for me. 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. Was there any hesitation for you in, in taking that job, you had been the director of the Ground Branch  in the SAC before. You understood the immense pressure.

I imagine that leading the SAC ,there would be even more pressure, more demands. 

Brian Carbaugh: I wouldn't say hesitation. Greg has such love for that unit, that command, the men and women there, and the mission. If Greg Vogel felt like I was the right person to take that job, then I trust Greg. I had an immediate recognition of just the enormity of what's being asked because of the risks that the men and women take there around the world every day to include now. Hesitation, no humility, yes. And um, you know, an overriding sense of the importance of what's being asked of that entire command and pressure on myself right away to say I, I can't let them down. In fact, Greg, Greg gave me a small sort of three by five piece of paper that he had framed, and it was a quote from a Marine infantry platoon commander of Vietnam and, who was ultimately killed in action.

And in his pocket, they found this piece of paper where he had written, please God, don't let me fail my Marines. And Greg gave that to me when I was the chief of Ground Branch . And his point was don't let this unit down, that that flash in my mind like, please God, don't let me fail my Marines. Don't let me fail the Special Activities Center . The people who work there.

Sasha Ingber: He must have really understood that you felt the enormity of the task. What was your strategic vision for the SAC and how did it ultimately differ from Vogels when all was said and done? 

Brian Carbaugh: I wouldn't say that my vision or sort of my approach was necessarily different than Greg's or Greg's predecessor or, or my predecessor. I think in a unit like the Special Activities Center was, was such a distinct mission, right, which is to be prepared to and when called upon to carry out global covert action in support of presidential authorized covert action findings.

That all being said, that unit has to be responsive to what's playing out on the world stage. Right? So what, what does the international environment look like then? So when I got to the special activities center, um, 

Sasha Ingber: And we're talking 2017 at this point,

Brian Carbaugh: 2017. You were five or six months into the first Trump administration, there's, you know, appropriately a reexamination of what, what our country's doing in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or others.

But you also start to see the ascendants of, and the importance of great power competition. So it's not to say that China didn't matter to CIA in 2001 or in 2017, but between 2001 and 2017, China asserted itself in a way that had, it was demonstrably different than what it had before. So you start to see, uh, I would react negatively when people say there's a pivot inside CIA or a pivot in special activities center to sort of great power competition, that would imply that we weren't paying attention to it before.

We were, but I would say it's a broadening of the aperture. So it's not that my predecessors weren't doing it, they were, but we had to just do more of it and faster because that's the way the world was evolving. 

Sasha Ingber: And let's break down some of these elements that you're mentioning as they became problems and priorities, from 2017 to 2021, um, there is a reprioritizing from counter-terrorism to great power competition as you're describing this. So why don't we start with 2017? At this point, Al-Qaeda, of course, is still a threat, but the louder larger threat is ISIS. There has been a degrading of ISIS, but, what did it look like for you in terms of the missions? The, the resources? And the support. 

Brian Carbaugh: I think precisely to your point, you saw metastasizing of the counter-terrorism threat, right? You saw this expansion, this mutation. It wasn't just Al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan anymore, sort of hunkered down in caves. It was the attacks in, in Belgium and France and the uk and in other places it was the ascendants of ISIS.

Its violence between ISIS and the Afghan Taliban. Its violence between ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and in other areas. So what we found ourselves facing as intelligence officers, again, classification sort of keeps me at a certain level, but I, I think precisely your point. The threat had changed enough and it became even more dangerous.

So I think what we saw globally, we paramilitary officers, um, is that the violence level in our operations started to increase dramatically because whereas in some cases you could have the application of force that would be precise enough or overwhelming enough to, to deescalate. As counterintuitive as that might sound, it's to be able to present force and say to a potential enemy combatant, life is about making decisions.

You have an opportunity to make a good one, or if you make a bad one, you know that it, it might not end in your favor. And for the longest time you would see people who would say, I'm alright, I'm done. Gun's down. With the rise of ISIS in, um, central Asia and in other areas in and across the Middle East, the levels of violence just really sort of skyrocketed.

So you didn't have that I'm gonna compromise or I'm gonna, I'm probably gonna get released if I get detained anyways. You just had that. I'm gonna bring as many of you down with me as I can. So we started to face greater kinetic violence levels, greater challenges in terms of the types of support that our forces required.

Which was again, sort of unique at that time. 

Sasha Ingber: When we come back, Brian talks about how the rising threat of China, the fall of Afghanistan, and Russia's buildup of troops near Ukraine, how all of that looked from inside the Special Activities Center.

I mean, we're talking about terrorists who beheaded people and sexually enslaved women, repressed people with a brutality that almost felt like it could have come from medieval times. 

Brian Carbaugh: Right. Yeah. 

Sasha Ingber: And so how doing that day after day in 2017, how did that affect the paramilitary officers? 

Brian Carbaugh: For someone to serve in Ground Branch  or in a maritime branch.

They've already served in a special operations unit. They've, they've been a seal or they've been a Marine, they've been a ranger. And with that comes real tremendous resilience and a development of some best practices to be able to see things. And as Greg used to say, sometimes you know when you touch the fire, you're a little bit different on the other side of that, you do develop an ability to have some emotional and mental resilience and some endurance. So we have some pretty specialized human performance programs within the unit, as we should. What we started to see even before 2017. But I think it starts to accelerate as the violence levels go up.

Your go-to behaviors, to moderate your sleep, to have the right type of, of diet, to make healthy life choices, to have balance in your life with your family, your loved ones, people who care about your friends. Um, that starts to over time, you're, you're looking at immense damage and risk to the system.

Sasha Ingber: So let's move to around 2019. We have now seen China rising up through technology with, say, Huawei telecommunications giant offering 5G services that the United States sees as a national security threat. There's the SolarWinds cyber espionage campaign that hits the United States pretty hard. How did Beijing's goals and its capability, how did that either directly or indirectly affect the center for you at this time.

Brian Carbaugh: You see an acceleration across a number of different fronts. Right? China's pulling every lever. They're using every tool to challenge the rules-based international order. They have both the will and the capability to do it. So our, our challenge at the time had been to make sure that ee're relevant. So we would say, hey, we, we have to make sure that the, the types of hiring we're carrying out, the people we're bringing in, the equipment that we're buying, the types of technologies and trade craft that we're employing, it has to be relevant. It has to be applied against the types of targets and strategic issues that matter.

It was, uh, uh, I think a challenge to make sure that we're drawing on the best minds inside SAC and across CIA to make sure that we're ready if and when that call ever came. A geostrategic threat like the Chinese with ubiquitous technical surveillance, global intelligence capabilities presents, um, a very high bar that special activities center or any other intelligence operation has to pass.

But I think it's just good form, it's good trade craft, good planning to make sure your planning and training against a very high standard so that what you're doing isn't revealed. We got that at the time. 

Sasha Ingber: Okay, so let's move forward to 2020, which was when the world almost stopped turning with the pandemic. I know that covert operations did continue, but what was it like from your vantage point? 

Brian Carbaugh: I'd say, I think for any of us, I, I think any, any American right could that, that COVID experience is surreal. I think anyone who you ask still

Sasha Ingber: I'm still processing it and also wanna forget it at the same time.

Brian Carbaugh: Totally. Yeah. It's one of the many reasons I drink bourbon. Um, I, I think, yeah, surreal, no matter what, but to be, to be inside CIA at the time is unique and to be enroll inside Special Activities Center  and to be serving alongside the team there. To your point, it's not like operations stopped, like people didn't sort of go pencils down.

It's not like we sort of had a global truce with with our potential adversaries. So the work needed to continue. You know, it was Greg who had said, you know, [00:20:00] when talking about the role in Special Activities Center , it's, it's hard people going to hard places and doing hard things. So to that point, being in hard places in 2020 during COVID meant you may not have the medical support you might need. You don't have the ventilators, you don't have, you don't have the things. So we had to, there's a whole new element of sort of logistical planning and, and medical planning. Like we have a job to do and we're not gonna expose people to, to even more risk if we can avoid it.

But it, it was like a bizarre sort of interlude in the movie, right? You're like, wait a minute. Like as a country, we're still in Afghanistan, we're in all these places around the world and we're trying to do all these things and now we gotta deal with like with this and some of the bizarre protocols that get layered in, right?

And you see, regardless of where you, one is on the political spectrum, like, do this, don't do that. Keep this many feet. These operations are already hard enough. People are gone several hundred days a year, and now you're layering in like bizarre elements to how we're trying to do the work. Or even if you look at someone who's been deployed in a war zone for a hundred days and they're, they're cooked, right?

They're tired. Like, I, I need to get back. What do you do in quarantine? Where do they, where do they quarantine? How off, how long do they have to quarantine? Do they have to quarantine? So you just, and, and I, I saw really good people, you know, really nobly intended people inside CIA, trying to do the right thing.

Just we're, we're all struggling to try to figure out, like. What's the most compassionate thing to do for the teams coming back? What's the right thing to do by these protocols that seem to evolve every single day? How do we get the other group of people to get out there in time? 'Cause we can't not be doing our thing.

So it, yeah, it's a cool question I hadn't really even thought about, but yeah, it was just a weird, bizarre overlaying of things that we're trying to do for one another. But again, to your point, you have terrorist groups. Yeah. They're doing their thing and they're continue to fight and they don't, they don't care about COVID.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 2021, now Afghanistan collapses, falls to the Taliban. The CIA have been working with the paramilitary forces zero units, and in the midst of this major chaotic evacuation and collapse. What is it like for you? 

Brian Carbaugh: I can't comment on any of the Zero unit or whether or not CIA was participating in that regard.

I would say for me as the director of Special Activities Center  over the arc of my career, when I first got to Ground Branch , I had deployed in some other areas around the world before 9/11, but 9/11 changed everything. And you know, some of my most formative combat experiences, the people I looked up to and and lionized, both Americans and Afghan teammates, that Afghan journey for me was deeply personal.

So to see it sort of coming down around us collectively in 2021, those feelings that I was having weren't unique to me. There had been so many Americans in uniform, not in uniform, who sacrificed so much. There's so many Afghans who did. Um, yeah, it was deeply traumatizing. But again, we have a job to do and we had work to do as an agency and as a center to make sure we were looking out for US interests, US partners at a time that was deeply, deeply, deeply chaotic, and I had just come back from Afghanistan just a few weeks before the, the violence starts to un unroll and unfurl in the summer of 2021, um, because we could see things obviously rapidly deteriorating. When I think through the, the challenges that paramilitary officers face in terms of the deployments, the time away, the physical and moral courage that I saw, so many men and women have to demonstrate all the time.

When I saw the looks on faces of people who came back at the end of August and early September who were there, who helped and just did absolutely amazing things to save as many lives as they possibly could. I saw people who I'd personally been in combat with, do some amazing things, and they just sat in my office in tough shape because of just the chaos and the human tragedy that was playing out at Hammi Karzai International Airport. H Chia.

Sasha Ingber: right. People hanging from planes. 

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah, hanging from planes, babies being passed across concertina wire. Babies, you know, children being separated from families. All, all the worst parts of humanity has this, this, you know, overriding sense of, of doom hung through the air and the heroism displayed by not just the Americans who were there, but by so many Afghans too, to quietly get out those who had risked an immense amount on behalf of our country is something that was, just to even hear the stories again, to be clear, I, I wasn't there in August. But yeah, just a really deeply traumatic in the sense that we as a country had just invested so much. The mission still mattered a great deal. There was, there was still CT work yet to be done.

None of us felt like it was time to, to sort o.. pack up our things and, and leave. Those are political decisions and we get that right? If you're around the corporate action space long enough, you, you realize like, this isn't the space for, for idealists. These are sort of hard decisions made by president on both sides of the aisle.

And you have to, you find yourself sometimes in the scenario where you've gotta play a bad hand and there was a bad hand to play in the summer of 2021, and we tried to do the best we could. Yeah, it was a traumatizing period of time for everybody. 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. A period of, a lot of pain for a lot of people. And painful to even think back over. So, so now let's just talk a little bit about something else that we saw happen, uh, Russia's buildup along the border in Ukraine twice in 2021. 

Brian Carbaugh: For me personally, the question I kept asking myself and, and Russia experts at the time, like, why, like why is, why would Vladimir Putin like this is a high stake scandal.

Sasha Ingber: Because the FSB was lying to him and telling him what he wanted to hear, that he was gonna be able to take Kyiv in a few days. 

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah, shocker. Right. He's obviously being given bad information in a organizational structure and we also, we have plenty of our own faults, but there's a willingness and a system built around.

Speaking truth to power, whether I'm the director of Special Activities Center , chief of Ground Branch , or just trying to run a business. You need subordinate. You need to create an atmosphere and environment where people feel comfortable telling you what's actually going on.

Sasha Ingber: But what's going through your head as you are seeing the Russians building up their forces along the border? There are packets of blood. There's all of these supplies being brought in. 

Brian Carbaugh: Mm-hmm. I think what's going through my head at the time, you're coming off the very traumatic transition out of Afghanistan and to have enough of the right kind of people to be able to absorb these, you know what sometimes feels like a surge very quickly becomes like the new normal.

So the part of me who was the director of SAC as Afghanistan is winding down, that's looking at a team that is highly accomplished, but also maybe could use a few minutes to catch their breath. Now I'm looking at Russian shipping blood forward, like it's coming. Like they're going to do this. Despite, I think the best efforts of American leaders and European leaders to disabuse Putin of the idea of going and do it, they're gonna do it.

And for me, I just, you think about, um, you know, your friends and your teammates and your colleagues, you're probably, again, I can't say whether it does or doesn't, but you look at it and say, this could be another big ask of the Special Activities Center  at a time when they're already coming off of all these different things around the world that they're being asked to do, and here we go again.

Um. Potentially. 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. And you have called Covert Action a team sport. The men and women that you're working with there have deployed for 220 days a year. They leave behind their family. It's mentally and physically demanding. So how did you handle that? 

Brian Carbaugh: The question's tough 'cause you asked me how I handle that.

Again, I view even leadership. I get the fact that I'm the director of, ultimately I'm responsible. Right? I have to set the tone and the direction, the vision. But I think the way I tried to go about addressing your question, which is, you know, the core of, I think the essence of the leadership challenge in a place like Special Activites Center, you again, this amazing workforce and not just the paramilitary officers. Again, it's the, it's all the quiet heroes on the periphery, the targeters, the analysts, the support officers, they feel those deployments, whether they're on the road 220 days or not, they feel the losses. 'Cause sometimes you'll come back as an operator and you're not gonna share with your chain of command what you saw, but you might share with that person who's a support officer, you might share with someone who's maybe not precisely directly in your chain of command, but they're your friend and they help you deploy, or they're the targeter you see occasionally. So those losses and those personal challenges, those behavioral health things that we start to see in one another resonate across the entirety of that workforce, not just the deployers.

So how, how did I do it? How? How do we do it? You try to create that, a leadership climate and a culture that realizes it's okay to say that you're not okay. And that's a very hard thing for people from, you know, from that particular unit. People who are used to just sort of take the pain, suck it up.

That's how I got through selection and that's how I get through all these deployments. There comes a point in time when you're in your thirties and you're in your forties, you're in your fifties and you're still doing this, you're still deploying 200 plus days out of the year. Um, you know, the body keeps the score.

Whether it's emotional stuff that we're all dealing with, life comes at all of us, and certainly these deployments do too. So we had to create a leadership environment, a culture where the guys and gals understood it's okay to, to say, I might have to sit this one out, or I, I need to press the pause button and I have to get some help.

So that's one. But two, you better have the programs to support them and. I think that had been a bit of a journey for the CIA, it, it takes a different approach to say human performance and, and sort of behavioral health. Not saying it's right or wrong, but different than say DOD where you have military doctors and others.

But through great partnerships across the country with nonprofits like the Third Option Foundation and some help from, from CIA, we were able to build programs to start to care for officers who are over deployed, overtaxed, overstretched, to layer in additional support for them. 'Cause if you're gonna ask more, you better, you better have that type of one culture and two capability I think to, to care for them and their families when things go sideways 'cause it happens all of us. 

Sasha Ingber: And when I think about the conversation we're having right now, you haven't been afraid to be vulnerable and share some of your own insecurities. Did you share some of your own story with the paramilitary officers to set an example for them to feel like it was okay to step away or get support?

Brian Carbaugh: I certainly tried, you know, I was very open for me, my own personal journey there as, as we transitioned from 2012, I'd say from 2011 to 2012, and then accelerate through those years, the toll of loss starts to mount immensely for me and Mike Spann. As I told, you know, Mike and I had been friends and his loss, his loss resonated with me that that one felt very close to home and I got to a point where clearly, like my friends and teammates could just see it on me. Right? You're, you're struggling, you don't wanna admit it. There are sort of go-to behaviors to help you through those types of situations, some of which are healthy, some of which are very, very unhealthy.

And I think I was probably sampling all of them. So I think people saw it on me the, the toll that it was taking on me personally. So I personally started to go see a therapist in 2016. I shared that very openly, absolutely changed, you know, my life and my ability to deal with what it was that I was seeing, um, which frankly paled in comparison to what so many of my teammates saw. But I was always very open with that, with my own challenges, the mistakes I made. And I felt like part of, you know, being a strong leader is you gotta be credible and you have to be authentic. And I. I didn't wanna be positioning myself as someone who like, well, this isn't affecting me. It shouldn't affect you. Like, it starts to, to hit all this pretty, pretty hard and to deal with so much loss too. 

Sasha Ingber: I mean, I've walked into the CIA past the Wall of Stars and you know, you see more and more stars being engraved on the marble. 

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah. That's a special place. Um, and the overwhelming majority of those stars are from men and women from Special Activities Center .

So I think probably for me. The experiences of being in front of that wall, whether you're with family members who are now coming in to visit the director because they've lost their loved one, or you're there in the annual memorial ceremony that one day a year where the names are read, and it's where Gina Haspel, former director rightly said, it's the most important day of the year at CIA, and she's right.

Sasha Ingber: You had mentioned Third Option nonprofit organization that helps the family members of paramilitary officers who were killed in the line of duty. 

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah, thanks Sasha. As you said, I'm one of the three co-founders of of Third Option. We built Third Option to, to take care of the the families of our fallen initially and to take care of the families, to include parents of our fallen children, of our fallen officers.

Also the families, um, and our current operators, we get to deploy together and go to go do these things. But it's [00:33:00] our families and our loved ones back home who in so many ways do sort of suffer in silence. And it's a unique change from service in the military where you may serve in a secretive unit in the military, but you have a family support network.

But prior to Third Option Foundation, our family members didn't really have that. And when I think of, of the people who are the real heroes in the CIA's covert action story, it really is the family members. It's the loved ones, it's the parents, it's the kids who are left behind while the officers go out and do their thing.

So it's a very special organization. I'm really [00:33:30] proud and fortunate to, to play any part, and it's been a great partnership with CIA. So it's a, it's a very cool story. 

Sasha Ingber: Just mind boggling to me that nothing like this existed before Third Option began. 

Brian Carbaugh: I think it speaks to what we just saw as the, the real sort of rise of the deployment rates and the, the physical challenges and the rates of, you know, combat.

I think Third Option sort of grew from the recognition that these were different times. This wasn't just a surge, this is the new normal. It's a, yeah, it's just a great story amidst some other backdrops that maybe aren't so, so great. 

Sasha Ingber: Are there aspects of the job that you miss beyond the people that you served with?

Brian Carbaugh: You, you nailed the one part of that answer. I was gonna give you people because…

Sasha Ingber: Because everybody says it. Everybody always says that. 

Brian Carbaugh: Yeah. You miss, you miss the people. For sure. That's the most overriding, you know, point, point of loss for me is that that day-to-day engagement with the men and women across the agency, and particularly across, Um, SAC I think the mission is powerfully unifying too. It's in, in a little, in, in a positive sense of the term. It's intoxicating. You get, you just sort of drawn in, right? It's a high energy thing. No two days are ever gonna be the same, whether you're a brand new officer and, and Ground Branch  where you're in the Special Activities Center , front office.

Each day's different. Each phone call could have a different meeting at the other end of that, or each ops meeting, each deployment's different. So I definitely miss the energy and the. The, um, sense that we're being asked to go do work that matters with some of your closest friends and teammates. That's, that's a really special thing.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about the SAC and your time there. 

Brian Carbaugh: Thanks so much for the invitation. Really grateful to be here. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a rating or review.

It really helps, and if you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and the show is brought to you from N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.