11 minute read
Interview of Former Navy SEAL and FBI Special Agent Jonathan T. Gilliam
Q&A PART 1
Interview by Rhett Palmer
Jonathan Gilliam
FORMER SEAL, FBI SPECIAL AGENT, FEDERAL AIR MARSHAL, SECURITY CONTRACTOR FOR HOMELAND SECURITY NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST
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I’m talking to an American hero, Jonathan Gilliam. Great to have you, and thank you for serving our United States.
Listen, that’s one of the reasons why I’m coming down there to give the speech for the Annual Muster, is that we should all be serving the United States.
Now, Jonathan has been a SEAL, he’s been with the FBI. He’s sat in for Sean Hannity on Fox, he’s been on NewsMax, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, and he’s the author of Sheep No More: The Art of Awareness and Attack Survival. He will be live and in person here and everybody within the sound of my voice is invited to come out to the Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, on November 7th to hear him speak. Tell us a little bit about your history. Where did you grow up, sir?
I grew up in the Ozarks, in Arkansas, just on the Missouri border in a town called Yellville. Then we moved down by Little Rock to a town called Bryant after that, and that’s where I graduated high school.
You attended the University of Arkansas with a double major in Political Science and Psychology, became a police officer in Arkansas, received a commission in the US Navy and you went to Officer Candidate School?
So after I graduated college, affirmative action was big in ‘95 and I could not get on with the police department, and finally got on with Camp Robinson Police Department right outside of North Little Rock, and within several months got offered everything that I’d been trying to get for three years.
So I got a slot, a SEAL slot for the Navy, which doesn’t mean you’re going be a SEAL; it means you have a slot to go to SEAL training. And I went through Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, and started in ‘97, and then was at BUD/S by 1998.
Wow. And so after graduating, you became a Basic Underwater Demolition Specialist with the SEALs. It’s very hard to get into the SEALs. Like one out of 35 guys that try out for it make it?
No, it’s way over than that. We have over 75% fail rate on average. My class started with well over 130, 11 finished with the original class, 21 overall that started, finished; the other guys got recycled for various things, and so overall 21 guys graduated from over 130. There’s even been a class that never was, a class that nobody graduated from.
So the good thing about the SEALs is, America can count on them, even with some of the changes that have happened. The training is so difficult and the water is so cold that it is still the place where you have to prove yourself in order to be the tip of the spear, and that hasn’t changed. Thank goodness.
What was the scariest training you went through? Was it where they tie you up and nearly drown you?
You know, everybody sees that on television, where we have our hands tied behind our back and our ankles tied together, and we’ve got to bob up and down and kind of float in the water. They think that’s scary, because the image is kind of claustrophobic, but the reality is that it was probably one of the least scary things we did.
But to be honest with you, the scariest thing about SEAL training is the thing that most people don’t really discuss, which is looking into your own soul and understanding what you’re made of. That will scare a human being, when they have to look at what they’re actually capable of, and then choosing to go beyond that which they think that they can, what their body is telling them is appropriate.
Most human beings, when they get to that point, they will stop, they will quit, because it’s frightening to look at the reality of where your mind can take you past your body. Your mind will go far beyond what your body tells you is smart and normal, and to go past that point, it’s scary.
Now, from just a daily standpoint, I’ve got to be honest, I was out there during El Nino, and the waves of the beach there in San Diego were pretty big, and when you hear something as big as a freight train crashing over you and pushing you into the bottom of the ocean, like somebody stepping on you with a large shoe, it’s a frightening thing. So water actually is the most frightening thing that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis in SEAL training.
Wow. And then later on you became an Army Ranger, Army Ranger School, deployed as a...
Let me point one thing out about that: Army Ranger School doesn’t mean that you’re a Ranger. You still have to go through battalion training in order to be fully qualified as a Ranger. But the SEALs, we do exchanges with all the different branches. We can go through their schools, but they can’t go through ours because ours is a very specialized school. But I went through Army Ranger School. It was the greatest learning experience as far as leadership I ever went through. When you go through Ranger School you get the Ranger Tab, you’re now qualified to wear the Ranger Tab. They’re still not a Ranger until they go through battalion training and actually function as a Ranger. I was a SEAL, but I get to wear the Ranger Tab because I graduated Ranger School.
Congratulations. Now, you also became a Federal Air Marshal. How was that as a job?
It was the same as if you pull a chair into the corner of your house and you sit there for five hours. I was flying September 11th, 2002 where we had real credible threats, so we were amped up and it felt good to actually be on the flight, but the reality is, nothing really occurred except for people who take medication or drink and then they get to altitude, they don’t realize that the cabin’s pressurized at about 9000 feet, so medication and alcohol has a different effect at that altitude. So you had a lot of people doing some crazy stuff because of that, but no terrorist incidents.
Then you became a security contractor for DHS. Explain what that’s all about.
I left the Air Marshals and I got offered an incredible job at a company that’s no longer around. It was called AMTI, Applied Marine Technologies Incorporated, and it was run by an amazing SEAL, Norm Carley, and a bunch of other Frogs from SEAL Team Six and other SEAL teams, and then you had Special Forces from the Army Rangers and Air Force Combat Control. So you had this incredible group of people with all this experience coming together, and then DHS would hire us.
We would go and do the threat assessments all over the United States as an assault force. So we would look at high-value soft targets and we would target them from the attackers’ point of view, and then we would brief them. And this is part of a presidential program that was going on at that point by President Bush.
And then also I came up with a course, and that was handed to us, called Soft Target Awareness Training, which I redesigned and turned that into a similar thing that we could teach all over the country, executives from different companies and their staff, on how to look at themselves from the attackers’ point of view.
I spent several years doing that, and then went from there into the FBI, and I was in New York City with the FBI until I left in 2013.
Demonstration at last year's Muster.
Photo courtesy Navy SEAL Museum
Now, you were an agent for the FBI Criminal and Counterterrorism force. Calling on your extensive experience in National Security, you’ve been an analyst for Fox News, NewsMax, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and a CNN contributor. How did that all happen? And how did you end up sitting in for Sean Hannity?
I’ll tell you, like every SEAL, when I do something, I’m going to do it better than everybody else.
I guess so!
It just happened that Catherine Herridge, who used to be with Fox News, did a story on my squad when I was in the FBI. This is after I left the criminal side and was on the counterterrorism side and I was running the Special Events Unit, which does all of the threat assessments and the security from the FBI’s point of view for all the major events and issues or incidents that occur.
So Catherine did a story on us, I think in 2010, and then when I got out in 2013 and I was doing crisis management for a client, the Boston bombing occurred. So I wrote her and said, “I’m out of the FBI now, if you need an analyst...” And so I had talked to her that one day in 2010, and she immediately called me and said, “I just floated your resume. They’re probably going to call you, so just be prepared, if you want to do an interview.” So 45 minutes later I was on the set at Fox News for about a four and a half minute interview. And for anybody who’s ever done any news, that’s a lifetime of an interview. That was very long, just myself and the host. I think I breathed twice the entire time.
Because of my resume, I started to be on Fox quite a bit. Different people were calling on me because….I don’t know if you remember, but during the Obama administration, there seemed to be a lot of terrorist attacks back then. They since stopped since President Trump came in office. But every time something happened, I was the guy they would call because I had this resume and I was 20 minutes away because I lived in Manhattan.
So what happened was, I was on Sean Hannity’s TV show. He asked me if I wanted to be on the radio. Then David Webb, who has a show on Sirius, asked me to be on his show. And as you can tell from this interview, I have the gift of gab because I grew up in the south. So they said, “You know, you should host the show.” So I started hosting the radio show for Sean and for David Webb, and then Andrew Wilkow. And then I’ve hosted for Gorka as well. I’m going to have my own podcast called The Experts.
It’s interesting being a fill-in host because you get to pop in and make everybody think that you’re really good at radio, and then you get to step out of the way and not have to do it every day. Doing it every day is totally different than doing it once a month. Totally different.
Yes, there’s a lot of work involved, but you get used to it. I’ve been doing it 27 years now.
Now, you wrote the book "Sheep No More: The Art of Awareness and Attack Survival." Will you be speaking about your book when you come here?
I’ll have my book out there, I’m going to sell it, sign it. And anybody who wants to come up and ask me questions about it that have read it, I’ll be there, and I’m not going anywhere until all the questions are answered.
Tell us about the Muster.
Every year they have a Muster where people can come, they can see what the museum is about, they typically do different types of demonstrations that SEALs or former SEALs will be a part of. They have had the Working Dogs there in the past, they’ve had helicopters in the past, although I don’t know if they’re going to have helicopters this year because of COVID. They have different types of things that you can see about Special Forces, particularly about the SEALs. It’s just a meet and greet and a huge opportunity for not just the civilians to come out, but for former SEALs, current SEALs to come out and interact with the public. It’s just a great time, and the amount of people that come there every year is pretty tremendous.
Kids get the opportunity to pet a military working dog
Photo courtesy Navy SEAL Museum, Fort Pierce, Florida
So I’ve got to be honest with you, I was shocked when I was asked to be a part of this. Being asked by your peers to come and speak and be a part of something like this, it’s probably the greatest honor I’ve had in my career. And it’s also terrifying, because I know I’ll be speaking in front of a lot of SEALs. There’s no greater critic than your own family.
