Hostage Rescue Team
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40
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11
EPISODES
11
PODCASTS
Search complete. 40 mentions across 11 episodes found for "Hostage Rescue Team".
Nov 2, 2026
Bill BlowersPANELIST
That's it.
Bill BlowersPANELIST
And I'm not that dude, right? But I didn't know what I didn't know, right? But I can recognize now that, you know, FBI HRT is better than my team at Hostage Rescue.
Bill BlowersPANELIST
Las Vegas Metro, which has a fucking op tempo, probably five times my team's op tempo and training cycle, is going to be a better team than me, you know? Now, that doesn't mean individually, right? I mean, some of my individual skill sets, I think I can be on par.
Bill BlowersPANELIST
But the overall group is going to be, I think, more proficient as a result.
Jim FitzpatrickHOST
He did.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
Calvo Winkle spent more than 24 years with the FBI, including eight years on its elite hostage rescue team.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
He also served in the Crisis Negotiation Unit, negotiating with kidnappers, pirates, and terrorists around the world.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
He joins us live to talk about his remarkable career and what business leaders can learn from it.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
We can learn some things.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
Well, we're going to talk about a lot of those things.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
But first, I would love to talk about now you served on both the FBI's hostage rescue team and its crisis negotiations unit.
Bridget FitzpatrickHOST
I would love for you to start though because most of us remember where we were during the Boston bombing and we remember the manhunt and the suspect being found hiding in the boat.
Mike RitlandHOST
How did you get yourself into the position to be able to do it, and what is the first thing you said to him? Ladies and gentlemen, as always, it's both an honor and a pleasure to welcome my next guest to the podcast.
Mike RitlandHOST
He was an airborne ranger, FBI hostage rescue team operator, sniper and breacher, FBI crisis negotiation unit, author of the upcoming book, Shaping Chaos.
Mike RitlandHOST
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, Kyle Vowinkel.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
Thank you so much, Mike.
Brian DriscollGUEST
It's, it's absolutely devastating.
Brian DriscollGUEST
Now, I am not diminishing the contribution and the capabilities of the agents, analysts, professional staff that remain, right? However, I had a, a, a very senior mentor to me on the Hostage Rescue Team that used to say, "You don't get twenty years of experience in less than twenty years." That statement rings true in this particular instance.
Brian DriscollGUEST
Those men and women that you just, uh, you just, uh-
Michael IsikoffHOST
Mm-hmm
11 MINS LATER
Brian DriscollGUEST
It was a, what we call a TDY, temporary duty assignment.
Michael IsikoffHOST
And you already had the highest clearances possible in the government.
Brian DriscollGUEST
Oh, oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, especially coming out of the commander of the Hostage Rescue Team.
Brian DriscollGUEST
My clearances were, yes, they were high and compartmentalized.
Michele NorrisGUEST
But, um, but yeah, these situations are obviously gut-wrenching for everybody.
Nicolle WallaceHOST
Um, I wanna bring into our coverage national security and intelligence analyst Rob Damico, former member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team.
Nicolle WallaceHOST
Um, Rob, we're sifting through the details that have been made public, um, and we are staring at a very familiar image and a very familiar graphic with the location of a school.
Nicolle WallaceHOST
In this case, it's an elementary school.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
No, that's a good point, too, yeah.
Jordan HarbingerHOST
Anyway, so years later, after West Point, you trained for a year, a long time training f- with two friends to make the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, HRT.
Jordan HarbingerHOST
So tell us a little bit about what this is 'cause I think a lot of people have never heard of it, and they don't realize that this isn't just cops who have SWAT gear in the closet, right? These guys, they get selected, but you don't.
Jordan HarbingerHOST
What happened?
Brian DriscollGUEST
I want to try to be a leader therein, but I also don't want to ever forget where I came from, the frustrations, the successes, the failures of what I was doing on my way up the ranks.
Brian DriscollGUEST
And I always look back at those times when I was in the ranks and There wasn't a single day, and I'm not exaggerating, that once I was a manager, again, trying to be a leader of whether it's on the hostage rescue team or on a squad or over the Joint Terrorism Task Force, International Terrorism Operations Investigations, there wasn't a day I didn't come into the office, look out the window, and ask myself if I didn't have the courage that day to step down and go back to working cases or being an operator.
Brian DriscollGUEST
And in those moments, I would kind of shake myself out of it and say, no, that would be a selfish endeavor to go back to satisfy my want to feel like I'm having fun and doing the things.
Brian DriscollGUEST
Somebody's got to be a leader.
Brian DriscollGUEST
week or two leading into the inauguration.
Brian DriscollGUEST
Calls I did not anticipate.
Brian DriscollGUEST
So I had left the hostage rescue team as the commander.
Brian DriscollGUEST
I did about three years there.
PaulHOST
Patel praised the collaboration, saying it was a tremendous opportunity to, for, for, uh, FBI agents to learn from elite athletes.
PaulHOST
Now, uh, a former member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team who also taught defensive tactics accused Patel of, quote, "trying to give his friend Dana White a lucrative contract." Now, here's why I have a gripe with this.
PaulHOST
Now you, you may notice it's, it's a little blurry back there, uh, but you may notice that I have hung up.
PaulHOST
In fact, let me, let me, let me show it to you guys because this is important to understand why I say the things that I say, why I'm a credible person to talk about this.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
And I, I never worked so hard to be average.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
On the Hostage Rescue Team and Crisis Negotiation Unit, right, these are the best of the best and it was extraordinary people.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
And I was truly just ordinary among the extraordinary.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
So you have to be continually improving and investing in yourself and higher performance and in the team's performance knowing that you are gonna fail.
5 MINS LATER
AJ HarbingerHOST
How do those two combine for you to allow you to start to learn how to shape the chaos in front of you?
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
So I was fortunate enough to serve on some top, really the highest performing teams in the world in the US government.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
I served for eight and a half years as an operator on the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, which is the Department of Justice's counterterrorism team created back in 1983 to be a civilian equivalent of Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.
Kyle VowinkelGUEST
And that unit, you know, we had the highest risk missions and the highest consequence operation, operating environments.
Steve StoopsGUEST
And Mike was in his mid-50s, and I s- I've seen younger men wilt under this training, and Mike did it.
Steve StoopsGUEST
But the, [laughs] the whole funny thing was once, uh, when Mike came up there, he was with FBI Hostage Rescue team, and, uh, he eventually handled my schnauzer because the dog that he was assigned couldn't handle the CQB.
Steve StoopsGUEST
But anyways, when we were doing the introduction, we figured out who we were [laughs] and that we knew each other, and, uh, Mike was an officer and he made young Marines miserable.
Steve StoopsGUEST
So I remember telling Mike, "Well, well, well."
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