Josh Alphonso

Josh Alphonso came to the United States at fifteen, spent his career in Air Force intelligence, and now runs a private intelligence firm.

He and Brad met on a couch in Nashville late one night after the bar, introduced by a mutual friend, and were good friends by morning. Brad admits that when Alphonso first reached out and he understood what the man did for a living, his first thought was whether he wanted to be friends with someone who might be tracking him. Alphonso's first read went the other way. He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to clear up what he can say and what he cannot.

He was an Air Force intelligence officer whose first duty station was NSA, and he supported air operations and special operations in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. A friend met at a coffee shop pulled him onto a contract at CIA headquarters supporting the DNI and the National Intelligence Council, which he describes as a lot of nerd work among very smart people. He ran off to a SOCOM deployment attached to Air Force Special Operations in South and Central America, then supported the NRO. Strategic Advisory Group came out of a room in an undisclosed location where he sat with twenty people working war plans and decided Felix, a former case officer, was his guy. They work with executives and high net worth clients, and the conversation usually starts north of fifty million. His pitch is that the protection people picture does not travel. You cannot carry a pistol into a ball game or onto a plane or into most countries, and a security detail is a large, expensive, obvious bubble that a nineteen year old at college does not want. So they train instead: counter stalker work, how not to look like a target, how not to get drugged.

His family waited thirteen years to get here. His parents are blue collar, and they arrived with two kids, five bags and about six hundred dollars, moving from one aunt's house to the next until the green card let them buy a place. He joined the Army at seventeen, fixed helicopters, went through ROTC while serving in the Guard and carrying a full college load, and earned a pilot slot, which was the thing he had wanted since he was a boy. He washed out at twenty one or twenty two. It was the first time he had failed at anything, and the part he still remembers clearly is not the washout. It was calling the mentors who had invested in him to tell them.

He names them anyway. Juice and Eric Monaco, who told him to get out of the safe track, take risks and fail fast. Jerry George at Georgetown, whose class he says was worth the hundred and fifty thousand dollars on its own. He mentors college kids now, mostly ones looking for a way to serve, because he grew up reading books he could barely read trying to work out that people like this existed. One of his mentors told him years ago that everyone is dirty, which was about pedestals. He and Felix have exactly one standing agreement between them: nothing against this country, and nobody hurts their brothers and sisters for any amount of money.