Full transcript
CIA Team Leader in a Nuclear-Armed Country
Nic McKinley opened the conversation by describing his time running a small, highly capable team in what he called a "country of presidential importance," a nuclear-armed, predominantly Islamic nation where operations were considered no-fail missions (Mike Force Podcast Ep. 120, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05jHgU9IPgQ). He explained that leadership let him hand-pick his own team, which caused friction with others but ensured every member met a high bar of both operational competence and the ability to get along with embassy staff and case officers. Nic recalled calling his former Pararescue trainer, Troy, to ask who the top-performing PJ coming out of the training pipeline was, which is how he recruited Mike Glover onto the team.
Nic emphasized that success in that unit was not just about being the fastest or strongest operator, noting that "51% of the job is getting along with people" and being able to blend into what he described as the culture of an embassy or bank. He said the unit was built around nonlinear problem solving: placing highly competent people together with sufficient equipment and letting them find and solve problems, including operations like green-side hides in the middle of a city. Building trust with the chief of station allowed the team to get unconventional operations approved that a more risk-averse staff might have blocked, and that trust eventually led case officers to see the team as an asset that helped them get promoted rather than an obstacle.
He noted the positive feedback loop this created, drawing better talent from other theaters, until what he called the agency deciding to do what it does undercut some of that momentum. Nic and Mike Glover also referenced having crossed paths earlier in Libya, reflecting on how those shared experiences and skill sets carried forward into their later careers.
Becoming a Pararescueman: An Unlikely Path
Nic McKinley described his path into Air Force Pararescue as accidental rather than planned. Inspired as a kid by the movie Navy SEALs starring Charlie Sheen, he first approached a Navy recruiter about becoming a corpsman assigned to SEAL teams, but was told the Navy could not guarantee that path. He was turned away by Marine Corps recruiting as well, since there was no such thing as a Force Recon medic, and the Army required conventional service before a shot at becoming an 18 Delta Special Forces medic.
An Air Force recruiter who noticed Nic repeatedly visiting other service branches eventually pulled him aside and, after Nic said he had never heard of Pararescue, won him over by saying he probably wouldn't make it anyway. That comment, paired with the promise of schools like HALO, SF combat dive, and paramedic training, sealed his decision. His father, present when Nic signed enlistment paperwork, warned him he had over a 90% chance of not making it and urged him to pick a fallback job; Nic refused and enlisted anyway. He selected into Pararescue at what was then called Operating Location Hotel at Lackland Air Force Base.
He described Pararescue selection as essentially a pre-dive course, with four to six hours a day in the pool doing drown-proofing, buddy breathing, and combat dive prep, at standards he said were tougher than the actual combat diver qualification course (CDQC) that followed. Nic spent about a decade in the Pararescue community, deploying during the Clinton-era operations, including Northern Watch, Southern Watch, and Desert Fox, with his first combat deployment to Kuwait and southern Iraq in 1998, and later serving in Afghanistan. He explained PJs are almost always embedded with other units, such as Army Special Forces ODAs or Navy SEAL teams, rather than operating as a standalone team, which meant constantly proving himself as the Air Force guy to each new unit.
A Cliffside Rescue That Defined His Purpose
Nic McKinley described a defining moment that occurred not in combat but during a civilian mountain rescue in New Mexico, where he served as the Pararescue liaison to the Mountain Rescue Association. A climber became trapped roughly 30 feet up a cliff face with his arm pinned under a boulder, developing compartment syndrome as multiple agencies, including fire services, state police, and a flight surgeon, arrived on scene with no clear command structure. Nic's team drilled bolts into the rock and rigged a haul system to lever the boulder off the climber's arm, at one point hearing the ropes' knots begin to smoke and snap under strain as they neared breaking strength.
Amid the chaos, with no one in charge, Nic said he finally stood on the rock and declared he had control, after which everyone deferred to him without objection. When the shoring supporting the freed boulder slipped, leaving it dangling on nearly failed knots, Nic pushed a visibly panicked civilian paramedic off the ledge and climbed down with him, a maneuver that looked frightening to bystanders but felt routine given his training. The climber lost consciousness once his arm was freed as acidotic blood reentered circulation, but he survived and kept his arm; the incident was later named Rescue of the Year by Fire and Rescue Magazine.
Nic explained that moments like this, rather than any combat operation, gave him clarity about why his job existed, since Pararescue is fundamentally reactive: PJs are needed only when something goes wrong. He said that dynamic, being essentially a crisis-management specialty rather than a crisis-prevention one, was part of what drew him toward the CIA afterward, since he wanted to see what the crisis prevention side looked like.
The Human Trafficking Case That Sparked DeliverFund
Nic McKinley traced the origin of DeliverFund to a specific incident in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, while working alongside a Task Force counterpart. He said his team developed what he called smoking gun intel on a human trafficker, but after weeks of process, the write-up never even left the station. That experience led him to ask a question he says he now poses to every operator he meets: despite extensive operational experience, had they ever targeted someone specifically because of human trafficking or child trafficking? He said the answer is almost universally no, even though some targets, such as bomb makers, sometimes also had exploitative behavior toward children that was never the actual basis for targeting.
He recalled realizing, in a safe house in the middle of the city, that the U.S. could kill people with flying robots from 6,000 miles away but had no one focused on human trafficking despite mandatory presidential reporting requirements on the subject. That realization led him to found DeliverFund in 2014, which went operational in April 2015. He noted DeliverFund was among the second wave of organizations attempting this work, distinguishing itself after another early group suffered what he called a catastrophic failure covered in the media.
Around the same period, Nic also started a separate venture-backed software company focused on investment due diligence, which he said he exited the previous November, distinct from the DeliverFund technology stack.
Debunking Myths About Human Trafficking in America
Nic McKinley used data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to challenge common assumptions about human trafficking. He said the U.S. southern border accounts for only about 10% of human trafficking activity, with the overwhelming majority involving U.S. citizens trafficking other U.S. citizens domestically. He also cited data showing that only roughly 0.00001% of missing children cases in 2022 were classic stranger abductions, comparing a child's odds of being taken by a stranger to the odds of being struck by lightning.
Instead, Nic said 92% of missing-children cases the National Center classifies as endangered runaways involve a predator contacting a child online, grooming them over months or years, and manipulating them into running away and effectively participating in their own trafficking. He cited an 846% increase in suspected child trafficking cases over a five-year period, correlating closely with smartphone adoption and the rise of algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook. He described the typical scenario as a predator reaching a child through Xbox chat, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, grooming them, and having them run away expecting rescue but instead being sold by the trafficker.
Nic also distinguished trafficking from prostitution, explaining that all trafficking involves force, fraud, or coercion for someone else's economic benefit, typically starting with fraud, progressing to coercion, and ending in force, whereas prostitution, which he said he does not support legalizing, involves a person keeping their own proceeds. He estimated the National Center's data suggests roughly 100,000 children per year enter a trafficking cycle of prostitution in the U.S., and said traffickers increasingly target rural and middle-class girls with good manners and decent educations because they are seen as more naive and make, in his words, better companions for buyers, in contrast to streetwise victims from cities.
How DeliverFund Attacks the Trafficking Market
Nic McKinley described DeliverFund's model as treating human trafficking like any other market with identifiable points of transaction that can be disrupted using data and intelligence, the same framework used against terrorist networks. He said DeliverFund embeds analysts directly inside law enforcement agencies, citing the Houston Police Department as an example where a former targeter works full time building target packages on traffickers, and said DeliverFund now works with more than 450 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. on one shared software platform. He said DeliverFund has built the largest counter-human-trafficking database in existence, collecting roughly 250,000 times more data than the Department of Justice and operating two supercomputers to process it.
He detailed how DeliverFund also disrupts trafficking financially and commercially by partnering with financial institutions like Nasdaq Verafin and publicly traded banks to flag and deny accounts, as well as companies like Airbnb, transportation firms, and hotels to deny services to identified traffickers. DeliverFund pulls hundreds of millions of commercial sex advertisements into what it calls a red light database, and offers a consumer app, searchable as DeliverFund or HTSafeguard, that lets parents check phone numbers and email addresses against that database. Nic explained that because traffickers must advertise online at volume to compete in a low-barrier-to-entry market, they are forced to expose a method of contact, which becomes the exploitable weakness DeliverFund targets; he estimated roughly an 80% chance that a person responding to an online commercial sex ad is dealing with an actual trafficking victim.
Nic said all of DeliverFund's law enforcement services and training are provided completely free, funded entirely by donors, since police departments have no budget for this work. He argued that technology is what allows the model to scale without linearly increasing cost, unlike traditional labor-intensive counterterrorism approaches, framing DeliverFund's work as an e-commerce business operating at the speed of war. He pointed people toward deliverfund.org for information, an OX program allowing communities to build their own trafficking-targeting cells alongside local law enforcement, and free online human-trafficking training courses recognized in all 50 states.
Comparing Special Operations Targeting to Trafficking Analysis
Mike Glover drew a direct parallel between Nic's intelligence background and DeliverFund's methodology, observing that Nic was applying the same complex targeting processes used by military S2 shops and the CIA against terrorist networks, now aimed at traffickers. Nic agreed, rejecting the popular narrative that targeting is a simple find, fix, finish tactical sequence; he pointed out that a raid like the operation against Bin Laden gets the cinematic attention, but the real work is the years of patient intelligence gathering that determines what door to kick. He said DeliverFund's target packages generally come from broader systematic analysis rather than isolated real-time intelligence, similar to how national-level targeting cells feed operational units.
Nic argued that no one before DeliverFund had built a truly systematized, algorithmic approach to fighting human trafficking domestically, despite plenty of people doing either target-package analysis or on-the-ground rescues separately. He said the guiding philosophy was that constraint, not necessity, is the mother of invention, explaining that having no money and no ability to charge law enforcement, since police departments lack funding, forced DeliverFund to build efficient, low-cost technology rather than relying on expensive manual, people-intensive processes typical of the traditional counterterrorism fight.
The conversation closed with Mike Glover proposing a potential collaboration between DeliverFund's community targeting cells and American Contingency, his own nationwide network of community-based disaster response teams, suggesting those same community assets could support law enforcement with trafficking work between disaster responses. Nic agreed, describing the goal as communities standing up in an Old West posse style to relieve pressure on overburdened law enforcement officers, closing the episode by reiterating that DeliverFund's core belief is that understanding how the trafficking market was built is also the key to dismantling it.