Jay Jordan Founder Pegasus Ops

Author Nigel Beckles Interviews Jay Jordan Pegasus Operations {Abridged Version}

Nigel Beckles:  Hi, Jay, welcome to my podcast series. I can understand that I used to be a soldier in the British army. What was your position and where did you served?

Jay Jordan: I reached the grand old Heights of LUNs corporal. I joined the army in 1998 and I left in 2004 operationally. I served in the Northern Ireland, Cyprus Gibraltar and the Falklands and Jordan.

Nigel Beckles: You created a company called Pegasus Ops or Pegasus Operations, when did you start your company and what does it do.

Jay Jordan: In 2012, I started working in child recovery. What I saw whilst I was working in child recovery is first of all, a lack of standards. There's a lack of organization. And there were a lot of individuals out there that the field primarily for profit. I figured this out after about a year and a half of working for a company. And that sent me on a road where I wanted to actually make this into a free service or cheap service, or a cheaper service with a higher level of professionalism in it. So I came up with the concept in 2015. In 2017 I took Pegasus live. And since then, we've just grown everything that we do. We actually locate and rescue missing children and kidnapped children around the world. So quite complex in the actual structure of the company.

Nigel Beckles:  So why were you motivated to create Pegasus?

Jay Jordan: Primarily because of what these companies are doing. First of all, there's families that can't afford to actually give these cases out. Let's say that's how it gets kidney. Whether that be a parent's abduction, whether that be kidnapped by an individual, whether they be groomed online to run away from home, or whether it be a runaway themselves or just a missing children. And no one actually understands what those entities are, because that goes to the kidnap and ransom scenario,  but they can't afford to get a private entity involved to actually take on one of these cases because they can become very expensive. So I see that the companies that charge too much and take advantage of the situation that these families were in.

And the aspect of not giving out that professional service and having a very low success rate. So the work that I was doing after I left the military, I started contracting in the security industry. We've got high levels of professionalism in the security industry and the private military industry. I decided to bring those levels into the child recovery industry, and then obviously combined with the low costs and the raising of donations for this that gives families the knowledge now and the comfort. Now that they've got professionals going out, looking for them.

Nigel Beckles:  So Jay, who are your clients and why do they approach primarily its individual families.

Jay Jordan: So parents, whether that be an individual parent, whether it be a couple whose had their child missing. Because it all depends on the situation of why they are, but its private clients. We want to get to the point where we're actually recognized by the government and recognized by the authorities and then start changing those rules with them to change their policies, change their procedures, and they start working alongside us. But until we actually grow, we've only been in the UK for a year now. So we've got a lot of growing to do before they will recognize us.

Nigel Beckles:  How difficult is it to get a court order to rescue a child?

Jay Jordan: They only exist for parents under the international Hague Convention on Child Abduction. That's when one parent will kidnap the child. Now a lot of people mistake a parent kidnapping their child as a safe abduction. I've seen these abductions go through to the point where harm has been caused to the child, if not death, and to the parent themselves as well. Just to get a mental play over the other parent that's been left behind. Every case that I've dealt with parents of abductions, there's always been mental health issues involved in psychological issues.

There's a lot of investigating that we do when, before taking on a case and that's to both parents to ensure that we're doing the right thing and making sure that we're actually supporting the right person in case someone's actually leaving a dangerous situation in the first place. So when it comes to the court order itself, basically the parent that's left behind, they have to go through the process of getting full custody. And then they have to convince themselves the entire system works for the parents in theory. But a lot of these systems are broken as they go through that system. As long as the country that the child has been kidnapped too is part of the Hague Convention. Then they can get a return order. And within a 12 month period, that child is supposed to be returned back to childhood country, which is the original location that they was kidnapped from.

It doesn't work very often when you're going through the Hague. The orders will be given out, but then you've got to be conscious that the child has been kidnapped too, and certain countries will not enforce those orders. Therefore, that child will never get brought back.

And if we take on a parent's live abduction after doing all the investigations to make sure it's the right case and that it's actually the right side of the law and that parents got that return order. Once we've located the child, the parent that has the right to pick up that child. Therefore we protect that child, that parent and that child to make sure that they are extracted without any harm coming to them.

Nigel Beckles:  Which countries have you rescued children from?

Jay Jordan: The first case that I actually took on was Lebanon. That was probably one of the biggest cases I ever took on us. That was the first case I took on with the second case I completed. So been to Lebanon, Germany, Japan, twice Ukraine, Spain and Norway. I've got two recoveries inside England to date, Switzerland Monaco on France. There's a few more been knocked around in there as well.

Nigel Beckles:  Well, you've certainly been busy. How much planning does a successful rescue mission require?

Jay Jordan: We have a very short amount of time to come up with the entire plan of an operation over the two week period. We need to learn the outlay of a city wherever we work, and that's our main area of operations. So we've got about two weeks to learn that better than we know our hometowns. We need to know so many details about our city and where every single entity that could work against us actually is. The planning goes into the finest of details. If you come to a junction in the road and you've got free ways to go, we will check out every single way we work our time and it's down to milliseconds and we work out what possibilities could go wrong.

That's just the planning phase for that. Then on top of that, at the same time, you've gotta work on the surveillance phase. You've got to work on the actual documentable phase, which is the documents and all of the it risks. And every bit of research I've got going on. And within a four week period, we have to have the entire picture laid out, which in essence, for a lot of other companies that could be months of work ahead of them, it's very detailed.

Nigel Beckles:  So typically how many people are in your operations?

Jay Jordan: Dependent on the operation of the sample and dependent on how complex you have it and the dangerous side, depending on the location of it. We average anywhere between two to five people, two people for the main phases of the operation, which is the planning and preparation phase. We've got five phases total. We also have people working back at home, which are not in the operational. And then we will bring in more operators for the actual recovery side of things, because a lot of these missions, it's not a case of just the paramount. We don't just work primarily in parents, that abductions, which seems to become a focus quite often because of the mistake of a parent's abduction, being a safe abduction.

We also work in very dangerous situations around events, serious organized crime elements and entities like this. So we're talking about five people on the ground at the time, and then we'll have a team back home for about three, four people working on me on the computers.

Nigel Beckles:  So what motivates people to abduct or kidnap children?

Jay Jordan: The mission is broken down into multiple elements. Like I said, abduction itself could be a kidnap which is a prime reason. There could be a runaway, it could be a problematic child. It could be a child that's in a very bad situation at home and wants to get out of the situation. So you've got the runaway children that just run away from home, primarily to get away from the situation they don't want to be. They usually ended up coming back. This happens a lot in care homes as well. Then you've got your kidnapping elements. The kidnapping side of the things could be a parent deduction. It could be from an entity for kidnap and ransom, which wants to run some of the child for money. And then you've got your organized crime elements, which goes into sex trafficking.

And then obviously you've got your parental abduction side as well. So it's broken down into multiple reasons. Dependent on the country and depending on where we are, it can go through to the extent of being not very dangerous at all, because you're blend against normal society in a Western civilization to the extremes of actually being in the same sort of situation as what an individual in a war zone can be abductions that we're willing to take on. We would go to places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So when even Syria, when you've got those sort of elements involved, then that's when we're going in. And that's where our hostile experience comes into play because we go in as a full blown private military unit. Weapons body armour, armed vehicles, and that's all present the client that makes sure that our guys are actually secure on the ground.

And then we'll use local investigators at the same time as that, when you've got Lebanon, obviously it's blending into Western society versus Eastern society. And then at the same time as that, you're actually in a very hostile situation because we was going up against Hezbollah. But then obviously the other entities is that there's been many times where I've slept on the streets as a homeless person, just to be able to get eyes on the top of that in a Western country. And then your main frets would be some drunk coming out of a bar at night time and causing problems. So various, so there's an element of work involved in what you do. The majority of it is.

Very low key blending into society, sort of sneaky Beaky you have to blend into the situation, you get to the position where you’re in country, and you have to create your cover stories in country to be able to cover you for the next entity. For example, when I was in the Ukraine, I had to, I spent two weeks to create a cover story, being very covert and everything that I was telling was based on that cover story, to create the element of when I got myself detained on the border purposely to find out what assets they had on the books. They questioned me for one hour and then I questioned them for four hours because my cover story was already put in place. It's all about using everything around you, to your actual, full availability and making it work. Everything's very, low-key. We get to the point where if we have to use violence, that's us failing at our job because this is brains of a Braun, rather than anything else who actually rescues the child physically dependent on what happens and the reasons why that child is actually missing will depend on who actually.

If it's a, an organized crime element, then obviously we would going through, into if we were in a hostile area, for example, we know for a fact that law enforcement not going to help us. If we went in, in a country where we've got entities, that what will help us such as law enforcement, such as Interpol or anyone like that, if anyone's available to be able to help them. Then they will be able to assist us and actually go in and rescue that child. So they will do actually going into the buildings and then we'll follow up and then we'll recover the children as a guarantor for the parents on a parent's abduction, a parent will always pick up their own child. And the reason for that is because they are the ones with the legal court documents on their side. The parent has the legal right to actually pick up their own child.

Nigel Beckles:  So Jay, how many children have you rescued?

Today, it's 17 and that's working from 2012 until now. Our last case was only two weeks ago. Primarily since I started in 2012, I was working part time and the aspect of my money would be made, but going over to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I'll be contracting out there, then I'll get a four week period after about three months. And then in that four weeks I've been doing the recovery and then I'll go back and then maybe I'll do one a year since we've came out to the UK. Quit Afghanistan and Iraq. And I will focus on this full-time now.

Nigel Beckles:  Well, I must commend you for your work. Very important stuff you're doing. You're also an author. What is your book called and what is it about?

Jay Jordan: So my book is called Angel in the Shadows. It’s about my first case that I took on as my introduction into the child recovery industry, the real accurate events and as it happened throughout the entire time that I was in Lebanon. It was the case of rescue and the mother and child that was kidnapped by and held against their will by a father that was connected to Hezbollah. They were under Hezbollah protection.

Nigel Beckles:  So what other interests do you have?

Jay Jordan: My prime interest is turning the child recovery industry into a free service. First of all, obviously the free service itself has to exist. Right now, there was nobody looking for people's parents. Whenever a child goes missing. The majority of the time by law enforcement in the classes are low to a medium risk.

And the very rare occasion it will get points that are high risk. And that's only when they've got solid evidence, that child is actually in an imminent danger. So that's a rare occasion for it to happen. This gives them about 48 hours to actually work on the case before they have to move on to something else. The way that it works at the moment is that the police end up with a chain of phone calls from one area to the next area, to the next era. And if that becomes international, it's one hour to the next hour, to the next era, internationally and through all of their areas and nothing ever comes back. So it was literally just waiting for the public to actually pass on information back.

So by turning this into a free service, the entire concept of what we're trying to achieve is to create the people's complaints and create creating a people's company with a population of 7.8 billion people on the plane. Our goal is to get a million people to donate to pound. We can get a million people that donate to plan that gives us four to six cases per month for the next two to three years.

And that'll give us two to three years to actually raise more money. And if we're able to raise more money in that time, we can then up the numbers of cases that we take on per month, which means training models. It means continuing to actually grow the company and get these numbers change. Now, changing the numbers, statistically that makes the government have to start thinking and questioning what is going on and then changing their policies. And then it also puts us in line with the law enforcement to actually work alongside us as professional advisors towards.

Nigel Beckles:  So Jay, how can people contact you?

Jay Jordan: We're on most social media platforms. And we've also got a website which has www.pegasus-ops.com. All of our links on there, on the websites. We've got all of our social media links. I do a lot of Tick-Tock lives these days to explain to people and build that relationship. So in our attempt to raise awareness, cause there's not many people aware that there is this alternative service. And obviously the website is abs got the news articles that we're pushing out.

It's got podcast links. It's also got testimonials from previous clients and donation link button. And also we're creating a shop shortly, which I'm hoping to go live very soon, which is going to be selling merchandise and the profits from the book profits from all goes into raising funds to actually take on these cases. Currently I've got eight cases and they need funding. So we've got to work very hard to be able to try to raise that money.

Nigel Beckles:  Well, I wish you every success in your endeavors. Thank you very much for your time.