Julian Dorey Podcast - #261 - No. 1 Middle East Expert Exposes $2 Billion Syria Drug Empire & Pop Star Bomb Plot | Joby Warrick

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Joby Warrick is a 2x Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and Middle East Expert. Since 1996, Joby has been at the Washington Post, where he currently serves as a National Security Reporter. His three books –– “The Triple Agent,” “Black Flags” (won Pulitzer Prize), & “Red Line” –– are all Best-Sellers (You can BUY all 3 of Joby’s books using my Amazon Store link below) PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JOBY LINKS: - TWITTER: https://twitter.com/JobyWarrick - BOOKS: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004O53IVA LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Syria Falling, State of Syria Right Now, HTS Syria Origins 13:12 - History of IS1S in Syria 17:33 - Invasion of Iraq (IS1S Founding Father), Why Did Young People Join IS1S 26:45 - Kurds & Unique Culture (Women Must Fight), IS1S Prisons, Kurds Day of Syria Collapse, Turkey’s Plan & Beef with Assad 36:13 - Turkey and Kurdistan’s Conflict 43:06 - Observing Rise of IS1S Right Before Takeover 52:23 - Story of Assad Empire (Iron Grip), Syrian Civil War 01:02:01 - Assad & Putin Relationship, Assad Starts Drug Market in Syria 01:13:21 - Syria’s Drug Empire 01:24:35 - Obama’s Failed Military Strike in Syria 01:30:17 - Getting Top Secret Syria Intel (Story), IS1S Caught Before Attack 01:39:34 - 2nd Hand Conversation & Sources, CIA Base for Briefings/Intel, Scrutiny of Journalism 01:52:51 - Assad & Chemical Weapons (US Refusal of Getting into War/WW 2.5), Ukrainian Drones 01:59:22 - Where Was Assad on the Day of Collapse, Syria’s Horrible Torture Methods 02:07:51 - Jordanian King’s Take on the Syrian Collapse 02:14:11 - Israel’s View on Syria (Earthquake Bomb) 02:23:35 - Radicalization from Bombing (Gaza)/Beepers Explosion 02:29:45 - Rising Anti-Semitism w/ World 02:38:47 - Biden Administration Provoking WW3, Putin’s End Goal 02:48:51 - Israel & Gaza Peace Deal Possible, Does Netanhayu Want This to End? 02:58:11 - NJ Drone Situation (Joby’s Take) CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 261 - Joby Warrick Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The problem with CIA is they don't tell their own story sometimes. It's one of the problems. They do so many things that help us that they can't talk about. And that's a frustration for me as a journalist, because sometimes you'll hear about things, there'll be an example that I think listeners will really appreciate is the Taylor Swift concert that was almost attacked in Vienna over the summer. It was a big concert planned in Vienna,

and there was a nice plot to have a terrorist attack on the concert. And the American CIA... Did you change since last time? You know what? I've slept in this thing for the last six months. But no, it's, you know, I have like a number of these that look exactly the same, but it's almost like a Charlie Brown uniform, just kind of interchangeable. See, that's supposed to be me. I usually wear the same thing on camera, but you walked in and I'm like, maybe we just took a long bathroom break in Syria. I'm just shocked with all your guests

that you'd even remember that. Well, Joby Warwick, you are certainly a longtime popular guest on this show, two-time Pulitzer winner, longtime national security reporter who has been working geopolitics, particularly in the Middle East, although all over the world, but in the Middle East, like crazy for decades now at this point. And so it made all the sense in the world when I saw Syria fell to bring you in. So what the hell's happening out there? Well, I wish I could tell you that I predicted this. And I wish that anybody that I talked to could have predicted this. But the crazy thing about Syria and what's happened the last few weeks is that nobody saw this coming. And now that we know what happened, it's just – it's a crazy story, and it's a fun one to talk about.

Why did no one see it coming? Well, you know, and not just me, not just people in my profession, not even American intelligence folks saw this. And I was just meeting – literally two days before Damascus fell, I was meeting with some visiting Arab officials. These are top guys running a government in the Middle East and with some of the best intelligence in the region, including people in Syria. And they were saying on Thursday before Assad fell on Saturday, they were saying, we think this is going to run out of steam. The rebels are probably going to get as far as to sort of the outskirts of Homs, this big city,

and that's it. They're going to burn out. And then we're going to start negotiating with Assad and try to figure out how to salvage the situation. And they were blind to this two days before it happened. That shows you how in the dark everybody was. Yeah, it's crazy. By the way, can you just pull your mic down a little bit just so we can see your face okay other than that you're perfect okay on the sound so we've talked about syria before episode 198 was the last time you were in here that is one of my favorite podcasts we ever did by the way it landed so perfectly we did like an hour on syria which will rehash some of those things that are relevant today like 45 minutes on yemen 45 minutes on iran and 45 minutes on gaza so it'll rehash some of those things that are relevant today, like 45 minutes on Yemen,

45 minutes on Iran, and 45 minutes on Gaza. So it was a full state of the union of the Middle East at the time. But we had gone through a little bit of like the narco state that Syria had become. But one of the things that I don't know that we went that deep into was the, I guess, diversity of the factions that exist across the country so i'm not really sure if i'm reading all this correctly i i understand you're going to get to it this hts group is kind of in control and everything but the way i understood it from the things i was trying to read is that all these different little groups were technically in on it but they're all still apart like like what's what's the, if you were saying, this is the map of Syria, here's who the groups who are trying to take over right now are,

here's what they got control of, like, how would you break it down? Yeah. If you think of Syria as like, think of it like a hundred piece puzzle. And it's that many groups, that many factions, and within each faction, there's multiple competing power centers. So it's nuts how complicated it is. There's this army that's sort of in, it's backed by Syria, it's on the northern border, it's not HTS, but it's another big coalition of groups, something like 40 different organizations involved in this one, you know, militia. And so all these folks are, you know, they all have their own little, you know, control and fiefdoms and be able to say what's happening in their districts and regions.

That's going to take some kind of crazy magic trick to get that to work well without some kind of disaster that we can't even anticipate right now. What are your intelligence sources saying about if they have people on the ground or if if there are cis on the ground that are working angles for them have they given you any information like that yeah there are as i think everybody is sort of taking a breath right now and just just trying to figure out where the heck we are and because those intel folks were taken by surprise too and they're all watching the big dog at the moment, this group HTS, and we can talk about them to figure out what

their intentions are. But right now, it's, you know, it's hard to know which horse to bet on at this point. And this has been the problem for America throughout the beginning, throughout the history of this conflict, going back to 2011, 2012, we all kind of wanted the good guys, whoever they are, to win. We wanted Assad to fall, but we could never figure out what, you know, which horse to put the money on. And that still remains somewhat true today. We clearly want to make friends with the victor, whoever that turns out to be. And right now it's this group HTS, but there's a problem because they're listed as a foreign terrorist organization by our State Department, and the leader has a $10 million bounty on his head.

That's great. So yeah, we can't even technically or legally talk to him because he's a terrorist. So figure out that. How are we going to have foreign relations with a government that we're not even allowed to talk to by our own rules? Technically. Technically. So that gets changed own rules? Technically. Technically. So that gets changed pretty quickly probably. Right.

But yeah, again, it's – everybody is just waiting to see what's going to emerge from this mess. Yeah, obviously at the middle of it is the guy you mentioned, Bashar al-Assad. We'll get to him. But staying on HTS here, this is the group that I understand evolved from al-Nusra Front. Is that right? Yeah. So when did they become HTS and why did they change their name? And maybe if it's relevant, you could give some of the history of al-Nusra Front. Yeah. This is mind blowing to me because if you go back, kind of rewind the tape to figure out

where these guys came from and what they were all about. In 2011, we all remember our friends, the Islamic State and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was the ISIS leader at the time. In 2011, he picks this guy, this young man named Jolani, that was his nom de guerre, and sends him to Syria to kind of find a way for ISIS to get into the civil war that was just starting to break out then. So that was his man. He sends him to Syria as his representative, him and a team of six people, literally a very small team. And he ends up forming this organization, which ends up being called Jabhat al-Nusra or al-Nusra Front. And that evolves again, you know, several times he breaks with Baghdadi, he forms an allegiance with al-Qaeda.

The network rebrands itself numerous times. But eventually, fast forward to where we are right now, this is the organization and this is the individual who is leading the country right now or has the most power. Someone who was once part of ISIS, later became part of al-Qaeda, claims to have broken with all those guys and wants to do his own thing in Syria now, but we just don't really know where he's going to go once he sees his power completely. Yeah, they're trying to say he's like a nice terrorist. Yeah, he's terrorist-like. He's a little softer on people, right? Like he lets the Christians live and only blows some of their brains out, right? Right. And actually, if you look at what he's done, not just what he's said, but things he's done before this offensive took place and since.

What's up, guys? If you haven't already, please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video. And if you don't have time to watch this episode right now, I'd really appreciate it if you saved it to your watch later playlist on YouTube. Finally, if you'd like to follow me on Instagram or X, those links are in my description below. There are some reasons to be encouraged. So he takes over Aleppo about a week and a half, two weeks ago now.

And he's, you know, Christians are putting Christmas decorations up in Aleppo, a town that is now under, you know, quote, Islamist control. But he's saying that he's going to tolerate different faiths and different minority groups. And so far he's going to tolerate different faiths and different minority groups. And so far, he's held true to that. But, you know, these guys are, you know, their pedigree is, you know, hardcore Islamist. And they are doing things in Damascus, like banning music in restaurants, beating people who catch smoking on the street. And there are videos of that that we're seeing pop up where you're smoking a cigarette behind the store. If the morality police find you, they'll come over and smack you around. That's happening now. They've smashed all the alcohol and liquor stores and duty-free shops and things like that. So they're doing

sort of Taliban-like things while also saying that we don't care if you're Christian or you're Jews or what your ethnic or religious background is. we're going to be tolerant, but you have to live within our religious system. And that's kind of where we are. So it's like halfway. Yeah. And you could say, you know, Taliban light. And I'm sure that Jolani would object to that.

He keeps, you know, kind of bristling at the fact that we call him a terrorist. He says, I'm not one anymore. But you know, we don't know what they're going to do. I mean, I keep telling people that if you look at recent history and some, you know, uprisings from Iran, the revolution in the late 1970s to, you know, even Libya, the overthrow of Gaddafi, you know, you unite everybody around the idea of getting rid of the leader that everyone hates, get rid of the Shah or get rid of Gaddafi. But then after he swept from power, you find out that none of the groups agree on anything else. So they're kind of starting from scratch and then this kind of, again, scrum emerges in which everybody is trying to kind of push their own agenda forward, including him. Yeah, it does beg the question about the competence of Western intelligence as a whole, though, too, because you were talking to me before camera more expansively about the Shah

all the way back in 79 and how we didn't know all these different groups could have potentially taken over and then they weren't organized. And so the bad group took over. And that's, fuck, that's like 45 years ago or something. And now you look at everything since the Arab Spring. You mentioned Gaddafi and then look at even what we did in Iraq with Saddam. Bad guy, but look at the power vacuum we created. Shit, it won you a – pilots are talking about it.

But it seems like in the West, we're very bad at establishing – what's the term i'm looking for stability yeah when we are looking at situations that we would like to improve with someone who is perhaps unstable like it is perfectly reasonable to say as saddam hussein was a very bad unstable guy yeah it is also perfectly reasonable to say we replaced him with something worse so when we keep on doing these plays over and over again and you've covered them over and over again, like, what does it say about us that the same movie keeps playing out with the same plot? Yeah, it shows the limits of our ability to influence events. And when everything it seems that we try to do in the Middle East, whether we go too hard, or we don't go hard enough, it just feels like there's generally

a bad outcome. We deposed a dictator in Iraq and like you said, gave birth to the Islamic State and to years of corrupt politicians running Iran and rocking to the ground. But there are also cases where we've just stood back and let events play out on their own with bad consequences too. And Syria for a long time was an example of that. And why is Syria such a problem strategically for international order, if you will? Yeah. So this is a place that traditionally it's sort of the hub of the Middle East. It's kind of the place where everything connects together. It connects to the Mediterranean. It's, you know, tied to, you know, historic ties to the Gulf countries. It's always been an important place.

It has become less important to America because it's been a fairly stable place, despite all its problems. It didn't affect us very much. It didn't affect the Israelis very much either. They had one peaceful border. Well, two, counting Jordan, they had a peaceful border with the Jordanians. But Syria was something they never really had to worry about because Assad kind of controlled his side of the border. He never kind of provoked problems with the Israelis, never sent people across the border so they could kind of just not worry about it. But historically, and just because of its geography and its history and culture, it is kind of a vital crossroads. And that's why what happens in Syria won't necessarily stay there in terms of the problems that come out of that place. The ISIS movement, as we came to know it, really got its start in Syria more than any other places. It originated in Iraq, but really came to flower, became this huge organization that could take over, you know, big swaths of territory because of the civil war in Syria. So- Wait, what's the history there? I don't know how much we discussed that in episode 134, where we talked a lot about ISIS. Like, what was the history of ISIS specifically setting up

shop in Syria? Yeah. So, you know, we've talked a lot in the past about Zarqawi and this sort of the rise of this, what was called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was an Iraqi organization that really rose in opposition to the American occupation and in resistance to Shiite rulers in Iraq. Zarqawi, you know, forms this movement, which becomes quite powerful and quite deadly. Eventually, he gets killed. His organization kind of goes to shit. By 2008, there's not much left of it out right next door in Syria. There are historic connections between the Syrian and Iraqi jihadist. Jolani, as we mentioned, was from Syria, but he had joined Zarqawi's group and had been part of that organization. And so they, you know, Baghdadi saw an opportunity in Syria to create, you know, you had to build an army and to create a cause, something that people, dedicated Islamists at least around the world, would want to join and become part of. And because of the appeal of the fight against Assad and sort of the idea of creating a religious caliphate in Syria, that's what made ISIS so successful.

So if it hadn't been for Syria, we probably would not have heard of these guys and are you talking like kinda I'm just doing math in my head because like Saqqawi dies in 2006 Baghdadi comes out of prison I think a couple years later are you talking like 09, 10, 11, 12-ish when they're really doing this in Syria?

yeah when they're really starting to come out all right so this is something I always try to think about in my head and I'm sure it's confusing for a lot of people at home because we just get stuck looking at a map with geography that says, oh, here's where borders are. And we're thinking about it, especially in America. We think about things so American-centrically like, oh, that must mean they have towns right there and there's a mayor and whatever. But in reality, there's a lot of no man's land and there you know, the Kurds may control who are the good guys

in this case, or ISIS could come in and just be like, yo, we run this place right now. So when ISIS, particularly in those years, I just mentioned is forming in Syria. What does it look like? Are they just literally going to a town of, I don't know, 500 people and being like, this is ours now and you're going to be under the ISIS flag and torturing anyone who doesn't join them? Or is it more subtle of a rise where they're trying to win hearts and minds at the beginning? Yeah. In Syria, it was a case where they literally rolled in in their vehicles and said, we're in charge. And they did that in the city of Raqqa, which is in Eastern Syria, instead of becoming their capital. And it's the place where we've seen most of the really

horrific images of beheadings and crucifixions and, you know, burning people alive, all the terrible things we remember seeing ISIS do happen in that place. And they, you know, the thing is about ISIS is that because of its history in Iraq, and because it had fought the Americans for so long, and because it had a lot of weapons and military experience, they were able to come in with more military competency than just about anybody else on the battlefield except for the professional army troops. They were the best fighters around. And so when they roll in with their select guns and their Toyota trucks with machine guns mounted in the back. Nobody tried to oppose them. They were the strongest ones around and they were able to quickly take control of an area and just kill people who didn't agree with them or tried to get in their way. And so that's how they took over big chunks of Syria and Iraq. And they had help. They had people who were Syrian or who, in case

of Iraq, people who had been part of the military and part of the government and the intelligence infrastructure who decided to join in with these guys because they saw them as winners. And so you go from a place where these are ragtag gangs of thugs from the desert to people who take and control territory and then create governments. What did fighting with Americans look like prior to 2013, 2014 – well, really 2014 when we all learned about ISIS because shit started going down in Iraq? Like were we – we were doing operations directly remember our history, 2003, early 2003 is when the invasion takes place. By late March, the United States has control of Iraq. You know, the guy who became sort of the seminal character in the ISIS story, Zarqawi, had moved himself to Iraq with the intention of creating this army to fight the great Satan, to fight the Americans. So he was in place, he built this sort of army around him, including a lot of disaffected Iraqis who didn't have jobs anymore, used to be part of the army or the intelligence services, and they joined with him.

And they became, they embraced this model of sort of spectacular terrorist attacks. So they went after UN mission, NGOs who were in Iraq to try to rebuild the country. Less against American soldiers per se, because they didn't want to fight us that directly. It was more about kind of, you know, eroding the infrastructure that helped us maintain some order and some control over in Iraq in that early period. Eventually, though, the Americans came to seize al-Khaoui and this sort of nascent ISIS movement as a number one threat. And so we invested a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of intelligence, firepower to just finding him and killing him and stopping his leaders. And so there's a period from about 2004 to 2006 when he was killed. And then for a couple years afterward where there was this really high-paced, high-tempo counterterrorist campaign that ended up sweeping up a lot of these bad guys and their leadership.

Right. But to your point, this is when like Zarqawi, and that's what your book, Black Flags, the Pulitzer winning book was about. It was about the history of him and how he formulated what became ISIS. But ISIS didn't take that name for years until Abu Baghdad. Bakar Baghdadi. Oh, yeah. Bak Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad, what they fought against 06 to 08 still existed meaning it wasn't just a few people who got the idea to stay alive and then bag daddy comes in and really grows it versus you know like none of them existed in a whole new organization formed so there's a little little bit of both and you said some truth to that for sure and that we we dismantled we just we kicked the shit out of them

and that was kind of our objective and we we were good at that. But what also happened was wherever Zarqawi and his followers did succeed in having control, territorial control over villages and we just demolished them. We dismantled their infrastructure until there wasn't much left by 2008, 2009. And so they're – basically what I'm getting at is the people who were now fighting American forces, which is where I started this tangent in say 2009, 2010, 2011 in Syria, these are mostly people who were not at all involved during that last time. Yeah, that is true. Right? Yeah. So they are – like we're engaging a – in my book, I know it's not like like officially but in my book it's almost like we're engaging a new phenomenon at that point because the the players have all changed it's like if you played against the philadelphia phillies today you're not playing against the 2008 philadelphia phillies all those guys are retired it's a brand new team they have the same name you know they're

they play in the same place similar type idea here but it's a new team, totally different organization era. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. Different, even ethnic and tribal makeup. So all that sort of changes because it becomes more Syria focused. And so you see, and the other thing, which is Sarkawi would never have dreamed of having this mass migration of people

from around the world to join. So there's all these North Africans and there are people from Chechnya, from the Caucasus who come in to join this thing. So it becomes this kind of very vibrant, diverse group of people who have one thing in common, which they're all extremists. They all have this very harsh, hardline view of their religion and of the world. And we're right, everybody else is wrong. And we're ordained by God to create this special project called the caliphate and nobody's going to stop us. Minus the rough and rugged nature of them

taking over by force land in Syria in 08, 09, 10, 11, and all that. What made Syria ripe for having especially young males who would want to join that at the time? Yeah. Well, some of it is just, you know, if you're on the winning team, if your Philadelphia Eagles are kicking ass every week. Damn right. So that attracts a certain profile to start with. And we have in Syria, you have a huge percentage of the population that really hates Assad, that thinks Assad is a brutal dictator, which he was, and that he tortured and killed innocents and he should go. And if you're looking to fight him and you're looking to push them out of power, if you're going to hitch your wagon to one of these groups, here's one that's successful.

Oh, and by the way, here's one that has the best weapons. It pays well. It pays better salaries. Oh, they were paying well. They're paying well. And they could do that because the places that they took over in Raqqa, for example, first stop is at the local bank where they just kind of just take all the currency out. And they operated this way across Iraq and Syria in places they controlled, just kind of hoovered out all the hard currency, all the euros and dollars, and became fabulously wealthy overnight.

And if you got that kind of a bankroll, you can afford to pay your fighters very well. And that buys a certain kind of loyalty. Where were the Kurds in like 09, 10, 11, while ISIS was muscling into the southern area? Because my understanding is that the Kurds, I don't know if we can pull up a map, Alessi, so maybe Joby can point out exactly where, but they have a lot of territory, especially on like the southeastern front of Syria. Is that right? That's right. And it's one of these major groups, one of the few in the world that have no homeland. The Kurds, kind of their population is divided among several countries, Syria just being one. There's a lot in there, Turkey, there are Kurdish, big Kurdish areas in Iraq. And they had been, you know, among the many

groups that had been beaten down by Assad over the years and beaten down by the Turks as well, because the Turks saw them as a threat. There was this group called the PKK, which is one of the major terrorist groups that carry out attacks in Turkey just in the name of Kurdish independence. And so they had been marginalized. ISIS takes over and systematically starts killing a lot of them. And so you see these huge battles that take place in northern, sort of extreme northeastern Syria, towns like Manbij and Kobani and other places where Americans ended up getting eventually involved. And there was this moment where the U.S. administration, this is in 20, getting my timing wrong, 2013-14, to to intervene at least you know with humanitarian um you know assets to try to keep these people from being slaughtered the yazidis

particularly but also kurds and so that was like our the first moment when the united states enters into this war against isis and eventually we end up sort of backing uh kurdish militias who become you know competent enough and and wellarmed enough that they can take on ISIS. Like Peshmerga? Exactly. But they're pretty good anyway, but they just didn't have the sort of funding, the backing, and the kind of weapons that we could give them. because Americans backing groups like Peshmerga, who became the frontline soldiers who went from town to town and village to village and pushed the ISIS folks out and mostly killed them. But they went from being sort of the victims in all this, the downtrodden and the ones who were

getting punched around to having a pretty capable militia with Uncle Sam backing them. Yeah. You and I have talked about the Kurdds in every podcast we've done so far but i always say it's like the most fascinating thing to me because they're allied with the united states which we're like the most powerful country in the world and there's like 30 million of them i want to say something like that who exist in these no man's lands of iraq, particularly that area. And they quite literally have their own bases that you have to have security to get through to get on. And the only thing they don't have is a bunch of dudes in an office somewhere, maybe at the UN in New York City, drawing lines on a map to say that they're a country. I don't understand why that hasn't

happened at this point. Yeah. and they're really extraordinary people, and I've spent a bunch of time with them. And what's amazing when you get to meet them is they have very different views about what a military is like. Women have a place. Women are fighters, and they have female units, and they're ferocious, and some of them, you know, people you'd never want to get involved in a fight with.

But, you know, they have – it's a very unique culture that's just different from anything else that exists in the region. And they have become our friends. We've kept them in power. We've kept them supplied with arms and ability to have autonomy in the region where they exist. And they're the ones that really stand to lose a lot right now, because if there is a future regime in Syria that doesn't have a place for them, and if we don't sort of back them and give them, you know, some kind of support, then there's a real question about what happens to them. And it's not just the Kurds that we worry about, but one of the little housekeeping jobs that the Kurds inherited is they have the prisons where all these former ISIS fighters are now. There's one-

They have them. They have them. So in Kurdish territory, Kurdish shell territory, is something like 10,000 hardcore ISIS fighters who were kept in really big detention camps. And there's another place called Al-Hol, which is where their wives and families and sort of the camp followers that used to be part of ISIS, they're all there now. They're all basically in huge outdoor prisons, a little more sophisticated than that, with UN and US money providing food and clothing, just humanitarian assistance because the Kurds can't do it by themselves. And they keep threatening sort of this one powerful card they have to play is, oh, if we're not, if you're not back anymore, then I'm sorry, we're not going to be able to keep all these prisoners, you know, uncontrolled anymore. There's nothing more than ISIS. Release! Go off into the wild!

That's right, right. And there's nothing that ISIS, you know, ISIS talks about this all the time, but we need to free the prisoners. And they would have an army of 10,000 if they could get to them. And that's one of the reasons why the Kurds are not just – we're not worried about them just because we're trying to be decent moral human beings. But because they have a lot – they're controlling a lot in that part of the world to come back to haunt us. Yeah. Now, you mentioned Turkey. Stick a pin in that though for a second, staying just with the Kurds right now. Where were they on November 27th and in the aftermath of this? Are they involved at all in anything on the ground? Are they trying to retain some territory that they could possibly take over for themselves or hold for whoever the Americans say they... Kurds. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm talking about the Kurds first. Oh, okay. Turks I want to come to next.

Okay. Did I say Turks? I'm sorry. I meant to say where are the Kurds during this part of it, and then I was going to get to Turkey. Okay. So they have, again, a fairly stable area that they're occasionally the Turks and Turkish backed forces will be involved in the clash on the border.

So there's that kind of activity that takes place. There's constant counterterrorism efforts by the Kurds. They're always having to kind of put out little fires to ISIS in their region because there are ISIS cells all over that part of Syria. And occasionally they'll attack a Kurdish military base or outpost. But things were, you know, as good as they get for the Kurds, they have, you know, control over their own territory. They have kind of an autonomy that had not existed in historical memory. And so it was kind of like the Kurds in Iraq. Once Saddam Hussein fell, the real beneficiary, once it really benefited were these sort of Iraqi Kurds, because for the

first time, they really had the ability to run their own territory in the north of iraq so that's where they were and that's why they're worried that this could go away if things go certain ways but meaning like when when these rebel forces started taking action on the 27th it wasn't like the peshmerga was coming in and trying to hold the line or anything it's like that's not our fight this isn't a different part of the country it is is what it is. Yeah. But what you did see was some of the Turkish-backed forces kind of having incursions into their territory. And you saw military clashes and people getting killed because the Turks were trying to make mischief, taking advantage of this sudden vacuum. And so they were getting kind of punched around a little bit then.

All right. Yeah. Let's get to that because I know that's such an interesting part of the story because when you read about it, it's like who are the rebel forces? And it will list all these different groups like we already talked about and then it will be like – and the Turks. And you're like, wait a minute. Isn't that like an act of war to be able to do this if you're a sovereign country in this way and they are now infiltrating territory. So, you know, what is Erdogan's perfect world look like here? What is he, Erdogan, the leader of Turkey, what is he trying to do? Well, he's feeling pretty happy right now, because he, he backed HTS, the guys that are running Damascus. But he also, you know, his he had his, you know, Turkish controlled militias that were on the border that were kind of a buffer zone between himself and all the problems in Syria. But he's one of the few international leaders who have come out looking pretty good in this because even if he can't directly control HTS, he has major influence.

This is another Islamist militia of – like many others that he supports, and they've had good relations with the Turks over the years. He's provided money and weapons to them. They kind of, the HDS folks really came out of the box and surprised everybody, I think, including the Turks. But even if he doesn't, even if HDS isn't his, you know, his horse, he still benefits from their victory. He becomes more powerful particularly compared to the the iranians and the russians who've lost a lot of influence in the last couple weeks what was and we're going to talk all about assad in a few minutes here but what was erdogan's issues with assad so they really um you know completely parted ways uh and in the beginning of the Syrian civil war with –

Which was when? Which was beginning in 2011 with Erdogan supporting many militias that were trying to overthrow Assad. And there were, you know, all kinds of, you know, of clashes along the border. There were huge refugee flows into Turkey, also into other parts of the region. So it was – they – it's complicated as these things always are. They have been sworn enemies in the past. In the last couple of years, they've been more accommodating with one another. And a lot of the Arab states saw Bashar as somebody they could negotiate with. I think Erdogan saw that too, that there was a way to kind of bring order and

stability to the region, which is more important to someone like Erdogan than necessarily controlling Damascus. That wasn't one of his objectives. He just wanted a stable border and didn't want to have huge influxes of refugees across into Turkey. Yeah, he's such a fascinating guy to me, Erdogan, because he's been around forever. You had that famed attempted Turkey coup in like like 2016 i want to say and that got overthrown and he kind of

took control more centralized control power he's this dude who kind of behaves like a like a trying to be western leader in a way but at the same time wants a more strict adherence to islam within the country which you know is, has always been more secularized in that way. And also, you know, we talk about Syria being a crossroads, which you're absolutely right. Turkey's the country that literally connects Europe and Asia. It's a part of both. It's a bigger country. It's got a bigger GDP and I guess more to work with in that way. But, you know, to me, I've always looked at that guy and some of the iron fist that he's used to hold on to rule as someone who has some

aspirations, maybe geographically of like a Putin, right? Like Putin's always kind of wanted to expand Russia into the, I mean, you heard him give his whole history lesson with Tucker Carlson, like eight, eight months ago or whatever. But like but like you know it seems like erdogan in his own way with turkey not that he's like invading italy or something like that but there there's there's kind of those behaviors in in in sight that this is a guy who wants to maybe do that i've given the opportunity do you think that's fair to say i think he wants to be the the great power in the region and that's where what he's been building up to with this. But he's also been fairly clever about it, both domestically but also with his relationships with NATO, which Turkey is a part of, which I sometimes forget.

But they're a part of NATO, which makes it complicated when we have Americans backing Kurds who another NATO ally occasionally attacks. So it's a real interesting soup there. But in terms of his domestic politics, one of his favorite lines that he used was in describing democracy. He said, democracy is like a streetcar. You take it to the destination that you want to go. Then you get off and you do whatever the hell you want to do. And that's been his MO. He basically was elected to leadership and then systematically took apart the opposition. So he's never challenged. What a quote. It's kind of a bar.

Yeah. It's kind of representative of how many autocrats around the world see democracy. It's kind of representative of how many autocrats around the world see democracy. It's a vehicle. It's a way to get power. And then after that, you kind of make up your own rules. And you keep talking about this Kurd-Turkish relationship. It reminds me, my buddy Eric Zuliger, who's on the show for 163 and 164, who I'm convinced is a spy. But he swears to God he's not. He is actually banned from turkey

because he was on all this is all he did he was on it allegedly he was on a train one time coming from kurdistan because like his whole thing is he's like to live in these places that aren't recognized countries around the world just to you know see how things are he's like one of those like touristy types in that way again probably for other surreptitious reasons but he's on the train and they come to like get his ticket and they're like where do you live and he said kurdistan and they're like come with us took him to a back room like strip searched him like kicked him off the train in some other country and said you can't come back yeah so obviously the dislike there is heavy but But what's the history of that? Because this obviously predates Erdogan.

Yeah. I think it's part of it is just this historic Kurdish ambition to have a homeland. And that's certainly understandable. They don't have one. And so you have various factions within the Kurdish community in Turkey who have decided to take up arms against the state. And it's something we don't read a lot about in our press because it's just not, it's a local fight. It's not something that involves us, but they see parts of the Kurdish community as, as mortal threats to them. And every now and then there'll be a terrorist attack in Istanbul or

Ankara and people are killed and then there's reprisals. And so it's a real fight for them. And it's, you know, the Turks aren't going to give away a homeland to the Kurds. So it's hard to see what the solution is. And that's been the Kurds' problem everywhere. They have very large, very capable communities, but there's no sort of natural place for them because all their territories are controlled by different countries. You know, you're a guy who's lived his whole career on finding where the stories are, right? So obviously that intersects with major global events that happen that of course in and of themselves are a story, but you've done a great job of identifying, you know, the threads on different things. Like we were talking about a book you're working on right now that I'm not going to say what it is yet, but like, that's, that's, it's something that's kind of unspoken about at this point. I'll say that that's so fascinating that you're going to bring to life. And so when I look at something like the Kurds, where you have this country of not country, this unrecognized place that holds strongholds in the places where we've been fighting endless wars for the last 20 years

of 30 million plus people. They have their own military. By the way, the military is friends with us and everything. They are having clashes that include potential terrorist attacks with Turkey. They're trying to fight for getting their own land. This is an unbelievable story of a very capable place. It's not like it's 500,000 people or something like that. Why do you think it is that it's what you just said, where it's like, oh, it's just something that's not really reported locally here? Yeah. To me, it seems like it's got the hallmarks of something that could be in the movies tomorrow.

Yeah. And we don't know which way this is going to go because they do have assets, including oil, because both in Kurdish Iraq and also the Syrian parts where the Kurdish control are some of the most oil-rich parts of those two countries. Gets better. So they do have, you know, they can sustain their economy if everybody leaves them alone. They would be very, very happy, I think, at least the ones in Syria, to just have their enclave. It doesn't have to, they don't care if it's recognized by the UN or not. They just want to be left in peace to have their own thing. They can support themselves with their oil and with just their

ingenuity. But if they're pressed, if this new government in Syria tries to squeeze them out, then there's seeds for a future conflict. Because they're not going to take that quietly. There's going to be fighting. So they feel like they don't, to be clear though, and what you're saying, they feel like they don't live in peace at all right now. They feel like they're constantly at war. Is that right? They're having to constantly protect the little bit of autonomy they have. And they feel like it's sort of on a razor's edge. And that right now they're doing okay because Uncle Sam has got their back. Uncle Sam has troops in Syria and in Iraq, and they're sort of keeping their enemies at bay. If the United States decided

tomorrow to pull out all those troops, it could be a completely different situation. They would have to fight against a Syrian army or against other foes or have to really, you know, be subject to real repression from the Turks if they decide that, well, America is not a problem anymore. Let's try to assert greater control over Kurdish areas. And so that's all, you know, these are all plausible scenarios right now. A lot of chaos could be out there, man. That's the thing. And you talked about, you know, trying to find the next story. You know, part of what I have the luxury of being able to do, because I don't often have to go out and cover breaking news. It's not where I am. I'm a few steps back. And you can start to think about, well, what's the big trend here? What's the thing that nobody else is noticing?

Or even to look back at something historically, as I'm trying to do right now on this latest book project, is to look at, well, here's this big problem we have right now, but where did that start and how did we get here? And Black Flag is like that a little bit too. We suddenly had this thing called ISIS and everyone was surprised by it. But if you look back to see where it came from, if you rewind the tape to 2002 and 2003 or even further back than that, you can see that seeds that are being planted for what becomes major international problems. And if we had been smarter, if we'd had better leadership or just more foresight, we might have gotten ahead of some of those things. Now, if I remember correctly, you started working on Black Flags shortly before things blew up in the summer of 2014, like right before, right? Yeah. So late 2013, I'm starting to – trying to convince my publisher that this is actually going to be a big problem, that nobody heard of ISIS. And they were just beginning to call it in fact they didn't call it ISIS yet but it was just the Islamic state of Iraq but then adds ISIS or Syria to it become

ISIS and I knew where they came from I knew about Zarqawi I knew his story and I said god these guys are dangerous and we see them starting to knock off towns and take on territory that that seemed to me to be you know hair on fire alarming and to kind of make the case that this is something that americans should should worry about that took a real sales pitch to get people to care about it yeah and then they saw people being burned in boxes on fucking youtube and they said write it right that's right first the first beheading on video camera like that's a winner let's go people need to know about this yeah so but basically that's good that's that angle that's our kawaii angle if i remember correctly is getting on your radar

maybe like 2012-ish 2013 so those earlier years we talked about oh nine ten eleven even a guy like you who's literally like out there reporting on all these areas it was still this quiet thing of like oh remember that guy who died and the remnants of him that's like really becoming a problem now who's literally like out there reporting on all these areas, it was still this quiet thing of like, ooh, remember that guy who died and the remnants of him? That's like really becoming a problem now. So it wasn't necessarily like talked about. Yeah, and look, they're back in Raqqa now. Look, they're taking over tribal areas in Western Iraq now.

And still, because amid the chaos of Arab Spring, everybody is focused on, wow, there's this revolution in Egypt, and Egypt has a democratically elected government for the first time, you know, ever. And all these governments are falling, so TV screens about this group and what they were doing that everybody united in just the desire to crush them. This is what we actually did beginning in 2016. Yeah, yeah. And I remember that. I remember the Paris attack in fall 2015. It was terrifying because then you'd read the story about how they got in and what they did and you're like, this is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. They could be anywhere and they haveidious way. Al-Qaeda was an organization that you – part of Al-Qaeda, you had to join. You had to be allowed in. You had to kind of pass all the tests. ISIS was not like that. ISIS was like, if you want to be part of us, go shoot up something. Go blow up a synagogue or have a car bombing in downtown Manhattan. You're in. You're in. Your act essentially made you part of the group. And also they took advantage of social media in a way that

no one ever had before and able to reach out and radicalize disaffected people around the world. And as it turns out, there are a lot of disaffected people around the world who have given the chance and the means and a cause are very willing to risk their lives or even take their lives in a terrorist attack. And that we certainly found in the late 20-teens. And it does center around religion in this case, which so many problems in world history, that's literally what they are. But you have one of the world's largest religions, people of the diaspora all over the world, maybe feeling a certain type of way regardless of where they are and something inherent in humanity and in the the cult that that can create in this case like this is an example of a cult within a religion calls them

home to have to do or you know around the world but you get my point to to have to do horrible things in the name of something that's supposed to be about peace. Yeah, and there's always things that are layered on top of that because it's not just a religion and there are many wonderful Muslim people that I know and very enlightened and just good people. But when you have a minority or a religion that feels – a religious group that feels that they're oppressed for some reason, and that's particularly the case in Europe where you have kind of ghettos of Muslims, kids who've never lived in a Muslim country, but they felt their entire life that they're the other. They're different from everyone else. They're not treated the same. 2015, they came from this sort of the back streets of places like Brussels, places where Muslims felt marginalized. So it's not just the religion, but it's the religion based on, layered on top of grievances.

And they may be very particular. They may have to do with where they grew up or their economic circumstances, or it might just be personal problems. And we've seen that here in this country again and again, the guys that pick up a gun and shoot up a school, there's often just personal problems and they just find, you know, they just are empowered for some reason to act out. And if they can blame their behavior on a greater cause or on religion or something else, then they're not just some wacko that killed himself. They're doing it for a reason. Well, you raise a great point. And that's, that's something where we have to look inward on this and where we're the West and I'm including the United States, Europe, and all these different countries absolutely have to reconsider how they've done things. You know, when you have, when you have immigration, it's supposed to be a beautiful thing, especially with, with first world countries.

Like our country is built on that. We're looking at the skyline right here. Like I didn't even have any people here before 1900. I love that. But you have to have systems that work because when you create systems where people are incentivized to just come in through borders and not have legal immigration because your system is broken, to be clear, people who are trying to find a better life then come through in high volume and said countries, whether it be the United States or all these different countries in Europe, aren't equipped to deal with that. So they create a self-fulfilling prophecy where they're like, all right, well, let's stick them all right here. Sure, nothing bad will happen there.

And you create, you foment that anger right there and i've seen this this is something i didn't understand when i was younger but i see it now and it makes me want you know i it shit just feels very broken but it makes me want to be a part of that conversation to how do we how do we fix immigration to be able to have a world where everyone kumbayas and holds hands together but we have to talk about that and how fast we allow immigration to happen and what that could mean for the future of immigration, which is that it won't happen at all because people will learn to despise each other, be it the immigrants on the people they live among or aren't allowed to live among, or the people who were originally there seeing

immigrants coming in and seeing violence in this case, or the worst that some of those people have to offer as opposed to the best among them yeah exactly i think when immigration works is when there is integration when people can come to this country and they can get a job they can become citizens and they want to be that's right you'll never meet a more sort of patriotic american than people who have made the choice to come here and have gone by the rules and were able to get the visa and eventually citizenship. And they're excited to be Americans. And they end up as groups doing better than the rest of us.

I mean, you can look at some of these sort of specific demographic groups that are essentially first-generation immigrants, but they've came over uh assimilated into american society and they're doing really well making more money than than than sort of on average people that grew up here but it's not the case for people who come over and then become you know never are integrated never really become part of society and then they become sort of ghettoized they're sort of estranged from the rest of us. They don't like us. We're suspicious of them. And you really see that, unfortunately, in Europe, even more than here, that when they're in the groups that come over are just never welcome. They never feel like they're Dutch or they're British or they're German. They're always viewed

as being other. And that creates resentments and then resentments turn into something often much worse. Yeah. And I think the obvious elephant in the room there though, is also that a lot of these countries in Europe, be it first world countries or whatever, they're historically of like one type of person. Whereas we have a melting pot here. So we're used to it in that way. We still have our problems that we got to fix with this, but it's like, we at least understand what that is. I grew up with someone of every different race and background. And there are places in Europe where through no fault of the people there, that's not necessarily what they did. And so you see people come in who just have a different way of life in certain ways. And it creates those

natural prejudicial suspicions, if you will. And that's what goes to the self-fulfilling prophecy we've been talking about. Yeah. And you're right. It's a lot less obvious here because you can see someone of a different ethnicity and you don't know where they're from. And in France, you see somebody who's wearing a certain outfit or has a different complexion, then you know they're not sort of ancestrally French. That's right. And so they stand out. And that's different about European countries than where we live. Yeah. So either way, we're getting into this because we've seen the downstream effects of

that where disaffected people can then be a part of some of these movements that get bastardized and happen and take advantage, I always say, of religion rather than actually be a part of what the religion is supposed to be. But in Syria, the guy who's been at the middle of this story is quite obviously the longtime leader now, Bashar al-Assad, who has always been such an enigma to me because here you have a guy who was educated in, I think in the UK. His wife is also, I think, from there, literally. She's British, yep. Right? He's a secular Muslim. Isn't he like an Alawite or something? Alawite, which is kind of a subcategory of Shia Islam, but it's a very small minority group. Right.

And obviously it's, anyway, that's his family's secular background or religious background. But just for people who are unfamiliar with the history, what is the story of al-Assad in Syria? His father was obviously like in charge and he took over. But was this always going to be the case? Like when he was a kid, he was going to be groomed to be the next leader? Yeah, he was not. And he was an accidental leader, which kind of makes the story very, very interesting to me. Because he was in the Assad family.

Yeah. So the old man was kind of seized power, was a military guy, seized power in a coup in the 1970s. And it was always assumed that his older son, a guy named Basil, who was very good-looking, charismatic, kind of race car driving kind of guy, just a lot of personality and character. He was sort of the heir apparent and he was groomed for the position. And then he gets killed in a car accident. Conveniently. Conveniently. But it actually was a car accident.

Apparently he was racing to get to the airport. He was late for a plane. So he and his driver were just hurling down some country road and ran off the road and were killed. And so then power falls to – sort of the succession falls to the next guy in line, and it's this guy Bashar al-Assad. And Bashar does not look the part. He's very shy. He's the kind of guy who, as a young man, could not meet your gaze. He was very kind of awkward in that way. He went away to school in Britain to study to be an ophthalmologist.

And the story, perhaps apocryphal, but he chose that profession because he was scared of the sight of blood. And think of that. He turns out to be one of the most kind of brutal, murdering, torturing dictators of all time. He didn't have to do it though, Joby. He didn't have to do it that way. That's true. But his dad time. He didn't have to do it though, Joby. He didn't have to do it that way. That's true. But, you know, he gets – his dad dies. He gets the job.

He becomes the president. And there's a moment, and this is around 2000, where people are looking at him thinking, you know what? He's someone who could really change the country because he is Western educated and he does appreciate the benefits of more enlightened and more open societies. And there was this moment that actually was called Damascus Spring. It takes place in 2000, way before Arab Spring, when he starts to allow dissent, where he allows opposition groups to form salons and discuss political ideas. And that happens for a few months. And then his advisors, kind of the hardcore, you know, apparatchiks around him say, this is stupid. We shouldn't let this happen.

And so they go in with their billy cubs and just beat the crap out of everybody. And that was the end of Damascus Spring. And so Bashar decides pretty early on that his success and his future relies on being just in lockstep with the brutes that run the government, the security services, the guys who do the torturing. Those are the ones that guarantee his success and the longevity of his regime. And so he hitched his wagon to them. And when people started protesting for democracy in 2011, he fell back on that old playbook of just brutalizing anyone who stood up, no matter where they're from or what their background was, throw them in prison, beat them, torture them, kill them. And he just really believed that he could kill his way out of this democratic uprising in 2011.

There's something to be said for that old video from – maybe it was like – I'm going to get the meaning wrong. Maybe it was like the Arab League of Nations or something like that in the late 2000s, possibly 2010, something like that, where Gaddafi, who was a pretty crazy guy obviously but was still the leader of Libya at the time, is up there like pounding the table saying, they're coming for me and they're going to come for all you next and it'll cut i've seen the video it cuts to his side he starts laughing not me it it took a while yeah but like it goes to show you obviously whatever that you know young westernized like oh he'll be friendly boy had been when he took over in what was it 2000 yeah okay you know by 2010 2011 he's now exactly what you say which is the yeah that'll be the day yeah i'll just beat their fucking heads in yeah yeah and he was looking around the region arab spring is happening he sees the the president of of tunisia is overthrown the egyptian leader mubarak is overthrown qaddafi's up against the wall every country where these

uprisings are happening, there's regime change. And he was just determined that it wasn't going to happen to him. And Syria was one of the last places to get major street protests. And as soon as they happened, his goons were out there to make sure that those protests weren't sustained. What it did, though, was drive people underground, and then they got weapons and started to fight back. And that's how the Civil War started. Yeah. And that's like 2011, 2012. 2011. By middle of 2011, June, July, you're getting members of the military breaking off and fighting against the regime. And that's when things really got crazy.

Prior to the Civil War, did he pretty much have control over everything in the country outside of perhaps the area the Kurds had in the south? Yeah, he was iron-fisted ruler of the entire place, and this is hard to think of now because Syria is such a, you know, even two weeks ago when Bashar was still in power, he didn't have the whole country. There were big chunks of the country he didn't control. Back then he controlled all of it or at least had his way everywhere in the country. Yeah, so meaning effectively like the borders we see, as I said earlier, have not existed since 2011.

No. Like it's just on our map with lines, but that's not what it is at all. It might as well be several different countries. And that's – these borders have always been fluid to some extent. And we've talked about this before, but you know, if you think about sort of the roots of some of the problems that we see today, so much of it goes back to the end of World War I, when most of this area had been part of the Ottoman Empire. That's right. The British and the French, the colonial powers that won World War I literally took a map, took a marker and said, well, we're going to create this place here. That's going to be part of the British-controlled territory. And it went the same with Palestinian areas.

And the whole Middle East was divided up by sort of these enlightened colonialists. You nailed it, guys. You did an awesome job. And the thing is when they did it, they were thinking about their own interest and not thinking about what logically made sense. Where are the tribal boundaries or what geographic areas really make sense to kind of carve out as a separate country. So the map made no sense. And you saw the seeds being planted for... It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors.

So what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. You know, decades of conflicts because people were kind of mushed into countries that just were artificial and never existed in history. Yeah. And then also in the middle of all this, Syria has always been this ally with Russia, which goes back to the Cold War days. We talked about that before. But what was the, you know, when they first allied with Russia, it was USSR, and then USSR falls. Was there a point there where they had to like rebuild a relationship with Russia that's not USSR? Or did that pretty much just get inherited as it was?

Yeah, it kind of got grandfathered then. And sometimes it's as simple as, guys, if you're still watching this video, and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. Well, I'm Assad, and we get all our weapons from the Russians. And so we've got all these, you know, T-62 tanks that need service and we need the new productions that are coming in. It's more complicated than that. But there was a relationship that was not just kind of a friendship between sort of a communist government and this dictatorship, but one that was kind of a military alliance.

And it was important for the Russians as much as for the Syrians, because they had their only warm water port in the world in Syria, in Latakia. So that's the place where they needed it. It was their outlet into the Mediterranean. It was a place, kind of a place for spies, for surveillance on neighboring countries to see what the Americans are doing and the Israelis and others. So the Russians did not want to give up their relations with the Syrians. And that's why you see them kind of jumping in to the Syrian civil war in 2015 when it really looked like Assad was going to fall. They were determined to keep in power with their own military if they had to. Wait, back up for one second.

The spies would go into place? What was the name of that port city again? Latakia and Tartus. These are the two coastal cities where Russians are based. They've got an airport in one and they've got a military or navy base in the other. And so those two are hugely important. But as has been described to me by CIA folks, these are essentially the listening posts too. So it's literal spies on the ground, but it's also their antennas and their sort of

electronic eavesdropping equipment. A lot of it was put in place there. So it was a hugely important operation. And because of, I'm just guessing here, the geographic vicinity allowed that to have much more power than it could somewhere else. Yeah. So they can look into Turkey, which is a NATO ally. So that's an important listening post for that.

Also looking into what the Israelis are doing. And Israelis have always played kind of both sides with the Russians, and they've exploited a relationship with them when it benefited them. But from the Russians' point of view they can keep a an eye on a big chunk of the world and one of the most strategic parts of the world if they have an operation in syria which is why they held on to it so tightly so did because assad comes into power at around the same time putin does right in 2000 did they immediately become good friends they it's hard to tell personal relationships because putin is uh uh he's just a very tricky guy to read it's hard to tell personal relationships because Putin is a,

he's just a very tricky guy to read. He's a cagey fuck. Very cagey fuck. He was, of course, he was KGB, literally,

he was a part of the KGB before the Soviet Union collapsed. But for sure, they had a, you know, a really chummy relationship in which, you know,

Assad would make endless trips to Moscow and have his picture taken with Putin. So they bonded that way. You can sort of look and try to read Putin's expression sometimes. And he's kind of this sneer at everybody that he sees as being somewhat inferior to him. Here's this Middle Eastern tin pot dictator. Why do I really have to get my picture taken with him? That kind of thing. But they did kind of use each other.

They were convenient, helpful to each other, had their relationship. And the guys that you talked about, like the Billy Bats guys, the dudes, the intelligence services, I guess, within the military who existed, who were under his father before him, that he then kind of kowtowed to as far as like their style was which is like all right anything that speaks against us we're going to beat down was there a lot of russian influence already in place within those organizations do you think there was a lot of intermixing and i know this because i i have spent a lot of time studying Syria's chemical weapons program. And you see Russian military officers kind of coming in and out of that environment, helping the Syrians get the equipment they need, teaching them how to do things. And obviously military advisors coming in constantly, a steady stream of people coming in to help prop up Syria's military. And for the Russians, it's a lovely little hangout for them because it's beautiful,

Mediterranean coastline. Damascus is not a bad place. Aleppo is a lively city. So if you're a retiring KGB officer or Soviet general, it's not a bad place to have a villa. It is a good spot. It is a good spot. It is a good spot. And there were lots of villas that sort of Russians bought and held for all those years and still do. So in those 2000s prior to the Civil War, he's still keeping that relationship going

with Russia. Obviously, his style changes. What is the syrian economy in peacetime like then like what are they how are they a at least slightly well-functioning sovereign nation at that point yeah and they had surprisingly well-developed industries like medical industry they had one of the the biggest producers of pharmaceuticals in the region up until 2011 was Syria. It was a popular tourist destination. It's a little hard for Americans to go there, but people from the rest of the world go to Damascus and go to Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world, and just enjoy touring. You've got these amazing Roman ruins in the desert, a place like Palmyra, which has just unbelievable temples and things that are left over from the Roman times. Many of them got beat up and knocked apart by ISIS when they came in. I was going to say, they're not still there, right?

The museum's been looted. A lot of the relics and statues have been literally destroyed with hammers and sledgehammers and that kind of thing by isis was someone one of them the many gifts they gave to the world but um but yeah it was you know a midland but um but not insignificant economy uh people were well educated in syria they have good universities for that part of the world and they don't anymore right it's it's the the economy is something like a tenth of what it was in terms of its gdp and there there were And they don't anymore, right? you know a a you know moderately affluent middle eastern country to to a country that essentially makes its living from making illegal drugs and sell them around the world yeah you were talking about that last time captagon is the main one the main one so just can you refresh people on what that is and and by the way like what you witnessed with that too oh it's insane so captagon is this

it's kind of kind of like a speed it's very popular in the middle east it's it's sort of the the um the club drug in in gulf countries where they're not the you know it's harder to get alcohol but they the kids love their captagon kids and joey the kids and what i my what i got to witness was uh was just the crazy trafficking that took place along the borders. Syria, along the frontier with Jordan, it's all kind of drug country. And so you have these big organized convoys, sometimes 100 vehicles, would punch across the border into Jordan and then kind of fan out with drugs, just truckloads of drugs to smuggle into Jordan and from Jordan to other places. You know, Israel has a problem with it.

Gulf countries are just getting tons of Syrian Captagon. So it was a huge problem for the whole region. And it was basically set up because Assad and his generals needed income. They couldn't tax people anymore because there's no tax base left. And so they became drug lords. So it's directly attributable to Assad. It's not like one of those things where he knows what's going on

but he's not really a part of it? His brother was a guy named Mahar, ran the 4th Army Division and the reason for existing was supposed to be mules for these drug production companies. And we was – part of my reporting on this is we identified individual factories, places where they were making this stuff. How did you find that?

So we had some help on the ground. Some of the Syrian opposition groups that are around would help us kind of locate places. And then we would use really good satellite mapping. You can see the trucks coming in and out you can see where the um where the places are and then we went to our intel friends and say we think these are essentially drug hubs and we would get confirmation that way but it was it was incredible it's a huge network of of factories that did nothing but make drugs and they're all along um these valleys east of them or west of Damascus between Damascus and Lebanon and their

tunnels moving the stuff into Lebanon just just a crazy infrastructure that came around or built around this one drug yeah do you ever get worried about obviously it seems like this is a really good case because you've actually seen some of the traffic with your own eyes but do you ever get worried about some of these places where you actually can't go like even you because they're literally in the middle of like an ongoing war and then you have to get confirmation from people about some of these places where you actually can't go, like even you, because they're literally in the middle of like an ongoing war. And then you have to get confirmation from people who may be biased to have a certain confirmation go one way or the other in the case of like any intel agent in any country that you may be working with. Yeah. So that's why I have to be really careful

with the reporting because you're right. There are people who want to promote a certain side of the story. In this case, we ended up getting real good help from the Jordanians who don't like to talk about this because it's a bad look for Jordan to have a drug problem coming across the border. So for a long time, they just tried not to talk about it. They wouldn't answer questions about it. But they came so concerned because it was such a problem that I got escorts up to the border. From the Mukavarat?

From the, actually from the armed forces, from the Jordanian Defense Forces. And we had to put on our helmets and body armor to go up there because it's a free fire zone in some cases. Depends on the time of year, it's sometimes worse than others. If it's crappy weather, tends to be more because they have to take advantage of fog or cloud cover to come across. But it's – they were sending drones. They were just any way to get drugs across and would get into fights with Jordanians all the time. So it would be firefights breaking out along the border, people getting killed on both sides. Doesn't that get weird though because technically these are people who are literally representing the government of a sovereign country,

even though they're drug dealers, and they're getting in a fight with the military guys of another sovereign country? Jordanians don't talk about this, but they actually had airstrikes in Syria, which is a country they're not at war with, but they identified the homes of drug barons or some of the drug uh storage facilities and they they sent aircraft across the border and bombed them so that's that's how concerned they are about it and that changes now well let's see it's interesting in the last two weeks some of the most interesting photos that are coming out of you know people's you know selfies and and phone cameras is is the Captagon they're finding on the ground.

Because I can't tell you how many I've seen just somebody's walking to a warehouse and, my God, it's just mountains of pills. Or along the border with Lebanon, tunnels where trucks are moving stuff across. Tunnels. Tunnels dug through the mountains into different countries. El Chapo style. Yeah. So it's huge business.

It's something, boy, different estimates. And it's really hard to get a real good figure for how much money they were making. But reliably, the regime was making a couple billion dollars a year just from their proceeds off of Captagon and the actual generation of revenue was much greater than that. If there were like airstrikes happening, though, like things got that serious. Again, we obviously didn't hear much about that here. But that's a big deal to me between two countries. How did a war not break out from that? Yeah, just because the Assad government is so kind of besieged. And so just basically just trying to defend whatever is left of it. They're not looking to get into a war with Jordan or anyone else. They just essentially they've put up the put up the fences, they're doing their drug thing, they don't care what anybody else in the world says, don't mind so much if a drug lord gets whacked by the Jordanians because it doesn't affect Bashar and his palace in Damascus. And so they just ignored it. I mean, they put out

a press release, or even better than that, they had a couple of staged, just because they wanted to show the world they were taking it seriously, they had a couple of staged um just because they wanted to show the world they were taking it seriously they had a couple staged drug raids well you could tell it stayed because because they had the cameras there they had the guys coming the trucks going to this oh look we found drugs at this place and you know it'd be a couple of bags and they have a couple photos and serious taking this drug problem seriously and then then the next day it's just they're back to business as normal. I need someone to cue the Eric Adams video of all the places to hide. You ever seen that?

I don't think so. Oh, my God. Alessi, can you pull that up on Twitter? Type in Eric Adams hide drugs on Twitter. Eric Adams back in like 2011 was going through like a dummy bedroom he's like picking stuff up and he's like go down go down a less i'll know where it is go now oh no type in eric adams perfect place instead of hide hide drugs yeah it's great when they're so obviously staged oh it's so funny he's like

and over here you have a knapsack which is a perfect place to hide crack well i must have been friends with marion barry that's um our dc mayor from years ago how is this not coming up go to go to media that's crazy. Or Eric Adams' funny video. I have to get this for people. I can't blue balls people with this. It's hysterical. Oh, yeah, first one. 59 seconds.

Right there. It's actually got really good at hiding stuff. And some of the creative ways they would smuggle out the drugs, one of my favorites was just um if you've seen huge uh rolls of newsprint they like newsprint for newspapers it comes these massive rolls of paper and somebody to figure out a way to hollow it out and just just put pour the drugs the pills into that excellent and this was actually captured in i think a port of salerno in italy um in the beginning people thought, this must be the sort of mafia.

But no, it was Assad and his gang that – Oh, they were teaching the mob how to do it. Said something, some crazy figure, like, I don't know, is in the tens of millions of dollars worth of – So they were good. They were talented drug dealers. They were very good, very good at hiding stuff and had quite an industry just for concealment.

Did he start this like right away after the Civil War broke out or was this something that came up in like 2014, 2015 when shit was really like going south economically? So it became a convenient economic model for them. So it wasn't Assad's idea, but the Captagon had been around for years before that. It was a very niche drug. There wasn't sort of much of an industry for it. And it was mostly people around him, particularly his brother, Mahar, who becomes kind of the drug kingpin, and his, you know, other cronies within the government and also just organized criminal gangs that become part of it too. So he built this whole infrastructure that Assad would always say he knew nothing about. He had no idea what people were talking about with this drug thing, but his entire government

was running it. And that was very, very clear to everyone. I don't think he knew anything. He was so high, he didn't know what was going on. That's right. He was sitting in his castle. He can't control what everyone does on the street. It's just his country. A little bit of drugs, little chemical weapons. That's not under his purview, Joby. I love that too. I mean, just the hypocrisy, the chemical weapons thing where they've used and documented so many times. And to the day that he left office, he would continuously say that we'd never, never, ever used chemical weapons once. He had to acknowledge that they made them, but he'd never admitted ever using them. And that was their line and they stuck to it the whole time.

Yeah, this is actually one of those situations where we see other stories being planted on this particular one. Because by the way, your book, Redline, went through the entire ordeal of the chemical weapons aftermath and what happened and then how they got rid of this afterwards and all the people that were involved. I'm sure some of that will come up right now. But link in description, by the way, if people want to check that out. But, you know, we see intel agencies around the world, including ones that are supposed to be the good guys, do terrible things throughout history. And we'll call that out every time the CIA has got a litany of things, including probably whacking a president of the United States when he was sitting in office. But one of the stories that has been really pushed over the past five, 10 years is that it was the CIA who did the chemical weapons attack and not Bashar al-Assad because they wanted him out of there and this is actually one of those that when i've looked at the evidence it seems to me like this would be you know everyone always blames things on like russian plant stories which

most of the time is not true this might be one of those that would make sense to try to say like oh no it was not assad who did it because they need assad in power there so let's just blame the americans on it when the americans were actually part of the people who were in this case trying to dispose of it out of the country afterwards and technically not overthrow him. Not that they didn't want to see that happen maybe at some point, but like they didn't do it back then. Yeah. So the Russians really had Assad's back on chemical weapons attack took place in the suburbs of Damascus using Syrian munitions fired from positions that Syria occupied into rebel-held territory, killed by U.S. estimates about 1,400 people.

Sarin gas. Sarin gas. So this is like the worst nerve agent. It's so deadly that a couple of drops will kill you. And because of the sort of the lay of the land where the attack took place, all that gas, which is heavier than air, settles into bunkers and basements where women and children, families are seeking shelter against an artillery barrage, and just caused massive death and destruction. So that was so egregious and created such an outcry that Russia

said to its buddy Assad, well, look, we've got to do something about this. So acknowledge that you made chemical weapons and we're going to have you publicly give them up and have them all destroyed and the whole world will watch this and we'll redeem you because you're getting rid of the drugs. He didn't get rid of all of them. He continued to use chemical weapons even after that disarmament. And after 2013, Russia just continuously defended, covered up, went to the United Nations to stop investigations,

to stop censure, you know, and would repeat through its official mouthpieces, but also online with bots and Twitter campaigns, pushing back against every suggestion that Assad could have had any complicity in this use of a weapon of mass destruction. And none of that, you know, there's multiple investigations by independent investigators that have looked at the evidence and have shown incontrovertibly that this was an Assad war crime. And the Russians have helped try to cover it up and to make sure he wasn't accountable for it. And that's just been a tragedy. Well, let's run through that here because you did an investigation on it. And obviously, there's people who always have questions on things like this, and I fully understand that. So what was the incontrovertible evidence cases have been made are the ones that come a little bit later because that's when OPCW, which is essentially the Chemical Weapons Watchdog, it's an international organization that investigates chemical weapons. They were in the country and they would go to these places just to kind of gather evidence right after the fact.

And they would find, you know, here's the airplane, here's the Syrian jet that dropped the munition. Here's the call letters for the jet. Here's the air traffic transmissions that we collected. Here's the ordinance that was dropped as part of Syria's, you know, known arsenal and dropped by an airplane and nobody else has planes flying in Syria except for the government. The rebels don't have an air force. You know, Americans aren't flying, you know, these Russian and Syrian-made helicopters. So just all the kind of claims that this was some kind of plant or false flag operation just become ludicrous. And the other thing, and this is true for the 2013 attack too, when groups have been able to collect the actual samples of the chemicals that were used and do forensic analysis, that kind of analysis is very good these days. You can tell the DNA.

It doesn't have DNA. It's not a living thing. But you can tell where the chemical was made, what kind of constituents. You can. You can tell what isotopes, you know the the isotopes of the water that was used in the mix and where that water came from it's very very specific who were the people collecting this so those groups and this case was opcw and after the 2013 attack they went to the scenes of the places where the attack took place they collected yeah

this is the chemical watchdog group the organization Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And they went to these villages around Damascus, obtained the shells still on the ground with some of the liquid in it. And they have all their equipment and their masks and things, and they that they gave up, and show this exact typical match for the things that Syria admitted making. So the only way they could plausibly be someone else would be that somebody came in, stole some of their material, and stole their munitions, and attacked from their army positions um and and and to this day syria has never acknowledged any chemical weapons getting out of its hands it's never acknowledged anyone stole anything or um but that would make them look weak if they did it's true that would make it weak if did but but now you're getting a point where it's so all the evidence is pointing one way yes there's no evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

No one has ever been able to indicate that Syrian rebels had this stuff or used it anywhere else or had the capability to make it. It's really hard to make good sarin, the kind of stuff they used. Well, I think this could be one of those situations. I just try to look at these logically when I can because this is what we do. We have the conversation. People at home are going to decide what they want. But the people, I think, with more of in these types of situations, the negative side on it, like, oh, no, in this case, like, oh, CIA did it. They're looking at something that maybe could be a 1% chance and they're extrapolating it out to 100 because they feel like the other side says, no, it's 100% chance that that didn't happen. You see what I'm saying?

All the time. And so when I look at this, I agree. I think it sounds extremely implausible. But is it possible that you could have had some sort of long-term operation in place where you had insiders go rogue who were perhaps paid off or on the take undercover for CIA. And I asked that because we are talking about the same country here that the highest level known spy who ever got caught, Ellie Cohen, was able to, obviously it was decades before, but in the early 1960s infiltrate and become, he was about to become the number three guy in the whole country and he was an Israeli spy. So is it possible that in this case, I think people talk more about like the Americans with this one. Is it possible that something like that

could have happened that would have therefore pointed the finger in that direction? Well, you got to think too, did the Americans want to get involved in this? And they didn't. I mean, the CIA was operating in Syria in the early days just to try to figure out which rebel groups are good guys, who can we give arms to. We did not want to have FAPUTS on the ground. We did not want to get involved militarily when there was this moment after that chemical weapons attack of 2013 when Obama wanted to have a military strike. He went to Congress to say, let's – we're going to have this military strike to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. Congress, will you come with me and support me on this? It was like 420 to 980.

Congress said no. So the last thing the Americans public wanted was another war in the Middle East. It's the last thing that the Obama administration wanted. And I could tell you from many conversations with CIA, they had no desire to be dragged into this. Nobody wanted to precipitate an engagement with the Syrians. There's just no logical reason for it. Yeah, that is, we talked about this part last time, but that is one thing I do think Obama deserves credit for because he had made this really stupid comment about, what's the name of your book? You know, that's a red line if they use any weapons, and then they did. So it was either, I'm going to look really stupid by saying, oh, well, we're not going to do anything

about it, even though I said I would, or I'm going to get us into another war that I literally campaigned on not getting us into. And to his credit, there was, and you reported this in your book, there were ways that he could have done certain attacks that would have certainly led to war without going to Congress. But he, I guess, removed his pride for a minute and said, I'll send it to Congress. And apparently he thought Congress would like support him. And they didn't. But like credit to that for at least doing it the right way because we would have gotten boots on the ground

and had a whole new Iraq in that scenario. Not that things are good right now, but like I think that would have have been even worse, you know, especially from an American centric perspective. Last place in the world you want to have US troops. And you're right, this was definitely eating crow for Obama, because he'd kind of, he really kind of put his foot in it when he said red line, it was just a throwaway line at a news conference, but it sort of backed him into a corner. Everybody thought he was going to have to use military force. And I do think he thought he was going to get Congress to support him, and then they just said no way. The one thing he did accomplish, and that's just really part of what the book is about, is since he – in return for not striking Syria, we got this deal, which was to get dismantled this program. And we didn't get everything, obviously. Assad didn't give up all his chemical weapons, but he got rid of most of

them. And more importantly, inspectors went in there with machines and heavy equipment and demolished all his factories, just took them apart. And so what had been Syria's most important strategic weapon is chemical weapons arsenal. He gave up 90% of what he had means you got the meal cooked so you can deductively reason how it's cooked. And then if we think we got whatever percentage, even 99% of any factory space, what if you miss the one little bunker where they still do this? Doesn't that give him the ability to produce it at mass scale? So he could, in theory, make some in the future. But what happens when the inspectors come in is they spent months interviewing the scientists who made this stuff, going to each of the factories where it was made, getting kind of inventories of the crap that was coming in and where the production took place, where it was stored. So there's like the Syrians had pretty good records for most of it. And so they were able to kind of trace the whole kind of chain of custody of all this stuff.

And if there were hidden factories someplace, they certainly were not significant in creating the arsenal that Assad had. Because we knew what factories actually made the sarin, and those places were taken down. And, you know, I spent a lot of time with the guys who were on the ground going to each one of those places and just browbeating the Syrians until they kind of fessed up to what they did. And then you could see these wonderful videos and selfies of the bombs being just crushed with bulldozers or sarin being, in this case, kind of taken onto a boat and then taken out to sea where it was destroyed. Yeah, that's a crazy process.

Actually, the Americans built a chemical weapons destruction factory that had never existed before and put it on a boat, which is the last place in the world you want to have something like that, and destroyed 1,400 tons of the stuff in the middle of the Mediterranean. Yeah. Within your book, that whole part is – from the entertainment factor, it's not the highest within this book, but it is so fascinating how they did that and all the things like the physics they had to take into account literally like in the middle of the mediterranean like just barely in international waters with all this fucking chemical weaponry that if put in the wrong hands or leaked anywhere could cause a massive international incident crazy story and they had protesters from europe who were like on on a flotilla of boats trying to find them and stop them.

They had – because this had never been done before, they weren't quite sure about the kind of the weight of the boat and how over time there'd be so much waste from the destruction that the ship might capsize. And they get back to shore and they figured out, well, the boat probably should have capsized about two weeks ago and somehow we made it. So it's a hair-raising story about what kind of the American ingenuity that went into destroying that stockpile and how we almost didn't succeed at it. Yeah. Now, when you say we knew where they were, we had gotten that information, how did – did you ever find out like how we uncovered that? Was that all just using like massive data sets on satellite imagery or were there sources on the ground like you said some of them were like you know fessed up to at least some of it but before it sounded like you meant before even we got that we knew where a lot of these things were yeah and that's an important story i think to tell because the way way we understood why we understood sirius program and

where things were and what they made is because we had one of the best spies in the world working for us inside their operation. And so in the start of the book, there's a story about this Syrian chemist who was actually trained in the United States. He'd gone to the United States on a scholarship as a kid. So he really liked Americans. And lo and behold, when he grew up and became a scientist, he went to work making sarin for Assad. That was his job. That's what we trained him for. That's what we trained him for. He had a really good chemistry degree.

That's right. And so he went to work in Syria and started making this stuff for a living. And at some point in the 80s, he decided that he needed to tell the Americans what he was doing. And there's complicated reasons. He ended up getting a lot of money for us, for one thing. So he got financially rewarded quite a lot. But over 14 years, this is a long time to run a spy, he would pass information to the Americans about what the Syrians were making and how much and where they were making it, and even gave them samples. And one of the reasons we had such a really good idea of what Syria's sarin looked like, because he gave us

some. He actually handed it over to a CIA officer at his house one day in the middle of Damascus, said, you know, here's a little present for you. It's Christmas time. A little bit of sarin for you to take home. And there was this whole operation where they had to smuggle it out of the country, send it back to the U.S. for testing. But the Americans knew everything about Syria's program before the war started by a long shot. And the spy, the poor guy who helped us, ends up betraying himself. He trips up during an interrogation. He's getting asked about some corruption that he was involved in.

And he thinks that his bosses are coming after him because they found out he'd been spying. So he confessed to the whole thing. And he was taken out, back, and shot, basically. And so that was the end of our spy. But for 14 years, it was one of the most sensitive operations in the intelligence community. It was so secret that not even the White House was getting regularly briefed on it. And it was because they just didn't want anybody else to find out about this super secret spy they had. You know, I get that. I understand the world is a very gray place and

that spy craft is incredibly secretive. The slippery slopes though, of literally the president of the United States not getting read in on something that highly sensitive though, is pretty wild. Yeah. Do you ever think about that? I do. And sometimes it's just that, well, president's got a lot of things on this plate this is not at a point where we feel it's it's relevant for him to have to know this but you do wonder what else the president is it is it told about because you know was it 20 000 people work for the cia they're all doing interesting things and you know that a lot of those uh those operations aren't aren't briefed until it comes to a point where they have to brief them so that's that's just the way it works yeah

this is the stuff that keeps me up at night though because I think about it because it's like I get it you gotta live in a secretive world but we see what that what happens when that goes wrong yeah because then you have effectively unelected people making the hardest decisions on yeah behalf of the American people that in some cases are objectively very, very bad. And they may think, well, there's a reason behind a reason behind a reason that, you know, we know here. Yeah. And that's, and that's always usually the case. It's, it's not, you know, one thing you get to understand about intelligence when you,

when you really get to know people is they're very, you know, ordinary. I mean, they have, you know, I live in suburban Washington. All around me are people that work in intelligence jobs. I mean, people in my swimming pool, you know, I have the community pool. Some of them are, you know, they work for the intelligence community. And so they're essentially guys trying to do a job and their interest for the most part is trying to figure out ways to protect us from things that we don't even know about and think about.

But that is a big responsibility, and sometimes they can do things. They can build things that the White House may or may not be cleared on. So that's where it starts to get into that slippery slope territory. And we've certainly seen in the past where CIA decided, well, this leader of this country should go. Yes. And we're going to help get rid of him because we think he's bad for us, not because he's bad for the people in that country necessarily, but he's bad politics or bad strategically for the United States. And so they'll help support a coup. And that's happened so many times in our past. That's right. So, you know, you do wonder sometimes that

the ability to do things doesn't necessarily mean that you should do them. And if there's no oversight, there's nobody looking over their shoulder to say, well, this may not be a good idea. You should think twice about this. Then, you know, that's a problem. And that's why I understand where some of these conversations start with people like, oh, did the CIA do this? You know, I try to live on the best evidence we can get. And that's why I like good reporting where people really dig into it. And, you know, nothing's ever a thousand percent, but like you get as close as you can. And I try to look at things empirically on a case by case basis, because what happens is we've developed these emotions towards organizations like CIA

based on some of the things that they have provably done in the past, like overthrowing governments that shouldn't have been overthrown and causing wars that shouldn't happen. What that doesn't mean is that every single time something like this happens in the future, it's them. The world can be both things at a different time. And the problem with CIA is they don't tell their own story sometimes is one of the problems. They do so many things that help us that they can't talk about. operation against North Korea or some kind of jamming or cyber information to stop an Iranian plot. And or an example that I think listeners will really appreciate is the Taylor Swift concert that was almost attacked in Vienna over the summer. This past summer. This past summer,

there was a big concert planned in Vienna. And there was an ISIS plot to have a terrorist attack on the concert. And the American CIA helped to thwart that, so it never happened. Do you know how they did this? A lot of it still hasn't come out. We're working on that story. I can say that we're actually working on it pretty hard right now to kind of give – we have to be careful because obviously there are operational details that we'll probably never know. And it wouldn't be necessarily in our interest to know exactly how, you know, what source provided the tip. Because if we report that there is an informant in a certain town and describe him, then that person could be targeted and killed.

So that's something we wouldn't want to happen. Sure. could be targeted and killed. So that's something we wouldn't want to happen. But just the fact that something of that magnitude was planned, and think about the casualties that could have resulted from an attack, and how that was thwarted, that was just pretty extraordinary. And again, the CIA has, there's been only one public mention, just a throwaway line by a CIA official at a speech who kind of said, well, that concert, that thwarting of that plot, that was us. But that's all that's been said publicly about it. So we don't know exactly how they found out.

Is that how you first got a hold of it being a story, just that throwaway line? We had heard things indirectly from others. And that throwaway line was the confirmation that, yeah, this is something. This is the Americans were deeply involved in this. And we found out since then that there have been other countries were involved too. There was sort of like a, there are several close allies that we share a lot of stuff with. And this is one of those that kind of got bounced around into several different countries and people were looking at the evidence to see what we might do or how, you know, how serious it was and it turned out to be a fairly significant plot with

like four or five different actors and ice you said it's ice is inspired isis was communicating with people um i we think isis was involved in the choice of target because huge high profile american entertainer um at a at a at a massive concert that was planned from europe in europe and it would have been if you can imagine if it had been successful you know how we'd still be talking about that now are we talking about bombs talking about there are bombs and there are other things and it's um and again this is part of the reconstruction work that we've been working on and i won't say more than that because it's a competitive story. But we think, yeah, there's a lot to it. And the individuals who were involved, at least one of them, was radicalized because of Gaza.

He was watching stuff going on in the Middle East and thinking that he wanted to act out in some way. And so guys like that are very susceptible to messages from people like isis that say look you have to you have to take action you have to you know take a stand against this stuff when you say something like we had heard about this indirectly obviously without revealing direct sources or things like that that would get you in trouble can you just explain what that what that means when you say that? Sometimes it's like a – it can start out as a secondhand conversation that somebody will say, look, this guy is my friend. I'm friends with somebody who's working on this case, and I can't tell you much about it. I can't – he won't tell me much about it, but I can tell you that there's something going on here.

And if I were you, I'd look into this. This is really, so that's how these things get started. Sometimes it's very indirect. CIA doesn't put out press releases saying that, you know, we did this, that, and the other. They never put out press releases about much of anything. They're very, you know, they're very self-contained in terms of- CIA secretive? Come on. I used to cover them, which was like the hardest beat in the world because, you know, if you cover Pentagon or State Department, there are like whole teams of press people. And all they do is like put out press releases or provide information.

You call them with a question. They send somebody to research it. They get back to you with an answer if they can. It doesn't happen like that with CIA. The most they can do most of the time is to steer you away from something that's just wrong. They give you a guest pass at Langley? Yeah, well, if you go there, yeah, they do.

Well, if you go for visits and meetings and, you know, if you cover the agency, you do get to go, you know, for briefings sometimes, if you can arrange one, if you can make an argument that look, I'm working on a story about chemical weapons and here's what I've found and I'd love to have a discussion with your folks who are interested in this subject that sometimes can lead to a to a meeting and it's a very i must say a

very cool place to visit um because you walk in the door and first thing you see is this this huge cia seal that's on the floor it's part of every movie that's ever made about CIA. It's this big seal. And then on the wall is this big display of stars. Each star for each CIA officer who was killed in the line of duty. And some are named, and some have names that are forever withheld

because they had secretive jobs and their identity was secret. So it's just like a blank space on the book next to them. But behind all that is this one of the coolest museums that you'll ever see in your life if you have the privilege of seeing it. And that's not many people. But CIA basically has its collection of stuff from 50 years of operations around the world.

And it's everything from somebody's you know communication device hidden in a pen or in a shoe or something during the cold war times to um literally osama bin laden's gun that was hanging on the wall of his house in obatabad when when the seals broke in and there it is right there where you can you can see it and so all the swag and all the cool stuff that they've gotten from operations around the world is is in this little spy museum and that's the stuff they can show you that's the stuff they can't show you right there's there are there's things that are hinted about on the display that just you just wish you could get the whole story for yeah so you were you were literally on like it was called the cia beat yeah yeah or intelligence people call it but that's sort of the cia is the

main the main agency we cover there's like here there's like the mushrooms here again feeding shit keeping in the dark let's go you know it's it's it's intimidating for somebody who's coming to it cold as i did in 27 2007 when i first got the job oh what a year i know i know it's unbelievable because that was all the all the stories that the cia didn't want to talk about at all, like black side prisons. Oh, I just had John Kiriakou in here for six and a half hours. Yeah. In fact, I dealt with John when his story broke.

Yeah. But yeah, that was not a time of warm relations with the CIA and the press. But yeah, it is such a fortress in terms of trying to get information and try to understand what they're doing that it takes a long time to get to the point where you feel like you have a handle on it. And until that point, you just feel completely lost. One of the things I cite all the time in different podcasts, just always comes up as a conversation we had on camera and then off camera the first time we recorded My Parents' House back in episode 134. But I think it was like 55 minutes in or something like that. We were talking about the tough conversations that happen when you're working on a story

that's sourced however it's sourced and you go to get the statements from the relevant parties, which include the security officials like at CIA and stuff like that and you hear on the other line okay something like okay what you're reporting on there's some at least some accuracy there but if you report this it's a national security problem and people are going to die yeah and you have to go back into the conference room as a team and make a decision you know with whatever information you have as to whether or not you're just being told that because they don't want it out or you're being told that because it's true. And I always think about how difficult this must be and like it's very easy for people out there to throw stones from glass houses at guys like you who have to live inside these worlds and do their best reporting it. But it also does mean that like, because of the people you're around, you're going to get great reports out there over the many years you've been doing this, where you source everything correctly. And just statistically, something's wrong. Yeah. Because

there's lies. And even if you source it from like, you talked about sourcing it from like 10 different intelligence agencies, sometimes, you know, who knows what they might actually be lined up on for something, you know? And you're right. There is this kind of excruciating moment when you, you know, you know the facts because you've got, you've done your homework, you know, what's, what really happened. You get, try to get comment as we always do. We, out of fairness, you sort of give the person that you're writing about or the agency that you're writing about a chance to respond. And when they come back and say, well, if you report this, you're going to cause a world of problems and this and this and this.

And then you have to go back to, like you say, go back and talk to your boss about, okay, are they just trying to prevent us from writing about something that's embarrassing? And it's a tough call sometimes. We do feel we have responsibility as good journalists and just as good Americans. We don't want to see people get killed or hurt because of our reporting. It's not worth that. On the other hand, we feel it's very important that citizens of the country

know what the government is doing in their name. And that's why this reporting is important, because that kind of scrutiny and oversight is fundamental for a democracy. We can't have people, you know, who are using our taxpayer dollars and doing things in our name, doing things that are illegal or criminal or harmful to Americans and our interest. So that's the balance that we have to try to strike. And I just have to say that the press gets bashed a lot and a lot of criticism is justified. But the folks who work hard to try to present factual information,

we don't make stuff up. We don't put stuff out on Twitter that's just like secondhand, made-up garbage that's being recycled. There's a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work that goes into trying to confirm what's true and what's important. And that's how we spend our days. Yeah. And I think it's a good point because like I said, I like to find the good in things and you're right. There's a lot of reason for people to not have faith in mainstream journalism these days. To be honest with you, I think a lot of that – you have colleagues. You're a guy who doesn't want to get into controversy with stuff like that.

So I don't want you to have to say anything or whatever. But when you look at any of these major publications, Washington Post, New York Times, any of the big traditional ones, a lot of the drama comes from the people who are reporting specifically on like domestic policies with a clear agenda. And the American people then – and I understand this. And I'll catch myself doing it sometimes too. They extrapolate that to absolutely everything. So what I do my best in in this job is to read reports on their own merits wherever they're from. I read everything across the spectrum. And when I see shit that's good, I don't care where it comes from, you know, because I do know like even within places that get villainized now, there's some people doing great work.

And that's what, you know, that's what we try to find here. That's why I bring you on here. But it's a difficult place to be because I think guys like you deal with the stuff that's way more important because all these types of geopolitical problems, they exist before any presidents get there and they exist after they leave. Absolutely. Right? And the organizations who are behind it on our end and on the other side of it, we know that's the truth there. So trying to get some level of truth or reporting, bringing light to those stories where it's relevant to do it, guys like you have a really big responsibility like that. Yeah. And it is a responsibility and it's also in a way a kind of a privilege

to be able to ask questions. And that's what sets the profession apart a little bit. People online can speculate about things. Often their knowledge or even their ability to go to the source and ask the question, was this real or not? People don't typically take the time to do that. They just kind of put out their opinion. People in my line of work, we go to the sources and we ask hard questions. And sometimes we get it wrong, and often it's because the person we're speaking to is spinning the information and we perhaps didn't take enough time to sort of check multiple sources to get it right. I look at journalism in a way kind of like the scientific process,

where scientists attack a problem, they gather evidence, they come up with theories and argue their theories, but it's a self-correcting process. So if you get something completely wrong, if you're wrong about theory of gravity or, you know, sort of the expansion speed of the universe, over time more data comes in and it kind of corrects the mistake. Agreed.

And journalists, at least good ones, reputable ones, if you get something wrong, you get challenged. You get challenged by readers. Your editors will come and say, well, we think that you made a mistake there. You can't just pretend you didn't. You have to go back and do the reporting to see if you screwed up. And if you did, you have to write a correction and the whole world sees that you screwed up. So that's our process and that's our self-correction. And despite the fact that we get things wrong, we are accountable at least internally and we have to own up when we screw up. And that makes us different from people who are just kind of tweeting their observations online without ever having to be confronted with, you know, knock on wood, we've kind of reached that point where there's a little bit of a recognition there that like the ecosystem has changed to where you will have people in independent media who more people are gravitating towards right now. Maybe they don't do everything

fully by like what they might teach in journalism school, but they're doing good work and mainstream outlets are going to have to be economically incentivized to keep up with that, which could help with some of the, I don't know, backroom politicking that's happened within that entire spectrum for a long time now. But it's like you're getting at, it's never black and white. There's a lot of gray there. There's weird things that go on. Of course, there's money involved in stories and within politics. It's just how it is. But we might be able to – I do feel like some things are changing a little bit. I've kind of had that feel over the past year, and I hope I'm right about that. Yeah, and that's a good impulse.

To echo something that you were getting at too, the important thing if you want to be an informed consumer and not just kind of repeat crap that you might see or read, is to check multiple sources. Yes. And don't, even if you, wow, that sounds like it's very plausible and probably real and it just makes sense to me. Everything is a lot more complicated if you start to dig into it. So don't just trust one source. Look into it from different angles. Try different points of view.

And try to find sort of the original source material documentation that proves it one way or another. Don't just kind of rely on easy answers just because it's an answer that you feel comfortable with. Yeah, that's why we got 305 sources. That's right. In the back of our headline right here. That's what we like to see. I'm one of these psychos, like when I get a book, I do read the bibliography. I go through it just to be like, oh, a little light, 100 in this this one i do want to see that there's real backing that goes into it rather than someone just writing brilliantly and making it sound good it's a pain in the butt to do footnotes but it is so important for credibility absolutely absolutely but on to a side we we've been talking about the chemical

weapons and the whole story you told in red line and the aftermath of all that but as you were saying the you know in in your reporting the cia and the u.s military did not want to get involved in like starting a war there so they have this consolation prize where they go to destroy at least most of these facilities and weapons we were talking we got into this because we were saying they didn't destroy quite all of them but they got a lot of it to the point that it was rendered not nearly as useful for him as it had been. But this now leads to – because those attacks were like 2013. So this leads to the period where he starts getting into the drug dealing to economically prop himself and his government up with what they can. And at the same time, the civil war is in full blown. So the country that he used to control, like what, I don't know if this is putting you on the spot a little bit, but in like 2015, like what percentage of the country does Assad

have legit, you know, police on the ground that's like running his society versus what percentage he doesn't have that? Yeah, in 2015, it was a fairly small part of the country, to be honest. It was Damascus and that string of cities, you know, homes had been fought over back and forth, but different sides, the seacoast, the Takia and Tartus, because the Russian presence, because that was probably the moment of greatest danger for Assad because people were kind of betting it was going to fall. And people were betting on what country he was going to go to to get asylum. And the only reason that he was able to survive is because Russia and Iran came to his rescue and decided it was more important to them to have Assad stick around than it was to everybody else to try to get rid of him. And they dug in. They invested their own military hardware and in Iran's case, fighters on the ground to make sure he stayed. And after that commitment, after the Russians really got involved, slowly and surely he just won back more and more of the country until there was nothing left except

Kurdish Eastern Syria and this little province, which was HTS and Turkish-backed fighters in the Northwest. Which is who we were talking about at the beginning. He's like in charge now. And I just, I've just been so fascinated by the story of how that little rump republic that was created just got busted out and took over the whole country. And they planned it for years. They made weapons with 3D printers.

They were making weapons with 3D printers? They built much of their arsenal with little, well, it's not exactly low-tech, but with means like that. There are tons of guns and rifles around like that. But a good chunk of their military capability came from things like 3D printers and then smuggled stuff. Fucking them and Luigi Mangione over here. Totally, yeah. It's just a way to go.

And the other thing they figured out was the drones, which is something that Assad never really invested money in. They didn't really need drones. But these guys got hundreds of them, and they got a lot of them from the Ukrainians. Actually, the Ukrainians ended up giving them something like 200 of these kind of first-person view drones. So we did. Well, yeah, we did, exactly. And they even had Ukrainians, the reporting I've seen,

come over to Syria to help train them on how to use them. Oh, my God. And so when these guys kind of bust out of Idlib, this little province where they are on November 27, the Syrians just didn't know what hit them. They suddenly were getting attacked by suicide drones left and right, and they've got these very capable soldiers with night vision goggles and really good weapons, and they just overran the Syrians. Just the government of Assad just collapsed in the front of this.

That's interesting. Assad allied with Putin. Ukraine, not allied with Putin. US giving weapons to Ukraine saying this is what they're supposed to be used for, allegedly. But Ukraine going in the middle of their whole war which is a very real war they're fighting right now giving it to these groups to fight to fight the war now in syria effectively create a proxy war of their own as a way to kind of 3d chess it was a way to mess with with putin and they and then putin's been humiliated in this yeah the iranians and and and the russians both have been they've lost their most important strategic asset in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Now, why did Iran ally – because Iran is like strict Shia Muslim run by a cleric and Assad is not that.

No. Right? Like was there any sectarian issue with them doing this or are they like everyone else, which they have beliefs up and until they have to talk about money yeah well so the Alawites are a different sect but still falls within Shia oh they do it's it's it's an offshoot of Shia um Islam so they were close enough and you know they would they would consider if you tried to be an Alawite in Iran you'd be seen as a heretic but you're still part of the same family in a region where almost all the governments are Sunni Muslims. So the Jordanians are Sunni, there's almost no Shia there. The Lebanese are kind of mixed, but there's, you know, but so the Sunnis are dominant in the region. So this was the one country where they had

kind of a kinship in terms of religion, but also just a historic relationship that just became very, very close. And, um, yep. Iran put boots on the ground. They, they had soldiers killed in Syria.

As far, like as early as when? As early as 2014 and really 2015 where it started when the battle of Aleppo, uh, it was Hezbollah, but it was Iranian forces who came into, it's mostly kind of their special operations guys. And, um, and they, they helped, uh, but it was Iranian forces who came into. It was mostly kind of their special operations guys,

and they helped push the rebels out of Aleppo, which is Syria's biggest city. Okay, I want to come back to Iran because we're really getting on some of these territories that are happening right now that I want to talk with you about before we're finished today. But to finish, I guess go through the Syria story that got us to today. So al-Assad, help from Russia, help from Iran, becomes drug dealer, spends the rest of the 2010s doing that into the turn into the 2020s. He's losing a lot of control of geographically of the country, but he still has military under his control and some local officials and stuff like that. My understanding is that as some of these, and correct me if I'm wrong here, as some of these rebel groups have gained more power, particularly over the last year,

they've gone to areas where the local police and the local military guys will put down their weapons and be like, I'm not being paid enough for this shit. And so effectively they were able to bite off just enough edges that eventually the foundation cracked they attack aleppo the second largest city on the 27th they take it in three days and then pretty soon they're on a straight shot to damascus and assad just crumbled yeah yeah it was unbelievable and again three days before this the fall of damas, people still didn't think it was going to happen. People still didn't think the rebels were going to succeed. Was Assad just in his castle chilling?

He was – we've heard so many different views about this, how dire they saw the situation. I know that by midweek of the week that Damascus fell, his people were really alarmed. They were alarmed because they could see their forces just collapsing in the face of the attacks from these rebels. So they saw that there was at least going to be, they were going to lose control of much of the Syrian heartland. And that happened pretty quickly. But as you mentioned, there are these other groups like in the south, along the Syrian Jordanian border, there's this group called the Druze, and they're kind of another of these interesting kind of mixes of different belief systems. But the Druze are very tribal. They hated Assad for a very long time.

They'd kind of stood down, didn't exactly disarm, but they'd kind of gone underground with their opposition to Assad. Until they saw these rebels from the north become as successful, then suddenly everybody picks up weapons again and just push out the police in local towns. Often, as you say, the local cop would just, you know, well, I'm not going to fight you guys. I'm just going to quit or join with you. And this thing kind of snowballed and cascaded until groups of multiple directions were ascending on Damascus at the same time. What were you thinking? First of all, how did you find out about the November 27 thing? Did you find that out before it was happening or like right as it was happening? Who told you? It was right as it was happening and nobody really took it that seriously at first because it felt

like, you know, every now and then these have been fairly stable lines in the north, like between the government forces and these rebel groups. And there'd be a skirmish or somebody would lob some mortar shells. And so you'd see that kind of thing all the time. And every now and then, a little bit more of a more significant flare up. We thought it was just that. We first heard about HDS fighting against Syrian forces. It seemed at first to be in retaliation

to some attacks from the Assad side. They'd sort of attacked a school or some provocation. But then the next thing you know, it's like, oh, wait a second, they've kind of broken through the lines. And oh, wow, they're in Aleppo now. And wait a second, they've just taken over what used to be the country's largest city before it was destroyed.

And they're in control. And the speed with which Aleppo fell shocked us but also made us realize that this was different. This is something that had not happened in a decade. This is something quite new in terms of this change of lines and sudden momentum by the rebel side. What about all the hardest line guys, those Billy Bat guys around Assad? Where were they in all this? Because they're not the ones that were necessarily giving up their weapons as this is happening. That's happening at lower levels.

But where are like the hardliner torture and chiefs, if you will? What we've seen has been this miraculous, the wrong word for it, but just remarkable um migration to lebanon into hezbollah-controlled territories something like 7 000 um you know syrians in a very compressed period of time just ran the hell across the border and and um and pled for safety and hezbollah granted it so people from i mentioned um ass's brother, Mahar, his army division, they're some of the worst of the worst. They've dropped their guns and ran to Lebanon, a lot of them. And others are, you know, the ones that are getting, it's been interesting that the HDS guys have said to ordinary rank and file Syrian troops, sort of the soldiers who are fighting for Assad,

if you put down your arms and you don't oppose us, if you're just like a normal soldier, we're going to leave you alone. If you're one of the bosses, if you're running torture chambers, we're going to find you and kill you. And if we don't find and kill you now, we're going to pressure governments for your extradition. Or CNN's going to break you out of prison and bring you across the line. That's right. Those fearless CNN reporters have been kind of – they've had a lot of fun with this, I think. But it's great how they're almost immediately on the ground and in the craziest places trying to interview people. Yeah.

For people who don't know the context there, there was like this – I actually felt bad for him. There was this story where – I forget her name, but the one reporter from CNN was on the ground and they're like videoing her rescuing this man like, thank you, from this prison. And like a day later, people are like, wait, I think this is like Assad's chief torturer. She had to put out a tweet today that was like, I confirm that the man we rescued if you if you're going to surrender somebody you surrender to a cnn reporter moral of the story that guy was a great actor he was a great he knew exactly how to play that role wow because i bought it like you know i'm watching, wow, that poor guy, he's been tortured. Nope. But he looks well-fed for some reason. Yeah, he's not emaciated, but he looks upset.

Oh, my God. That story, actually, it's in Red Line, and it's kind of a tragic ending in just the last few days. But there was a guy who was a Syrian, just a normal Joe who was trying to deliver baby formula to the height of the Civil War war ends up crossing the wrong line, gets picked up by Assad's people, and just tortured brutally for a couple of years. Obama was going to bomb Syria after the chemical weapons thing. Syria decided to round up all these prisoners and bring them to these military bases that they thought were going to get attacked by the Americans. And they just put them in big warehouses. This is August, September. So heat of the summer, really awful conditions in these big hangars, basically.

And they kept them out there for a couple of days. And I met this prisoner and he told me this really heartbreaking story about just laying there on the floor of this hangar and looking at the ceiling and thinking that any minute these American missiles are going to come through and kill them all. And after a few days, Assad gives up and everybody goes back home. But he becomes relevant recently because he got he got away for a while but then he got captured again and he was found in a in a prison hospital and he had died like two or three days before the for the prison was was uh was liberated the same guy same guy he'd been tortured so much that he was just you know his body was a wreck and they they brought him to a prison hospital for recuperation and almost made it to the end, and then he gets killed. I remember that story in your book.

It was an incredible story to hear personally because the guy, sort of the evidence, physical evidence of torture were all over his body, and he'd been abused in the most horrific ways. What kinds of things were they known for doing? Oh, so lots of electric shocks, electrodes connected to genitals, you know, rape with crude instruments.

A lot of things where, you know, you're in a room full of people and you kind of have to vote who gets, who's going to, which of us gets executed tomorrow. So that kind of psychological torture. And it just goes on for years like that. gets executed tomorrow. Um, so that kind of psychological torture, um, and it just, just goes on for years like that. And just people being kind of randomly killed,

um, in prison. And he, he managed to survive it and, and got out, uh, and, and in this crazy circumstance ended up back in Syria and captured again.

Horrible. I'm sure there's a lot of stories like that, unfortunately. And this seems like now we're at the point where all those stories are starting to come out because prisoners getting out of jail, they have been in jail for years in some cases. And like you think of these things that have been going on for a while where you think of these countries in a certain type of way, but we all see the pictures of even older examples. You know, oh, here's an Iranian girl in 1978 at college, right? Oh, here's an iranian girl in 1978 at college right oh here's an afghani girl

at college in 1956 or whatever oh here's someone in syria at a villa chilling you know in 2000 and then it's like in the movies when you see the light and then suddenly it time lapses and everything just goes dark yeah and everything's destroyed and that's what's happened to so many of these countries and now syria is this unfortunately it seems to be like a vacuum yeah again which by the way have you talked to your friend king abdullah about this yet yeah i've talked to him a bit about it and um talk to him on signal well you know just at um by the swimming pool as mentioned right right we're talking about the Jordanian king who Jobi is good friends with. But what's his take on everything? He's been helpful.

And he's a good guy, I must say. He's someone who's tried to, whose head has been the right place in a lot of this stuff. He's my favorite king ever, for sure. He's in the short list of good kings. Yeah. He, it was a really,

it was a difficult situation for Jordan because they've got – Syria is on their border. Yes. And Syria has caused no end of problems since the beginning of the civil wars. Everything from ISIS infiltration, weapons coming across the border, then the drug problem. So it's been a violent situation. It's been awful. At the same time, they kind of felt that they had to somehow work with Bashar. He was there. He was the leader of the country. They didn't have any

choice but to try to have some kind of normalcy with him. So there's been this talk about restoring normal relations, having at least communication back and forth. And so they made a real attempt, and they thought that they could try to peel Bashar away from the Iranians, make him, reform him in some way. So there was a lot of talk about that in the last couple of years, trying to bring Bashar over, make him a responsible leader and help him to reform his country, stop the drug trade. None of it worked, frankly. Bashar made promises he was going to stop drug smuggling. None of it worked, you know, frankly, that the drug, Bashar made promises, he was going to stop drug smuggling, none of it ever happened. So all their hopes of

trying to, you know, bring Bashar over from the dark side, just everything evaporated. And then, you know, the revolution happens, and they're in this situation of not really knowing what to think. I mean, in a way, it's great, good riddance Bashar and your Iranian allies, but now mentioned it in this book and also in some of the articles I've written. This scenario where Assad falls but something even worse comes in and what the Americans called it was the catastrophic success scenario. Catastrophic success scenario. Yeah, where you have – the goal was always to get rid of Assad, so that's success. But you could have a catastrophic success that is so bad that it's actually worse than the thing that you were trying to prevent. Which has been every single thing basically in that region we've done.

The worst thing that can happen is if you have a failed state, that becomes a launch pad for terrorist attacks around the world. So that's kind of what happened in Afghanistan from the 90s to the early 2000s. That was what 9-11 was all about. That's what people are most afraid of. That's why they fear that folks like ATS, despite their good rhetoric and their sort of gestures of moderation, if they turn out to be like the Taliban or like ISIS in some way, even if it's some more moderate form of that, that could have bad implications for everybody. So that's what people are afraid of right now. Now, I've talked about the king a lot on different podcasts. We've mentioned yours,

of course, and some of the things you've dealt with him in the past on. But one of the things that really impresses me about him looking over the past 25 years of his rule is how prescient he's been in predicting what happens next. So you told me what he's worried about right there, but did he give you kind of any definitive like, you know, Joby, if I were a betting man, here's what's probably going to go down? Yeah. I don't think, and I didn't ask him about this specifically, but I talked to people around him about the possibility of Assad falling. And they didn't believe it was going to happen. It seems like no one saw that coming. And so I think they had sort of resigned themselves to being in this situation where it just was going to be continual conflict on their border.

And the best they could do is to try to put up a physical wall, maybe not bricks and mortar, but they have a pretty robust system of concertina wire. I've been up on the border and it's pretty – it's just miles and miles of just barbed wire barriers and ditches and berms and military guard posts. And that was just going to be reality for them for the indefinite future with the sort of overlaying problem of the Iranians doing whatever they wanted to in the region. The Iranians are a real threat for the Jordanians as well, a direct threat to their stability so those that all that stuff going on and then and then you know gaza next door and the west bank and you know if jordan is is 50 palestinian you can you go over there you can just feel the sort of everything from anxiety to rage of what's happening in gaza so his wife's a pal She's Palestinian. She's been very outspoken about some of the things that have happened in Gaza. Queen Raina, right?

Raina, yeah. She's got just a ton of – so much is on his plate. And this is just one more problem that he didn't need. There's a country that doesn't have any natural resources to speak of. It doesn't have oil or natural gas. It's got a very educated population and good relations with the West, including America, and it somehow ekes out a living. But it's a very perilous situation. Now, where is, speaking of elephants in the room, where is Israel in all this? Alessi,

you sent me a video earlier. I don't know if we can play that because it might be graphic, but at least for Joby to see it. What was the name of that bomb they did, Alessi? The earthquake bomb. The earthquake bomb? So Israel is apparently putting earthquake bombs in Syria now. Israel dropped an earthquake bomb on Syria yesterday, 3.1 on the

Richter scale. Beyond 650 airstrikes, Israel dropped an earthquake bomb depicted in this video in northwestern Syria near the city of Tartus, leading to a supposed giant mushroom cloud fireball. The bomb was so powerful that it was measured as a 3.1 magnitude earthquake on the seismic sensor, as strong as the earthquake of that measure. It was the strongest bomb Israel has used over 14 months as the country takes more land in the south and pummels various sites across Syria by air. So my understanding is since this latest war broke out, they've taken some area in the Golan Heights, I guess, preemptively. Like what's the strategy here?

Like what are they thinking? So Israel sees an opportunity here. No, Israel? They would never. Come on. And it's – they've been pretty much striking in Syria whenever they felt like it, when they saw Iranians or Hezbollah doing things. So if they saw, you know, missiles coming in or just new capabilities that Hezbollah or the Iranians were working on, they had the freedom to go after those.

And oddly, in this sort of strange, you know, three-way relationship, the Russians didn't seem to care. The Russians would say, well, it doesn't affect us if you want to attack an Iranian position here and there. So this strange pageant that went on for the last few years, this is different. Israel's seeing an opportunity to preemptively prevent the new government in Syria, whoever it turns out to be, from ever threatening them, or at least in the near future. So they've essentially destroyed the entire Syrian navy, something like, I don't know,

the 17 ships that are kind of blown up and sunk at their moorings on the coast. Destroyed something like 70% of Syria's airplanes, sort of their military aircraft. Are they just doing, and these are through airstrikes? Through airstrikes. And I don't know if there's been sort of standoff missile strikes too.

It's mostly been by air. But sortie after sortie, and it's just they're going after everything that could be militarily viable to Syria. And the new leaders, HDS, is complaining kind of mildly about it, but also saying, we don't want to have a war with anyone. And so it doesn't seem to matter that much to them if all of Assad's military assets get wiped out, which is what's happening systematically. I think when you see those earthquake explosions, this is an indication that Israel sees some kind of underground structure, some kind of deep bunker in which Assad had something. Maybe it's residual chemical weapons, maybe it's some kind of production facility that we don't know about. But Israel sees an opportunity to go after them whether they know what it is or not and just put a dent in everything that Syria is trying to do or anything that a future Syrian government could try to bring against the Israelis. concerned just because of their geometric, oh my God, the close location they have to Syria when Syria had all these chemical weapons because they were worried that they could use any in Israel.

Did Assad really care about that though? It seemed like, you know, to me just reading from the outside, it was like one of those things where, all right, well, some of the Arab world doesn't like Israel. So publicly, that's kind of what we'll say. But it was almost like that wasn't his fight. Yeah. It wasn't his fight in recent years, but it had been historically because Israel and Syria fought two significant wars, so 67 and 73. That's right. of Syrian tanks and planes and really decimated armed forces. And so Syria's response to that is, well, we can't really compete with the Israelis, you know, in terms of our army.

We don't have a nuclear weapon, which Israel does have. So we're going to create the world's biggest chemical arsenal. And so that's what they tried to do. That was their project. This was our deterrence against a possible Israeli attack on us. And they invested a lot of money. And again, this was not just some side project. This was their most significant military investment, was to create serious chemical weapons and the delivery systems, missiles, bombs, things they could send to Tel Aviv to kill thousands of people. And they thought that would keep them safe. And then in 2013, 2014, that arsenal almost disappeared,

except for whatever bits they managed to hide away. But Israel saw it as a very serious threat when it existed, to the extent to which when the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israelis were given, in the north, were given gas masks and preparations for a possible chemical attack by Syria. They expected it might happen. Well, now they're also in the middle of this. I think like one of the leading causing factors of this being able to happen is the fact that Israel happens to be in the middle of a serious issue now in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has to have people on the ground and all kinds of funding from

Iran going there, such that Syria was left kind of exposed here. Right? Because the focus was more on Lebanon. Yeah. And they were kind of out of it in a way. But Syria had been kind of the supply route for Iran to supply immaterial weapons to Hezbollah. Hezbollah had helped prop up the Syria's government for the years since the chemical weapons incident took place. Are you hearing this audio? Yeah, no, you're good. Don't worry about it. It's just Siri talking. It happens. I've got this thing anytime i say syria oh it pops off

so that's a problem yeah i get that at random times it's really funny but you were saying they were using syria as like as a core yeah and um but now you got you know israel has you know just whatever you think about the way things have gone in the last year, they have certainly remade the map of the region that they had – Iran had a – had built an army on Syria's – on Israel's northern border. A very capable military force with, always throw around the figure, about 150,000 missiles and rockets pointed. Hezbollah. Yeah, Hezbollah. And that was a real capability. A lot of those were guided systems

that could potentially strike military bases, nuclear facilities in Israel. And we just always assumed that was just going to be a permanent feature of the landscape until some future conflict. facilities in Israel. And we just always assumed that was just going to be a permanent feature of the landscape until some future conflict. And we've had the conflict now. So there's, Hezbollah has lost something like 80% of its missiles. Its leadership has been decimated. It no longer has an ally in Syria that doesn't exist anymore. It's a complete, you know,

180 degree change from what we saw, you know, 180 degree change from what we saw, you know, a year and a half ago. And it's, you do have to kind of step back and see, geez, you know, this, the whole security, you know, environment has completely changed for Israel in the last year. Again, though, it's like the downstream effects of this stuff are what you can't get away from. And my friend, Brandon Buckingham, you ever seen his channel on YouTube? No, I don't think so. I ever showed you that? He's awesome.

He does these amazing documentaries, goes and does like underground stories, could be in the streets or somewhere internationally now, doing a lot of great work. But he was supposed to go shoot a documentary in India like a few months ago. And on the way to India, something happened with his visa they said all right you can't you can't come in so he's like all right well I'm already halfway over the world so where should I divert my flight to he's like oh let's go to Lebanon goes to Lebanon and the bombing starts like the next day or something like that and he made this amazing over an hour long documentary where he was just capturing on the ground what people were saying and what's going on and it was so sad because some of the guys he filmed with are dead now wow and these were these were perfectly regular civilians and the things they kept pointing out in this documentary are like here is a normal place where we go all the time and like people are on vacation

doing whatever and now you can't even go there. And I always wonder, it's like, Israel has such strong fortifications on their border. They have such a highly capable military. They have the most talented intelligence apparatus in the world. It's like, okay, yes, I agree. That's a threat. If like Hezbollah funded by Iran has 150,000 people towards the border, but isn't there, you know, I understand war is extremely complicated. Isn't there a better way to go about this, though, that's not just so blatantly striking places where you are now fomenting hatred, where people are now who weren't going to be terrorists or weren't going to be, I won't even say that, like opposition, oppositional forces to Israel are now

going to grow up wanting to be that? Yeah. And that's the part that you can't control and you can't prevent because every, and we learned this in Iraq, we learned it in Afghanistan. Every strike, every death of a terrorist target, you end up creating more enemies because that guy had a family, he had brothers, he had uncles. And so now they're part of the cause. And what we see in Gaza, and I think that's, this is the long-term problem that we haven begun to wrestle with, there are people who have nothing left. They've lost entire families. They've got nothing to live for. I was just one – I was in an interview with a physician who was in Gaza, had no particular beef with the Israelis, certainly didn't like them, but had no reason to fight them until an airstrike killed his children. He had a daughter

who survived, and then she ended up dying of her injuries. And his comment to the interviewer was, the only thing I have to live for now is revenge. And so I'm going to dedicate my life to that. And that is the unfortunate reality. And so it's people in the region who've been affected and have been radicalized, but also that radicalization tends to not just stay in the region, but it spreads. And what we've found in our reporting is that there are many people around the world who see Gaza as a cause for them, a reason for them to potentially participate in a terrorist attack in the future. And that is part of the unintended consequences of every fight like this.

Did you cover the whole beepers thing? I did. Exploding beepers? exploding beepers wrote about it quite a bit yeah that was a few months ago now what what what was the full story that was pretty wild yeah i read it at the time but it's one of the craziest um intelligence operations i've ever heard about and it was one of these things like kind of like the stuxnet thing in Iran a few years ago when there was like an intelligence operation that ended up destroying a big chunk of the centrifuges that Iran had to make enriched uranium with. But this was even more consequential.

Basically, Israel had this long-term operation where it worked with a vendor without the vendor's knowledge to get a contract to supply beepers to Hezbollah. And they were specifically marketed to Hezbollah because they were more rugged than your normal ones, so they could withstand all kinds of tough conditions. And they had a super battery that could last for a very long time, all the things you'd want to have in a conflict situation. So Hezbollah thought, great, we'll buy a lot of these. And they equipped their entire, essentially the entire middle level management of Hezbollah, you know, thousands of people ended up getting these beepers. And it

turns out that the Israelis had very cleverly, you know, infiltrated this sort of the supply chain to put explosives in every one of those. And they were so ingeniously made that the explosives would not show up if you put it through like a metal detector or if you put it through like an airport screener. It was like a thin strip of explosives that blended in with the battery itself. So even if you took it apart, you couldn't see it. But the Israelis controlled the trigger. And at the moment of their choosing, and this is like an operation that began before October 6 or 7, nobody really knew when they were going to use it. This was Mossad run? Mossad run. And they saw their moment in October of this year and decided just to fire those things off. And they ended up

crippling Hezbollah's management up and down the chain. And then they followed it up by killing Hezbollah's leader, Hezbollah, in a military, in a bombing. And so within the space of about three weeks, Hezbollah went from being this formidable machine, this formidable military, to suddenly being confused and disrupted and chaos everywhere. And then that was followed

by a ground invasion that went after all those missile depots, all those places where those thousands of missiles were hidden. And Israel's gotten something like 80% of them, destroyed them. What made it the right moment? Like, why didn't they do it earlier? It was that capability. It was controversial. And we know this from our reporting that it went up to a cabinet meeting. The Israeli prime minister did not know that Mossad had done this. And there was like a big kind of fierce argument that broke out in the cabinet meeting where this was discussed. And somebody –

Didn't tell Netanyahu. Yeah, didn't tell Netanyahu until they were making a decision about whether to use it. So even the leadership did not know that they had done this. And then they were kind of faced with this decision, do we take advantage of this thing that we've done? And one of the reasons they decided to kind of pull the trigger was there had been some compromise someplace along the chain. Somebody they believed had figured out that these things

might be booby-trapped. And if that happened, if people got the idea that these might be dangerous, then they've lost your asset. So you either use it or lose it. And so that kind of went into this decision-making in October when they finally pulled the trigger. Part of this debate in the cabinet, there was this, I think it was IDF who, apparently someone from IDF opposed the idea of blowing up the pagers for various reasons. And they said, you know, Mossad, your little toys are going to get us all into a lot of trouble one of these days. But no one anticipated that it would work so well. And it actually, from their point of view, it worked extremely well. And there's never,

like I said, there's never been anything like it. It was disruptive, but also just, it was the moment that kind of was the pivot in this, you know, years-long conflict that from being, you know, two not exactly equally matched adversaries, but two adversaries that respected each other to being something where one side, it was just been weakened beyond repair yeah i mean if you've ever read the book rise or kill first yeah by ronan bergman a lot of respect for that book yeah and you read like the history of how creative massad is in ways to kill people yeah nobody's better it's fucking unbelievable i gotta say like i read that one i was like no yeah no i did yeah so that's i mean when you're working a story like that though you're doing this in the post october 7th world

yeah so you know i would imagine especially given the heat israel's take it we'll talk about gaza in a minute and everything that's going on like how do you even get great sources when they're probably so like as a country so closed off to the world because the the attitude is strongly against them around much of the world including in america yeah they do see the um that they're more besieged now um in terms of international public opinion than maybe in their history. Yeah, I agree. This is a new time for them. At the same time, I've always found this to be the case with intelligence folks,

that they want people to know when they're successful. And they may not be able to talk about it directly, but there's maybe a human desire to get credit for something good that they've done or something they feel that's been good. And we found that that was a door that we could push on, that you're not going to get a briefing from Mossad in its office in Tel Aviv. You're not?

Probably not. But there are people who are involved and who, who just think this is the coolest thing they've ever seen in their life. And then they just can't believe it was, they pulled it off. Um, and we just work those sources until you end up getting a pretty good narrative.

And that's what happened in this case. We just, we ended up getting exclusive material about how this whole thing was put together. And we had a story back in say late October late October that kind of went from A to Z, how this thing was planned and how they found this supply contractor and how they ended up being able to build these devices. And it was just extraordinary.

It was one of the most, I must say, in all these years of working on intelligence stories, I've never seen anything quite like it. Wow, that's a big statement it was it was uh spycraft at its most sophisticated um and just the technology part of it you know just designing building this thing and then getting it into thousands of devices literally thousands of devices that Hezbollah was carrying around. And then just sitting for years with the knowledge that we've caught this thing, we've got, all our enemies are walking around carrying bombs. And are we gonna set them off or not?

And then have to make the political decision, yeah, we're gonna do this. Did you talk to the guy who hit the button? I didn't talk to the guy that hit the button, but the button was a series of phone, like essentially messages coded messages that went out and the ingenious part was that you know i i you know one of any of us used a beeper that's really old technology but but hezbollah used them because they felt they were a little bit more um resistant yeah they couldn't be penetrated like cell phones. But this particular command

that came in said, you've got an encrypted message. That's sort of the digital code that comes up on the beeper. You've got a digital message. You have to hit like F1 and F4 to see it. It's like a two-handed response. And that was deliberate

because it meant they had both hands on the pager when it blew up. And that was deliberate because it meant they had both hands on the Pedro when it blew up. And that is extraordinary thinking, you know, and sophisticated, you know, you can call it malevolent or whatever, but they were thinking that far along that we're going to build this thing, we're going to put it in the bombs, and we're going to make it so that when it blows up, the guy that's getting blown up is going to have both hands on this thing when it when it when it explodes as i'm just thinking the science maybe i'm way off here but because if it's one hand it could kind of blow up this way yeah or or just blow up one hand instead of two so you're maiming

people and you're taking them off the battlefield forever if you're if you're damaging both hands at once how many how many people did you say again they got with this approximately? It's more than 1,000. It was a lot. And then they had walkie-talkies that had been sabotaged too, and that was the second phase of the operation. So all the guys who weren't using pagers but they had walkie-talkies, those had been sabotaged too, and then they'd go off the next day.

And so Hezbollah, you don't know what's coming. People around you are getting blown up, and nobody knows why originally or initially. And just like the chaos that followed that attack was just something. See, when the Gaza war broke out, Israel, as a result of, I guess, having to defend defend against that afterwards gave Iran what they wanted, which is they wanted a war that would be nasty and that could then, you know, lead to horrible things happening that could be used for political purposes. Something like this, though, they pull off, this is not in Gaza, this is in Lebanon, it's with Hezbollah, who's funded by Iran. They pull off something that embarrasses Hezbollah and therefore Iran tremendously. It does decimate Hezbollah in the short term, but you still have a very economically

viable country in Iran who still hates Israel, still wants to see them gone and still is going to fund places like Hezbollah or wherever else they decide to invent at this point. Have there been any whispers of some sort of response that's being built in response to what just happened here with the beepers in particularly because it took out all the leadership that Iran's working on? Iran, the signals we get is they've been completely outfoxed here. And there's not just with losing their main proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, but those military strikes by Israel in Iran, and people have to remember, this is the first time that Israel has struck Iran proper. And they did it twice. They did it in April,

they did it again in October, and they went after very strategic targets that only recently we've really got to understand what they went after. But they've intentionally destroyed the air defense systems around Tehran itself and around all the nuclear facilities, the major ones like Natanz and Fordow. Those S-300 batteries that used to protect those sites, they're gone. And so Tehran is completely vulnerable to an Israeli attack. Israelis or the Americans, if Trump comes in and decides he wants to attack a nuclear facility, they're much more vulnerable than they've ever been, at least in our recent history. And they know it.

So their recourse might be to race to make a nuclear weapon. That's what folks are mostly afraid of. But in terms of their ability to really retaliate there's not much they can do because anything they try to do against israelis is going to invite you know hellfire on them so it's it it's there's never been like a checkmate like this that we've seen in in the last 15 20 years what about their allies though they're allied with russia and china right, how strong is that? Because those are nuclear powers. Right. And so the Russian relationship has always been complicated. So they do business together. They don't really trust each other. There's always been this kind of bit of skepticism and suspicion in the relationship. But right now, Russia is completely preoccupied. They've got their hands full with Ukraine. Their economy is in much worse shape than people realize. They're on a trajectory now that if things continue as they are, they wanted to right now. So that relationship isn't what it used to be. And China, frankly, just doesn't want to get involved.

We don't see China – How do we know that? Well, just because there's no benefit to China to – like, for example, even Ukraine context. We see China doing a lot of things like supplying Russia with parts for weapons or parts for drones, but they're not providing weapons. We haven't seen any instance of China actually investing, helping their ally in that way. Because their most important business relationship is with Europeans and the Americans. They don't want to alien you know, alienate their biggest economic, you know, trade partners.

So it's, you know, the volume of trade that China does with us versus what they do with Russia, there's just no comparison. So there's no reason that they would kind of really go out on a limb and alienate the West in order to help Putin out of his troubles,

not in a significant way. They do it sometimes just for, it's kind of to create, you know, strategic advantages to kind of, you know, you screw with your enemy by helping, you know, your enemy's friend or enemy's enemy. So there's some of that calculation, but they're being very cautious about it. They haven't really kind of decided we're going to save Putin. It just hasn't happened. Which is – I mean from our perspective, that's a good thing because there's obviously less fireworks going off because of that. administration here to go on this tangent for a minute on russia ukraine where the minute trump

won the biden administration whoever the hell is running that you know increases the funding like crazy to ukraine and it's like listen i hate all the people that are dying there it's war it's terrible and like i don't like i don't want to like reward putin and give him all kinds of land or whatever but there have been recent there have been decent signs that there could be a way out of this to where all right maybe he just gets to keep crimea from 2014 and a segment of the donbass and ukraine gets to fully exist and we can have peace and now we're like upping the scale here and to me it's like are you poking a bear when you have a country that as you just pointed out is starting to run against

the economic wall they got a little exposed on the battlefield because they didn't run over ukraine in two days like shout out to the ukrainians for holding their lines like that and they just keep getting they it's like it's like i said it's like it's like the the administration administration keeps poking them like oh you won't use a nuke you won't use a nuke you know i don't want to be a fear monger or anything like that. But I think about that a lot because you're not dealing, you know, Putin's an intelligent guy, but he's a very bad guy too. And he's an extreme narcissist. So you're dealing with someone who has the ability to be completely unreasonable if you give them a reason to be unreasonable. The benefit that I see potentially, and this is always – it's a game of chicken sometimes. It really is. I think what the Biden folks would like to see is that to put the Ukrainians in the best position for a decent deal. Putin wants to negotiate at a moment of his maximum strength when he can get the best, best bargain he can. So he keeps not just Crimea, but all the Donbass and also has to, you know, he forces Ukraine to disarm or, you know, a permanent ban on ever joining NATO or EU

or anything else that that would be his, his winning hand. So I think that there's always in these conflicts where you got proxies or you got kind of other countries manipulating circumstances on the ground, is everybody now is not trying to win the war as much as they're trying to get in the best possible bargaining position they are. So you can imagine Trump could come in and sort of take advantage of that if Russia's a little bit more on their back foot if their north korean troops aren't doing very well and they're getting killed which appears to be the case right now yeah that um that maybe the ukrainians will get a better bargain out of this but it is why is biden trying to give him a win then i mean that's that's cool but like this is not how

these parties usually act they're not trying to help each other out. You know what I mean? Yeah. So there's this really arcane jockeying for the best position. And it's hard for us to understand from the outside sometimes. So I don't know. I don't know where it's going to go, to be honest. But I do think it's winding down. I feel like there's a moment. And I could see this appealing to Trump. He can come in and, you know, it's just almost like in the Iran 1979 context, new president Reagan comes in in 1980,

and there's someone that the Iranians suddenly can bargain with, even though they don't like Reagan very much, but somebody new. And you can imagine that Trump is sort of this new force and this desire to kind of settle these conflicts. Maybe there's a moment where he can do it and get good leverage, get something out of Russia. Interestingly, Syria may factor into this. How so? Russia really wants to keep its military bases. Since the fall of Damascus, you've seen the Russians retreat, you know,

take forces out of Damascus, like 400 Russian soldiers in Damascus itself. They all got put in convoys and sent to bases on the coast. But Russia wants to keep its Navy base, and it may be willing to do some bargaining in Ukraine in exchange for, kind of grand deal to allow it to keep some of its forces in Syria. I'm speculating here, but that could be a card that someone could play. But it's been humiliated in Syria with this setback, but it doesn't want to be driven out completely. And so this could become a factor in all this. Yeah. Obviously, there were multiple factors that led to the election. It just happened with Trump being put back in office. But to me, if I'm doing an autopsy of it, there were so many

things within the administration's control that if they had done it differently and taking you know taking no pun intended taking control of the situation maybe they'd have been put back in you know and one of them is there's been such a carelessness with just allowing these wars to happen now look maybe they're not happening on our shores here that's great we in america don't have to deal with the pain and toil of that but you know people here they see us funding that yeah and they see hundreds of thousands of people dying in two different places right now. And when you just let that continue, you're going to give, in this case, a guy like Trump the opening as he brilliantly took to be like, you know, we got to step this shit, you know, and now he might be able to do that, which

I hope he does. And I'm rooting for him to do that. But like, you know, politically, it just felt like suicide to me. Yeah, this was a no-win situation that I think Biden folks were dealt. No, they didn't. They started to see this coming, so that what Russia was going to do, there were people that right to the very end didn't think that Putin was really going to try to take over Ukraine, that he was going to try to get some kind of deal with the Ukrainians and prevent them from ever joining NATO. But then suddenly there he is, you know, sending forces across the country to try to take Kiev. And his ambition was to take the whole country. Biden's – the thing that he did that was good was that he did help enable the Ukrainians to make a stand to keep them from getting completely swept away by the Russians, which a lot of people thought was going to happen.

Did that – basically some of it with intel. There's a lot more involvement from our people, I think, than people realize and some of that just hasn't come out yet. We haven't been able to confirm a lot of it, but we've invested a lot in making sure that Ukraine didn't fall. And I applaud that. I do feel that what, you know, Putin just made this very crude land grab that just pretended like this sovereign country didn't exist and should be part of Russia again, and he just went for it. And I'm glad he was prevented from succeeding in that. But you're right, the sort of situation that's been created because of that has just been horrifically costly for everyone. It's the never-ending aspect of it. I think

people will now look back because they're so pissed off about it and say, we never should have gotten involved with any of it. If you look at it objectively, yeah, at the beginning, if you want to hold off that stance so that you can get a better room at the negotiating table and stop this shit great the problem is they kept pushing it and pushing it and the money kept going up and up and up and up and it's like oh you don't want to see this stop yeah you just wanted to keep going and that's where the american people were upset about that and i get that you know and i and there was a real shift in in the past probably probably the last six months leading up to that election. I could just feel it not just in here, but in how people spoke like online and obviously things get a little

crazy online, but like, you know, people were just fed up with the lack of common sense and stuff like that. And common sense says, look, there's bad people around the world. Putin's one of them. But sometimes you have to go to the table to do what's best for everyone. Yeah. That, you know, it's not like you're rewarding him. You don't have to look at it that way. But you're like, we just, we want less people dying. Yeah.

You know, the world's a better place when less people are dying. Yeah. And then it gets into a sort of a Munich 1936 kind of moment too. There's this bit of, I think the fear, and it's a real one, is that Putin has territorial ambitions and he wants Ukraine to be part of Russia, but he also is looking at the Baltics and others that are pretty close to Russia and share borders with Russia are really worried that they'll be next. And so it was important for the West to make a stand and say you can't in the 21st century take over our country. But then after that, it does start to get complicated. How much are you willing to expend to make sure this doesn't happen? And where should the lines be? How far should Russia, you know, where do we stop them?

That's right. And I feel like that's a really complicated decision. It is. I'm not having to make it. It is. And you make a great point. I think about Munich all the time and about, obviously, like the appeasement that happened there. The difference to me in this situation is

twofold number one you have nato which is an allied front military that would stop if any of that happened they would have the full ability to completely fight back within those countries and extend beyond them which would be a death blow for russia who exposed themselves militarily as a paper tiger and secondly hitler was building the world's greatest economy at the time. He was an awful dude who took advantage of a situation and then was able to bring in some economic boom. Russia's GDP is the size of Italy. It might even be smaller now. I don't know. I haven't checked recently. So when I see it keep going and going and going, it's like, yes, I understand you're preoccupied with the

guy that's like this bad dude but at the same time my friend david satter was telling them about putin for fucking years and they wouldn't listen to him his ass got kicked out of the country he's been on this podcast twice 92 and 133 like he's the preeminent biographer of putin putin killed all his friends and nobody cared and then suddenly when it was politically expedient to care, they did. And I understand why people get upset with that hypocrisy for sure. Yeah, absolutely. You're right about that. Yeah.

But back to Israel and what's going on in Gaza. What is the update there these days? And do you see any sort of like peace deal in the future there? We thought this morning actually. We're talking on – what is it? It's Tuesday. This is going to be coming out on Friday. Okay, Friday is the come out day.

But yeah, there was this real kind of flurry of activity this morning indicating that it may be a breakthrough. And we have certainly seen that Hamas has moderated its negotiating position and it's got off the kind of the position where it was saying that there won't be a deal, there won't be a ceasefire unless Israel agrees to completely vacate Gaza. And that's not going to happen and they're acknowledging that now. So there is a window. People are starting to get a little bit more hopeful that there could be some movement just in the next few days. We've gone down this road so many times, I can't completely get excited about it. But we do need a ceasefire.

We do need to enter this conflict. We are at a point now where Hamas still exists. It will always exist as an idea, but militarily, it doesn't have a military anymore. It's been destroyed. There's a moment where we can hopefully start to rebuild and give some kind of normal life to the millions of people who've had to suffer through this, and some of them are completely innocent. Some of the reporting I've done over there involves amputees, and we see a lot about the casual people who were killed in the war.

The number today is something like 45,000 in Gaza since the war started. But there's something like 100,000 people who have lost limbs. And that's kind of a life-changing injury. Yeah, I'll say. Yeah. And I was talking to a kid over there who actually, the Jordanians have created this program where they're, they have this mobile clinics, like an ambulance with a, you know, with a truck and they go to neighborhoods and they can fit somebody with prosthetics in like an hour or two, which is just really unheard of technology.

But to talk to a kid who was just, you know, 14 year old who was out playing soccer with his friends and it comes back to the house to get something to eat. A bomb falls in the apartment building. He and his father are both amputees. His father lost a leg. He lost both legs and an arm and a couple of fingers. Oh, the kid did? Yeah.

And he's running around. It's been several months since the injury, and he's got new prosthetics, and he's able to move around and thinking about being a computer designer one day. But you can just imagine what that young kid's life has been like, just to suddenly wake up and both your legs are gone. I can't imagine. You're never going to play soccer again. So much is going to be of your life has changed because you don't have the limbs. And that story is just repeated, in this case, 100,000 times. So the consequences, the human toll has just been off the charts.

And we just need the fighting to stop so people can start to rebuild. And no matter what side of the border you're born on or what your politics are, kids deserve to grow up in a world where there is some hope and some stability. When's the last time you were there? This was in october so it was my last trip so i was supposed to go back again but things kind of fell apart but it's um where'd you go when you were there like on this one i was actually up on the syrian border um didn't think we're gonna have much to write about but then uh but most of the time was Amman, and then ended up talking to a lot of Palestinians. We're just doing some reporting on what situation was like in the West Bank. It's a little bit hairy to get over there these days, but everybody uses Amman as kind of a stop-off

place. And so you get, it's a great place to set up meetings with people. Yeah. The question I got to ask though here is, and I would agree. From everything I'm seeing, it seems like Hamas has been largely decimated. And it's interesting to hear you say it will always exist as an idea. I could probably guess why. But like does Israel want it to stop? And I say that with cited sources in the sense that when you hear someone like Smotrich, the financial minister, say, and I'm paraphrasing what he did here, but maybe you can pull it up, Alessi, that he believes that there's biblical land rights to Israel that goes into parts of Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt,

and there might have been one other place in there too when i hear someone like that say this and he's in a powerful position in the middle of a war like this where they keep saying like we got to get all the hostages home which i agree with you know you've gotten to a point where you've decimated hamas so much that they are peg-legged no pun intended at the at the negotiating table at what point do you say like we got to do that we have enough leverage the hand is one yeah and you know the things that he says are so outrageous that's you know it offends our ears you can imagine how it lands with people in the in the arab world who who see this guy i mean he's he very much would like to annex the entire west bank to make it part of israel and the only problem there's with three million palestinians who live there

and that's their ancestral home and they're not gonna take very kindly to to israeli just just kind of putting up the flag and moving in yeah and so it it's it's awful for you know for for israel with its relations with its neighbors with its relations with the rest of the world but it's awful for Israel with its relations with its neighbors, with its relations with the rest of the world. But it's also just – it just continues to fuel the hatred and statements like that just – Terrible. Terrible. And some of the interviews I had with Palestinians, the sort of common theme was some of the older guys, people, you know, my age who just, you know, they just want to have a normal, quiet life. They want to enjoy their grandkids or whatever.

But the entire youth population, um, among Palestinians is just so just beyond rage that, that just, they, they don't feel like there's anything to live for. Um, you know, there's, there's talk about new intifadas or other or other ways to sort of fight the Israelis. And that just deepens that rage when you hear rhetoric like that. I'm not condoning any of those actions, but can you not see where that comes from? Absolutely.

I mean, you see it better than I do. How would you be if that was your situation? And I think we don't, you know and empathize nearly as much as we should i mean it's it's hard it's if we especially we see people who look a little different from us or their religion is different we can we can create some sort of emotional separation between us and them but i tell you i mean i i go there these are these are really you know people who just want to have you know a life. And they don't feel like they're going to have a decent life if they're continuously throughout their existence as being second-class citizens in an apartheid society where there are no rights for them. And where every checkpoint they walk into, they're seen as potential victims or hostile.

And it just kind of gets into your psyche. And you could see how it, you know, you could just see the emotional turmoil that it creates in a person. Do you think there's, or do you see evidence that there are people in the higher parts of Israel's government today who do genuinely want to see a two-state solution? I think politically, that's a difficult issue right now for a lot of Israelis to talk about. However, the people in my world, or the people in the defense establishment, and the people in the intelligence world, feel there has to be some kind of accommodation for Israel's sake. It's not because they want to do, you know, morally the right thing necessarily,

as much as they just feel like it's important for our own survival to have some kind of um you know some way for for palestinians to see hope you know to see that there's some pathway at least to having sort of um you know some you know dignity in their in their lives and to have some control of their destiny it's a problem for the israelis because they feel like every time that we give an inch every time time we allow, you know, Gaza to be autonomous, for example, we've done that. And what did it get us? We got this massive terrorist attack. So there, people were afraid. But, you know, because if there is to be some kind of future grand bargain, which is not out of the question, that like normalcy between the Israelis and the Saudis, um, and some, you know, military cooperation, all these things that people are talking about for the future,

you know, some kind of path to a Palestinian, um, state has to be part of the conversation. Everybody, except for some of the real, you know, hardliners in the Israeli community, feel that has to happen in some way. You have to find a way to accommodate those aspirations. I hope that wins out too. Because I always say people are not their governments. And especially when certain hardliners can get in control of stuff, shit can go sideways. And hopefully it's just a blip in time.

Unfortunately, as you point out, there are lasting effects of these things. And it's so sad to watch. And I feel bad for everyone involved. But as always, it's been an amazing conversation on the Middle East. You know I can't let you get out of here with one more thing though. Okay. You know when I'm going to ring up. Where are we going?

I mean, there was no one who breathed the bigger sigh of relief that you were willing to come to the great state of New Jersey today than me. Because we've had all kinds of drones up above here. And if they were actually like going to cause some real shit i feel like you wouldn't be here so what are you hearing it is the strangest thing and i i have to liken it to there there are these moments of of kind of public hysteria that you know over ufos for example back in the 50s everybody was seeing a ufo because they were in the news and once once there are stories about them, everybody's seeing them. So I feel like there's a core of, you know, real incidents

that's going on. And I'm not really sure what it's about. I'm convinced, based on people that we talked to, that it's not a foreign actor, that whatever is going on, there's like a domestic, probably innocuous explanation, but we need to know what it is because people are freaking out about it but what what's going on instead is that that people are distrustful they're they're a lot of people who like to you know who are pretty inventive in their minds anyway are seeing things or seeing airplanes and thinking they're drones so there's a lot of crap and a lot of noise but there's there are is a a group of you and a lot of noise, but there is a group of – a set of events that have happened that really need an explanation. And I'm actually shocked that our government hasn't been able to come up with it yet.

It's just so strange that we can't tell people, well, it's this or that or it's not this, except to say they're not bad guys. There's something else. But what are they? I have to ask what your view is on it. Well, I want to talk to you with your journalist hat on off the record when we get off here away from these microphones about what I'm hearing, because I've had some pretty high play sources on this. And I have seen the drones myself, by the way. I did see them on Saturday. To your point, some of them are not drones. Some of them are helicopters in the same lighting pattern and they were flying low.

They were right here on the river in the Hudson. I took video of it, but the video doesn't really do it justice. They were right above me. So the helicopters would go back and forth in the same pattern. Like you could almost time it. And I think Alessi, your reports, cause you live out where these things were really popping up. Some of the reporting you've been doing on your YouTube channel, people did time some of the, some of the vehicles that were moving through the air. It was like a minute and 18 seconds exactly or something like that? Yeah, they timed like it was exactly a minute, 18 seconds. They'd show up in a pattern just like – And some of them are – they're not the small drones either.

Some of them are not the little – No, SUV size. Yeah, SUV. Wow, that's incredible. There were some – like I could see right away, New York's a crowded airspace, there's always helicopters. And I could see that there were all kinds of regular helicopters, because I'm always looking at like the 34th Street Station, where all of them take off from, and then some of them are from down by Battery Park. And you

could see regular helicopters, and then some that were probably newscopters, hard to say. And then you could see in the distance where there's planes. That's a very easy thing to see. I can see them through my skylight here. And then there were two distinct differences though. There were these flat military helicopters with the two lights going back and forth in the same exact pattern over my head, along the Hudson over and over again. And then there were stationary drones right over the center of Manhattan with the black and green lights, which are exactly what Alessi's people were reporting to have seen. And when I saw that, I watched that for a long time. Like, those are drones.

And I was tweeting at the NYPD like, yo, are those yours? They didn't answer. But like, you know, it is definitely a little spooky. I want to run something by you, though, off air just to see if you have anything that you could verify with this. But what I heard spooked me, but it – I think everything is going to be just fine. It's more of a matter of like the government really kind of fucked up and now they're just like, yeah, all right. We can't really tell anyone, but we'll get it figured out. That's what it feels like.

Yeah, I think you're probably right about that. And it's just weird that Wright or the Dix Air Force Base had to shut down. Yeah, Wright-Patterson. The UFO base. So something went on, and the U.S. government was sufficiently nervous about it that they shut down airspace. So let's have some answers. Let's figure it out. Well, Joby Warwick, this has been as build as great as build

as usual. I love having you through here. Thank you for going through everything on Syria and the greater Middle East. It's always a pleasure. We will have the links to your book in the description below and can't wait to do it again. It's always a blast. Thank you for having me. Of course, everyone else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory.

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