Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Iran's Nukes, Syria's Narco State, Yemen's Houthi Rebel War | Pulitzer-Winner Joby Warrick • 198

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

WATCH my other podcast w/ Joby (Episode 134): https://open.spotify.com/episode/54X8oWGEeahCdsIFmlMKmq?si=Qv_Ms56oTdS8V9v70uxBGw  (***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) EPISODE LINKS: - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/ugT4aayT  JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  JOBY LINKS: - TWITTER: https://twitter.com/JobyWarrick  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Joby’s Syria Book, “Red Line”; Joby just returned from Gaza & Middle East 9:08 - Getting into Syria during 2011 Arab Spring; Iraq & Stockpile; Kurds 18:15 - Geographic & Historical Value of Syria; Syria’s relationships w/ Russia & Iran; Sunni & Shia 28:30 - Russian Expats in Syria; Bashar Al Assad; Syria Sarin Attacks 39:22 - History of Syria’ Chemical Weapons stockpile; Obama’s “Red Line” w/ Assad story 48:28 - Syria forced to give up biological weapons; How UN destroyed weapons 1:00:58 - Syria’s brewing Narco State 1:11:08 - Yemen; Houthi Rebels; Most Dangerous Port in the world 1:23:57 - Private mercenaries in Yemen; AQ presence; Houthi pirates 1:34:22 - Joby’s trips to Middle East covering Hillary Clinton; Middle East vs America 1:45:35 - Houthi takeover in Yemen 1:46:55 - Iran; Iranian Revolution Recap; Resistance of Iran Younger Generations 1:55:56 - Woman who removed veil & burned story; Iran Mass Poisoning; Iran Drones & Missiles 2:06:52 - Iran’s partnership w/ Russia; Iran’s Nuclear Program; Ayatollah of Iran 2:17:26 - Shah of Iran’s son (Reza Pahlavi); Masih Alinejad’s story; Iran’s future 2:29:11 - Iran funding: Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis; Netanyahu & Israel vs Iran 2:43:02 - Israel’s surprise; Israel vs Hamas; King of Jordan; Jordan’s poor geography 2:53:33 - Status of Israel Gaza War 3:04:02 - Tragic Story of Palestinian Doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish after IDF rocket; How Israel Gaza War will end 3:16:41 - Joby’s crazy new book concept CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 198 - Joby Warrick Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. What's up, everybody? We are back for another episode, and this one is a masterclass on the Middle East. I got my man, Joby Warwick, back in studio. He was here for episode 134, where we discussed his Pulitzer Prize winning, his second Pulitzer Prize, book, Black Flags. That was back in January, 2023. It's a very popular episode. And this guy is one of the preeminent experts in the world on the Middle East.

He has covered it in its entirety for the last 25 to 30 years. So today you're gonna hear all about the background on Iran. You're gonna hear all about the background on Syria. You're gonna hear all about the background on Yemen. And oh yeah, that little war that's going on in the Middle East right now that we all know about. So sit back, relax. And if you're not already subscribed, please smash that subscribe button. Hit that like button on the video. Seriously, guys, it's a huge, huge help and enjoy the show. Where's Iran's nuclear program these days?

I'm really concerned about that. And I've been watching it for about 15 years. And for the longest time, the concern was that, well, Iran says it doesn't want a nuclear weapon, but gee, they're sure accumulating a lot of fissile materials, the stuff you make that explodes in a nuclear bomb. In the last three years, we've seen a pretty big change with Iranians. They're now making not just the low enriched uranium, which they were pretty good at making, the stuff you could put in a nuclear power plant. Now it's high enriched uranium. It's 60% enriched. It's very, very close to weapons growth.

So we're telling the world that, you know, wink, wink, we could make a bomb if we want to. And that's not just a bluff anymore. They've got it. joe b warwick welcome back sir it is good to be back and to see the new digs. Holy cow. We're getting there. Last time you were here, you were still in my parents' house. That was when we had the studio there. But I got to say, and I say this to a bunch of the people who came early on, I really, really appreciated you doing that, coming in from out of town, helping build this podcast, you know, taking a shot on me. And that episode was amazing. So couldn't wait to do it again. Well, it was so much fun to do. I had to come back. And I must say, it's just fun doing this with you. I'm glad to see the thing taken off. And it's great to see this cool studio. It's a big step up. Easier location, too.

Yeah, for sure. We're up here in New York. So like you were saying, people are here, you know, so we can get some people to pop over sometimes. It's a little easier than Mullica Hill down there, but it's coming along. and a fun town too yes a lot of fun it's like quiet and loud at the same time which is like perfect for me yeah it's right there so and you got the sinatra stamp over everything which makes it extra cool that's right that's right we even got them in this i wasn't going to put them in the studio but then i was like that picture's too good we gotta do it that's a great picture got Got to do it.

Yeah. But there's been a lot going on since you've been here. And for people who are not familiar with your background, you are a longtime national security reporter for The Washington Post. You are a two-time Pulitzer winner. And one of those was your book, Black Flags, The Rise of ISIS, which is the greatest history ever written on ISIS. I recommend it to everyone I know. I actually found out from a friend of mine who is in military intelligence that when guys get posted overseas, it's not like they have like required reading lists, but there's like an

underground required reading list that they're like, oh, new guy coming in, you need to read this. And that's at the top of it. So you certainly left your mark with that. That means a lot to me. And I do hear that occasionally. It's not just from college students, but people who are being deployed in places that have to deal with these issues. So it's nice to know that they find it valuable. And I think the biggest little fun factoid in terms of that book was that if you ever

get a chance to go inside CIA, they have a bookstore. It's an employee-only thing, but you can buy Black Flags there, which is awesome. And my first book is on sale in the Spy Museum in Washington. So if you go to the gift store there, you can see that on the rack. No kidding. That was the one on Al-Balawi? Yeah, exactly. It was a CIA operation trying to get al-Qaeda's number two.

It went terribly wrong, and it turns out there was a mole in the works working against us from the Al-Qaeda side and killed seven of our people. So that's that story. So I think we talked about that last time you were here. The most fascinating terrorist figure I think I've ever come across. We're familiar with Bin Laden. Bin Laden and Zawahiri, his number two guy, they were of a completely different type. These were people who were professionals. Bin Laden was an engineer. His number two guy, they were of a completely different type. These were people who were professionals. Bin Laden was an engineer. His number two was a medical physician.

So they're educated, sophisticated people. They have sort of a strategic vision of this terrorist organization they're trying to create. So Khali was none of that. He was just a street tough. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

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the war itself but just uh kind of get a sense of what's going on in the region and what's going on now is quite alarming not just in gaza itself but what's happening in the in the periphery we just saw a few weeks ago with americans being killed on a military base what happened there so that was uh so the the big thing, and it's Hamas in Gaza, but it's all these other groups that are on the periphery of Israel. These are militia groups

that are funded by Iran. So they give them money, they give them weapons, and they've been provoking our people, sort of the bases that we have in Syria and Iraq for a long time, but it really stepped up after the Gaza crisis. And so there was a rocket attack or a drone attack rather on a US base, a base

where US officials or US personnel were based, and hit a barracks and killed three of our people. And that's the first time since the start of the war we've had fatalities because of these proxy groups. Whoa, I did not hear about that. Totally missed that. So when you were over there, where were you specifically? Did you go in? I assume you weren't in Gaza, but like, where were you? So we were up on the mostly on the Syrian border. And that's where a lot of this activity is happening. Syria has become, since the civil war started, that's been more than a decade now, it's 2011 when the war broke out, but it's now completely a failed state.

It's become a narco state, and we can talk about that later. It's a place where all kinds of bad things and all kinds of bad people are based. And including these militia groups that are funded by Iran and they hate Americans and they look for every opportunity to try to go after us. They do it in a kind of sort of restrained way because they don't really want to mess with us but they want to tweak us when they can and in this one particular case they they got lucky they sent a drone onto this base and there are guys who are watching it come in saw one of our drones returning and so this one was behind it so it actually was pretty good choreography on their part but they ended up just hitting dead on in the middle of a barracks area

and killed three of our guys. Yeah, whenever I talk with Syria about people, I just picture Mad Max Fury Road. That's the thing. It's essentially, because we were talking about it last time, but we look at the map up here on the screen, like there are borders that say Syria,

but the way I've always read it, and I think you kind of confirmed this for me, is that there's a bunch of no man's lands there that are controlled by random groups. Everything from the Kurds in the south to just random terrorist groups and all these terrorist groups like don't even like each other. So they kill each other too. And then Assad is up, I guess, in like Aleppo and areas and Damascus and things like that. So it almost seems like we need to redraw the map. Yeah. And the map was drawn for kind of weird reasons anyway. This is all the way the Middle

East looks now with the boundaries that do exist. It didn't happen because there was a river or there was a kingdom here. It was because the British and the French decided at the end of World War I that they were just going to carve up the Middle East into areas of interest. And so Syria becomes an area of French interest, and Palestine becomes a British area. Jordan was a British area too. And all these eventually became countries, but the borders and boundaries make no sense because they cut right across tribal areas. So you've got people from the same families on both sides. And as you mentioned, the terrain too. Once you get away from the coast, a lot of it's just wild, wide open spaces, rocky deserts, sometimes really harsh areas. And one consequence is it's real easy to move stuff and to move bad guys across borders and it happens all the time.

Well, maybe we should start here with Syria because it is so fascinating. And like I said, you wrote an entire book on it, which actually I left out there. I'll bring that in. But first of all, how did you when did you first start getting into the Syria story? Like when did you have to cover it for the Washington Post? I assume it was before the chemical weapons were deployed. Yeah, absolutely. So it actually was really it was the start of the Arab Spring spring and we're really kind of stretching our listeners memories a little bit but 2011 you have this this series of uprisings across the middle east it's kind of like a democracy movement where you have uh you know leaders overthrown in the case of say tunisia uh in egypt you know a military dictator is overthrown so one country after

the other has has these uprisings. And they're somewhat successful in the sense that people power succeeds in a lot of these places. The one place where it didn't work so well was Syria because there's a brutal dictator named Bashar al-Assad who rules Syria with an iron grip. And he decided, well, you guys, you demonstrators aren't going to win. And I'm willing to do – be as brutal as I need to be to crush this uprising. Was he hereditary? He was hereditary, but he wasn't meant to be the president. So his dad was the president, was dictator before him.

And Bashar al-Assad, when his turn after his father died, the job was actually supposed to go to his older brother, who was like smart, suave guy and kind of a tough image. Bashar al-Assad, being a younger son, decided to be a dentist instead and went to England and was going to school. They said he was going to be – sorry, not a dentist. I misspoke on that. So an ophthalmologist, which is an even softer job. So there's no blood involved, which is the great irony. He's like the bloodiest tyrant in the Middle East for decades. And he apparently didn't like the sight of blood, though.

So he went to ophthalmology school. But he's in Britain. Yeah, married a British woman. She's of Arab descent, but she's very elegant, beautiful British wife. And actually people had high hopes for him after, you know, before Arab Spring started. Like Americans were going over there visiting. John F. Carey went and other sort of senior Americans went to try to build a relationship and try to make him go the right way and be a little less like his father and more like a normal leader. And that was going very, very good for a while until Arab Spring happened and the civil war came about and then he just became the most brutal tyrant imaginable and just essentially decided to crush the rebellion with tanks and guns and that's what happened after 2011.

Now, I think a lot of people will remember a main focus. Obviously, the Arab Spring was happening all over the place, but a main focus was in Egypt. I think it was – was it Hosni Mubarak? Right. Was that his name? Mubarak. He was overthrown. He was the longtime leader and that brought in like a whole new government

and everything. And then that kind of spread across all of these countries. But when it was happening in Syria, was there, before that happened, were there already like some of these terrorist presence, whatever you could say, like setting up shop in the country?

I'm forgetting some of the names. I know there's like al-Nusra Front. There's some al-Qaeda affiliates. Obviously, it turned into ISIS, some of them too. But like, were any of these guys really there yet? Or did that happen after 2011? So the interesting thing is they were there, but they were in prison for the most part. And one of the things that Assad did after the uprising started was to try to turn it into, for public relations purposes, an uprising by extremists. So he tried to say, well, the people who are opposing my regime, they're fanatics and they're terrorists and horrible people. And as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or to kind of make that happen, he actually let a bunch of these bad guys out of jail. And some of those ended up kind of

reforming into groups. But more importantly for the sort of history of the Civil War was they invited their buddies across the border in Iraq. And that's where the real bad guys were. That's where Zarqawi, who's the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, had developed this movement, which became ISIS later. So ISIS came over pretty much by invitation because there was a war going on. What a great place for a terrorist group to thrive. They've got plenty of weapons. They've got safe places where nobody's coming after them, a great opportunity to recruit. And so ISIS comes and takes over half the country by the time they've reached their zenith. Like 2014, 2014 is the year that they sort of established the caliphate and

marched into Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq and took it over and declared essentially a religious empire that spread from the eastern part of Syria across Iraq and an area the size of Great Britain. So if you want to get a sense of how big that place was, it was a lot of area under the control of a terrorist group, which meant not just that they're in place there, but they have all the infrastructure of a government. They've got universities, they've got military bases, they've got tanks, they've got bank vaults full of gold, more money than they could ever spend. That's why the Caliphate was so dangerous, because it just was terrorist plus state infrastructure and wealth and weapons,

and it just made them extraordinarily dangerous. In the middle of all this, I mentioned this a few minutes ago, so I'd love to get some context on where they were during this, but have you ever read Nani Murad's book? I know of it, but I haven't actually read that. Okay, phenomenal book. I never want to read it again because it's heavy. She won the Nobel Peace Prize.

She's a really, really amazing woman. She was a yazidi who was kidnapped by isis her family was all killed she was sold into slavery the whole bit but a lot of her story charted out those earliest days of the caliphate for me like geographically to see where things were and the crazy part is that on the northern part of ir of Iraq and along the southern part of Syria, there's like the Peshmerga and the Kurds who are these poor people who don't have a country, which is kind of wild. But like, where are they in all, like, that's what I didn't understand about ISIS being able to get into Syria. They had to go around the Kurds to do that, right? So did they just let them do that? In the beginning, they didn't have much choice because the Kurds didn't really – they had their defense groups.

But ISIS just kind of bulldozed right through there, particularly in areas where the Yazidis are more populous because that's kind of – that's a weak underbelly. So they're able to kind of push right through. The Kurds didn't really start fighting back until we helped them. And there was this interesting moment in 2014 where a lot of this, the Yazidis in particular, were besieged on a mountain. And the Americans dropped first aid, and then they began to arm the Kurds in a way that they could start fighting back. And that was the beginning of pushing ISIS back. And when Raqqa, the ISIS capital in Syria was liberated, it was mostly because of these Kurds back with American forces, well, you know, essentially as intelligence and as ISR, like the, you know, the drones and

airstrikes. But they were the sort of the shock troops that pushed ISIS out of those areas. And the only reason ISIS hasn't come back really is because of those kurds because we still back them today yeah i don't want to get off on a tangent there but i've heard some things about where isis is now it's not dead yeah it's not dead which is scary and the the further you get away from the kurdish areas so in syrian held areas they're really coming, and it's pretty long. Oh, even up there? Up there, yeah, except for the northeast corner, which is still kind of a little – Yeah, but in Palmyra, which is kind of a desert city, so a little bit – yeah, we can almost see it on the map, but it's ancient Roman cities. It's kind of central, kind of south of Aleppo. But Palmyra was, you know, now it's

almost become a no man's land because these ISIS groups, which kind of faded away after 2019, have been coming back and they've been, you know, knocking out army posts, you know, threatening soldiers who are in the area, so they flee. And it's pretty disturbing. And people who are watching that closely say there's an opportunity for ISIS to come back, at least in the area so they flee and it's uh it it's it's pretty disturbing and people who are watching that closely say there's an opportunity for isis to come back at least in that area whoa let's see before i forget you know you know the aisle in there with the tv and the drawers below it i have where the books are i have red line in there would you mind grabbing that and then joe b has two on the chair right outside the studio too i just want to make sure i have that in here.

Sorry about that. And I'm seeing, Paul Meyer, it's just south of Raqqa. Oh, yeah. I see it right here. If we're looking at the screen right now, I think Alessi has it on that cam. Yeah. So that's kind of like it's like in the first third of the bottom of the TV in the middle right there. That was a remarkable area that, again, it was sort of a Roman settlement.

So there's beautiful artifacts and museums just full of this antiquity. And ISIS came in with sledgehammers and smashed it all up when they took over back in 2014. They just didn't care about anything. No, they just, they saw that as idolatry and they just smashed just really valuable antiques and artifacts from those times and syria is such a strategic place too because it's one of the countries that actually borders on the mediterranean so it has ports it shares a border with jordan i believe it has a border yeah has a border with israel yeah right so this is like almost the cross – and then obviously Turkey is up north.

This is like the crossroads of the Middle East in a way. Yeah. In fact, people heard the term Armageddon, which is like the mythical last battle in time. That's based on a city that's actually in Syria. So there's a sense that – Really? Yeah. In fact, ISIS made a big deal when they took over this little town.

This is prophetic. This is end of time stuff. And they've always – but you're right because it's so centrally located just south of Turkey, which is the other big border. So it's kind of the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. And so, so much commerce, so much history happens through Syria, or at least it did when it was a functioning country. And now that it's a narco state, it's just a great place to send drugs, you know, to use it to distribute drugs into Europe and into the Mediterranean too. We're going to get there for sure. That blew my mind when you, I don't know anything about that. So we're going to definitely talk about that. But how long have they also been an ally with Russia? I know that's been talked about over the last decade, because

like Assad is close with him, with Putin, but was his father also already aligned with them? And what's the history there? Yeah. So it's a bit prickly, but the Syrians have always been kind of clients of the Russian state. And as a result of that, you know, they obviously, the Syrians buy weapons from the Russians and that makes the Russians happy. But they also have, the Russians have a navy base in the town of Tartus, which is on the coast. You see Latakia, which is the northern coastal town. Tartus is a major port

and it's the only warm water port for the Russians in the world. And so it was important for them. Wait, they're only one? Only one. And so they, you know, not counting, you know, warm water parts, we're only one? So when Syria's civil war broke out, it looked like the government might fall. They were determined that that wasn't going to happen because that was bad news for the Russians. So the Russians – really the reason that Assad stayed in power is the Russians and the Iranians together decided that no matter what the rebels threw up against the government, we're going to put up that much more and make sure that Assad survives.

Now why did the Iranians like Assad? That's another thing we're going to talk about today, a lot of Iran. But why did the Iranians like him so much? Yeah. So the Iranians don't have many friends in the world, believe it or not. But Syria is one of them. So Syria has been a very close ally for a long time. And strategically, it's an important ally because if you can look at the map, you can see – you can go from Iran through Iraq. If you want to get to Lebanon to the coast, Syria is kind of in the way or on the way. So they've essentially tried to create a land bridge that goes all the way from Tehran. Yeah.

But through Iraq, which they now essentially control. It's another kind of sad artifact of what we're seeing going on right now. But they control the parliament. They are kind of the dominant power in the region. And now they control Syria. So they have, there's nothing really that interferes with their ability to move weapons and whatever they want to the Mediterranean, to the ports of Lebanon. And that's how they're able to arm the Hezbollah, which is a big militia that's based in Lebanon. They can directly support them not just by air but by land now.

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Because if you kind of look at where their militias are based now, the oldest militia is southern Lebanon, so it's Hezbollah the shiite militia that's based there now syria except for government controlled areas there are all these um syrian militias that are pro-iran that are all across the south um and then you've got the the iraqis uh who have become such a client state of the iranians to to a large degree so it's essentially iran is not our clients yeah yeah because they've they've been able little by little to take over ministries of government, like Ministry of Transportation. These are wholly owned by Iran now. And we find the few U.S. troops that are still in Iraq are constantly harassed by these pro-Iran militias that occasionally lob rockets into the bases where our folks are, or drones. It's a constant harassment thing. And the Iraqis can't do anything about it. The militias have become

so powerful that they're almost as big in terms of numbers and armament as the armed forces of Iraq. So it's a complete game changer for the Iraqis right now. Am I remembering correctly here, like Iran is Shiite, right? And Iraq under Saddam was Sunni, the Ba'ath Party. And then when they got rid of Saddam, like all the way to today now, is it more Shiite running Iraq? Yeah, because the interesting thing about Iraq, even though the government historically was Sunni, it's the shiites which iran is that control the country now and they're um the leaders of many of the shiite parties are pro-iranian very directly okay so are there like meetings by the way like these days like with asad and oh yeah the ayatollah and stuff yeah and we we've seen that like a g7 summit yeah exactly and you'll

there's always they always look exactly the same It's the Syrians who wear Western dress. They wear suits and ties. And you'll see Assad hanging out with the Ayatollah or with the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. And it's a very cozy relationship. And it's – if anything, it's just gotten stronger because Syria would not exist right now as a – at least the regime would not exist if not for the iranians backing them up but is asad how secular-y is asad these days because like i would think ayatollah would look at him and say heathen yeah you know whatever but i guess you know yeah what's fair is love and war right and the fact that the asad family is this they're not really shia or sunni there is this really strange little sect that's called the Alawites,

and they're kind of Shia, but most Shiites would consider them to be heretics or not good Shiites in any case. So there's always been this sort of awkward relationship in terms of their religion, but because it is sort of a Shiite faith, they've managed to click. And in any case, Assad looks to the Iranians as their salvation. So they've been able to put whatever religious differences behind them. And you're right, Assad's not really a religious guy. He's not – there's nothing about him.

No, he's not. Not in his behavior and also not in his practice. There's no evidence of him being very pious at all. And I had asked you about the history of the Russia relationship with them, and I just realized that was a dumb question because they were the guys. Russia are the ones who got Ellie Cohen.

Yep. Who like caught Ellie Cohen was the famous Israeli undercover spy in Syria. I guess they caught him in like 1965. Yeah. And they used their Russian, like there was some sort of tracking technology that the Syrians brought in the Russians and they helped them. So I guess that's been around since early Cold War.

Nice Netflix. I think it was Netflix. Yes. Nice little series. Excellent show. The Spy. Yeah. With Sacha Baron Cohen.

Yeah. Really, really good. And the reward for that for the Russians is there aren't too many Mediterranean ports where they can go and hang out. And in the 60s and 70s, Russian generals would retire and build villas down there. So you've got a pretty big Russian expat community even from that time. Like now? Yeah, you can still run into them. Like can you vacation?

Go hang out with Boris. In fact, the start of the book Red Line is about there's – the Russians are helping the Syrians develop a chemical weapons program and there's a crazy Russian general who keeps coming back and forth and providing help. In one case, it took a whole trainload of lab material to bring to the Syrians to help them out. So they've been there for decades to try to help the Syrians, but also kind of help themselves to a luxurious lifestyle. Is there, maybe forget Americans for a second, let's go with like Brits. Is there a safe place, a safe whatever in any way for like a British person to be like, oh, I'm going to go visit Syria? Can you do that right now? Probably not recommended. If you're American, you're not going to get in because it's unless you've got dual citizenship

and that's even more dangerous if you've got like a Syrian passport. That's just bad news to go to Syria right now. So I've personally, I can't get into Syria. From early morning workouts that need a boost to late night drives that need vibes, a good playlist can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. With the best playlists, you never miss a good song.

With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Proper, I can go across the border on the south or the north because it's a little bit fluid and there's refugee camps, things like that. A legal emigrant, there you go. Legal emigrant, right. But you cannot, they won't give you a visa. And we've, as journalists, you know, we'll often try,

but sometimes we'll have to get somebody with a Turkish passport or someone who seems to be safe to get in. And it's a shame, actually, because, you know, what's left of the country after these, you know, 13 years of fighting, some beautiful places. Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world. It really got the crap kicked out of it during the Civil War, but there's still nice areas. Damascus is almost unscathed it was a some attacks on the suburbs the horrible chemical attack that took place in 2013 the suburbs but the most of the buildings and the infrastructure is is intact and it's wow it's quite beautiful in places and um that's so sad like you can't it can't be enjoyed by many people

yeah we uh my my father was was a minister and and uh when he was when i was a kid he went to the holy one and went to damascus and there was a scene that in the new testament which uh any kid that went to to bible school would know about this paul's vision from christ on the road to damascus and that's where that happened outside the gates of damascus so all those stories from there and and they welcomed americans back in the in those days um and not but not now and you wouldn't want to go just because it's it's it's pretty dangerous in many areas of the country it's not not a good place to tour that's such a shame well this is the book we've started to talk about we're really going to dig into it now it's called red line i'm holding it up to the camera but phenomenal book i have read this one

and this came out what beginning of 2021 yeah the worst possible time to try to january 6th right after february of 2021 so you you could not map out like a worse time to come out with a book because it was it was it was a pretty bad covid wave that winter uh january 6th just happened and trying to get like any show in any TV show to talk about Syria was just impossible. All right. Well, we got one now. So we're doing it. And we are going to talk all about Yemen today.

You are very familiar with all the history there, which a lot of people don't know about. And I'm very misinformed on probably. And then we're also going to talk about Iran as I said. But this book coincides – it's called Red Line because of the line working with, I guess, various governments to try to clean this up. So would you mind just starting from the beginning and explaining why those attacks happened, when they did? And also maybe we'll get into some of the people who try to say like, oh, this was the CIA that did that and stuff. I know there's cases that are made there, but you the CIA that did that and stuff. I know there's cases that are made there, but you looked into that and that was not what you found in this book.

Yeah. So, I mean, one way to start describing this is that most Americans aren't aware of the fact that we really dodged a bullet in Syria in 2013, which is because Syria had a weapon of mass destruction. It didn't have a nuclear weapon. It wanted to get one. But since it couldn't, it developed one of the most sophisticated and largest chemical arsenals, chemical weapons arsenals in the world. And it consisted mostly of nerve agents like sarin and VX, stuff that just a couple of drops will kill you.

What is it? It shuts down your lungs? It shuts down your nervous system. So essentially your nervous system goes haywire, so your nerves can't communicate with each other. So your brain, your heart, everything shuts down and it can be deaths in, in, in seconds in some cases, but it's a terrible way to die. It's fast, but it, but it's also just excruciatingly painful, but that was Assad's big weapon. And he spent a lot of time putting it together in the book. We talk about how he did it in the early days and who helped him. And there's this crazy American chemist who

shows up in the middle of it or American trained chemist who actually really likes America and becomes a spy for the CIA right in the middle of their chemical weapons program. But when civil war started in Syria and when the regime has its back against the wall, when it looks like Syria may actually fall, Syria starts to look around for how to stop the rebels. 2011, 2012? 2011, 2012. Really by late 2012 and 2013, they're deciding that we have to use everything we got and that includes the chemical weapons we have. They made chemical weapons because they were going to use them against Israel in theory. That would never happen, but instead they, we'll just use it against our own

people. What was their beef with Israel? So they've been in, what, three wars with Israel historically. The big ones were 67 and 73, when frankly, they got their butts kicked pretty badly. And in each case, you've got like, Russia, like Israeli tanks coming across the border and killing Syrians. And so they – Syrians hate the Israelis and it's complicated. There are all kinds of reasons why they do, but they really still remember those wars. And so there's a deep animosity that exists. And part of their – I guess their – the ability to feel secure about their border with Israel that they knew that Israel knew that they have chemical weapons. So if there's some kind of exchange, now we got these sarin shells that we can lob into Tel Aviv or something like that.

But civil war breaks out. They use them against their own people. That's been documented something like 70 times altogether. It includes chlorine gas and some things that are not nerve agents. But you said they wanted to use it against rebels, but they up using it against like regular syrian civilians in in rebel neighborhoods so in 2013 when probably things are the darkest for the for the regime you've got rebels so close they're in the suburbs they're close enough they can they can fire mortar shells in the downtown damascus so that's pretty dire so this operation gets started to try to clear out the rebel areas,

including suburbs where just like apartment buildings and homes where ordinary people live, but these are rebel areas. And so part of their clearing campaign was to fire a bunch of sarin shells into neighborhoods, and particularly on one day in August of 2013. The thing is about sarin, it neighborhoods and particularly on one day in 20 in august of 2013 thing is about sarin it's it's heavier than air it's it's a it's a heavy gas and uh and and syria doesn't like it um but the the gas because it's heavy goes into underground areas goes into basements goes into bomb shelters and that's where all these families were seeking shelter from the the syrian bombardment that had been going on for days.

How does it die off? Like, when we talk about nuclear bombs, for example, and the radiation blast, right? There's a certain number of miles, and as it gets farther and farther, it gets less and less. You said, like, a couple drops of sarin can kill you. Like, how does it stop? It's gas. Doesn't it just spread? It spreads for a while. It eventually degrades. The interesting thing about some of these nerve agents is that water degrades them.

They don't last very long in the environment. That's why the munitions are made to spray them, to disperse them as a fog, an aerosol. If you get anywhere close to that, that's lethal. There's another variation called VX, which is kind of like sarin, but it's oily, and so it sticks around longer. And the Americans and the Russians back in the Cold War days developed VX so it would stick to surfaces like tanks or artillery. So even days later, if somebody touches it, they could get a fatal dose,

and the Syrians are making that too. Scary how many things out there, like we're so delicate in the world. Like it blows my mind that, you know, this kind of stuff doesn't happen all the time because, you know, half the places that have it are kind of wreaking havoc type countries too. Yeah. But the scary thing about that is it's harder to control an arsenal in a place like that and that was part of the problem in the civil war in syria they had all these weapons and the country was falling apart and the big scary freak out moment for the americans and the rest of the world was what happens if the government loses control of

all this sarin and there's all these extremist groups in the country they could just back up a truck that's right and haul the stuff away and you know blow up something in europe or take it to north america that's the part that really spooked people the most where was their base for all this stuff like where were they keeping it and how were they storing it so yeah they were pretty pretty good in their engineering so they had a network of about 22 major facilities across the country some were like underground bunkers built into sides of mountains so they were you know pretty hardened against outside attack other places it was like airport hangars where they

just kept the bombs stacked up but they had accumulated a lot of it in the liquid form in big tanks with the idea that if you kind of mix two ingredients like peanut butter and jelly at the very last minute and that turns it into sarin said everything was ready to go except for the final mixing and so a lot of the places where they stored things were just big vats of chemicals sometimes you know i've seen pictures of these and just row after row of huge you know you know barrels of of really really nasty stuff that they were ready to use in a moment's notice can we pull that up alessi syrian barrels of sarin gas you probably what that looks like you might find some for my book because there's uh they might be on there yeah

oh yeah you might have i got some of those little tankers in there right that's that's crazy so they were doing someone's backing up outside by the way sorry but so they were how long like do we know the year they started building this approximately and the second question is when obama gave his red line line which maybe you can explain some color there too was that they hadn't used it before at that point, but we were basically announcing to the world that we knew they had it. Yeah. Yeah. So they'd had it since the eighties.

And again, the way the book starts out is this American trained chemist who was put in charge of making sarin. And he invented a unique formula for it. That was different from anything that exists in the world. The Russians can make it, the Americans can make it. He made a different kind.

And that becomes important later on because when they recover samples of the sarin that was used in the world. The Russians can make it. The Americans can make it. He made a different kind. And that becomes important later on because when they recover samples of the sarin that was used in the attacks, they're able to line it up exactly with the formula that the Syrians had. So they started making it really good quality sarin in the 80s. And by 2000, they had factories making the stuff.

So they were making it in large quantities. They had big reserve stocks. It was they were making it in large quantities. They had big reserve stocks. It was a serious weapon of mass destruction program. And that's sort of the state of things in 2011 when the civil war started. And then you quickly get into a problem where the government, Syrian government is losing control of big parts of the country, including areas where this stuff was kept. And that's when all the alarm lights started going off. And so when does Obama come in and how did that go down? So Obama comes in in 2012 the first time. There's a famous red line remark that he makes.

Can we pull that up, Alessi? Obama red line Syria remark. We might be able to play it, but go ahead. You'll get that because it was actually at a press conference. I think it was Chuck Todd that asked a question at the end of a news conference, which is about something else completely. But Obama and Hillary Clinton both had been sending little warnings to the Syrians publicly, but also privately. But I need some private conversations as well, because they were getting intel from our intelligence community, but also from the

neighbors, from Israel and others, that Syria was starting to move these chemicals around. And that started getting people really nervous. And we can hear a little of that if you want. Yeah, let's get that. Let's hit this one. Turn that volume on. It's off on YouTube. Sorry. Yep. Yep. Good. We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. First of all, I didn't set a red line. The world set a red line. Ooh, that was cold.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's's that's interesting so at the time again this wasn't a communique coming out of the white house with that goal that we thought about this the president's responding to a question he uses a colloquialism which is red line which was to say that we see what you're doing syria don't go there because bad things will happen he didn't say exactly what everybody assumed in the military force But it was a message that was being delivered because, as I said, intel communities were watching very closely what the Syrians were doing. And they saw things, saw chemical weapons coming out of their bunkers. That meant either that Syria was planning to use them, or the scarier scenario was that Syria was about to give them away. So if the government thought it was going

to collapse, why not give this arsenal to Hezbollah, the militia group next door in Lebanon? It's really close friends. And the Israelis started thinking about the possibility of attacks from Hezbollah that now include sarin gas instead of just rockets that could wipe out whole towns and villages if that started happening. And so you have this moment,

and nobody was really talking about it. These cryptic words the president used, we talked about if we see syrians or anybody else using starting to use these weapons or move them around he was sending a very clear if somewhat subtle from our ears message to the syrians that you can't do this and and i can tell you just from hours and hours of interviews with people who are working this issue at the time, they were freaking out about the possibility that something very bad was going to happen with these Syrian weapons. And so this is like the president using the kind of toughest language he can from the pulpit, you know, the White House saying, please don't use these or we're going to mess with you in a big way. Which, yeah. way, which came back to haunt him later because when Syria did use chemical weapons against its own people, Obama's first impulse was to launch missiles and he was all set to do that. The ships

were in the Mediterranean. It's a very complicated story about why the missiles weren't launched. It's not just because he didn't want to, and we can go into that later, but it was a decision was made about getting involved in a Syrian conflict that we did not want to get involved in. Well, actually, I think that was a huge revelation in your book, because a huge, huge criticism I have of Obama's presidency is in particularly his second term foreign policy. It was putrid, to be honest with you. But I was unaware of this history right here. So he obviously makes a big mistake on an offhand remark with this and sets what I'll call a pride line. Because now if it's crossed, he feels a sense of pride to have to take care of it. But he's a president who had run on trying to get rid of these wars in the Middle East, not start new

ones following up the George W. Bush presidency. And here he was once that red line gets crossed his impulse as you laid out was to launch a missile attack and you're gonna have to correct me if i'm wrong in my interpretation of this at the end but the way i understood it from your book is that he that was not a declaration of war he had the right as the executive of president to declare that attack yeah but last minute in an effort to check himself, which I do appreciate, he said, fuck it, send it to Congress, let them vote on it, which he did not have to do, but he did that. And he actually did think like they were going to vote for him, but they voted like 400 to 100 against, and they didn't do it. And so I say I respect this because

he didn't let his pride get in the way of starting what would have absolutely turned into a war. It would have been a formality at that point. And I think about where it was on the timeline. This is the year before ISIS really becomes a thing. Imagine if we had had a war in Syria already when ISIS goes down. I mean it would have been a disaster. So this is actually one thing in his foreign policy that I'll give him some credit for. I think that wasn't too bad.

But is that a fair interpretation? It absolutely is. And I really like your ability, which so few people have these days, is to look at things just straight up. What were the decision factors and did the person make the right decision or not? And if you can put politics out of it, you know, for whatever your political beliefs are, it just kind of look rationally at, well, if this was my decision, and here's the inputs, here's what I'm thinking about, what call do I make? And first of all, you have to at least recognize this is really, really complicated stuff. Because the easy thing

is to say, well, sure, you should have just bombed the crap out of them. The reality is, you're not going to destroy all the chemical weapons. And then what if he continues to use them? Then what do you do? So these guys in the White House Situation Room are gaming out all these things that could happen and how many things could go wrong. And so they're trying to think carefully about this. And you're right, the president had been a big supporter of the fact that presidents should go to Congress if they're going to go to war, which is just sort of unilaterally, you know, launch campaigns. And so some people thought it was a cop out, but he did go to Congress and say, how about this? Let's all do this together as a country. Let's unite behind this if we're going to do it. Congress, bipartisan, bipartisan agreement,

wanted nothing to do with it. They didn't even want a little slap on the wrist with Assad. They didn't want anything at all. And so the White House had to kind of withdraw the idea of a congressional approval, because there was zero support for it. And that was embarrassing for the president. It was kind of put him in a box, because now he threatened a red line. And not only was he having to eat his words but he had the humiliation of congressman backing him so it was a real low point for the president but it was also i i think that was at least putting it appeared to me like it was actually for a second trying to put the country before his pride because he he had fucked up already yeah it was what it was like now he's got to step in his shit yeah and he did and there's a lot of guys who would have been like hit the button

yep you know so that was that wasn't too bad i guess but there was like a whole you really painted this full picture backstory that i had no idea about in this book about the whole operation to get rid of it and to get it out of there. So how again did the UN, I read the book about a year ago, so some of it's a little hazy, but how again did the UN get access to Syria? Did Assad like technically let them in or did they forcibly come in? Like what went down? Yeah. So when Assad used these weapons, it looks clear in hindsight that the Syrian army had no idea what they had just done. They thought they'd launched some chemical weapons. They didn't realize that 1,300 people were going to die because of it. So the next day, you've got these horrific images all over cable news throughout the world of this massacre.

And it's all kids and women because they're the ones in the bomb shelters and they're the ones who got killed for the most part. And so Russia, being Assad's big backer and sponsor, just got on Assad's ass and said, this is, we can't have this. You just embarrassed us in front of the world. You said you didn't have any chemical weapons at all. And now we all look like idiots. So they forced the Syrian government to cut a deal. And the deal was, as your price for being idiots here, you have to eliminate

your entire program. You have to unilaterally give up all the chemical weapons you have. And that's a one-sided give up because the rebels don't have to give up anything. Syria has to give up its most important, most expensive weapons program as the whole world watched. And it was because of Russia's embarrassment that basically a deal was brokered that the UN could come in and help Syria destroy these weapons. Do we know for a fact that they gave up every location they had? They didn't. And they didn't from the very beginning. So in the very first kind of declarations, the Syrians were asked, okay, well, we've got to list all the places

where they are and tell us what condition they're in. And it was all a bunch of lies in the beginning. But we called them on it because, remember, we had a spy inside Syria's chemical weapons program up until 2004 when he screwed up and got caught being a spy and was executed but up until then oh he was he was executed yeah he was essentially he was arrested because of a corruption suspicion but he thought he was being arrested because the syrians discovered he was spying for the cia so he admitted to the to the wrong crime and of course he was taken out and shot almost right away

but up until that moment these uh you know we, we had really good intel on exactly what they had and where it was. And so they started to give us some crap. We just said, oh, no, no, no. Here's where your stuff is and you better give it up or we're going to reconsider this whole airstrike thing. And so they were forced to give up most of what they had, but they still didn't do it all. They hid some of it away. They kind of fudged their records. And so we didn't get everything. So there's still some there today. We got about 90, 95%. That's what the CIA thinks. But that's still a dangerous... That's a massive amount of material.

Yeah. And of course, the other big issue is, okay, so you've got all these chemical weapons, how in the world do you get them out of a country that's in the middle of a civil war? This was amazing, this whole thing. And then what do you do when you get them out? Who's going to take 1,300 tons of liquid chemical weapons? We're not. The Americans aren't going to take it. Russia didn't want to take it.

And so you're stuck with this thing that, okay, we can get them out, but what are we going to do with them? And so there's a whole kind of meltdown over physically how you destroy a stockpile of this size without anybody getting killed can you explain how they did this because this was this was amazing they built like this they built ships specially for it and was emanating from america yeah i forget the the place was in maryland is that right it was in actually in virginia down in the portsmouth norfolk area but basically so yeah this is a crazy crazy story and it only happens you know you know it sounds like a movie but basically they had this one kind of cranky old guy in the army whose job that was entire career was was cleaning up chemical weapons and usually finding old stockpiles

around the world and his his his and his team their job was to kind of make these things go away and so they came to they came to this guy. His name was Tim Blades. He's still working down in Maryland and said, what's the best way to get rid of this stuff? And his little back of an envelope sketch becomes a floating chemical weapons destruction factory that was built from scratch on an old cargo ship and then sent out to the middle of the Mediterranean. And the plan was when those weapons finally come out, they're going to go on this boat and 10 blades and his crew are going to make them go away

and just destroy them. And they didn't have a great plan as it turned out. It worked just barely, but it also almost capsized the ship because they almost ran out of fuel and the ship was becoming top heavy and had all these... Can you explain how it worked though? Because all I kept thinking about, and maybe I was becoming top heavy and had all these can you explain how it worked though

because like all i kept thinking about and maybe i was thinking about this wrong but i'm like this is so close to an environmental disaster right like i don't know how gas would behave you said water destroys it so maybe not i guess if it's in the middle of the mediterranean but you know there you got a whole crew of people and you've got enough gas to kill a whole country on board. But how did they build this thing? Yeah. So water is a key, but it's a very complicated process. You basically have to take the chemicals and then pressure push a bunch of water and water molecules blend with it.

It's a fairly technical mechanical process. But you're right about the environmental concerns um all of southern europe when it the word gets out that the americans have this most big ship of you know floating chemical weapons you know right off the coast of greece and italy people went bananas they sent like uh flotillas of activists out to chase the ship and try to stop them and and um and everybody was worried that this stuff was gonna oh you know the place was gonna you know capsize and all these fish would be killed and god knows what else and dead things wash in on beaches and it didn't happen but it happened almost in the fact that

it succeeded was was just almost accidental i mean these guys knew what they were doing but nobody had ever done anything like this before on this scale on a boat in the middle of the mediterranean as you think about did they have to pick like where specifically yeah so they picked the countries that were upset it was in their area yeah had to be kind of international waters and far enough off sea so nobody could really monitor them and so they had like this little rectangle of space in the middle mediterranean they just basically did laps around it for 42 days while the chemicals were being destroyed. And it just, you know, say, it was that the idea was great. The guys who did it were just unbelievably brave.

But because no one had ever done it before and because it's crazy to try to do it on a boat that rocks and that there's waves and winds and, you know, nothing is stable on a boat. And so it was the worst possible place to try to pull off something like this and they managed to just succeed they got the last barrel destroyed as they were running out of fuel and if they'd run out of fuel because that's ballasted the ship the ship could have capsized and they were doing programs they check the programs later about their the boat stability it should have capsized in the last week of operation and it didn't that's crazy man so how it was 42 days where they're going around in a circle and this is in like 2014 so it's august of of 2014 where it's like crazy hot in mediterranean these guys are working in you know full hazard suits 24 hours like 12 hour shifts and day and night just sweating their nuts off and not getting much sleep and just working on kind of destroy this stockpile one barrel at a time.

And the guys who did it just – it was one of the most difficult things that any of them had ever done. And they're completely anonymous. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody had heard of 10 Blades outside, you know, a few departments in the Pentagon. And he was absolutely a hero. I mean, he came up with a pretty bold plan, talked people into it, and just had the sort of the balls to get on this boat and do it himself. He was there, you know, wiping spills off the deck himself with his own handkerchief, you know, it's that kind of guy who just had to make sure he was on top of every every detail what it was going on and you talked to him spent a lot of time went on the boat with

him oh that's cool yeah what the captain who piloted the ship came back for a little reunion and so we all got to spend like three days just talking about just every detail of how this thing came together and how how improbable it was and nobody at the pentagon wanted to do this nobody thought it was a good idea to put chemical weapons on a boat and try to destroy them and in the end it was the only plan they had it's the only thing only thing they could come up with to get rid of them and once they did this what happened so they they're allowed to there was the deal brokered like you said where russia forced asad to say yes you can come do this they take it out they get it on this boat they destroy it they think they got 95 of it whatever they got what was the immediate aftermath in the relationship with asad was there any type of

attempted diplomacy between him and the united states or as it had been has it been completely ice cold and no communication since then? It started to sour about halfway through this program. The Syrians played real nice in the beginning. And we always wanted to get rid of these things anyway. So thanks for helping us out. And then, but then as they started going along, the Syrians just started like dragging their feet and making excuses and putting up obstacles. And by the end, everybody was furious at each other. But the one thing that kept it together is because at that moment, when they were getting rid of the last stockpiles of chemical weapons,

the Islamist groups, the terrorists, were starting to really be on the march and taking over whole areas of Syria that they hadn't had before. And the last stockpile of chemicals that existed in Syria was on an airbase out in the desert that was surrounded at the time by by jihadists oh that's nice they would have loved to have gotten their hands on but it was something like 6 000 gallons of sarin precursor enough to fill a small swimming pool can imagine just a few drops kill somebody how what kind of damage you could do something like that oh my god And it was literally the reason that the last shipments of this stuff had trouble getting out was because they had to run a gauntlet of terrorist groups that had surrounded the base completely and blockaded it.

They had to kind of fight their way out in order to get the stuff to the port. Now, I'm trying to remember exactly who has reported on this. I want to say Cy Hirsch is one of them, but there is the theory that CIA would have done this. What I've never fully understood there is what their motive would have been. Because the way I understand it is that they had bigger fish to fry. Like if they were going to try to start something in the Middle East, they had way bigger fish to fry at the time than Syria. Yeah. So the conspiracy theory that's come up around this is that anybody who wanted to see the Americans involved in this war,

they would have a motive potentially to try to do a false flag chemical weapons attack. So what if it was the CIA that launched those rockets and killed all those people? That runs into trouble real quickly because, A, the CIA had wanted nothing to do with the war. They did not want to get involved. They did everything they could to avoid Americans getting involved. How do we know that? Well, I just – from covering at the time and going to many meetings and drinks and lunches with guys who were running the program at the time, they didn't want to get – they'd just gotten out of Iraq.

There's no benefit for Americans getting involved in Syria. It was another quagmire. They just did not want to get involved with it. So the fact that the idea that the CIA would want to sort of trigger something, it just doesn't make any sense. There are other people who could have, like say the rebels, for example, and that was the more credible theory that maybe the rebels got hold of some chemical weapons and launched this attack. And that seemed credible even to the UN inspectors

who first came in to investigate this chemical attack in 2013. They thought, well, maybe the rebels had staged this. It took a pretty impressive forensic investigation to figure out, well, no, the rockets were fired from this location. That's where the Syrian army was. It's not where the rebels were. The rockets, the munitions that were used, the chemicals that were used, everything tracks back to the Syrian regime. There's never been any evidence that the rebels ever got any significant quantities of sarin or anything else. So essentially, almost by process of elimination and by good forensic evidence, it all points to Syria itself. And there's little things too that kind of reinforce that belief, such as when the attack happened in 2013,

there were intercepts of Syrian generals and army officers talking to each other about, whoops, we really screwed up. Did you see all the people who were killed from this? We're really going to be in trouble with the boss. So we have that kind of intelligence too. So all adds up pretty clear portrait of a Syrian government trying to find some desperate means of fighting a war that they weren't winning, and then doing everything they could to try to walk away from it when in fact, they've just committed one of the biggest you know human rights atrocities in the last couple decades were we ever able to get and maybe if we did they would have never given this publicly but was there any sort of like smoking gun like memo or tied to the order to fire that we were able to get that you've talked to your sources about

if you're allowed to say no nothing in the sense of a command or order. So that would be nice if we had it, but it didn't, you know, we don't have that. What we do have is intercepts of discussions afterward, which just seemed pretty convincing. But I think the most convincing thing is, as I said, Syria's sarin was different. It had different molecules, different chemicals. And years later, and in several different investigations, chemists from different countries have been able to look at the remains or the residual material from this chemical attack and from others and say, this is precisely serious formula. And it's not just something that resembles serious formula, but we could tell on an isotopic level, this is the stuff they made before 2005. And it's not just something that resembles serious formula, but we could tell on an isotopic level,

this is the stuff they made before 2005. Got it. So they, they, they had the pedigree because they, one of the things our spy did, we had this, this Syrian chemist spy who was inside the program.

He gave us samples. So he was not only telling us where all the locations were. Hey, you guys want to try something? Yeah, he did. He, he met a CIA guy at his house and said oh

you know here's your like of the seven yeah i'm sorry it wasn't his house actually in a car uh near near his house and he in in the front seat of a car handed over a vial containing some of this errand that they'd made nice so the cia could take it back and analyze it so we knew exactly what they were making and later later on when they used it, it was a smoking gun in that sense. We had the formula and we knew this was theirs. Whoa. All right. So you're saying fast forward to today though,

this has turned into like a narco state or something? Like again, Mad Max Fury Road already out there since circa 2011. Yeah. Who's bringing drugs in there? What kind of drugs is it terror linked as well i assume like what's going on so uh there's the drug that's called captagon that people don't know much about in this country but it is the drug of choice and in the middle east and particularly in the gulf countries it sounds fun it's a club drug

yeah it's kind of a it's it's a it's a speed it's But it's also – there's a very unique euphoria, I'm told. I haven't used a lot of myself. I was going to say, you are speaking from experience over here. I know this one. And they used to call it like the terrorist drug because it gives you – if you take it, you have a sense of invincibility. That's nice. And so the knock on like – you could give it to ISIS fighters, and they did. And these guys would feel like they were supermen, and they would go charging after tanks and things because nobody could beat them.

So this is the drug we're talking about. And Syria used to have – it used to be a fairly middle-class country in the sense it had industry. It had a very educated population and a lot of pharmaceutical facilities. They made a lot of drugs there. But since 2013, they're not exporting many drugs or anything, any legitimate products to the world. Their economy has completely collapsed. And so those pharmaceutical plants have switched to making Captagon and a few other nice things. They make some crystal meth too.

Oh, cool. And they make it in massive quantities and so you've got supply there right inside syria itself and you've got a distribution distribution network which is all the proxy groups iranian backed back proxy groups from lebanon to syria to to iraq they're all involved in it so it's like hezbollah doing this hezbollah is involved they they get really mad when you when you accuse them of making it. But there's no question that people in the Hezbollah network are big movers of this stuff. And they've been doing this historically since the 80s with cocaine in Latin America.

Hezbollah managed to get involved, to get its hands in all kinds of things like that. They find ways to make money and sometimes you can do it through selling drugs. I'm sorry to cut you off have you ever seen that politico story that shows the this came out probably like seven eight years ago that shows the track of that and how they do it yeah like use cars getting it through west africa and like piling cocaine in and putting it through the through to mexico these guys are businessmen yeah they may be kind of wacky in different ways but they they know how to make a profit. They know how to move things across borders illegally, because that's how they've survived for decades now. So they're really good at this. And, you know, my last reporting trip in the Middle East, I was up on the Jordanian border with up against the Syrian border. And now Jordan, you know, a fairly stable country is having to deal with armed convoys of these drug traffickers coming across the border. And sometimes three or four armored vehicles, 70, 80 people involved. Who are terrorists.

Terrorists. A lot of them are militia members, but these are guys trained military people with RPGs and machine guns and and small arms and so when i'm up there that these jordanians are telling me that any day when it's foggy if you have bad weather these guys are coming across they've got a border that's a couple of miles long a couple hundred miles long it's it's all desert and so there are many many places where they could potentially pass and the jordanians are talking about their patrols being surprised on a foggy day with these guys coming out of nowhere and then shooting up uh their own patrols oh my god killing people and when it's when the weather's not crappy when they can't move convoys now it's drones so drones come across the border with drugs

with drugs and in drugs and weapons yeah and um it's and i did so they they they were very uh you know eager since i was interested and showing me just some of the stuff they've gotten. And it was remarkable, just thousands and thousands and thousands of tablets of Captagon. Just – you could just fill up the floor with these bags of stuff. You didn't try any? Didn't try any. Wouldn't let me take any home. And then just the other weird stuff like landmines, claymore mines, machine gun parts, just all kinds of just weirdness coming across with these shipments heading to God knows where.

So it's become – it's not just a drug problem, but it's any kind of illicit contraband you can think of. That is now – the Captagon is the leading export of Syria today. The entire country – The leading export. The leading export. This is the big money product that they have. I got to try this stuff. It sounds awesome. It must be good. the entire country leading the leading export this is the big money product that they have i gotta try this stuff sounds awesome must be good but you know because you know you always get like-minded

people you know if there's money to be made there are other people come in they're attracted to it so there was a huge uh bust i think it's 2020 or 21 in in southern italy where there was uh of course there was collabrians or it was i think it was collabrians but don't shoot me um and they uh well they're the big heroin guys yeah and they're used to this too and they find really clever ways of hiding it so in this particular case it was a ship full of rolls of paper like like newsprint paper and they just stuck it inside the inside the rolls and ah it was some massive amount many tens of millions of dollars worth of stuff and just the italians just happened to find it but sometimes they'll put it inside

crates of pomegranates or you name the kind of a way to smuggle something and um it's it just uh yeah here we go 18 million worth of pills from syria i think that that's the that should be the one their biggest seizure of amphetamines in the world. Yeah, so it's the one that starts Italy's biggest seizure. And I think you'll be able to see some of the... All right, from Rome. Italy reports biggest seizure of amphetamines in the world. One billion worth of pills.

One billion dollars worth of pills from ISIS in Syria. So to correct that, the only thing that's wrong with that story is it's not from ISIS. ISIS became associated with this trade. Yeah, but ISIS sells the people isis became associated with this trade isis sells the headline that is right it sells the headline but you know the they came from ports uh ports held by the yeah there's there's your little roll of paper yeah go up a lesson yeah one you'll hollow it out and then this the crap just rolls out oh my god that's genius stuff and and so this is this is big business so isis there's no doubt

that some of these other terrorist groups get involved and they they profit on it when they can but this is a government-run enterprise there are divisions of the syrian army that have a piece of this and help run the factories and we know this because we could see their vehicles moving in and out of the places where it's being made but But they're obviously bringing this north, south, west, all over. Yeah, and the biggest markets are actually Saudi Arabia, a place where you can't get a drink. They'll kill you for that. Yeah, but Captagon gets through. And it's one of these kind of like weird drugs where it kind of – it's not like heroin.

It's not addictive like that and uh and that saudis don't like to talk about problems they have anyway but it's it's rampant and it's moving to other places in jordan for example which is like it used to be just a transit country now it's it's a user country and i know that from my own reporting and talking to young people and say yeah you can't you can't go to a club without somebody offering your Captigon. It's everywhere. So this has become a really big deal.

I've never heard of it. That's crazy. Yeah, it was new to me too, and now it seems to be everywhere. And the Europeans are seeing it starting to creep up in the south in places like Greece. Of course, in Greece. Of Greece, yeah. But it's a good time party drug, and it's fairly cheap, and especially there's cheaper made versions of it that sell for not much, so you can get high without a lot of money.

Now, do they have like a lace fentanyl problem like we have here coming from like the cartels or not so much? I've heard that it's more just really crappy product. So it's lace, but it's essentially cut and watered down. So people get it and they're disappointed. Got it. Yeah. And am I also crazy to assume that anything coming out of Syria like that, especially if you said it's starting with like the former pharmaceutical companies themselves, Assad's getting a cut of it? Yeah, because Assad, they run the country.

Obviously, it's a dictatorship but um his family is is kind of entrenched in all the major industries whatever is left there so from from telecoms there's a sort of a cousin of asad who runs the telecom business and there's others that that run the pharmaceutical companies that are left and so if you if you've got any successful business in syria you're you're connected either to the ruling family or to the army or the intelligence services. Everything else is pretty much destroyed. What a crazy place, man. That is a wild history on Syria. So once again, everyone make sure you get Redline. Great book explains all, a lot of that, at least in detail, but let's keep going across the Middle East here.

Absolutely. We got some ground to cover. So I had mentioned this early on, but one of the things a lot of people online are constantly like, wait, what is going on there? But I don't understand it. Is what's happening in Yemen or Yemen I hear as Dale Comstock said. It wasn't like, you want me to go to Yemen, kill a few terrorists? Sign me up. It's like, I'm not going to yemen kill a few terrorists sign me up it's like i'm not going

to ukraine but i'll go there but this i guess yemen used to be like a series of little kingdoms that came together into a country in maybe the 90s something like that but essentially the way i understand it is you have this group the houthis which is you know this group, the Houthis, which is, you know, some sort of interpretation, religious based, who are backed by Iran, and are trying to take control of the rest of the now combined country. And Saudi Arabia, who is who shares a border and has had problems with them is like, no, no, no. And they're having this proxy war that then the US is somehow involved in sending in, you know, involved in sending in you know a few bombs you know yeah gotta gotta support the military industrial complex but like what's what's

happening so let's start from the beginning let's actually get an educated take on it unlike mine so in this a great rat that rat's nest to get involved and it's needed needed another little shithole i'm sorry not not to disparage yemen but i'm but just in terms of its situation right now, it's pretty crappy. That's what they all said too, so that's cool. And I've been there, so it's fascinating. It's a really wild place. I mean, the interior of the country is just amazing mountains and high desert and beautiful in a very stark way. And the cities on the coast, particularly Sana it's uh the inner city is just tiny medieval

winding streets but but not like you know medieval europe it's i mean it's like right stone age you know winding streets just really a really unusual place but it's got this crazy complicated history there's actually a part of it used to be a separate communist country that the chinese and the russians supported And it's had civil wars and other countries like the Egyptians have been involved in some of their fighting. So it's, it's just been this crazy mess for a long time. And out of this mess emerges this group called the Houthis. And the Houthis are, I mean, you almost have to think of them as being cult-like. They have their own little religion, which is kind of of shia but kind of their own weird little

thing there's a ruling family the houthi family which which uh kind of leads this cult they're um they've decided they really like the iranians because the iranians they they see themselves as the hezbollah of the south that they've essentially allied with with iran and its interest and and and the fight against the two big satans in the world, which is Israel and the United States, which they absolutely hate. And they're just committed to destroying, even though they have no way of doing that. They have this – their big chant whenever they have crowds together, they have to chant something. And so it's like death to Israel, death to the United States, and destruction to Jews everywhere or something. I'm getting it all wrong, but that's the essential message.

They've hated us with a passion since the Iraq invasion. That's the thing that really set them off. And so they really do view the Americans as kind of the center of evil in the world. Didn't they have a leader, though, not the Houthis, but the country had a leader at the time that played like both sides against the middle? Yeah, yeah. And they had their own arab spring moment too and there was the the the leader actually that met him in uh i think 2012 went over there was covering state department went with the delegation what was his name oh you're gonna you're gonna stump me on that now

but he was um he ended up getting sick and died um but uh he was beginning to have to deal with this issue at the time of the Houthis kind of taking parts of the country and becoming a threat to the region. Because as we've mentioned, they don't like the Saudis, the Saudis don't like them. So a war broke out in which Saudis and the UAE together tried to fight the Houthis and ended up not really succeeding and backing out of it. The Americans supported the Saudis and the Emiratis with weapons and money, mostly with weapons, selling them weapon systems. But the Saudis now look at it as just a disaster. They don't want anything to do with fighting the Houthis anymore, even though they're vastly bigger and one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They don't want to fight the Houthis

because you just can't really fight them. As a friend was describing to me, he's like, you can't bomb these guys back to the Stone Ages because they're already in the Stone Ages. So there's really almost no leverage against them. They see an opportunity after the Gaza crisis to fight their big enemies, Israel and America. How? Well, I was going to say mostly symbolically because they obviously can't do a lot of damage to us or to the Israelis, but they can shut down shipping because they happen to be right there in this little crossroads of the world where much of the oil tanker traffic goes.

Oh, was there a video? Alessia, can you go to YouTube real quick? I think there was a video recently from the wall street journal type in wall street journal most dangerous shipping port in the world just the thumbnail itself i this is this is on my watch later i'm pretty sure it should have like maybe 648 649 000 views somewhere in there do you see it yes that one it yeah yeah wall street journal explains so we can't play it because it's wall street that little uh straight there this uh right now is one of the most dangerous places to to for shipping traffic in the world the gate of

tears yeah and uh it's because the hoodies are there on that sort of east coast, but they've got, because of their friendship with the Iranians, a remarkable array of weapons. And this is a country that, you know, one of the poorest countries in the region, if not the world. So it doesn't, they don't have a lot, you know, people are poor, but the Iranians have given them some pretty impressive weapon systems. So they've got something like six kinds of anti-ship missiles, some cruise missiles, all kinds of drones. A lot of these are Iranian either gifts from the Iranians or the Iranians have showed them how to make them, essentially helped them create their own factories to make them. So they have a pretty robust armament industry, all of it aimed at being able to sort of take out boats and other things that they see as threats to them.

Just today, and this is, we're doing this on the 22nd of March, they launched a missile at Israel that actually apparently struck Israeli territory. And it didn't hit anything. It apparently landed in a desert area. And to be typical of the Israelis, they're watching it come in. They see it's just going to land harmlessly. Why do you waste a Patriot or an Arab, you know, or an Arrow anti-ballistic missile system, you know, by trying to take it down if it's just going to be landing harmlessly? But as far as I know, that's the first time that one of their missiles have actually hit Israeli territory.

So how far? But that's far away. That is a that is a hall but it's they're aiming at the southern port of the lod which is just a very southern tip of israel um okay but it's still up here so we can understand it's still a pretty impressive um feat to be able to just to strike from there and it just shows you their capabilities so there's yeah there's right there yeah and so that's not terribly far wait where's yemen yemen so the south tip of of the peninsula that's pretty goddamn far yeah that's

but it's within range for them i guess it's some of these these cruise missiles are a couple thousand mile um or a couple thousand kilometer range i was gonna say what's the relative you know top to top bottom tip to or bottom tip to top tip of saudi arabia that's a pretty long oh is that like the east coast that you almost i wonder zoom out for a second alessi so i can see america that's figure it out yeah yeah directions yeah that's right you know see if you can walk from uh and or Aqaba. Let's see. So we can choose, right? So if we go to like right here? Do Aqaba.

Right there, yeah. Do Aqaba. Yeah. Allat's just right across the border from that. Okay. Maybe let me change this direction. Let me start in... Do it from Sana or...

Sana. Yeah. That's their capital. Okay, wait. Sana to Aqaba. Aqaba. All right. So zoom back out with names and i think it'll it'll show you very cool names over there i think i'll show you all the taco bells on the route too mcdonald's all right you got to go way up yeah this is zoom out that is far yeah dude this is like yeah now click akaba there it is all right it's loading

27 hours 2170 kilometers so that's what like 1500 miles yeah so as the crow flies it's probably under under 2000 so that's probably the range that's that's looking at the outer range of some of these systems and they have something powerful enough to get there thanks to the iranians they have some really sophisticated drones too scary and that's why it's it's not a you know it's not an inconsiderable thing that they're they're flinging rockets and um and drones at at ship traffic and going through traffic going through and they actually have hit a number but we've we're we've been pretty good at knocking a lot of those um missiles down every now and then something sneaks through but they just cannot be deterred and that's the the weird

thing about them any other country like you you know they don't want to lose assets they don't want to get their their ports bombed and we've been bombing the crap out of them almost on a bi-weekly basis right Right. We like America. We and the Brits are essentially doing it with us. I think the Danes got involved in one of these missions. The Brits have? Whoa, this is a – Yeah.

They've been sending planes down there with us, and we've been flying these routes together because we're trying to make it – Just bombing. Just trying to make it an international thing, going after mobile – International bombing college. Yeah, that's right. But essentially striking a blow in the cause of shipping freedom or something like that. But that the international shipping lanes should be protected and we're going to enforce that idea.

But they're killing civilians also in the midst, no? Trying real hard not to, which is kind of interesting. And we don't know how many Yemenis have been killed. They've admitted to a few. But often these strikes take place at times or in locations where it's not going to kill a lot of people and that's deliberate because we don't want to incite things even further because, as I say,

it doesn't, you know, these little slaps don't seem to have an effect. And we don't want to send troops over there, believe me. It's like the last little thing. Oh, my God, no. Yeah, so that's like the last oh my god yeah so so that's about the best we can do is just to kind of try to keep them uh from doing anything worse and and and to yank on the iranians chain as much as we can because the iranians have a lot of

influence and control they don't absolutely tell the houthis what they can do and what they can't do but they have a lot of influence and so they could get them to back off if they really wanted to now like i know dale who dale comstock guy I was talking about who's on the show. He's ex-Delta Force, Green Beret, CIA ground branch. And he's one of the world's most recognized mercenaries now. We drove into an area that's about seven kilometers that the Taliban owned. It was their territory. You can't make a left or right turn.

You got to go north or south down this road. And we had to stop. We heard the Taliban on the radio. They had to set up ambushes on both ends of our small convoy. And they were getting ready to hit us. And then I realized, oh, shit, the only way we're getting out of this is we got to run the gauntlet now. And I remember when we turned around that night, my Afghan interpreter was with me. Dude, as soon as I started driving, I said, shoot anything where a bad guy can hide behind it.

You know, I said, don't relent until we get out of this thing. So as I'm sitting there, I'm watching the vehicles go one by one, the firefight starts. I got time to watch the show and think about it before it's time for me to start driving my vehicle, right? And all of a sudden I thought, you know what? I've been in a lot of ambushes, but I've never actually had to deliberately drive into an ambush to get out of it. But I have no choice this time. And then I started thinking, man, what if I don't make it out of this one? You know, I am driving the one with the antennas. And so I thought about my family and I took the moment. I said, okay, I want to visualize every one of this one. You know, I am driving the one with the antennas. And so I thought about my family and I took the moment.

I said, okay, I want to visualize every one of my children's face, everybody's face, my wife, my kids, one by one, see their face for the last time,

maybe their face, their face, their face, their face is right. And then what I want to do is get that all out of my mind. So I'm no longer distracted by that. Right.

And knowing that would be maybe the last time I ever think about it or see him. So I know he's done like some mercenary work in Yemen. But do we have like intel slash paramilitary operatives on the ground there? If we do, it's a well-kept secret.

It wouldn't be impossible because we've actually done a lot of counterterrorism work inside Yemen. Not in Houthi areas necessarily, but Al-Qaeda used to have a pretty big presence there. And so we operated against Al-Qaeda quite a lot. When was that? So early to mid 2000s, this is the headquarters of what's called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. So they're based in Yemen and they were behind the, remember the underwear bombing? I think that was 2005. And so the guy had a bomb in his underpants and he was trying to fly into Detroit on Christmas day. So they had a part in that. They had this other big plot where they were trying to take printer cartridges and put explosives inside them. They were going to

blow up some cargo planes. So they had some pretty creative ideas that we managed to intercept and foil. But the al-Qaeda presence there was a real big worry. And so for more than a decade, we've had a pretty robust special ops and agency presence in mostly, my sense was kind of more the northern areas of Yemen where the Sunni population is based, not so much in the Houthi areas. Oh, so all right. So yeah, we have that whole – I keep forgetting that. We also have the Sunni Shiite thing going on.

Yeah. Again. That's a part of the – The whole Middle East. And everywhere where there's the two groups are side by side unless they're controlled by a dictatorship or authoritative government like they were in Iraq for decades, they do seem to eventually get into blows. Guys, I have three other channels on YouTube where I am posting daily content from the podcast. They're called Julian Dory Clips, Best of JDP, and Julian Dory Daily.

The links are in the description below. Please go subscribe. Thank you. What's the main differences between Sunnis and Shiites? So it's – For the layman. Yeah. So it all has to do with which of these immediate descendants of the prophet, which of his followers is the kind of the legitimate successor to the organization essentially.

And I don't want to get in trouble with Islamic scholars who know this history much more than I did. I'll defend you. Don't worry. But fairly early on, there was a split between people who felt that this one successor to Muhammad was the legitimate one and then others who had a completely different view of it and went with another one. It was something as basic as that, as who's the boss after the after muhammad died and it um and then it turned into centuries of fighting and uh and enter uh you know inter-tribal intersect conflict um which continues to this day and and there's there's they're very different belief systems now i mean

some things they have in common but there's um you know, who the leaders are and what rights they follow. It could be quite different. But the way they worship, is it similar? Certain things are similar, like the praying to Mecca and the fasting and things like that. But it's like the Iranians have this view of – they call them the 12ers, the 12 leaders of Islam. And there's been 11 of them through history, and there's one more that's coming, and he's supposed to be a Messianic figure. I must not pretend to be an expert on this, but in practice,

they have very different ceremonies and rites and customs than the Sunnis do. Are there communities in the Middle East where Sunnis and Shiites both live among each other and get along and are friends? Yeah, it used to be. Iraq was kind of that way. And you'll see pockets elsewhere where the two exist side by side. There's some of that in Syria. I've got a good colleague i work with who's i think her father was sunni her mother her mother was shiite and so she's called a sushi so it's so uh yeah and uh yeah that's so yeah they do the you know they like like christians of you

know catholics and protestants yeah they're together sometimes that's how i try to think about it yeah but it's different because they're very serious about it. Yeah. But in some cases, Protestants and Catholics have been very serious too and have slaughtered each other and been awful to each other. So it's just maybe our history. My U.S.-centric view in some ways. And our history is a little longer in the sense that Christianity is an older religion and we've had more time to do terrible things to one another. But yeah, it's just been really just awful fighting between the two big branches of our faith too. Right. Okay. So back to Yemen. Houthi is Shiite and then the other guy is not.

And so we're bombing, you said, if we do have paramilitary or intel on the ground, it's a wellkept secret which i guess is how intel is supposed to work but you said the u.s the brits and the danes are doing these bombing campaigns particularly towards where that port is yep to protect the shipping first of all have we had recent examples of like of like some very recent news stories of who to use successfully like murking an entire ship or or even hijacking a ship or something like that. Yeah. So early on they hijacked, it was a tanker. I'm trying to remember what the name of it was,

but they took over entire ship. And then because it's social media age, they, they YouTube the crap out of it or, or, you know, put it all on Instagram of them taking over the ship. And here we are on the ship and.

Aloha butter. That's right. It was even so just because it's it's a crazy time there was uh one of the one of the guys was apparently a fairly attractive man you know with kind of sweeping hair and just we just and he became like a like a like an internet sensation because he was like the the hootie hot hootie or something like that so there was that they did sink one ship. I don't think anybody was injured,

but they, let's Google that. Hooties sink ship. Yeah. And I think you'll end up seeing, you know, bottoms up with some, some,

it wasn't a tanker. I think it was a cargo ship, but they've had some successes and they've hit a number more. Not as, there we go. Okay. Ship recently hit by Yemen's safety rebels sinks in the red sea first vessel lost in conflict this is from march 2024 yeah so it just happened all right a ship attack

by yemen's houthi rebels has sunk in the red sea after days of taking on water officials said saturday the first vessel to be fully destroyed as part of a campaign over israel's war against moss in the gaza strip let's go down the sinking of the Ruby Mar, which carried a cargo of fertilizer and previously leaked fuel, could cause ecological damage to the Red Sea and its coral reefs. Persistent Houthi attacks have already disrupted traffic at the crucial waterway for cargo and energy shipments moving from Asia and the Middle East to Europe. Already many ships have turned away from the route. The sinking could further detour and create higher insurance rates being put on vessels plying the waterway, potentially driving up global inflation and affecting aid shipments

to the region. Yeah. Okay. So with these attacks, the Americans and the Brits have been doing, we've been trying to reassure the shipping traffic that it's okay to come through here because we're going to have your back. Right. This is going to, yeah, this is gonna not gonna help that effort very much at all

got it and and the fact that it was carrying fertilizer that that's not good that's not good at all because that's uh essentially that just um will cause an explosion of algae growth and you've got uh you know and you know vetted contaminated water off the coast where a lot of the you know local populations populations fish for a living. So that's not good. So when was the last time you were there, by the way? So in Yemen, the last time was probably mid-2012. So it's been a while since I've been in Yemen proper.

Now, what was it like then? Because my understanding is that this war really got hot maybe like 2015, 2016, something like that? What was going on then? So that was a time where the government was sort of – our guy in Aden was – Is that Ali Abdullah Saleh? That's it. That was the guy you can remember his name. And he was – our government, the U.S. government,

was trying to nudge him into reforming as a response to Arab Spring uprisings and also trying to get him to kind of promote peace talks between these various warring groups in Yemen. Obviously, they didn't go very well, and he eventually died. But my impression, it was – it's like going back into Bible times in the sense of how you would imagine a biblical city to look. It's like a lot of kind of mud buildings, but really ancient and just crowded, narrow streets. I remember – again, this was with Hillary Clinton's entourage when she was Secretary of State. Oh, they brought all the reporters. Brought all the reporters brought up the reporters so we know when the secretary of state travels she always takes a you know a half a half a plane full of reporters because we all want to go see what what american diplomacy is up to you

get to sit next to her on the plane actually not next to her she's got her own little compartment but but she used to come back a lot which was kind of fun yeah she'd come back and have a beer with us sometimes all hill dogs yeah yeah she would tell jokes and have a beer with us sometimes. All hill dogs have a beer with you in the back? Yeah, she would tell jokes. And the nice thing about being on one of those trips is that at a certain point, people completely take their hair down. Or there's a dinner after. They've been on the road for five days, and now we're just going to kick back at a dinner and just have some drinks and tell stories. Talk about some wars to start. Yeah, that's right.

That's when you really get to see what these people are like. But on this particular trip, so we're going down these winding roads that, you know, she's driving in SUVs, big old honking things. Oh, yeah. And the roads will barely accommodate it. So just squeezing through these little narrow lanes. So you're in an SUV. It's like a big caravan SUV. Yeah, like five or six of them, one of them.

Got it. And because it's narrow streets and because there's huge throngs of people, and now there's this VIP here that's there, and we suddenly just get swarmed. People are just like coming up against the cars. And you can see the special, the Secret Service guys getting really, really nervous. Oh, yeah.

We've got bulletproof glass supposedly on the outsides. They're hitting on it? They're hitting on it. They're kind of pressing against it. They're not being hostile. They're actually kind it. They're kind of pressing against it. They're not being hostile. They're actually kind of being welcoming, which was kind of nice, but it just felt like, you know,

things could go south really quickly. The only other time I felt like that was in Tahrir Square in Cairo. This was after the Mubarak was overthrown. Oh, yeah. But we were, you know, the U.S. government was trying to kind of express solidarity with the protesters and say we're on the side of democracy.

And so Hillary Clinton goes to Tahrir Square and gets out of the car and just mingles, just goes into the crowd. There's still like just songs of people just tanking in Cairo. And you've never seen such nervous-looking gun-toters in your life. All the guys with their ent entourage you could see the little uzis starting to come out of their of their jackets and they're just like fingers on the trigger waiting for something to go bad and she walked around for five minutes and you got back in the motorcade and off we went but it's one of those moments you thought gosh this is very cool but this could get really ugly fast there's a lot you can say about that woman that's not great but

one thing of those is not that she doesn't have balls she's got a big fucking set on her and the other time i think it's the same trip we went to tripoli and libya right after the fall of the qaddafi government and that country was being run by a bunch of warlords at the time and these are like different rebel factions in control of different parts of the capital and one of those groups happened to pick us up and they were our escorts from the airport to downtown Tripoli that day. So we're riding along the main coastal highway and it's these four or five

vehicles and a bunch of guys riding shotguns and these little technicals, it's like pickup trucks with guns, you know, mounted machine guns and guys hanging out the windows with, you know, scarves on and masks. Regular ambience. Exactly. And, and we had no idea i mean i had no idea where we were going or what these guys are leading us to and at what point along the road we're going to get shot at by somebody but she seemed completely you know you know unflappable through all that texting away just texting away a little texting on her blackberry at the time did you say that was right after

benghazi right after what i don't i say that was right after Benghazi? Right after. I guess it was after Benghazi too. So it would have been after that. Yeah, tough time. It was a tough time to be there for, you know, as an American diplomat. I think she knew Chris Stevens, who was the guy that was killed. They were friends. And so it meant something to her personally.

But it also was important, and you could see this at the time, that she really felt that America had to stand for freedom and democracy. And her other big issue was women's rights because this is a moment for women were beginning to sense political potential for themselves. And here's the problem though. Like we can look at these situations. You look at Saddam Hussein. You look at Muammar Gaddafi. No one's going to argue these guys are good.

These guys were all scumbags. But it seems like we are very, very bad as a country at spreading democracy, because what we do is we knock the head off the snake, but it's a snake that can grow back 10 heads and we create a giant vacuum sucking sound, which is exactly what we've done in all these places. That's absolutely right. Over and over. over yeah and to toggle back to syria for a second on that that point you know we people look back now and think why didn't we you know just destroy assad you used chemical weapons we should have like you know destroyed his regime after a while the smart people who've been through this now multiple times the middle east with iraq and other places started to well, what if we did get rid of him? What happens next?

It's not going to be a democracy. It's probably going to be a radical regime that we're going to hate even worse than these guys. At least we can kind of predict what Assad's going to do. He's a survivor, so you can understand what his impulses are. But there was a real fear, and it was justified, that if Assad fell, the guys that come in after him are probably going to be worse. And I mean, it's kind of a lesson we learned in Egypt too. We thought, well, we'll support democracy.

The Egyptians elected a Muslim Brotherhood government and started to ban women from wearing bathing suits and things like that. And so that's not what we stand for. So our ability to anticipate the values and thinking of other people in other parts of the world, we almost always get it wrong. So it has to come when you have to be humble when you approach these things because we just don't get it most of the time. I remember back in episode 107 when I had Andy Bustamante in here, the former CIA guy.

Well, if he's former. Did you ever have access to, let's say, government secrets that were so big that humanity could never find out about it? Humanity is too big of a word. So I would say I have absolutely had access to secrets that would impact how the American public would respond. What do you mean by that? Meaning the roles that I filled the operations that i

participated in were operations that were relevant and impactful to americans they were relevant impactful to other countries as well but never humanity as a whole uh talking about collegiate culture and that was that was a term i was like very unfamiliar with at the time but he talked about how there's really just this thing where it kind of that culture kind of craves a strong man leader. Yeah. And in his mind, it's more like who's the strong man you know versus a strong man you don't. Exactly. Which is exactly what you're saying.

And it kind of ties together. Now, I'm not a cultural expert of everything over there. I love learning about it. But like, I'd be really curious to have been a fly on the wall with you over all these years, going to all these places and seeing it and talking with some people and getting a feel for what they want. Like, when you've had a chance in doesn't matter what country, but in some of these countries that are maybe more chaotic, when you've had a chance to speak with say you know swaths of locals there about what they want in life do you feel like they want a lot of the same things that like americans might want in their basic life but they just don't realize that you know electing dictators is not

the way to go or what's what's your? Yeah, it gets really complicated. That's a great question. Because people in other parts of the world, in this generality, have kind of love-hate for America. They think they envy us in a lot of ways. They love a lot of things about our culture. Some things they think are just decadent and stupid, but they also admire what we've done as a country. They admire our military. But they don't necessarily want to be like us. And that's really hard for us to get our heads around because we do think we're the greatest country in the world and we're for all the right things. It's not seen that way at all in other parts of the world. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking about America, about the CIA.

Everybody thinks they're all powerful and they're behind every bad thing that happens in their parts of the world. And they give us and our intelligence agencies a lot more credit than they deserve on those kinds of issues. But the thing I find about basic values is on one level, people all want the same thing. They want to have safe homes. They want to be able to raise their kids and be able to afford a decent life. And that's a distant dream for a lot of people, but that's something we all have in common. But how we get there, the things you need to have a comfortable life, that's what's different. And so I'll go to just to name a country, United Arab Emirates, which is this small little country that's neighbors Saudi Arabia. It's not a democracy. It it's it's a it's a monarchy it's it's a it's

a very tightly controlled society but people live well there because there's a lot of wealth they don't want democracy as we have they want things to be stable and predictable so they can send their kids to school and you know eat at a nice restaurant and have a decent life but if there's a democracy there they would worry that everything would change. And they would be, they have leaders that are crazy or that are extremists, and it would not have the same, they wouldn't have the same quality of life. So they don't want what we have. And that's true for a lot of places in the Middle East, particularly, if you get to Europe, traditions are completely different. And people generally want to have, you know, free democratic societies. A lot

of parts of the world just don't see the value in that. It's just much too chaotic and much too unpredictable. So is it more, I'm trying to picture like how to think like this is very hard, but are people quite literally saying to you like, I don't want the right to vote. I just want that guy to tell me everything. Or are they saying basically, I want the strong leader to do X, Y, or Z and not realizing that they're also kind of giving away their agency in the process when they do that? Like, which is it? It's more, more the latter, more people thinking that I probably couldn't control those things anyway. I mean, we can say, look at our own situation is like, you know, we have, have in theory freedom to do a lot of things we in a practical practice we can't control very much and so we the those become abstract issues

even for us we just kind of focus on our own lives and trying to have the best quality of life we can and these people you know generalizing again um they they just they they they just want to be quiet and keep to themselves even get those expats taking again UAE, people who've lived there for years, they're from Britain or somewhere else, they realize that it's in some ways a police state, you can't go to the

corner and yell at something bad against the leader of Abu Dhabi and you can get in big trouble, maybe get evicted if if not worse but that's okay they just would not want to make trouble anyway they just want to have a nice comfortable life and so they end up living there for decades and thinking it's a pretty cool place i live a very nice life i have a nice villa i do good thing i could travel and things like that i don't need the democracy part which is uh just uh just something doesn't really

make a difference in my life so what about the people who maybe don't have the democracy part, which is just something that doesn't really make a difference in my life. What about the people who maybe don't have the villa and are more lower class? Do they feel differently or do they explain it away somehow? Yeah, and again, it depends on whether your sponsor or the strongman in your country is on your side or not. Next to UAE, there's a country called Bahrain where majority of the population is shiite and fairly poor the the rule the government is is sunni and if you go talk to people in shia neighborhoods they'd say well we don't we don't have any agency we feel like we were oppressed um and and so they they will will say to you we'd love to have more of a say in our lives other parts of the country you know they've talked to Sunnis and they don't feel that way at all.

So it sometimes does depend on what neighborhood you live in and what, you know, and how your group fits within the, you know, within the structure of the country. It's fascinating. We're going back to Yemen just because we went on a tangent from that there. So we've kind of covered like what's going on there. And we're going to dovetail this into a rant in a minute, I'm sure. But, oh, is that you? Are you in there? I might be.

It's hard to tell in the back. Maybe four or five rows. But he's a guy with a blue tie. I can't. Anyway, I'm there in that crowd somewhere. 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. Yeah, we're looking on the screen right now. Yeah. There's all kinds of images. Yeah, so I'm there that day, and you can see some of those Secret Service guys. They're not called that at the State Department.

There's Huma. Yeah, there's Huma. She's right there. Is that Wolf Blitzer? I think it is yeah wolf is on that trip i remember i think that's uh might be andrea mitchell kind of to the left of of huma or to her left they got the who's who over there for this one yeah that was a it was a big trip just because of the places we were going so you know all the network guys sent sent someone and

the print people like me were kind of in the the inked stained wretches in the back of the bus. We stay in your corner. Yeah, we stay in your corner. That's funny. So anyway, right now, you still have essentially Saudi and Iran kind of funding both – like Iran is definitely funding the Houthis. Are the Houthis making progress at taking over the full country is that like you know is that sea of red if you will starting to move like what's what's going on so they've been able to solidify certain parts of the country and kind

of consolidate their control the other parts of yemen that won't have anything to do with houthis so up and they keep them out keep Keep them out. And so that's, there are ongoing talks, or at least until recently, between different factions trying to get some kind of confederation, some kind of way for them to all live together without being, one being under the other. And that has always been just,

just on the brink of happening, but it hasn't. And, and now since the gaza crisis the the houdis are more interested in just being agitators and you know bomb throwers literally in this case okay and at the middle of everything we're talking about is obviously what happened on october 7th and the enormous aftermath that has gone on since then so i'm sure that's going to be coming up where you see it fit to bring up the color commentary on that do that but iran is really really what i wanted to talk with you about

because this is something that you know when i had jim lawler in here he had serious concerns about obviously he was if he is retired he was a 25 year spy for a cia that specialized in weapons of mass destruction and that's the kind of work he did. So Iran was certainly something he was heavily involved with. It's interesting to talk with you because your expertise was in the field undercover with nuclear arms deals and things like that. And it's like the whole reason we went to Iraq was because they had WMD. And that turned out to not be true.

That's exactly right. People ask me about that sometime. And it is true that Saddam Hussein had been working on nuclear weapons And that turned out to not be true. That's exactly right. People ask me about that sometime. And it is true that Saddam Hussein had been working on nuclear weapons before then. He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group there in Iraq. Killed thousands of them. In fact, one of his cousins was known as Chemical Ali.

And Chemical Ali used... And he had serious concerns about where that could go. Maybe at the beginning, though, it would be good to start with some of the foundation, because, again, like sometimes some of these things get lost in history for some people out there just to iran leading up to the revolution and then the revolution itself like when when the shah was in charge who he was how that all happened and then how it went to shit yeah so people may be real surprised to hear this but but iran was a really close ally of the united states we supported the shah of iran they were the other good other good friends in the region was israelis the iranians and the israelis were pretty tight and you could travel back and forth it was uh they were supporters of israel um there's no question that the shah was was a you know he was a an

autocrat uh he was very uh very brutal against people who disagreed with him and resisted his regime. And because of that, there was resentment against him and against his backers, the United States in particular, continued to grow over many years. And by the time the Iranian revolution took place, you know, people were thrilled to kick out the Shah and saw us as the great Satan and the one who enabled him to rule their country in a brutal fashion for so many years. How do you get – I understand people didn't like the Shah, fully get that. I've always been curious though how you get a country of people where you could have pictures like this one we have on the screen where people are out looking like it's America and women in bikinis, men in regular bathing suits, having a good time. So many people in the country support like those types of freedoms. And then suddenly, this crazy Ayatollah comes in and says like, Allah Akbar, death to Israel in the United States. And by the way,

everyone put on a burqa. You know, like, how do you get people from that enough people from that to that to take over the whole country yeah it's something that i never can quite understand and i've been places like afghanistan where if you look at pictures of afghanistan in the 50s and 60s same kind of images you see women in smart you know western business clothes now you go there and you you wear a dress like you could could have worn in the 50s and 60s you get arrested if not something much worse and and some women just resent you know that that loss of freedom and yet you also find many women who who don't who at least embrace the the modesty of a veil feel like it makes them more comfortable feels like they're less of an object it respects

their privacy. So you'll get into, you know, I've gotten into really interesting discussions with women who say, this actually feels better to me, it feels more natural to me. How do they explain it? They see, it's, first of all, they think of us as objectifying women and sexualizing women to an extreme and um and so the men i've i've talked to one's a very conservative um a muslim and well that's the first subject they'll get on it's just how decadent we are and how we and we we claim to honor women and treat women as you know

as independent and you know and and just you know welcome their freedom when in fact we're we're sex obsessed in this country. So everything is sexualized. And they see that as a perversion of nature and offensive, and they don't want what we have in that sense. And many women who grow up in that culture feel kind of the same way. They may resist some of the more oppressive things like the the full bee suits that right we see but um but it's not really what it's called a bee yeah of a bee beehive beekeeper suit

yeah that the really extreme burkas where you can't you know yeah i know what you're talking about i didn't know i don't actually i know you know i've been you know in an airport in uh you know in middle east countries and you see the women with this the full regalia and and watch them try to eat you know it's like it's it's really see the women with this full regalia and watch them try to eat, you know? It's like, it's really hard to do. So you've got to lift the veil. It's like an acrobatic act. You've got to kind of get your fork up in there,

and it just looks really hard. It's like the fucking cookie monster. Exactly. It's sort of the food disappears behind the veil. And to me, I'm looking at it and thinking, boy, that looks really hard, A, and then why do you have to go through that? And to me, I'm looking at it and thinking, boy, that looks really hard, A. And then why do you have to go through that?

And yet it's interesting that you also see these same women kind of take pride in little things. Like you can see the eyes and the eyes are really done up. You know, you've got all kinds of makeup and eye shadow. Wait, underneath the behind? Yeah, or if you can see a little bit of the eye. And often you can. So these real extremes, you can't see anything. But some of the other, like that one, so the Saudis, where you get little opportunities to flirt or to kind of –

You get your flirting on in the airport, Joby. With just a half inch of opening. You're trying to take a beehive home? That's right. But also just feel comfortable in their own way. And I must say, I've been surprised again and again when I have the courage to ask a woman in an outfit like that, and it'll only be in a circumstance where we're having a deep conversation

about something else. How do you feel about this? And often it's defended in that way. this makes me feel a little less exposed i feel comfortable in my own little cocoon here and it and i feel respected like this and so and they look at a mini skirt or a bikini and think that just is an abomination so it just the cultures in that area are just a million miles apart. I remember reading in school, actually, a series of like dense literary comic books. It was, I think it was called Persepolis. I forget. Can we look, you remember that last year? Yeah. Okay. So that was pretty eyeopening to me because, you know, this, this woman, i forget her name maybe you can google

it but she was there when the ayatollah took over and it shows like all the regular pop culture what they had and then afterwards it turned into this dystopian you know scary place right and it was always eye-opening to me because you realize how quickly society is capable of changing overnight and that's obviously kind of what we were just talking about but when they took over in 1979 a lot of people at least have heard of like the iran the iranian hostage crisis there was a movie argo made about that as well and so obviously didn't get off on a good foot there because they they wanted to kill us but for the last i guess 40 almost yeah 45 years effectively the it's been status quo right like they're they hold the same exact beliefs they have the same deadly type chance at the same religious restrictions on the people like nothing's changed so to speak right well yeah there's i mean at least of the the religious elites or

the rulers have very much kind of kept the same codes you do see and it's been been clearer now for the last few years the resistance building um below you know, below the regime, though. And it's, you see that in these these really amazing protests in the last year and a half by women who refuse to wear the veil. And when it goes from being okay, well, I like to have the option of wearing the veil, but but now you're forcing me to do it. That's the part where you really start to, you know, get more resistance. And so you've had very brave women in iran you just taking taking off the veil or burning the veil and getting in trouble some cases being arrested and tortured because of that what was the first catalyst of that like who who did something that started that so the woman's name is lost on me but it was just a a woman who

who who just made a show of you know show of rejecting the veil and just was arrested and beaten and then dies in prison. And because of that, a movement grows up around her, and it's still thriving. It kind of comes and goes in waves, but every now and then you'll see an outburst of people having a flash you know protesting the veil or pushing back in other ways and and the the regime's way of cracking down they have their morality piece police who can go around and arrest somebody if they have too much of their face showing or or god forbid you know some ankle or something that just offends them but you also have um you know, there's been these weird incidents of mass poisonings, mostly make them all sick. And it's happening, you know, it happened so many times that it's pretty clear that it's organized. Why are they doing that?

It was a way to kind of signal to women, signal to girls that you know your place or something bad is going to happen to you. So that's part what the Iranians are, you know, the Iranian citizens are up against. It's funny, the Iranians have the highest, as a country, have the best view of Americans of pretty much any group in the Middle East. Yeah. So now, like, if you do an opinion poll, most Iranian citizens love America and would love to come here. It's their leadership that hates it so much.

And they have enough of support. They're able to have these almost ritualistic demonstrations where they chant death to America, and then the government, which is unbelievably corrupt, fights America at every opportunity. Do we have any good data that could give us some sort of ballpark percentage breakdown of what percentage of the country supports the current regime versus once it overthrown? The polls I've seen, and I can't quote specifics, but it's well over 50%.

So it's a plurality at least of people that have a fairly high regard of America and would like to see improved relations at least, if not an overthrow of the clerical regime. Yeah, I would think you can't have one without the other. You can't like believe like, oh, I love America and want them to be friends and still support the regime being in place. I have friends that still have family in Tehran and they go back there for family visits and they describe this weird sort of dualistic existence where young people go to parties, they drink, they take off the veils, they have a nice time. Whoa.

And then they have to kind of put the veil back on to go out in the street. So they kind of – there's a hypocrisy with it where people kind of forced into certain kinds of behavior and they follow the rules not to get in trouble, but they don't like it very much. And then if they got caught at a party like that, they're... Yeah, could end up going to jail. Although, because, you know, people and families, children of the regime leaders do the same kinds of things. So it gets, it's pretty pervasive as it's described to me, particularly in big cities like Tehran, where young people just want to live like young people. And they do, they go to their parties and they have drinks and dance and they just can't be public about it. And so even though those protests, I believe, started like fall 2022.

Yeah. Is when that girl, I don't know if we can pull up that article, Alessi, but if we can Google Iranian woman murdered in prison. prison yeah that should do it let's try that pull that up because i'd love to just get her name on it because she started it and then there were there were hundreds of thousands of people yeah it ended up they were protesting in public yeah it was a mass movement and it was really worrisome yeah type click that's it of Amasa Amini. Yeah. Okay. Did we lose it?

In a report released on 8 March 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that Amini's death was caused by physical violence she suffered while in morality police custody. It's crazy they have something called morality police. Yeah. Morality Police. The report found Iran responsible for her death and claimed the government had attempted to hide the truth and intimidate Amini's family rather than conduct an impartial investigation. In addition, the report and evidence of widespread human rights violations during Iran's response to protests in 2022 and 2023, with many amounting to crimes against humanity. The report found evidence of widespread. Okay. I mean, that's not surprising because they were arresting people and there were other people who were killed in prison. Yeah.

And it makes our position as Americans what to do and say about these things really difficult because we want to support women like this. And at the same time, we don't want to be, we don't want to give the Iranian regime an excuse to say, oh, this is an American-led movement. We don't want to give the sense that we're instigating it somehow. So we have to be really calibrated in how we respond to these things, supporting the women and supporting the protests without, you know, being more active than that. And because that last thing you want to do is just to take that

big segment of the Iranian population that likes us and turn them against us because they feel like we're meddling. Alessi, can you also Google what Jovi was talking about with the schoolgirls who were poisoned? This was new. I was unaware of this. That's fucking crazy that they were doing that. So they weren't killing them, but they were poisoning them, so making them massively sick just as a way to say like we own you yep and you'll see yeah if you look up that okay yeah hit that iranian

school girls mass poisoning reports okay some of them were um the iranian school girls mass poisoning reports are a series of alleged chemical attacks during which students in dozens of schools in iran were reportedly poisoned in various and undetermined manners by unidentified perpetrators. These events started in November 2022. Oh, I wonder who could have done it. At the Ishafan University of Technology and reports of thousands of students being poisoned in ongoing assaults were claimed to have occurred in the following months. Many psychogenic illnesses, MPI, have been identified as possible cause of the incidents this is due to similarities of the iranian situation to other claim mass poisonings of you

okay so they're trying to explain this away yeah but there's there's so little evidence because obviously we can't send investigators in to look at it but it just seems incredible to me that um that the schools of you know girls would girls would just repeatedly make these things up. There have been some incidences at least that – and what I've read, what I've seen on this suggests that supporters of the regimes and these besieged groups that kind of goon squads essentially for the Iranian government could be behind some of it, but it's, it's a phenomenon. I can't remember how many different incidents, but it's more than a, more than 20, as I recall, there've been groups that have been tracking them from the outside. Now, how does, like we were talking earlier about Iran's alliance between the Ayatollah and Assad with Syria, which allows them to get, I they go across northern iraq now which is no man's land in some way and allows them to get access to the mediterranean and the whole bit but

how are they surviving because all these other countries around the world i know we have it a lot of other major first world countries have it like you have to say you're not going to do business with iran just to work at a bank yeah something like that so they are economically sanctioned out the ass obviously the nuclear deal which was i don't even know what the hell that deal was that was canceled so all those things went back on but how are who are they allied with i assume in the east and how are they making money to support the country and not starve everybody so they've been doing this for long enough that they've gotten really good at just running in runs around around the sanctions that we've imposed and the sanctions have been really tough

um it's what kind of forced the iranians to the bargaining table back in 2014 when we did get a a deal with them on their nuclear program but the uh, you know, just actually looking at some material right now, and we're thinking about writing about this, but the complexities of some of these networks for selling stuff to make money. They have a lot of oil and they have a lot of gas. So they can sell the oil if they can make it look like it's Iraqi oil, which they can do easily now because they're good friends with the Iraqis. So you've got a tanker full of oil. It's from Iraq.

If you do a forensic investigation, sometimes you can tell, oh, it's not Iraqi. It's from somewhere else. But they get away with that a lot. They also have clients that either don't particularly care about the sanctions or actually are very happy to violate them. That includes the Chinese in particular. So they sell a lot of oil to the Chinese, to the Indians as well

because if you're under sanctions and you can't sell oil legitimately, you have to sell it at a discount. So if you're a country that's looking to get some cheap oil, well, here's where you get it. And they're also just like these really crazy systems that have been set up with Iranian oil that ends up going to some broker in Iraq, and then the money gets laundered in a Russian bank, or through Turkey and it all comes back to the Iranians and sometimes goes to some of these militia groups

they fund their militia groups through proceeds from oil sales for the most part so making not only enough to survive as a country but enough to keep their their little proxy groups going how good is their own military so they're we'll talk about the militia groups some more in a bit but like what does their military look like the the scary thing about their military right now is their capability with missiles because they've they've been working on missiles for a long time and drones as well as we see them mostly using uh the russians using iranian drones in ukraine right now because the iranian drones are pretty good and uh they've they've actually been able to develop jet power drones which act almost like cruise missiles um they keep pushing the limits on the on the missiles and rockets they make so there is there are a handful of countries

that can make um make missiles pretty well and they've become they're part of that group now they have pretty formidable capabilities. They're working on satellite launch vehicles, which means essentially ICBMs. If you can launch a satellite in space, you've got a multistage rocket that could also, you could potentially put a warhead on. So that's something they're working on a lot right now. Other areas they're not is they don't have a great air force because they still fly old jets that they had when the Shah was in power. They keep kind of patching those up and using them. One of the scary things that's going on right now and something I'm concerned about is Russia and Iran are becoming real partners now. How so?

So Russia, both of them are kind of international outlaws at the moment. So Russia needs air defense systems. They need artillery ammunition. And more and more, they're partnering with the Iranians to get a lot of that stuff. So the Iranians and Russians are now – they have a joint factory that's run inside Russia that's making Iranian drones that they keep sort of testing and improving and trying to make them better. The Russians are good at certain things with flight mechanics and sort of structural components of planes. So they make the Iranians design better and send it back to Iran. And so Iran has a better missile or a better drone too.

So there's that kind of assistance going on. And now the Russians have agreed to sell the Iranians sophisticated jet fighters, so Su-35s. So agreements have been made. We haven't seen any of them flying over Iranian airspace, but we know from intel intercepts that the Russians have agreed to sell some of their top of the line fighters to the Iranians. And that's potentially a game changer, along with air defense systems that could make it really hard for us or for the Israelis to attack nuclear sites, for example, in the future because the Russians have been able to have helped them harden their defenses and build better anti-missile systems. How much does Russia have access to like some of these places including Syria right now because they're a little bit locked off in the world like are they able to get it's hard for me to picture because there's like this no pun intended like this iron curtain yeah that has now descended where everyone else is like yo fuck russia

yeah so how are they even how are they even getting back and forth to some of these places so yeah syria is no problem because they have they still have their port there their their naval base but can they but they have to go through stuff yes get there, right? Yes, they go through the Black Sea. That's been a little more difficult now because the Turks have created problems for them, but they can still get vessels in and out. And they've also built a major air base too, and that's something that's happened since 2013. The Russians moved in in a big way militarily to help defend the Syrian regime, and that included a brand new Russian air base. So they have a lot of their transport carriers and fighter jets based in Syria now.

So it's not a problem for them to get there. And then do we have, like, is the Ayatollah going and meeting with, like, Xi Jinping? Is there anything like that? He sure meets with the Putin a lot. And that's become a very cozy relationship. And that really is... Fly on the wall on that one.

Right, because in the past, you think of the, as Iran being a client state, there's kind of a complicated relationship between the Russians and the Iranians. Now they're not just good buddies, but they're partners. And when you have two fairly capable adversaries who are now on the same team together, they're both international pariahs, but now they're an alliance.

And so they can help each other with all kinds of things around the world, everything from averting sanctions, selling oil, improving their missile systems. So it's a concern. And so North Korea entered that too because they've now become a closer partner to Russia because they've got things the Russians want too, like artillery shells now become a closer partner to Russia because they've got things the Russians want too, like artillery shells they could use in Ukraine. Where's Iran's nuclear program these days? So I'm really concerned about that. And I've been watching it for, boy, about 15 years.

And for the longest time, the concern was that, well, Iran says it doesn't want a nuclear weapon, but gee, they're sure accumulating a lot of fissile materials, the stuff that explodes in a nuclear bomb. In the last three years, we've seen a pretty big change with the Iranians. They're now making not just the low-enriched uranium, which they were pretty good at making, the stuff you could put in a nuclear power plant. Now it's high-enriched uranium. It's 60% enriched. It's very, very close to weapons grade. And they're at this point now where they can –

you could take this higher enriched uranium and turn it into weapons grade just in a few days. So if they wanted to break out, they would have the fissile material they needed to make a bomb literally within a week or two. So that close to having a weapons capability. We think that now they're kind of acting like a nuclear-capable state, which means that they know that there's big trouble

if they actually detonate a bomb. All kinds of bad things could happen. So they're kind of being ambiguous about it and sort of telling the world that, you know, wink, wink, we could make a bomb if we want to. And that's not just a bluff anymore. They've got the material, the fissile material to make weapons. They worked really hard on a weapons design up until 2003.

We don't know for sure what they did after that. But as of 2003, they had the ability to make at least a crude weapon that you could put on a truck and blow up. It probably would take them a bit longer to develop a missile with a warhead, with a nuclear warhead. But that's, that's not that far in the future either. Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive.

So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. So we're at a point now, what's also dangerous about right now after the Gaza crisis, the Iranians felt kind of secure within its network of proxy groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian militias, Yemen, that was their deterrent. Because if anybody attacked Iran, they could expect that these other militia groups would come after if the Israelis or anyone else. But that's, you know, because Hamas is, you know, may soon be history or is no longer going to be the threat that it once did. So that deterrent network for Iran is eroding, it's going away a little bit.

And so will that be the thing that drives them into thinking we really need a nuclear deterrent too? And that's not bad news just for the Iranians, but if Iran gets a bomb, not much question the Saudis are going to want to have a nuclear weapon too, maybe the Emiratis and others. So it could start a nuclear arms race in the middle east which is the last place in order you want to have one is the ayatollah or even just the leadership structure of iran though so narcissistically religiously fanatical as to say fuck it and launch a nuke at israel or United States when they probably, I think, are smart enough to know. I'm giving them maybe too much credit there, but I would assume they're smart enough to know

if they did that, my guess would be that Iran would be wiped off the face of the earth. Yeah. So they are survivors and whatever their other problems they they don't seem to be crazy in that sense they don't want to invite armageddon on themselves there are other countries you can't be as sure about that we're never sure what kim jong-un is is thinking half the time the iranians don't seem to be irrational in that way well they do i think they do see value and to be able to bluff and to you know to essentially use their their nuclear program as a lever and say, if you push us too hard, we can make, we can have a bomb pretty quickly. So if you want to go that way, we can go that way. And that's, I think that's where we're going now. And that's,

that's destabilizing in itself. And that pushes other countries into looking at the possibility of getting nuclear weapons and thinking that might be an attractive thing for them to do. Where do you think our relationship with Iran or Iran's place in the world is five years from now? So it's hard to be optimistic about anything in the region and in particular the Iranians. There are a lot of things, though, that you could maybe squint and try to be a little bit hopeful. One is the fact that the supreme leader is an old man, is going to die pretty soon. That whole generation of, you know, sort of veterans of the revolution back in the late 70s, they're fading out pretty quickly. So we don't know what the next generation is going to be like.

There have been, you know, moderate, semi-progressive leaders in Iran's recent history. Even after the revolution, there were some that were willing to negotiate with us and accommodate our interests to some degree. So you can't rule that out. And there's also this fact that there is a huge portion of the population in Iran that wants to live under a different system. They don't want to live under a theocracy. They're educated, they're sophisticated, they're proud of their culture i mean my god iranians are really really proud of persian culture and its antiquity and all the things that it's accomplished over the years they don't want to be led by religious zealots and so the hopeful thinking and maybe it's a little bit naive is to think that eventually that that dominant view is going to have a more of a political voice than it does now.

Well, how did the protests die down? I mean, there was a time there. I remember when Jim Lawler was here December 2022. We were looking at it, and I'm like, this feels a little different. It feels like something could happen, and then it kind of went away. Like, how did they get control of that,

and is there any sort of civil disagreement going on there now? Yeah, yeah. So it was pretty much beat down. But those attitudes and those views still exist. Right. And that's why you still see occasional flare-ups where there'll be a protest that'll happen on one day. And you get the sense that the thing is still alive. Those views and those attitudes and that resentment has not gone away. And it's just, I think, I hope, that if history is kind to us, there'll be a time when those voices will find a way to be heard. It may not happen in the next 10 years, but hopefully sometime in the near future. What's their access on social media over there?

Is a lot of it blocked? A lot of it's blocked, but they have pretty robust networks. They have ways. It's like Telegram channels or other ways of speaking. It's not the same platforms that we use necessarily. So they can organize? They can. And there are a lot of Iranians that travel

and Iranians that know people that travel. So if you're middle class and higher, you've probably been somewhere else. So you know how other people live and you know how to get onto Facebook or whatever platform that you want to read. So they're not ignorant of what's going on in the outside world.

Unlike the North Koreans, for example, that have very limited ability to see what anyone else outside North Korea is doing. Well, a guy I'd love to get on the podcast, I haven't worked on it yet, but the guy Reza Pahlavi, who is the son of the Shah, who obviously was kicked out in 79 and then died in exile shortly after that. But he, under that lineage, would be the next in charge, but not necessarily how it would go

if the country was taken over but he's he and his family have lived in the united states since then so he came here i guess as a young man yeah 79 i think yeah something like that and you know he's done he's talked to a couple people he's talked to piers morgan i think he did a sit down with patrick bett david and he's a very fascinating guy yeah and one thing that he's seems to have done a good job of since 1979 as he was growing up and becoming his own guy is he is a world visitor and communicator with all kinds of iran Iranian refugees in different countries and is kind of playing to that cultural identity and, hey, we could go open to being back in charge? He's very careful to be like, you know, let's chill with that. I'd like to see a free Iran. Like he kind of punts it. Like do you think something like that is possible?

And the second part of the question is – and I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I think this is probably a good thing. But that guy is kind of like a US asset. Like he lives here. I'm sure the intelligence community is very good friends with him. Like, that could totally change Iran to, like, a friend, I would guess, and CIA and those places would be happy if he was in charge.

Yeah. Yeah, I've actually met him at a dinner party one time, and he's a really interesting guy, like you say. And there is a huge community in the United States of Iranian expats or just descendants of Iranian refugees. There's a lot of them here.

And a lot of them would like to see something happen, some change in their country that they could help support in some way. The one danger, it's always harder for outside groups to influence the course of what's happening politically inside a country. We learned that a bit in Iraq where there was a big Iraqi exile community and some of the Iraqi exiles were CIA assets and they were telling us things like, oh, if you go into Iraq, you'll be greeted as liberators. And by the way, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and we think they're here, here

and here. And I actually met with those people too in the run up to the Iraq war and they were pretty convincing. And really, we thought that these guys were going to be able to, you know, they'd come in on our tanks and take over the government, and everybody would love them and welcome them. It turns out it's hard if you've been outside to come and have credibility and tell people, you know, here's what your government should be like. So it would be much better for the Iranians if this happened organically, somehow within the country itself, maybe with support and inspiration from Iranians on the

outside, but it may be something that has to come from inside the country. But if it did come from inside the country, and then he was called upon, I guess that's possible, right? Yeah, sure is. I mean, there are some people that will think it's great that he was the son of the shah um others will think uh no we hated the show we don't want that again but i think it'd be an interesting voice in that mix and maybe somebody with some authority because he's uh he's been kind of a focal point for a lot of the opposition groups and people to rally around so he has a lot of connections and a lot of things he could bring to the table if given a chance how long did he get to talk with him?

So it was a dinner party as an embassy and it was probably eight or nine years ago. And I think he was there with his wife and it just, he was charming, you know, very smart. Uh, had a pretty sophisticated view of what was going on and what was possible and what wasn't a deep, deep hatred. I can't even tell you, toward the regime. And just the guys that are outside just, they view the Ayatollah and his cronies with such vehemence. It's just, and you can't blame them because a lot of them have had their own family members

killed or tortured under that regime. And even now, one of the awful things, one of the many awful things the Iranians do is target dissidents outside Iran. And so there have been people, a fairly famous case a couple years ago, where an Iranian from California, he's a US citizen, goes to the Emirates, goes to Abu Dhabi or Dubai for a meeting and gets lured into – we don't know exactly what happens, but he gets essentially whisked out of that country, taken to Amman. And then next thing you know, he ends up in a prison. And he's essentially on death row in Iran. So if you're a dissident, it can get you killed.

There's a woman I'm trying to bring in for a podcast. I've been talking with her team. We'll see if it can happen. But she's here in New York, this woman, Masia Alinajad. I hope I said that right. But she's pretty amazing. She is hair because that's like her fuck you to the government and she essentially was she was targeted in the united states by an iranian hit team yeah that was fortunately thwarted i believe by the fbi and caught and it was stopped but you know they were they were trying to kill her here yeah like in the united states which is i guess maybe it's not that crazy to think about but that's the these guys are ruthless they are they are cutthroat they are they want to beat down any opinion that that could go against i mean it's it's a true form of like you know religious fascism if you will yeah and they've done it not only against Iranians, but there was a real famous case where there was a plot to kill, I think it was a Saudi diplomat in Washington, D.C.

And the plot involved bombing a restaurant where he liked to go. So if they had succeeded, they would have potentially killed all those people, including a lot of people just having a nice dinner on a weeknight. And the good thing of saving grace is that it was so clumsy. And the guys they enlisted to do this job were just idiots. And they just kept kind of like tripping all over themselves. And before they got anywhere close to doing it, you know, the FBI was all over the case. And so they just rolled it up. But it does show you the kind of the audaciousness that they think they can even go into the United States and kill somebody at will. And that's, you know,

pretty horrible thing to think about. And the other thing to remember about the Iranians is the government there is not necessarily monolithic. It's controlled by a theocratic leader of the Ayatollah. But there are also factions within the Iranian government. There's groups of hardliners that are more aggressive even than the Ayatollah is. And sometimes – More aggressive than the Ayatollah? A little less, shall we say say cautious in some of their planning so that this this one uh

one one group there was uh this this attempt to do this bombing there were some uh people in the what's called the irgc which is the iranian revolutionary guard corps who were pushing this plot and it was never clear at all that that on the ayatollah's level that he knew anything about it was just kind of like they were freelancing on this. So there are factions within the government that are even more hardcore than the leadership and could do, you know, are capable of almost anything. What was the plot? So this is the one where they're going to bomb the restaurant in D.C. Oh, bomb the restaurant. Okay. All right. Got it.

So that was them and he wasn't even aware. Wow. That's interesting. Where did Soleimani fall on that spectrum? So he was a really dangerous guy in part because he was a visionary he had he was the one that's nice yeah so it's someone with a with brains and also kind of a a strategic sense of where he wanted to go and where he wanted to go was to build this this network of proxy groups that would help Iran and would be essentially its foreign arms in the region, particularly. But, you know, he wanted it not just to be a bunch of crazy groups with guns, but groups that were integrated within government structures. And it was his vision to turn these,

you know, proxy groups in Iraq from being fringe groups to being kind of, you know, the guys that were organized to fight ISIS or however they got started into being political parties to being part of the system and being members of the government. And that's what you have now where they've gone from being sort of outsiders to being insiders in Iraq, particularly, and also in Syria, to some extent, too. And Hezbollah is the same model. They're politically powerful as well as having guns and sometimes some pretty crazy ideas. And Soleimani was the guy the White House whacked in January 2020. Yeah. And I must say there's no regret, no tears shed by Republicans

or Democrats that he was taken out. There was a lot of worry early on that Iran was going to seek retribution in some way, maybe a big terrorist attack. It could still happen because Iran has a different timetable than we do. But the fact that he was taken out was definitely – it was taking a very capable, very smart guy who had high ambitions for what some of these militia groups could do in the region. Now, who replaced him? So there's been several others who have kind of risen to the top, none with the charisma and none with the vision that Soleimani had. He was kind of a one-of-a-kind. We don't see anyone who's followed him that's been in the same league.

He was a uniquely dangerous person. Are there factions within the government that are like you mentioned ones that are even harder line than the ayatollah but i assume there's also factions that are maybe to the left of the ayatollah that perhaps don't like the united states but you know could sit there and have a beer with them if they had to is that a thing yeah absolutely and and there've been times in the past where some of those guys have been ascendant and have been helpful to us. After 9-11, there was actually a period where there were meetings between what was then the George W. Bush administration and some Iranians who – they don't like al-Qaeda either. Right, because they're Sunni.

Yeah, and so they were looking at ways that they could be helpful to us. Those efforts were pretty much turned back. We didn't want to get into business with them. But there are pragmatic politicians in Iran that would like to see a more moderate policy that aren't as convinced that nuclear weapons would be a good way to go for Iran. And to the extent that we can support them and help them, I think that's a good thing. We often see though, they're often just excluded from politics in the country, because if you're regarded as a moderate or somebody who's potentially willing to deal with the Americans, you're not allowed to run for office, you end up getting kind of pushed back and disqualified for whatever reason so it's really hard for them to get much of a base now you've been talking all about these proxy groups throughout this conversation you mentioned

Hezbollah you mentioned Hamas which that's a little separate right now we'll get to that Yemen what were some of the other ones so Khatib Hezbollah which is the Iraqi group one of the Iraqi groups okay how so can we start with Hezbollah and just explain this? Because I believe Soleimani, and I think you just said this, Soleimani was like the main leader of them. But when was Hezbollah formed, where do they operate out of, and what's their main objective? Yeah, so they kind of grew out of the the israeli become sort of long-running conflict with israelis but they're essentially an anti-israel that was that was their that's a reason for existing and it's the shia shia militia groups all based um mostly in southern

lebanon um and also up in the baka valley which is a little bit to the east but um you know vehemently anti-israel uh they've they've armed themselves down to the point they have something like 150 000 rockets and missiles pointed at israel so if there ever was a conflict that's the reason that that there's there's real fear about the gaza crisis spreading to lebanon because hamas you know if it's awful horrible group but it was also fairly limited in its capabilities it had a lot of, but they weren't very sophisticated. Hezbollah's got the real deal. They've got a lot more rockets, and they've got some guided systems,

so they could potentially have some precision strikes on nuclear plants or military bases, airports. It could do a lot of damage in a hurry. Yeah, and I see that I'm looking on Wikipedia on the side here. I'm seeing their size is around like 100,000 people. Yeah, it's a huge thing. And that's their armed force. And they've been fighting in Syria now because they became directly involved in the Syrian conflict. And so there's a generation of fighters that have combat experience from their time in Syria.

And what was the name of the one in Iraq you mentioned there? Oh, Khatib Hezbollah. Okay, so that's, am I right in saying that's like a estuary of Hezbollah itself? Yeah, so it's, they're not directly related, but they, it's all kind of Hezbollah, meaning it's a party of God. And so that's, it's essentially, yeah, it's nice to have that kind of authority, I guess. But there's, gosh, there must be 20 or 25 groups like that in Iraq. Qatib Hezbollah is one of the more prominent ones.

And are they, I assume they're the people who are like helping create the underground railroad between Iran and Syria. And they're well armed now. So they're the ones that every now and then, you know then see missiles lobbed at an army base where Americans are based. Oh, my God. And it's typically them and then there's one other group that has a lot of that capability. Okay. So October 7th happens. That is an Israel-Hamas situation.

I want to come to that in a second, but you mentioned Hezbollah, there being an issue there in Lebanon now, potentially. I remember in the days after that, maybe like October 9th, October 10th, whatever it was, there was military conflict between some Hezbollah guys, I want to say, and Israel on the northern border. But that has since died down? It's died down in the news, but it's happening almost every week. There's been a few attacks. What kind of attacks? Some of it looks symbolic.

There's a sense that Hezbollah doesn't really want to get deeply involved in this, but they want to show the colors. They want to show their comrades in arms in Gaza that they're on their side. So it's mostly just an occasional rocket attack at a long distance attack on an Israeli base, or rockets will fall on an Israeli village near the border, which are mostly evacuated now. There's not a lot of people who live there, but it's surprisingly regular. And it's a little bit, it's showing the flag there but it's surprisingly regular and it's a little bit you know it's it's it's it's showing the flag but it's more dangerous than that because there's always the potential

that they're going to hit something big and the israelis are going to retaliate because they have to and then if they do then hezbollah may do something else so this tit-for-tat exchange could get you know really really ugly quickly okay and and that. And that's always the fear. And with all the proxy groups, it's this way right now, even the Houthis. Because they haven't struck a lot of things, but say they did. What if they hit a Navy destroyer and killed some sailors? Big deal. Big deal.

And we'd have to come after them a big way because we just couldn't ignore that. And so there's a fear that Hezbollah will hit something in Israel that's so hurtful that Israelis will be forced to respond in a big way. And then suddenly Lebanon is dragged into the war too. How closely allied and incommunicado with each other are Hezbollah and Hamas? Yeah. So they've had an off and on relationship because Hamas is a Sunni group and so they don't have the same affinities. They actually were on different sides

in the Syrian conflict. There was a split between them because they don't like Assad and so they kind of broke with Hezbollah for a bit. That's like the... You ever seen that meme of the Bloods and Crips holding up the things together? Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's like Hamas and Israel. Like, yeah, we don't like that guy. Yeah, that's right. Enemy of our enemy. And, and, but that, um, but then just in the last few years before the crisis, you saw them kind of make up and there were lots of delegations, um, traveling to, to Lebanon for meetings, for training. We think there was a significant amount of training of some of the Hamas cadres that ended up getting involved in the Gaza crisis. So they do help each other. They're certainly strong allies. But Hezbollah so far just doesn't want to go into it full-fledged.

They're just waiting on the wings. And I guess similarly to what we were talking about with Hezbollah for background here, what is the history of Hamas and was Iran involved from day one? So they, yeah, they grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is a strictly a Sunni movement, anti-Israel, sort of hardline resistance to Israeli, you know israeli control of palestinian territory they that's what they've been all about since the earliest days um they've you know i've the deeper i get into the history of the palestinians and the different factions and groups um they sometimes fight each other more than they fight the israelis they've been the you know the the uh got the hamas people fighting and killing members of the plo the the Fatah movement, and they've been bitter enemies at times as well. And Hamas as an organization has objected to the idea of any kind of a combination with Israel.

Anything that recognizes Israel's right to exist, they've seen as wrongheaded and they've opposed it. And that's why their continued presence is such a problem for the Israelis, because they think that there can't be any peace in that region with Hezbollah having any kind of serious control of territory, because they've said publicly they would strike Israel again if they get a chance. All right. I want to be careful how we navigate all this because obviously there's an ongoing war it's horrible no one likes to see people getting killed left and right obviously what happened at the beginning was terrible there's seemingly a huge lose lose across the board situation here i'm almost i'm not cynical but like i'm almost like god damn it

like what's what's even a solution here but alessia i don't know if you can pull this up 2019 google this 2019 netanyahu hamas funding yeah this i can't get out of my you know i know where i'm going like it, I can't get out of my, you know, I know where I'm going. Like it's, I can't get this out of my head when I, when I saw this and I,

and I'm somebody, there are two leaders that I have studied over the past four or five years extensively around the world, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. I've read thousands of pages on these guys. I've read Netanyahu's personal biography the whole bit, you know, biographies that were written more against him, stuff like that. And he is a very, very complicated guy. I even said there was some conversation I had

about it on the podcast with you over a year ago where some of it looking back on it I thought about after I'm like I feel like that's misinformed so I got more into him I'd really been a Putin guy and then you know I'd looked at some Netanyahu but I really got deep on him last year before all this conflict happened ironically but there this quote grab this one Al. For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Okay, so down, yeah. This is from the Times of Israel, and it's been reported in a lot of places. But according to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019 when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank and Hamas

in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. So translating that into English, what that would mean if this quoted report is true, which is worth a question, like, oh, are some of his enemies trying to misquote him? But that would mean he's saying, let's give money to Hamas because they'll be separate from PLO. They'll also wreak havoc if we do that. I don't know. We'll have some excuse to be able to go in there and clean stuff up. Now, obviously, nobody ever wants to see what what happened and and what went down there but you have to wonder on his personal history with this if there's a deeper point here because he actually

he was prime minister from i want to say 96 to 99 and then he was voted out in favor of that guy who's friends with Epstein. What the hell is his name again? What was the prime minister's name? Was it Barack? Yeah, Ahud Barak. And then he became – once Shimon Peres got back in charge, he became the finance minister. So he – Netanyahu did. So he was high up in the cabinet.

And he ended up after having some – actually like a successful run, very successful for Israel, a run as finance minister. He resigned from the government because of the original deal they made to give the land to Gaza. Like that was his red line. He's like, you cannot do this. If you do this, I will resign. Right? Good impression. And so he then stepped away from the government.

Eventually, three years later, he gets voted in as prime minister. But Gaza has already been given up. So this Gaza thing was a personal pain point to him because actually in his defense, I'll say this, he's like, why are we going to put something right in our backyard that's going to end up having problems with it? Fast forward 13 years later, he's quoting saying, well, it's in our backyard, but if we want to get rid of it, maybe we should fund the people in there that are causing the most chaos. Have you gotten any sources or anyone around the situation who can speak to the veracity, like how real this quote is, or if there is some sort of, you know, espionage type activity to prop up an evil group like Hamas such that they can have the mandate to be able to say, all right, let's get him out of there. Well, certain things are absolutely true and just verifiable as far as I'm concerned. One is that Netanyahu in particular and his government in general adopted a policy to prop up Hamas.

And that happened over several years. And I've seen the documents, the Israeli government thanking Qatar, who was essentially kind of the conduit for a lot of the money that came to Hamas. But they said, yeah, yeah, this is great. So there's a situation where there's actually suitcases full of cash that would come into Hamas to keep them going. And the idea was suitcases full of cash. And then it got a little more sophisticated than that. But in the beginning, it was literally suitcases full of cash.

And sort of the difficulty that I think the Israelis as a country are wrestling with is the fact that a bet was made that you can kind of divide and separate. We can contain Hamas because they're in this little area. They're not going to get out. We've got this really great defensive system around Gaza, so they're not going to cause any trouble for us. We'll make them prosperous enough that they're just going to be fat and happy and not be a problem for us. But because Hamas and the Palestinian authority don't like each other, it's a way of kind of splitting those two apart, going to keep them opposed to one another, and it's going to be impossible to have a Palestinian state because of this conflict.

Essentially, there's a way to prolong this very ambiguous situation where there's, you know, some leaders say that we eventually favor a two-state solution, but in practicality, they're doing everything they can against that to make sure it doesn't ever happen. And I think Nahoo embraced that strategy, you know, wholeheartedly. And, you know, his fingerprints are all over this supporting of Hamas with funding. And I think as part of the reckoning that's eventually going to have to happen, I'm not going to begin to be able to tell Israelis how to vote, but when there is a political reckoning in Israel, when there are elections, people are thinking about this, about the decisions that were made

over years to, in a way enable hamas thinking that they would be controlled and they would never be able to do something like they did on october 7 which surprised and shocked everybody nobody thought hamas could pull off something like that how did they do it because i i i know how good massad is yeah you want to talk about a swing and a miss yeah i mean you can't take a shit along that gaza border without there being patrolmen how did these guys get across and do this yeah they had a really good intel and we're still not sure exactly how they got all of it the iranians probably helped but they had a pretty good sense of exactly when to do it,

what parts of, you know, where to send their forces, where to go over the wall. They had sort of all the kibbutzes and the bases mapped out to the square meter where they were going to go and what they were going to do. It was a very, very sophisticated operation. And it was low-tech in a way. And we kept thinking that we were going to see

more impressive weapons from Hamas than we eventually saw. But they were really good at what they had. And so there was just this element of surprise. The Israelis did not think that an attack was coming from Gaza. They just didn't see it. They should have seen there were lots of warning signs that could be read later. A lot of that evidence, just like with our 9-11 situation, was ignored or misread. And Hezbollah got lucky in some ways, too. They managed to did it on a Sabbath, on a holiday, when some of these observation stations were not

looking for anything. And they were vicious. I know in this country, we were quite surprised too, but the Israelis, and I've talked to a lot of folks in IDF and in the intel community and they, they've, yeah, everybody's fully, you know, candid about this. We really were fooled. We really didn't see it coming. Uh, it's one of the greatest failings in our history to, to let this happen to us. Now, you were over there in Jordan along the Syria border, like you said, but when we were talking before camera, you were saying, obviously, parts of the reason you've been over there is to cover this war. Yeah. What's going on? Which, by the way, how's your boy King Abdullah doing? He's, gosh, it's excruciating for him because clearly half his country are Palestinians. He's married to a Palestinian woman.

Yes, he is. But he also has a long-range vision of the region and what he thinks should happen. And what he wants to happen is for there to be a free Palestinian society, a place where people can, you know, maybe it's demilitarized, maybe there's some way that it can happen that Israel can accept in terms of security threats. But if you don't solve that basic problem of giving Palestinians some self-determination, some abilities to direct their own destiny, then this problem is just going to pop up again and again and again. In fact, you just create more martyrs, more suicide bombers with every death in Gaza.

So he's seeing all this. He's worried about it. And yet he feels like there's these insurmountable, if I could speak for him, difficulties. There are people that just are standing in the way of any kind of solution one of them being netanyahu and the other being hamas which neither one of them are willing to compromise yes and until it just you almost have to look beyond those two into some future where where you have more so reasonable um you know partners for negotiation that uh that you

can get some kind of solution. So you've had some, am I hearing this correctly? You've had some private conversations with him since the war broke out? Yeah, I don't want to talk about the extent, but yeah, I've been lucky enough to have several meetings with him. Yeah, we laid out on episode 134 when Joby was last here, we talked all about black flags and a lot of other stuff too but we laid out your whole relationship with the king over the years which is a very very fascinating relationship and how that got formed and that guy's pretty cool yeah i mean he really like i said you know in america where kings and queens thing we go i don't know about that yeah but he didn't want power

yep he is he's very aware of his region but also westernized in like all the good ways. And a really calm, solid leader who's self-reflective, which you, I mean, you'd think like king and self-reflection. Yeah. That usually doesn't go hand in hand. But it was funny, my friend, Remy Adaleke, Navy SEAL who I had on here. Trident can really, the power that comes with it, the accolades that come with it, it's not good at times. What do you mean?

In my opinion, no human being was created to be worshipped by another human being. You know, when you're a SEAL, go to the base that's not the SEAL base. You go to NAB or go to another base, you have that fighting on everybody stops and he look like oh crap I need a seal and it's like that can build up pride within the person and there's been guys who you know It's been too much power Here his boys with him too. Oh, no kids like oh, dude. He's the best. Yeah, but he he made a really interesting point He was given he was spitting some fire at the beginning of this war when he was at the king, when he was at different conferences and stuff. But people can go look this up and watch some of the things he said. But one of the things he was pointing to is a common complaint that was being wielded against places like Jordan and countries that were speaking like, hey, we got

to get to peace in this war was that, okay, well, why don't you take in the Palestinians? And he actually, in my opinion, gave a really eloquent explanation saying, look, don't like Hamas. Like you said, don't like the hardline stance in Israel on some of this vis-a-vis peace. But if we in the palestinians it's not that we're not taking them because like the idea was that they're saying oh those countries think they're garbage or something he's like that's not what it is if we take them in we are we are we are going to allow the ethnic cleansing of the region yeah because those people will leave do you agree with that yeah that's and and that's something the palestinians are really sensitive to and even in

gaza because there's suggestions why why do you do you live in this prison? Why don't you go somewhere else? lose that little bit of dignity or, you know, identity and geography that they have is just deeply offensive. And in addition to all those concerns, the Jordanians are just overwhelmed as it is with refugee problems. They've got, you know, the Assyrian conflict, something, I don't know, it's like a million and a half Syrians ended up coming into Jordan. How many people live in Jordan? It increased the population of the country by about 20%. Holy shit. So, you know, the whole country had like 6 million people.

And then you get these waves of people, some settling in semi-permanent refugee camps on the border, but many more of them just coming into the towns, coming into Amman and to some of the northern cities, which are now just like huge populations of Syrians. And Jordan has to provide schooling. It has to provide housing. It has to provide water, which Jordan doesn't have. It's one of the most water-poor countries in the world. They have no rivers.

There's a trickle of a thing called the Jordan River. It really is a waterway. It's not much at all. There are no lakes. They've tried various things like piping water from the Red Sea or the Dead Sea, rather, up to Jordan and running it through desalination plants. But they don't have enough water for agriculture or for people to drink and to have suddenly like a million more mouths to feed and more people to provide water to. They don't have energy. They don't have gas and oil. And so every time, you know, there's still people living in Jordan from the Iraq war, you know, 20 years ago. So people kind of come there

because it's a fairly safe, sane, you know, quiet place. And then they never leave. So it's the last thing that Jordan needs is another big Palestinian or big refugee crisis that sends more people into their country. And to see, certainly to see Israel's perspective on this, and I fully understand this, it's like, you have this patch of land, right? You tried to compromise to give it to people to live there now it is geographically separated from the other part of their country which makes it problematic you did basically have to box them in and i get that because you look at it you there's four borders on one side there's the sea and once i forget what it is maybe it's like three miles out it becomes israeli territory and that's where all the fish are, so they can't go out there.

On the north and east sides, it's Israel. And it's like I tell people, I'm like, look, since Hamas is there and people who hate them are there, imagine if like Iraq in 2006 were where Mexico is. Yeah. We'd all want a wall. Yeah. Okay. Like there's people who want a wall right now. I'm like, you really want one for that.

So like you'd never be letting people in. And then on the south side, it borders Egypt. But like the Sinai Peninsula is a no man's land. And it's only – it's not even really – some of it's not inhabitable. And it's only inhabited in the places it is by terror groups. Is that correct? Yeah. ISIS had a big presence in Sinai.

Of course. It still has people there. And the Egyptians don't want – just don't want the palestinians they're adamant about it um and so there's really no place for the for the people from gaza to go they're not allowed to cross that border and um and you're right i've spent some time in the sinai and it's it's an extreme desert you've been there yeah it's it's uh it's looks like been there for a while? it looks like a moonscape a lot of it is there like a hotel out there? there is a little resort on the coast

actually but most of the peninsula is just kind of wasteland what were you doing out there? I made several trips to Egypt so that was just on one of my little excursions so it's a great perk of my job i get to go to interesting places and when i have a few extra days um you just take a drive out there

by yourself yeah well with with with someone else yeah like security or somebody just knows the area and uh because my local guide it's making me a little nervous i don't know about that you know there's a lot of dudes with ak's along those roads. Yeah, you just have to know. You have to be with somebody who knows the turf. Okay. You just get to stay out of trouble. All right, fair enough. So where is this? When was the last time you were there again?

November? Is that right? Yeah. No, sorry. February. Oh, you were just there in February. Yeah. And that was in Jordan.

Yeah, that's Jordan up to Syria. Okay, because you can't get into Gaza, obviously. No, unless you're embedded yeah you could get in yeah i i guess like some of the war reporters who's who's paul rosalie's by matt gutman who i think may come on the podcast i think i think he's been there i gotta check on that he's definitely been in israel during like a lot of this time but what you know what's what's the status there i mean i'm very careful with what i believe because there's propaganda from every angle absolutely from both sides you know you see your hamas actors you see your israeli claims that you know the government's just pushing but i you know i hate war i think

that makes me normal i hope but there's so many people, it appears, regardless of what the numbers are, who are dying. And there seems to be no end in sight. And yes, it does seem like Hamas is unreasonable and doesn't want to have ceasefires. But there's a lot of people there who are living under their thumb that probably do want that. Like, what's happening? Take me there. What's happening i think the big disappointment um among many actually is um this kind of this notion that that hamas could

be cleared out quickly and that just hasn't happened and it may not be possible and um at least in the in the way the israelis want it to happen. So there were all these predictions, well, this will be this hot campaign, but by sometime in January, it'll be over. And then we'll figure out how to pacify the place and what happens next. And that fled, well, by sometime in February or by Ramadan, surely, like God help us if we don't have this thing settled by Ramadan.

And it's not only is not settled, but now you have a situation where Israel is having to go back into places in the north, got this new siege that I guess is just wrapping up at Al-Shiba Hospital, where there's a lot of controversy and fighting before. And now it's back again, because it turns out that Hamas went back and reoccupied the hospital. And there's been like four or five days of pretty intense fighting. Which is a real, by the way, that is, and you would know better than me even, but like talking to some of my guys who have been over there and I'll quote one of them, like Remy Adelake, who literally was like embedded. It is a real thing. Like they do

use hospitals. They do use ambulances to get around. They do use schools sometimes. Does that mean they're using all of them? And does Israel sometimes use that as carte blanche to say, oh, it's a school. They're using it? Yes. But they do use them. No? Yeah. And the tunnel thing is a real thing.

And the more we get into that and just get a sense of how sophisticated these tunnels are. And it's like the New York subway. It's this massive project that took them obviously you know 15 years to build and underground you know are not just like bunkers and hideouts but weapons factories and and it just the tragedy is they spent all this money building this defensive or this military network while the country was you know almost, almost starving. I'm essentially right. You're not, you know, instead of building useful infrastructure, you're building, you know, this fortress. And it just seems incredibly unfair to people who have to live there.

So, but yeah, I mean, it's one of the big logistical problems with this conflict for the Israelis has been, what do you do about these tunnels? They're so massive. There's so many tunnels and so many miles of them is just how to neutralize them so that hamas can't use them again and there's hostages down there hostages down there they've been uh there's been some efforts to flood the tunnels taking seawater and just pumping it in it's just try to which would kill the hostage which will kill the hostages from the in the wrong places other places if they feel Other places, if they feel confident that the hostages aren't here in the north, then if you flood the tunnels with seawater, they may not be usable again for a long time.

But they're trying to come up with engineering solutions for dealing with these things. But it is a problem that, despite predictions that it's going to get solved quickly, you can't completely defeat Hamas. Just that can't happen. The idea, it's not just in Gaza, but in other areas too. I mean, Hamas has become heroes in the Palestinian territory, and that's not an outcome that you want to see. What kind of percentage are the heroes to? Well, I mean... Ballpark.

I can tell you that an overwhelming majority of people, I mean, it's hard to get good polling because it's hard to do polling in that part of the world. But when people are asked, you know, would you prefer living under the Fatah, the palestinian authority or under hamas it's uh um you know at least in in in the in the west bank right now hamas is more popular by far in the west bank the west bank so we're not talking about god we're talking about west bank we're talking about away from it and you know in jordan you, I'm talking to ordinary people who have,

you know, no dog in this fight, but they, they, they look at, uh, what Hamas has done is heroic. And it's, it's hard for me to get my head around because it's really the kind of the barbarity that we all saw, but they, um, they, they, they, you know, they're sort of anti-Israel and their outlook and they're just glad to see somebody beat up on the israelis even if it even at such great costs even if it's civilians even if civilians and i'm talking to young people who who go to clubs and you know like wear western clothes and look pretty western but somehow sympathize with hamas which is hard to imagine because they wouldn't want to live under them i I don't think. Because that would just be, you to look at the – this is like weird as this is. I like to look at the marketing of these things, how wars are marketed, which is propaganda.

It's called what it is. And I have been expressing concerns since about three days into the conflict about the strategy of the israeli government in this they at the beginning they had a lot of sympathy obviously at the very beginning because you know they were their civilians were attacked it's barbaric what happened but then it became this almost tragedy porn format of it, meaning it wasn't good enough to say babies were killed. We had to keep spreading that like they were definitely beheaded and then have arguments over whether or not babies were mutilated or beheaded, which to me should be irrelevant. Like babies were killed. That's horrible then they had to you know they had to go on every station and anything that was even questioning anything was anti-semitic yeah and i'm like

this is gonna piss people off who agree with you and i will tell you from what i have seen take it anecdotally take it as as you will, the sentiment in this country, they don't fuck with Israel. And some of the – and I don't fuck with Hamas at all. I don't like them at all. It's horrible. That's why I'm like – some of that stuff, when I see like Trans Lives Matter out there talking about, yay, Hamas, I'm like oh my god you would you would be like executed in two seconds but like you know you can kind of look at it both ways and say all right this is a terror group that's bad what are we doing over here why are we mortar bombing places leveling them there was one like the israeli government even admitted to

this one where this was this had to be like four or five months ago where they did admit they attacked like a refugee base because there was one guy there yeah so they went after one you know maybe mid-level hamas guy and killed god knows how many people men women and children it's like you are creating the next generation of people who are going to hate you so that when you are interviewing people outside of clubs 20 years from now which i I'm sure you still will be, you know, those young people will be like, yeah, fuck Israel. Yeah. You know, we love them. Like, they'll say stuff like that.

Like, how do you think they get out of this from a PR perspective? The thing that I get from my work is you get to see the complexity of situations that nothing is ever just reducible to soundbites or slogans. It's always a lot more complicated than you think it is. But a few things are absolutely clear, and one is that Israel's lost the PR war and this conflict. conflict that public sentiment particularly internationally not not as much in the united states as in other countries but it swung so heavily against israel that's going to take a very long time to to get out and there's no there's no kind of day after plan that that looks to me as a reasonable way to kind of get us on a better trajectory that's what feels so hopeless about this is that i don't know how we get out of this. And if you're Israel, how you get to a point

where you can kind of cleanse the stain that Gaza has become for them. It's just, it's its own separate tragedy. And there are lots of people of good will that want to see good things come out of this, but they're, you know, just the conversations I have now are just so depressing. And so I don't know. And I do worry, and I think you're absolutely right in saying that the thing that is most alarming is the fact that this is probably just the start. You know, this is a very discreet moment in history, but every time there's a, there's a conflict like this, there's a generation of people that's impacted by it and that you get a whole new terrorist movement or, or, or a wave of terrorism that comes out of this because people are angry and they want revenge. I heard this story. I'm trying to remember who told me this, but it's, I think it was one of the conversations I had with, with the officials in Jordan

about a doctor in Gaza who saw his entire family wiped out except for one girl. Yes. I know this, this, Alessi, can you pull this up? Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan, Palestinian doctor, family. I'm going to pull this guy up. This guy's amazing. Yeah. And he advocates for peace. Yeah. He's delivered. He worked in an Israeli hospital and delivered Israeli babies.

Yeah. That's his job. Yeah. And yet you worry that there's so much hatred being generated in this right now. Let's maybe listen to a little of this. Yeah, I don't know if we can because it appears as stuff, but what's this guy's name? Nobel Peace Prize?

Izzeldin Ab... I remembered how to say this. Now I'm going to fuck it up. Izzeldin Abelash. That sounds right. Yes, that was him. Yeah. Have you ever heard that tape of him talking to the

israeli media while his family's being found dead no i haven't heard that actually we can play this unless you type in isaldine abelash into youtube calls israeli media daughters. I want people to hear this because this is just this is crazy. This was years ago now. I want to say 2009. Go down. Second one, Al Jazeera got Gaza doctor's family caught on camera. So he was, pause this for one second, Leslie. He was friends with, this is an Israeli news station, he was friends with the anchor on TV. And what happened was his building was hit with a rocket.

He's not a threat. It was a mistake. They thought there was a threat there. They hit his building with a rocket and they killed – he has like eight kids. They killed like three of his daughters. They killed nieces, whatever, and he was calling in as he was finding the bodies. Go ahead and play it, Alessi. Call to a doctor in Gaza who's been reporting daily for an Israeli station. His three daughters

have just been killed. They've killed his family, he says. I think I'm a bit overwhelmed too. He then explains that Dr. Abul Aish is a Palestinian physician who's worked for years at an Israeli hospital. Who was hurt, he asks. My God, my girl, Shlomi, can't anybody help us, please?

He has eight children, the journalist explains. Maybe we can do something to help. Abul Aish, where is your house? The cameras then follow the journalist as he tries to use his contacts to send ambulances to help the survivors. Incredibly, he succeeds.

The Israeli army allows a Palestinian ambulance to go straight to the Eretz border crossing. From there, the injured are transferred onto Israeli ambulances and taken to Israeli hospitals. Among them, one of the daughters who survived. For the most part of this 22-day war, Israeli journalists were not allowed

to report from inside Gaza. And Dr. Abul Aish, a Hebrew speaker, was one of the rarer voices putting the reality of the Palestinian suffering into the Israeli living rooms. Everybody in Israel knows that I was talking on television and on the radio, that we are at home,

that we are innocent people. Suddenly today, when there was hope for Sismar, on the last day I was talking to my children, suddenly they bombed us. Is that how you treat a doctor who takes care of Israeli patients? Is that what's done? Is this peace? That's good, Alassi.

Now, remarkably, this guy has such a – I'm so glad you brought him up. He has such an amazing outlook that he's like a peacemaker. Yeah. But who would have been able to blame him if he became like a Hamas supporter? Yeah. Because this is a guy delivering Israeli babies in their hospitals every day. Yeah. And that's what they do to him.

It's just, you know, I know it's complicated, but sometimes it feels careless. Yeah. And the character in my first book, The Triple Agent, Sabalawi, was a doctor as well. He worked in a Palestinian clinic for pediatrics and was radicalized by fighting in Gaza in 2008. And so he ends up becoming, you know, eventually a volunteer for Al-Qaeda. And this is someone who's educated, he speaks English, he's Western in many ways, but it is possible and pretty predictable that if people are exposed to trauma like that, they look for ways to strike back. And sometimes it's, you know, it's in lethal ways. And that's what happened in the case of the triple agent. Absolutely. How do you, I mean, you said right at the outset of this part of the conversation, you're like, well, Hamas at some point might be going away. Do you see this ending as not until Israel has wiped Hamas off the earth?

They're going to have to be satisfied that Hamas can't have political control, at least in the near future. And I don't know exactly how they manage that because they don't want to own Gaza. That's just a horrible outcome for them. The best that I think people can hope for is that the Arabs collectively, the Gulf states with their money, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, West bankers, and others can come up with a formula for, you know, some kind of governance that excludes Hamas. And they're going to have to be very careful about how they do that. But there can't be Hamas, you know, any kind of real Hamas authority left in Gaza for there to be any kind of peaceful outcome. Think think until that group is really driven out

or driven underground, as sometimes is the case, the Israelis aren't going to give up because they want to see them absolutely crushed. And it's interesting. I think most people in the region who kind of favor a two-state solution all kind of recognize that two-state solution is not possible with hamas in control

of any any part of palestinian territory um so it's the most complicated difficult operation that you can imagine but that's the only way that you can begin to have a sense of some kind of normalcy is if there's another a governing authority in that area that doesn't have the same kind of radical aspirations that Hamas does, but yet has legitimacy with people. And that's a lot of needles to thread. Sure. Have you spoken with Israelis over there? Like you had said, you spoke with a lot of IDF guys and some military and intel related guys. But have you spoken with civilians as well? And did they have peace on their mind from what you gather or what do you think?

Yeah. So my conversations range from the sort of the sources that we deal with. And a lot of these are either government, military or intelligence, but also with ordinary people too, and including Israeli colleagues. We've got people who were reporters for the Washington Post who happen to be Israeli citizens and live in the country and have experienced the crisis

pretty much as any other normal person would over there. And you can't understate the trauma that October 7 was, because it's like everybody in Israel knew somebody who was affected personally, knew somebody who was killed or knew somebody who was in the kibbutz that was attacked.

And so they're all quite shaken by this. It's also hard to get any of them to think about a Palestinian state as being something that would be good for the region because like we gave Gaza independence and look what it did. Look what happened. Yeah, it's just you know as

soon as you set it up they're going to come after us and you can understand that that view on the other hand if if there isn't some compromise there isn't some way to give palestinians a a path to a state in some hopeful future this is just a endless conflict And I feel like there's a – this is not universal, but among some Israeli government officials that I've spoken to over the years, they accept the fact that these are unsolvable problems and that the best that anyone can hope for is to get through the next few years. I mean, they view Iran this way. I mean, Iran is – the trajectory of Iran right now is pretty frightening, and it is an existential threat for the Israelis, and they recognize that. But if they can figure out a way to kind of have peace in our time, that, I mean, that's why I think people make deals with Hamas and do kind of hypocritical and underhanded things to kind of support bad people because they see it as

a way to have peace right now um and i guess you can't blame them for that but it's not a way to get a permanent solution to the problem yeah it's it's tough because you have political factions too obviously like israelis are all about israel they have a good national pride there but you know you look at back in back when rabin made the deal with arafat with the PLO and what was that? The Oslo Accords in 93? Yeah. Right? He was then viewed – some supported that. Others viewed him as a traitor. He ended up getting whacked by some crazy guy who disagreed with it, who assassinated him. And it brought in – then Netanyahu won the election and it kind of pendulum shifted the other way. Like we will never negotiate with a terrorist like Arafat.

And sure, you can make some arguments that Arafat had certainly okayed some things that certainly were terrorist. But it's like if you're going to have peace, you're never going to get 100% or even close to what you want. Yeah, it has to be compromised. And maybe you've got to deal – I know people hate this line, but you've got to deal with the devil you know. Yeah, absolutely. And it turned out Arafat was among the most reasonable among the ones the Israelis were dealing with. Which is wild to say. Yeah, but he actually – there was a point where he came around and was willing to recognize Israel's right to exist and to want to negotiate some kind of solution with them.

And it didn't work out and he was intransigent in his own ways and kind of things fell apart. But I think he genuinely aspired to have a peaceful relationship with Israel. Have you, throughout all your work work because obviously you have a lot of intel contacts and stuff like that have you ever had long conversations about the intelligence relationship between say cia and massad with any of these guys and if so what do they say about that yeah so it's it's a pretty close relationship but it's not problem free um we the cia works very closely with a with a number of countries there's the the five eyes which are kind of our closest allies but also you know the jordanians are good allies their intelligence community is really good and they and they work

with us on a lot of things particularly in counterterrorism with israelis it's um there's a lot of sharing that goes on but it's also clear that the israelis are are more concerned about their own they're very micro focused on their own problems um and they don't necessarily want to help us if it's not in their interest too it's it's a bit i wouldn't be careful how I state that, but it's, I can tell you from the American side, there's sometimes frustrations. Yes. The Israelis will withhold information or they'll, you know, they're very much seeing things through their own lens

and not necessarily wanting just to be good allies with us. Sometimes it's a little more complicated than just helping us. It's about, more about kind of keeping their own, uh, system in good shape. Heard similar sentiments from my much smaller stable than yours, but yeah, certainly heard that before. But are you, when's the next time you're headed back over there? So probably sometime later in the spring, I've got a new book in the works. I just, just started working on it. Um, can't talk about a lot of it yet but it's uh can we get a topic so it's it's um it's related to terrorism in the middle east but it's a little bit more

historical but there's uh there's a central character who's just one of the most fascinating people i've come across in a long time and it's uh he's still alive and um and i've got uh i can't go into a lot but there's a story that i need to tell about him that's i think it could be just in terms of an entertaining dramatic story it's one of the best i've come across so i'm looking forward to rolling that one out this is gonna be number three well it's gonna be another conversation with julian doria oh it definitely will be this this has been awesome like we i didn't even stop to go to the bathroom during this this was straight through ah it's amazing i have it you know keep going but i really appreciate this this is a lot

of fun thank you so much for coming up i i love talking about this stuff with you just because like your knowledge of that entire region of the world and by the way stuff we didn't get to like china and russia and all this other shit it unbelievable. So we will put the links to Redline down there as well as Black Flags. And I also have the triple agent here, which is the book once again on El Belloui, which you saw that story unfold in Zero Dark Thirty. You, sir, are a genius at writing. Love your books. Love talking to you about this. We'll do it again. It's a pleasure, man. All right.

Good to see you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Love talking to you about this. We'll do it again. It's a pleasure, man. All right. Good to see you. Everybody 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. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.