Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 [VIDEO] - ISIS' $2 Billion Rise & Fall, EXPLAINED by Pulitzer Prize Winner | Joby Warrick • #134

Episode Date: January 21, 2023

(***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,” & “Red Line” (the second of which won him a Pulitzer Prize) –– are all Best-Sellers (links below). “Black Flags” by Joby Warrick: https://amzn.to/3WdiGwp “The Triple Agent” by Joby Warrick: https://amzn.to/3kgNvmu “Red Line” by Joby Warrick: https://amzn.to/3XxTe5W ***TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Joby’s remembers his first Pulitzer Prize 6:08 - Joby explains his first book on the infamous 2009 Attack on CIA Base in Afghanistan 14:48 - The hot Jordanian Translator who got Joby into bomber’s house; No judgment journalism 26:13 - Homeland’s CIA accuracy; General McChrystal’s Iraqi kid story 35:51 - The CIA’s tracking of Bin Laden in the leadup to Sepp 011 38:55 - Joby’s Nucalear Weapons reporting during Iraq War; Building trust in Middle East 45:20 - Rogue translators & developing sources 50:32 - How to determine whether CIA sources are telling the truth 56:39 - The Tom O’Neill WAPO CIA source story 1:03:27 - King Abdullah II of Jordan; Jordan & its role in the Middle East 1:13:28 - Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, The Founder of ISIS; The murder of Nick Berg 1:20:50 - Al Zarqawi’s radicalization in prison 1:24:29 - Al Zarqaqi meets Bin Laden; CIA & Zarqawi’s early standoffs 1:29:50 - King Abdullah told President Bush NOT to invade Iraq; Sectarian Violence (Sunnis & Shiites) 1:36:36 - Al Qaeda makes Al Zarqawi a franchisee; Iraq’s implosion post-invasion 1:41:30 - Nada Bakos - CIA’s chief Al Zarqawi targeter; How the US merked Al Zarqawi 1:46:33 - ISIS vs. ISIL naming; Al Baghdadi succeeds Al Zarqawi 1:50:19 - The Arab Spring of 2011; Al Nusra in Syria; ISIS leadership doesn’t do dirty work 1:56:22 - When did ISIS come on Joby’s radar? 2:01:05 - Caliphate explained; the brutality of ISIS 2:05:49 - The Kurds; 20th Century European Agreements that led to Middle East violence 2:14:04 - Strongman leaders; Bashar Al-Assad & Syria 2:21:43 - The Yazidi Genocide 2:26:56 - How the US neutralized ISIS 2:35:12 - The US Drone Program; The War in Yemen 2:42:37 - What’s happening in Iran right now? 2:48:32 - Iran’s race to a nuclear weapon 2:52:46 - Israel’s new far-right government 2:56:52 - The Jordanian Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat); The Laurence Foley hit 3:00:34 - Joby’s Middle East schedule; Joby’s upcoming book project Intro Credits: “Homeland” (Showtime) “The Looming Tower” (Hulu) “Body of Lies” (2008) “Munich” (2005) “The Physician” (2013) “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012) ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 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. So when you walk into a bar do you introduce yourself as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner only if I'm looking for a date which I'm not allowed to do anymore hey you're married you gotta watch that I don't know man I actually just found out about because we were talking about I didn't realize that you had also won one, that there's a whole Pulitzer for just to be known for, the subject was hog poop, literally. It was a story about factory farms.

And there's massive growth of these huge farms, in this case for pigs. So putting 10, 20,000, 30,000 hogs under one roof, an industry that grew overnight and was essentially allowed to come into southern states because of lax regulations not much environmental enforcement and so they ended up literally creating a massive ecological disaster and so myself and this other reporter we kept pulling on this thread and we realized there was a huge story there and um then again just just did good journalism and didn't expect to get much recognition. And it always was a little bit of a slight embarrassment when you talk about what the prize was for. Well, it's about hog poop.

But it got a lot done. We actually got laws changed. And this is in the 90s? In the 90s, yeah. Because it was just when this industry was taken off and as a result, in these areas in the south now, there's much stricter control of what they do with the waste, how many animals they can put in a barn, where you can put them. Are they next to a neighborhood where people live, particularly poor people? And so now all these considerations have to go into where you been relatively pristine and now just loaded with poop literally and all the nitrogen and all the sort of nutrients that create algae blooms and kill fish. And we like to think we helped change at least that part of the world with this reporting. Well, that's amazing you were that early to it because as a layman outside of this and everything, this is a topic that to me has felt like people are finally talking about it, including me.

Like I never talked about it maybe the last three years it's been. So you were on this 25 years ago doing it. And that's great. You made some changes, but I eat a lot of meat, and I find myself, especially over the last year, thinking more about, okay, where is this one coming from? What one is this? I like pork.

I don't order pork at the restaurant. After seeing the limited stuff I've seen, it's like pigs are really smart, and they happen to taste good, which sucks for them. But like the way they do this stuff to say nothing of some of the natural and ecological disasters that are happening around in the communities, like the way they're killing these animals and things is wrong. Yeah, and you're right about that and you're right about the fact that people are waking up to that part of the story we're aware of it and you can't go into one of these barns and see a sow with you know 10 or 15 piglets in a crate so small she literally can't turn around and and so the we made a decision that this was not going to be a sort of animal welfare story because we were focusing on other issues but the welfare issues and the treatment of animals is is something that's really come into focus more recently and you don't have to be someone who's you know vegetarian uh or a pita

member to be to care about that because you you do i mean i i make the decision now when i'm you know buy chicken is this chicken that's uh has been in a crate its entire life or it's added some some kind of life i mean i feel like as human beings we have some responsibility morally there and that's just my view but it's but it's important in the decisions i make now yeah and it's like hunting's important for keeping the environment balanced and things like that and also animals hunting other animals like this this is a reality of life and it's a brutal thing but i like how when you look at some of the pure hunters who love animals and and are about being a part of that ecosystem and and what they do i like how there's a lot more

content you'll see online where they talk about okay here's why there are some deer that need to not be living here otherwise there would be a million of them and no one would be able to the the environment would not be able to prosper so it's not like when you get into that all killing is bad and you can't do any of that you're probably going to lose that argument but when we're talking about like the humanity of how we do some things i don't think putting a bunch of pigs millions of them into a little factory you know crammed in and then putting them into like killing chambers like i just feel like that's as a human that's totally wrong so crazy stuff but that'll be another story

for another day i want to talk with you about that off camera because i'm very interested in getting some people in here maybe you as well in the future to talk about that topic and particularly from all the different angles so that that's small world that's really cool i literally was talking about that with someone last week so we'll talk about that but i became a fan of you i guess probably about a year and a half ago or so i did not read black flags when it came out back in 2016 and we'll provide all the context later but black flags is one of your three books it's the one you won the pulitzer prize for that you basically broke down the history of isis in this incredible narrative driven way with sources that i couldn't even believe when i was reading this and you know i like to look back on recent history that maybe you know we didn't learn all the lessons from or could

learn a lot more from and try to understand other cultures and how places around the world view us as americans and you know all that stuff and that was part of the reason why when i when i clicked that title i'm like oh yeah i really haven't done a deep dive on like isis now that's like five years past its prime and things like that and the things that i uncovered about the rest of that region beyond just ISIS were crazy. But before we get there, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that you wrote the book The Triple Agent. That was your first book, right? That's right, yeah. In 2009?

11 it came out. The incident's happened in 2009, but the book came out in 11. Right. So people out there who are wondering what that book's about, you actually probably know that story pretty well, because it was highlighted in the movie Zero Dark Thirty. It was a very sad, true story, but you had, why don't you take it away? Sure. So at the time, just to set the stage of how I got into this, I was the CIA's, I'm sorry, the CIA, the Washington Post CIA reporter. Watch that slip right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get accused of that enough.

But covering the CIA for the Washington Post, which is not an easy job. And it was my first job trying to cover an intelligence agency. And the thing you learn pretty quickly is the CIA doesn't have to tell you anything. And they have a public affairs department who are very nice people, but most of what they have to say is no comment. And so it's a really tough um you know job to break as a reporter but as i was doing this job there was an incident happened in christmas week of 2009 and listeners may remember this there was a uh an attack inside a secret cia base in afghanistan that somehow this secret base was infiltrated somebody got in with a suicide

bomb, blew himself up and killed a bunch of Americans. And so pretty big story at the time, and I was covering it, like many of my colleagues, the deeper I got into what really happened, it became one of the most fascinating spy stories I'd ever come across. And I became so obsessed with it, I kept really digging and digging, and eventually got permission to take off time from work and write a book. And it was my first attempt at it. My plan was to try to really describe this as a spy story. And with real people involved, people making real life and death decisions, you know, on the dime sometimes, and this essentially perfect storm of really crappy, bad circumstances

all coming together at one moment where an informant was allowed to come into a secret base and was literally being given a birthday cake because they knew the guy

just had a birthday. So the CIA kitchen had cooked up a cake. They were bringing it over to greet him. And as a thank you he you know pushed a button and blew himself up and killed seven americans and a couple of others who was l belloway because we always heard like the fray the tagline the jordanian doctor yeah

so i guess was he a pediatrician he was a pediatrician and and probably the strangest you know candidate to become a suicide bomber most of the ones we see are just, you know, pretty poor, ignorant people who get pushed into this role or talked into killing themselves. And sometimes even have to kind of sew the suicide button on their coats, because they're afraid their handlers are afraid they're going to chicken out the last minute. Here's a guy who was, you know, a trained doctor who spent years in a pediatrician's clinic, but ended up flipping. And the story tells how he did that, why he was sort of picked up by Jordanians, and they thought they had a potential spy on their hands. So they tried to train him and make him to an informant and send him to Pakistan with the mission of trying to find al-Qaeda, trying to find where bin Laden was.

He was a doctor. He had skills. He was somebody who could meet a lot of people, potentially. And he ends up making really good contacts. But all along in his head, he had the idea of that, you know, he's going to use his access to try to get back at the CIA. And he did in a devastating way. He was able to talk them into allowing him into his base. And once he got in there, killed himself. This is his ultimate mission. What was his real turning point long before this where he wanted a mission like that and obviously had a hatred for the CIA and probably America and everything that it stood for? Was it earlier than 9-11 or was it kind of after that era when we went over there and went into Afghanistan and Iraq?

It was kind of personal reasons. I mean, he definitely had his eye on 9-11 and al-Qaeda and how that was really coming to the fore. But in the late 80s, here's a guy who was, as we said, he was a doctor. He was treating children every day. He had kids of his own. He lived a middle-class life. But he was radicalizing on his own because of what was happening in his neighborhood. He was a Palestinian by birth. He's watching every day what was happening in Gaza. There was a military incursion by the Israelis

into Gaza in 2008. And he was outraged by it. He was treating some of the wounded kids. And so this fueled his anger and his desire to try to strike back in some way. But his only way to strike back as a doctor living in Jordan's fairly peaceful country was to write a blog. So he was writing this secret blog under a sort of a assume name, he created a name and identity for himself. And he's putting out content just like a podcaster might do sending out just, you know, daily summaries of what the jihadis are doing. And here's what they're saying and, and making it, you know, graphic making it, you know, loading it with pictures and videos of Americans getting getting killed in iraq and that kind of stuff and people ate it up he became a celebrity even though nobody knew who he was was

that easily traceable though like couldn't they have gotten that that's how they got him eventually it took a couple years um because he had this little closet activity for a long time and finally with american help, the Jordanians were able to sort of trace the computer signatures to this man's house. And lo and behold, this really radical, very popular jihadist blogger was right under the Jordanian's nose,

living in Amman and having this secret life. And so the Jordanians basically busted down his door one day and arrested him now Jordan I do want to put a pin in this as well Jordan is gonna be a big subcategory topic today through all the things we're going to talk about because one of the wildest things about black flags was the character of the King of Jordan who you now know very well and you know I didn't know a hell of a lot about jordan i try to know what i can about the middle east i'm very interested in the topic but they were always kind of that country who i guess was like kind of allied with israel and and wasn't

like it wasn't religious zealotry and stuff there but beyond that and i didn't know much and to fill in the blanks like like with your books you you really lay out how much – I'm going to mess up the pronunciation of this, but the Mukabarat, is that right? Yeah, Mukabarat, yeah. Mukabarat, which is their intelligence agency, is wired in directly with the CIA, and there's a ton of Al Bellowy and discovered him the reason I was asking like isn't that easy to get caught I'm kind of wondering if like as a smart guy like a doctor if he knew that and kind of wanted that almost to be like that double agent do you think he had some some sort of already cooked up idea they're like he could play both sides in his head or or was it just like he was just pissed and created dumb website I think he was pissed and created a dumb website but then the the real interesting mind game starts after he gets arrested because he

pretty quickly flips and tells the jordanians well yeah i'll be i'll be a spy for you but what's going on in his head and you know really is is making a plan you know how is he going to use this circumstance that he finds himself in to maybe do something even more important and and that comes later in the story but this is you know part of the fascination of this guy's story is trying to figure out his own mental journey where he ends up walking a tightrope between so these intelligence agencies and trying to help them or at least appearing to and the the jihadi guys the al-qaeda guys that he really identified with and tried to figure out what side he's really on and what he's going to do ultimately with his life. Now how quickly – because I don't remember – how quickly did they release the information publicly after the bombing happened at the end of 2009?

How quickly did they identify exactly who it was? Was it pretty much right away or did the CIA hold off on that? There was a bit of a delay. I think probably about a week. It started to come out that it was a bomber, so an informant, somebody who got into the camp. And then it became clear that it was a Jordanian. And this is for journalists. This is where really we were off to the races because once we found out that it was a Jordanian, then we had to figure out what in the world was he doing in this no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. How was an informant for the CIA in this position to begin with and why did he flip?

And this became the puzzle that I was just determined to try to solve. So within a week – because that is pretty quick. I didn't know if they held it a couple months or something like that because you got this book out in 2011. But within a week, you know the names, so now you can go do your thing. How quickly did you start to realize, oh, there's a major feature story here beyond just the reporting, which is at the time what you had always done? You had been writing investigative journalism. You hadn't done a full-length feature so to speak so i didn't know how long it was going to take to try to figure out some of these these mysteries and um turned out to take a quite a long time starting with the fact that all the americans in the beginning there's seven americans who lost their lives their names are classified we'd even know who they were for the longest time we would get bits and pieces because there'd be a a funeral service a memorial service for someone who's, okay, well, this is one of the people from the CIA mission. Eventually, we were able to get all the names. And then it was a question of, can I get family members to talk

to me about the lives that people were involved? And can I get their trust? Will they share things with me like, you know, text messages and emails and letters? And ultimately, yes, they were. I was able to make contact with each of the families and start to put together the CIA part of the story before anyone at the agency would talk about this at all because everything about the mission was classified. Were you going into it, because you're obviously the CIA reporter

at the Washington Post at the time as you laid out, but were you going into it thinking this is, just by the sounds of what you were saying right there, a full CIA story versus, hey, I really want to get to who this guy was because what you ended up doing, and this is your one book I haven't read because I had watched documentaries on this whole thing before. I found out later that this happened to be your first book, so I do want to go back and read it, but the way you explained it to me, you ended up really telling the story heavily of this guy yeah and who he was and why he shifted and you were you already laid out some of it but did you think that's where it was going to go or were you

more looking like let's look at you know who died here and what they were doing yeah i was looking mostly at the cia angle and trying to figure out what went wrong initially. But the more I found out about this unusual spy, this mole that the CIA thought they had inside al-Qaeda, the more interesting he became. And I ended up – we talked about Jordan. This guy was from Jordan, middle class neighborhood in Jordan. And I had to spend some time trying to figure him out. So I, of course, traveled to Amman. I spent a lot of time trying to get around his family and try to figure out who to talk to. And it ended up, there's a great story in this, but I ended up being able to get

access to his family and spent a lot of time with them. And they- Like his wife? Well, his wife lived in Turkey and she was a bit of a different story. But his father, his brothers, I had this, you know, we just have a translator, this wonderful woman who works with me when I go to Jordan. And she's a trained journalist. She's really smart. And she happens to be just a beautiful woman. She's blonde. That helps.

Yeah, that helps. It does. And it helps in this particular case. She says, very unusual looking in Jordan because it's, you know, usually dark skin, dark, dark hair, dark eyes. She's a blonde. So she stands out everywhere she goes. And so we decided we were just going to cold call this family. So we go to their house, drive up to this neighborhood in Jordan, knock on the door. And the guy's dad, the bomber's dad, he's lost his son a few months earlier, walks to the door to see who's there. And my translator explains that, you know, I'm a journalist from the Washington Post. We just wanted to talk to him about his son. And he says, I can't talk to you. The government's watching me.

Nobody is allowed to talk in the family. And I just can't. But because of my secret weapon here, my translator, this lovely blonde woman who just charms the hell out of this guy until before I know it, he's saying, oh, come in now. Come in quickly. Okay, you can come in too, saying to me. But anyway, we get into the place, sit down in this living room because they're very polite Arabs. They offer tea. And then, you know, I'd like more tea, please, more tea, please.

And we keep just drinking tea and just having chit chat conversation with the guy and the more that we more time we spent and the more sort of batting of the eyelashes that my colleague was doing the more he was just you know fascinated interested in talking with us and finally at the end of the conversation he says come back tomorrow i'll have my family here and i'll give you the first chapter of your book real And we did, we came back the next day and sure enough, quick question. When you went in there and we're first sitting there, did you as a journalist say, by the way, this is off the record as first or was it technically on the record already?

It's always off. That's usually my style. I'll say, look, if I'm going to use your name or if I'm going to quote you in any way, I'll come back to you and I'll say, this is what I'm going to say. I want to make sure you're comfortable. No surprises. surprises and in this case we were just having just casual conversation and asking very polite questions um and at the end uh it was clear to him that he wanted his story to be told so when we came back the next day and we had the guy's trust he just opened up his his family story to us in a way that was unbelievably rich and sharing things about what happened to his son and how he was such a promising and charismatic and passionate

young doctor and how he ended up becoming more and more angry and how this anger spilled into something else that just sort of began to take over his life and describe the night that the cops broke in the door because he was at home with his dad at the time. And his experience in prison and how he was tortured and the whole, you know, everything that happened to him that sort of turned him comes out of this interview with the family. And it was just a remarkable break for a reporter

who's trying to understand a story, but you can't really understand it until you get all sides. And this was a very important side. the channels tab and it's right below there. Please, please, please go over and subscribe. We're posting daily clips from the episodes of the show and hopefully it's going to help this thing grow. Anyway, if you haven't already, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends. I say it all the time and I will keep saying it because it is very, very true. Sharing the show is the best possible thing we can possibly get because it spreads the word, it helps the algorithm big time, and it gets us out there so that we can continue to get great guests like this and even level up and make this show as great as possible. So thank you to all of you who have been sharing the show around, and thank you to all of you who are going to do it now.

If you haven't already subscribed and liked the video, please be sure to do that, and I would love to hear from you guys down in the comments below. Finally, if you haven't left a five-star review on spotify or apple please take a second and do that it's a huge huge help and i appreciate everyone who has already done so i almost forgot we are in fact working on a patreon finally we should have something live within the next month or two and i will let you know as soon as that is up and running can't wait yeah it's so unique because obviously the father and the family didn't agree with what he thought. They were good Jordanian citizens. His son is incredibly educated, has an amazing job, and yet falls down this rabbit hole. And look, I mean, I can't – I don't even have kids, so I really can't imagine it.

But to be there and you're talking to him, I guess like like within a year or something of his son dying and also in disgrace in that way because of what it was, that's really amazing that he opened up the home to you. And I think you told me this on the phone, but is it him that keeps keeps maybe it was someone else but he keeps the book yeah on his mantle it when my my assistant went back and saw him a few months later and brought a copy of the book and then saw him again after that and then it was he kept it on his mantle because it was and i have to say that i felt good about that and i felt good because we certainly weren't trying to make this guy heroic by any means. He was a murderer. But my intention was to make him real.

And it's one thing to sort of read about bad guys and think, oh, these are black and white decisions and these are just evil people. And his act was certainly evil, but I wanted people to understand his motives. And how one makes the journey from somebody who's treating sick kids to someone who wants to kill himself and kill a bunch of other people at the same time. That's like a true documentarian and great journalistic approach to it too because you're not – you're not so – I mean you're going to judge with your words when you have to say this guy murdered so-and-so. Like that is judgment right there because he did that. But like you're not going into it like we need to paint them this way or whatever. We're just going to say, this is what it was. This is how it went down. Let's see what we can learn from this.

And that's a great thing about your writing. Well, thank you for that. And I do feel that my own approach, and maybe this is just the way I look at things, but even this story, there are big mistakes the CIA made. They were too trusting of a source they hadn't met before. They waved away precautions and red flags. But I was not out to sort of indict them for that, because they made them in real time under difficult circumstances. And so I just wanted readers to understand their process and what they were thinking and what they were trying to do. Nobody was going into this with bad motives.

I didn't want this book to be saying, oh, this guy screwed up or this person made a mistake i wanted people to understand how this incredible thing happened and all the forces and all the sort of motivations that went into it yeah and you definitely you definitely accomplished getting across that that lack of judgment in in your books and and kind of telling the story as it is which as a reader i really appreciate because when i when i go to read stuff and it's just injected with opinions everywhere it's kind of like telling me what to do that's not really what i want and and i don't sit here like oh let's go empathize with every single person no matter what but i do want to try to understand people including some of the worst people who have ever lived i mean i made sure like when i was in college like i studied Adolf Hitler.

I wanted to know, like, how does this happen? How does that move so fast? I studied Osama bin Laden. How does, how do you move from this to that and, you know, suddenly want to kill everyone? It's not like you're born that way. There may be some people who are born with certain genes that are maybe predisposed to getting angry at stuff.

That's certainly an argument. But to to like mass murderer something something happens there something in your environment a lot of things probably happen and i don't know it it wasn't necessarily accurate towards the cia at all but did you ever watch that show homeland i did yeah benched that one you what we benched big chunks of that show yeah my I did, yeah. We binged that one. You what? We binged big chunks of that show, yeah, my wife and I. Oh, so you did like it. Yeah.

What did you think of the depiction? It was okay. So liking it as entertainment versus how close it is to reality, and it's not that. It is not how these guys do their jobs. And I know you've had some great CIA guests on the show and then sometimes their jobs get really exciting and dangerous. A lot of the work they do is pretty boring, frankly. And they're just like working in any office in any bureaucracy and they're not some spooky, crazy people.

They're ordinary folks like the rest of us who just have a really interesting job. And to kind of explain their world, which is a real privilege as a journalist because most people don't really get to see inside the world. But it's fascinating. And it's, everything is gray in their world, because I think as some of your guests has pointed out, their whole business is about breaking the laws of other countries and getting people to betray their country and do bad things to their cause or to their families even. But that's's what the job is about that's how we keep our country safe yeah it's kind of it's the ultimate us or them kind of argument and so I I get that and it's hard to like I can't imagine doing that job because sometimes you know it's not like you're calling all the shots to they do have there's a lot of covert spies who have a lot of leeway for sure but there's an overall mission and it's given to you like hey here's what we got to accomplish. And sometimes you got to make some serious moral jumps in what you do, and I don't envy that.

But when you look at reporting on them and comparing it to something like Homeland, I know obviously like you lay out some of that's cringy. But there was one quote I've cited in that show. I think it was from season four or five, something like that, that always resonates with me. And it was told by the terrorist Haqqani, I think his name was. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. He was the dude in Afghanistan. Which, by the way, that dude played a great terrorist. That was the best terrorist I've ever seen.

Shout out. But he had a line where he's talking with Saul Berenson, who was at the time, I guess, in the show, like the deputy CIA director or something like that, where he had him hostage and Saul was trying to understand him. And he said, America hates what it can't understand. And I think about that a lot because, you know, I know you're trying to do good in the world and spread democracy and, you know, fight against totalitarianism or evil, and that's great. But, you know, I feel like a lot of people who have done evil things, like look at terrorists like you do, I think part of it is they see some of these endless wars, they see the mistakes and not the right things that we do that's just human nature and they start to wonder if you know the people in the west give any about them and they assume they don't and then they start to wonder if well maybe that whole democracy thing and and that american experiment isn't all it's cracked up to be yeah absolutely right and i think we do have this sense over here of thinking that we're right and everybody else is wrong.

It's an interesting thing that I discovered pretty early on in my job, which involves a lot of foreign travel, is the rest of the world doesn't see us quite that way. And if you're living in a country in the Middle East where you live in a dictatorship, you've got a guy who runs your country and runs your life because he controls the police and the Secret Service and everything about your life. He's propped up either directly by American aid or because of oil that we're buying from that country and enabling these really corrupt governments to stay in power. If you're a young person with just normal aspirations, who just wants to have a normal life and live with some freedom and dignity, you're looking around and saying, well, the problem is this dictator we have and the way the dictator gets here is because America is corrupt in supporting him. So they often look at us as the bad guy. And so when you want to understand people's motives, you see even someone like bin Laden, as awful a person as he was, he's not going out to say, well, I'm going to do evil

things. From his point of view, he's trying to right the world, right the Arab world and bring it back to some kind of sanity as he sees it in his mind. And we're not good actors in his book. And I think understanding that can sometimes help us get out of a lot of problems. And just to skip forward a little bit, but just if you look at the Iraq situation, we all wanted to go in as heroes in Iraq and liberate a country. And, oh, gosh, they'll be so grateful if we do that. And, you know, the Iraqis didn't see it that way. Most of them didn't, especially as time went on and things didn't get any better for them. And sometimes if we think about these things a little bit more ahead of time, might put the brakes on some of our ambitions.

Yeah, and that's where – I mean Iraq is the ultimate one. And I always say this just to separate it. Like the people who went there following orders to go there, our military goes where they're told to go. It's not their fault and it's a terrible war that they got dragged into but when you do see what happened there and the fact that you took your eye off the ball the stuff that was actually a problem as far as like oh Afghanistan was harboring the terrorists who did 9 11. when you start to go there and then you look at how we went to Iraq especially all the things that come out in the years after that's where if I'm an unbiased party and I'm putting myself in the shoes of some kid in Yemen who's part of a victim of a proxy war right now that's with one of our supposed allies Saudi

Arabia not so much these days but you know what I mean like I might be looking at the U.S. and going who the fuck are those guys like why why what gives them the right to be here and destroy my land and you know that doesn't condone any of the evil shit that may come of that kid growing up becoming a deranged terrorist in this way but i understand how he got there yeah if i can share a quick story that's actually in in black flags but it's it's it's a story told to me by staniel stanley mccrystal who who was the general who was head of special ops, special forces in Iraq and a really exceptional military commander. But he tells a story about this midnight raid in this house. They were looking for Zarqawi, this terrorist.

But they go into this house and as our soldiers do because this is how they're trained, they break in because it's a dangerous situation for them they ransack the house for weapons and then they're sort of entering women's bedrooms which is a huge offense i mean it's very offensive in the muslim world for men to walk into a a strange woman's room uh it just isn't done in their culture and then making all the men go out and lay down on the street face down with their hands behind their heads. It's just typical behavior. But in the middle of the scene, out comes this boy, maybe four or five years old. He sees his dad lying in the street with his hands behind his head. He walks out and he lays down next to his dad and assumes the same position, puts his hands behind his head. And McChrystal's watching this, and he

has this moment of realization, puts himself for a moment in this little kid's head, who sees these big Americans who look like linebackers with all their gear and their guns and their night vision goggles. They look pretty scary and not very human. Coming to his house and humiliating his father, and then he just lays down on the ground next to his dad. And McChrystal's thinking, this kid's world just changed, and he's never going to look at Americans the same. He's always going to have in the back of his head this moment.

And how we sort of change that kid's behavior and and try to you know direct him into being like a normal you know productive citizen instead of being a terrorist i mean we're already behind the eight ball on that yeah it's such a great i remember that now from from the book and and it's it's great that that at least like a very very senior leader in the military could see something like that and step back because i understand like you know guys like that especially it's all about the objective here's what we got to do but there's a human cost to everything that you do and i think that there were certainly a lot of once we did go into iraq there were certainly a lot of mistakes that were made from like a policy perspective but the guys who then had to

protect against some of those mistakes were were in these impossible situations because part of it i think what you're talking about was when they had to do all like the house raids after the sunnis were flipping out because the bath has had been am i right exactly that this had been banned so you know well now we got to do that because they're all pissed off and they're bombing people and stuff. And we're trying to make sure less death happens. But you're in this never-ending spiral now because you're just going to push everyone farther and farther away. Yeah. And you can't blame the 19-year-old U.S. soldier who's there who's just trying to protect himself and save his buddy's lives.

And so, of course, they're going to do this and they're going to follow orders and do their mission and serve honorably. But there are consequences. And we like to try to push them out of our heads. But these consequences have ways of coming back even decades later to create problems for us. Years down the road, and we just have to think about the Afghanistan story and how that was sort of a CIA project to arm these Mujahideen rebels who were fighting the Russians and fighting communists. And the actions back then ended up sort of fueling what became al-Qaeda years later. So you just never know how history is going to turn. What about all the people just right on that topic? I didn't know you were going to bring that up.

But a lot of people who have a problem with 9-11 comment on YouTube a lot and and say the CIA did that and stuff like that they often point to the CIA funding the Mujahideen as like oh see they were funding them and then they made them their own soldiers throughout the 90s and then they came here and knocked down the buildings like what how do you understand that to me that always seemed like this is what the CIA does they they go and they get intelligence assets who are going to help them in whatever the big problem of the time is and the big problem of the time was yeah you had russia you had the soviet union still in existence and it's not like they knew like oh osama bin laden is going to be osama bin laden but a lot of people

out there who are going to have theories about her are going to say of course they did yeah yeah so the the problem with funding and arming the rebels was not that they were someday going to someday come against the west it was it was the fact that we you know after we achieved our objective after we pushed the russians out of afghanistan then we pretty much forgot about the place then we left afghanistan to become this the big smoldering crater that it eventually became just a you know a collection of warlords. And then the Taliban comes in, and it's just an awful, horrible place that has lots of armed factions, some of them carrying weapons that we gave them back in the 80s. So it's not the fact that we're arming them, but it's the fact that we often don't have the long vision of where these conflicts are going to go.

So the CIA was extremely successful in Afghanistan because we did, our big adversary was the Russians and we did manage to help kick them out. And it was one of the great accomplishments of the Cold War. But it turns out it had other kinds of consequences that we didn't even imagine back in the 80s when this was happening. Yeah, when you look at content made about the 90s,

especially with the CIA, and you talk about those early deaths what was it what was the name of the bin laden desk again i'm blanking oh it's uh alex station alex station that's it it's like they were like the small little desk over there like doing this cute little thing kind of and it became the central story because it i think whenever you have some sort of power vacuum and especially if you're the one that left it behind in some ways, you don't really hear that sucking sound until it's too late. If I look at world history, that just seems to be a common pattern.

This doesn't seem any different. Yeah, nobody took bin Laden seriously up until, even after the bombings in Kenya in, I guess it was 98. They were just seen as just Bush League, not very important, certainly not a threat to us. And this little Alex station, this small unit within the CIA that was focused on bin Laden was getting no resources. Nobody was paying attention to them until at the very end

when things started to get really, when the red lights, as George Tenet would say, started to flash that something was about to happen. We didn't really care about bin Laden or al-Qaeda at all. Yeah, and the timing of also you had a new administration in there, which is brutal because then you've got to reconvince a bunch of people. The timing of everything was wild. But what year again did you become the CIA reporter at the Post? It was 2007. So this is right after the revelations about black site prisons

and so it was a pretty murky time for we'll probably get there today okay but before that what was your what was your role at the post so uh i had been investigative reporter at the post i was brought in um to essentially do environmental investigations because i'd done that that's just like you won the prize and so the post hired me to do that and then 9-11 happened and this is one of those moments when everything in a news organization changes we had our national security reporters but suddenly everybody had to be a national security specialist because of my environmental work i'd done some some work on nuclear radiation on on on weapons uh you know weapons stockpiles just happened to be part of what I looked at. And so my boss has said, Oh, you know about nuclear stuff. Why don't you write about

Al Qaeda and dirty bombs. So I went off to figure out was Al Qaeda going to be able to blow up a dirty bomb someplace. And that became essentially a proliferation beat. So for the next four years, I ended up essentially traveling the world trying to figure out what were the WMD threats, what were the things that were going to, you know, the possibilities that al-Qaeda could get a dirty bomb or a biological weapon or a chemical weapon. And like 020304, you're saying? Yeah, that was it. And right in the middle of this comes the big question of, well, what aboutq does it have a wmd program and i was still new enough at the job that i was of kind of a lot of self-doubt i mean am i really going to be able to answer this question this is a question that lots of reporters trying to get at and my colleagues at the new york times some of them were sort of singing the same chorus as the administration at

the time saying yes you know saddam hussein has this nuclear program and we're going to, you know, we're going to wake up to a mushroom cloud someday because they're off to the races to build all these weapons. Like Judy Miller. Exactly. And I understand how these stories get started sometimes, but I was kind of beginning with a blank slate and just trying to figure out this story myself, the more I kept poking into it and talking to real experts, the bigger the doubts became about whether there was really a significant weapons program there at all. And the bits of evidence that the administration would put out

saying Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes or this and that, and it was evidence of a secret nuclear program, when we really got to the details, none of them worked out. None of them panned out. We talked to Iraqi defectors who were said to know where chemical weapons facilities were and where Saddam Hussein was building nuclear bombs. And we got Google Earth maps and just satellite imagery and tried to piece these things together. Every single one of them would just evaporate the closer you looked at it.

And so our stories became very skeptical. We said, well, you know, there's claims about a WMD program, but there's no real evidence. And yet, even after the invasion started, my bosses were so convinced that they were going to be found, they were ordering me to go and, you know, to be on hand to whenever these big stockpiles were discovered so I could write about them and of course years passed nothing was ever found this is wild though because you essentially go from i i would imagine that had to be some international reporting but you're doing a lot of stuff that like we focus on here with like environmental reporting big farms and then and then suddenly it's like all right go to the middle east yeah like what what do you do you they They send you over there the first time you get on a flight.

You're obviously going over there to try to find sources. Like, did you have to learn how to do all that? Because that's, I mean, you're going into a different culture. Like, what was the, that's crazy. Like, you did this so fast. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. But it was an incredible learning curve for me, how to operate, how to work, how to report overseas. Because it's a really big challenge, especially in the Middle East where it's not particularly safe.

People don't want to talk to you. And so sometimes it's a matter of building a source network, getting people to introduce you to people. Sometimes just being at a publication like the Washington Post, which has a reputation, will allow you to get an interview with a foreign minister or somebody in the cabinet. And piece by piece, you start to put together a network of people who will talk to you, people you can reach out to if you're trying to figure something out. Did you speak any other languages? I spoke German, which did me absolutely no good. So I ended up having, I thought about trying to learn Arabic, but it always turned out to be sort of the easiest, fastest, cheapest thing to do is to get a really good translator. People we call fixers because they essentially become the person who does everything for you, who speaks the language but also knows how to keep you out of trouble and can help you kind of connect with people for interviews.

So when I go to a country, you sort of set up your fixer to help you to meet you at the airport, and then you kind of create a program. We're going to try to do this, this, and this, and this. Can you help me? And then it takes 10 times longer than anything in the States, but you just slowly kind of get your work done. Meet people, try to develop sources. And over time, if your reputation holds up, and reputation is everything in these countries uh you can start to do really good stuff and once you begin to sort of break news or be become someone that people look to as someone who really knows what's going on then your reputation helps you as well but

what for reputation though what about when you write honest stories based on what you find that people aren't going to like yeah and that's going to happen almost every day. But the trick is, are you accurate? Did you reflect the reality that people can see? Because the folks who are involved in this certainly know the situation better than you ever will. But did you portray it accurately and fairly? Did you reach out to them for comment to make sure that their side was represented or at least had a chance to respond? And also just really important in this part of the world, did you reach out to them for comment to make sure that their side was represented or at least had a chance to respond? And also just really important in this part of the world, did you keep your promises? If you promise to keep somebody off the record or not mention them or their agency and you keep your word, you're just putting credit in the bank.

So the next time you go over there, it makes your job easier. One mistake, one slip up in a story, getting something really wrong in a story or betraying a confidence or getting a source in trouble, then suddenly all the doors are closed to you. So it's extremely important that you handle these stories, you know, delicately and accurately and just so you can go back to the source a second time. Well, we also always hear about with the military or journalism commonly about the whole interpreter thing it was a major focus for example when we pulled out of afghanistan because there were a lot of interpreters left behind who were going to be found and executed by the taliban but i was thinking about this when that happened i'm like where it's not like like there's some recruiting agency when you land on the ground like, okay, here's where every translator is or whatever.

The way I understand it, you're going out and you're finding people who obviously speak the language and who volunteer and you get a out to places often alone with this person, wouldn't there be good intelligence missions for people to put in other countries, translators? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like as far as like then they get to lie about what's actually said? I found that out the hard way. I did have one significant overseas experience, you know, sent before all this happened so back in before the the the pig farms uh story days i was a upi correspondent a wire service correspondent based in eastern europe and what does that mean also working for it's a wire agency so ap associated press and the other one at the

time it's now you know doesn't really exist but's called UPI, and they were kind of the rival to AP. And I was a foreign correspondent for them for about a year and a half. And one of my, you know, I was covering countries like Bulgaria and Romania and places that were still either still communist or starting to emerge from communism. And one of my fixers in Bulgaria turned out to be an agent for the Communist Party. We didn't realize it at the time. I didn't even know it until years later. But it turns out he had been essentially feeding me party crap, which we didn't necessarily take at face value. But it was interesting to know later that this guy was completely untrustworthy.

So more typically what we do is there is – in every country, there is a small group of people who are known within the journalism community as reliable so i've you talk to your friend and he's been in in um iraq and he's worked with this one guy before he's always been great he's really resourceful he's very honest and so you try to try to connect with people who've done this before we've turned out to be you know trustworthy and that's you know yeah you can always find out that the guy's been bought off by somebody, but that's just the best you can do. And then you triangle it. You don't take anybody's word for anything, really.

It's just you get a report about something, but then you have to check it and check it again and check it with someone else until you're sure that it's true. Now, you're talking about all the overseas stuff you had to throw yourself into when you took on the nuclear reporting role. But how quickly did you start either personally developing sources at, say, the CIA, or being handed some sources from other relationships at the Post who may have had them, or both? So what happened there is with agencies like CIA, like I mentioned, they have a PR staff, which you have to deal with because if you have a question, that's usually – you have to at least at some point ask the front office, what do you think of this or will you give us a comment about something? But to cover an agency like the CIA, it's always working from the outside in.

So it's finding people who used to be somebody, who used to have a job in the agency and knows a lot of people who are still inside, but is willing to help you for whatever reason. Allegedly used to. Used to, right, exactly. And sometimes it's, like, for example, on the, sort of, the triple agent story, this bomber, a lot of the formers, the folks who used to be in the agency, were really upset about that incident. And they had all kinds of theories and explanations of what went wrong.

And so my very first set of sources on a story like that is often people who are just angry about how the agency screwed up. And so they'll kind of talk your ear off. And then they'll say, well, you know, I know somebody who's still in who could give you a little bit more about that. He's a good friend of mine. I'll vouch for you. And if you can figure out a way to meet him without, you know, any fingerprints or any sort of trail, then he's willing to work with you. And so those first relationships become sort of the way inside the front door. And, and eventually what you discover is that people like to talk if they feel like they, they want to be heard, they want to be understood, they want their point of view to be communicated. And if you can convince them

that you'll handle the information fairly, it's amazing how you can get folks to talk about things. That's kind of been the secret of my career, is just wanting to know, being curious, not having my own agenda, but just wanting to figure out what happened. And people want to help you on that path, because own agenda but just wanting to figure out what happened and people want to help you on that path because they often want the truth to come out even people whose

lives are guarding secrets that is very interesting it makes it complicated because a lot of them have polygraphs and one of the questions in polygraphs have have you have you spoken to a journalist and so the ones who are undergoing that process it gets really really tricky but you find out that the higher levels of management, sometimes those polygraphs aren't really a thing because they happen very rarely, if at all. And that's even better because you get to the best sources. To the best people who really understand. But that's also the question from a cynic perspective. I can't imagine doing a job like yours as well because I just do a podcast where we have guys in and we keep it real and people shit talk on youtube comments that's very very different right but you're actually writing feature stories that are official reports and you're writing books and you're dealing with

people who absolutely as a part of their job and i'm not even saying that this is this doesn't make sense i think it makes a lot of sense but as a part of their job they they have to operate in deception of what the public knows yeah and that means the media yeah right so how do you i know you can never like bat a thousand on stuff like you're not a robot here but how do you try to figure out what's being what's being fed to you in a specific way versus what is actually at least some level of truth here that I can run with to start doing my work to figure out what happened. Right. That's a really good question. And I think it's useful for people to understand how this process works, because I think people don't often understand how journalists do their job, at least at reputable news organizations.

And the thing is, we get told things all the time that may or may not be true. So just because somebody is telling you something, even if they're a high level person, they're not necessarily telling you the truth. It may be very self-serving. And so it becomes important to triangulate. And that sometimes is the hardest part of the job because you've got to find somebody else who really knows about this, who has no connection with this first guy you talked to, who can set you straight if it's wrong. And I'll give you an example. There are Middle East governments who, because of my background and my travels and past experiences and connections, will sometimes reach out to me and say, hey, did you know X, Y, or Z? Did you know the Iranians are doing this or that? Or did you know that the Al Qaeda is over here and they're about, you know, it's amazing what you'll hear. It's like a minefield too, because you're trying to pick it

out. And then you say, oh, that's really interesting. And how do you know that? Try to kind of probe a little bit, you know, what's the source of this? Can you be on the record about this? Usually they can't be. So then I, okay, well well if i'm going to report the story i got to do a lot of work to figure out if it's true so i'll check in with with uh people i know in another country who have maybe they're even antagonistic to this first country to try to figure out what their perspective is and if it's real intelligence it tends to get shared around by governments if if the israelis figure out something they'll share it with the Americans or the Germans. Keep this line close to you. But if you go to them and say, listen, I've heard this,

but we want to make sure it's accurate. Sometimes in the service of just trying to correct an inaccuracy or just to give a different perspective, people open up and say, well, that's partly true, but it's really more like this. And then through this process of triangulation and just lots and lots of work, you get to the point where you can be comfortable saying, well, this is probably – this is how it happened. And then you have to be careful in how you describe it and how certain you are and maybe not certain. But at least you have some comfort in knowing that this is pretty solid. So you actually – and I want to make sure I followed this correctly. You made me think of something I hadn't thought about with how to corroborate things.

Like we think about, okay, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, like there's rivalries. Like there could be all kinds of back and forth. So you can play on something like that to be able to figure out like, oh, no, this person is bullshitting you. And they might actually be telling the truth that they're bullshitting you because they don't like those guys. Maybe the FBI and the CIA are beefing and you actually figure out like, oh, the CIA was lying to me on that one. Fine. But it sounds like you're also pointing out using like some of the country examples that you could have some really good situations where let's just make up one right now. Let's say – let's say – let's make up one that would never exist right now.

The FSB and the cia are partnering on something and you have sources in the jordanian intelligence who on this thing they have nothing to do with it they like america obviously but like they don't really care and they may actually understand though what's going on and have no dog in the fight and you may get information from the cia and the the jordanian guy may say well actually that's not true because we have intelligence that says this and they're not actually helping out the u.s here yeah so you could even like play your your culture connections to try to verify stuff which is pretty cool all the time and it

turns out that there's often even countries that have alliances. You'd be amazed how often there's also jealousies or just sometimes a lack of respect or some kind of antagonism. And it could be, like you mentioned, CIA and FBI. Often they really don't like each other very much because they have completely different jobs. The FBI folks look at the CIA people as just guys who sit around embassies and read newspapers and then rewrite them and pretend like it's intelligence. So they're very dismissive. And so you can get – if you hear something from an agency person, if you check it with the FBI, if it's wrong, they're very happy to tell you that the CIA is full of crap

and they didn't have anything to do with it. But the same kinds of relationships occur in the Middle East in particular. It's a big gossipy community. All these countries have relationships with each other. Often they're personal. They're kin folks, like sort of the emir of this country as, you know, it's very incestuous. And so once you kind of connect into the gossip stream and then check different parts of it, it's amazing how people like to talk about each other and like to put down each other or maybe compliment the other.

But it's a fascinating flow of information that if you can tap into, you can learn all kinds of things. Yeah. I mean, it's just, there was a story that stuck out and unfortunately was from the washington post a couple years ago joe rogan had this guy tom o'neill and who i don't need to go into the whole thing because i've done it before but essentially this dude gave up like 20 years of his life and something that was never supposed to be a book turned into a book about the manson murders and mk ultra and his evidence was absurd and so during this long odyssey making the book sometime and i i want to say it was like the mid 2000s late 2000s something like that he had a friend who was she was high up on the editing team at the washington post i don't

know if she was the lead editor i don't remember but he was in possession of documents from the cia that had let's say it had three to four answers on it like absolutely for sure this is what it is because he got it from a perfect source and like it was checked i think he checked shit the national archives whatever it was like he knew the answers to questions and he said to her he said how well do you trust your these two guys at the cia who she was working with on a bunch of the stories that were happening she said oh they're great and so he goes all right well can we come in and ask them some questions she's like sure so she brings him in they go into her office they get these guys on the phone and mind you he's got the answers right here and he has her ass three four questions

whatever it was and they like were very nice and they're like oh yeah no totally we'll fill you in on that and she's like okay cool gives all the answers and she's like awesome thanks so much for the help hangs up the phone and he hands her the document and says they were all wrong well every single one now goes back to one of the original points we were making i understand that the cia can't sit there and be like oh yeah no totally we're working on that mission right there or totally totally, we did this thing right here. They have to deal in deception. But it goes to show you, even at places like the Washington Post, wherever it may be, you don't know.

You have to do the back work that you just laid out all right there and hope that you get it like six ways to Sunday so that you can say with a reasonable confidence that like, all right, it appears things are in this direction. And yet you still could get caught in that minefield. Yeah. And there's a, it's really fascinating story. And I hadn't heard that until you'd brought it up the other day. It sounds quite credible. The other problem that you might encounter at the end of this, this is something we actually get into all the time, is even after you've proved your case six ways to Sunday and no one can really deny it, you still have this sort of final interview with the CIA in which you're presenting what you're going to say, because they have every response. As we see it, they should be able to respond and say what they want to say. And often they will make an appeal to you as an American saying that if you write this story,

you're going to get somebody in trouble, you're going to get somebody killed. And then it gives us pause. And we stop and we think, well, is that really true? Or are they just kind of feeding us this line because they're going to be embarrassed? And often we'll negotiate. We'll say, okay, well, if there is a security issue, if there is a person at risk, we're willing to withhold certain facts.

We're willing to, and that's a difficult decision for a journalist to make, but we see that as being responsible, that you don't just say something, or write a portion because you know it. There's also, you do worry about human lives. And if you're going to compromise a security operation, we're not comfortable doing that. And so we'll, you know, modify the report in a way

just to leave out certain details that might get somebody in trouble. And one example where this happened was the sort of the black side prisons that we talked about. There was a secret CIA program where they set up prisons around the world for interrogating members of Al-Qaeda that they caught. And it was a top secret thing. Nobody knew that these prisons existed. It was outside to the judicial system. There's no accountability, no oversight. What years are we talking about for the story?

This was 2005 and 2006 is when the stories broke. Got it. And so the initial stories that we wrote, we knew where the prisons were, Got it. if we pointed to specific facilities. So we left that out. And it was still a powerful story. We still revealed something we felt was very important for people to know about. But we tried to do it in a responsible way. And that's just sort of the balancing act that we have to deal with sometimes.

And that one actually seems easier because I think not necessarily saying it's in this town, at this building. Yeah, of course, people want to know that. But like, you can get the point across and be able to say if you have evidence among a whole bunch of other variables there, that one makes sense. But this is such a difficult thing for you guys because that slippery slope of like, all right, well, where are we being American versus where are we getting played right now?

You can look to the example you laid out with like the whole nuclear proliferation reporting and stuff. There was a lot of that i know once snowden came out with all his stuff i believe i hope i remember this correctly but there had been stories that were axed in the years leading up to that about i think stellar wind and some of the things he specifically reported on where they said americans will die if you tell people about this and it's like well in hindsight no you were you were spying and not to say like you know one life can be taken anywhere this is a world of eight billion people like you can't totally work that way but you don't want to start wars you don't want to start major international conflicts i get that but you know they use that as a cloud to cover up for the fact that they were

essentially violent not essentially they were violating the constitution by spying on americans yeah and you know it's easy to stick your foot in the face of the reporters way later but i do try to imagine myself in that room having worked hard on this whole report having all this evidence and having some dude with a with a deep voice on the phone saying hey man people are going to die if you put this out yeah that's a lot yeah and sometimes some of the most ferocious internal fights at the paper will be when there's disagreement about whether or not we're just getting BS here, that the agency is just trying to keep us from embarrassing them. And so the reporter who just fought and fought and fought to get the information

wants it to be published, and an editor will say, well, look, we should modulate this a little bit. We don't have to say everything we know. And it gets kind of contentious. And, and we do often wonder, even after the story's posted, if, if we've been played, you know, and that's just, but it's just part of the daily kind of murkiness of the job. You try to do the best you can to inform the public, but also try to be responsible as citizens, because we do see ourselves as that too. Yeah, it's tough. But like you've been saying all day, you have a lot of friends in a lot of other places.

And we got to go there now because we've been talking about Jordan. And I mentioned something early on about the king. But like I said, that was the revelation in Black Flags how cool this dude was. Because, you know, I'm from america and it's like we hear king we hear queen it's like we fought a war over that shit like 300 years ago i don't know but this guy was a dude who never wanted the job never expected to get the job and he's cool as shit, can you tell people who don't know what King Abdullah is about and what, like how he came to power and maybe how you got to know him as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a really fascinating story. And so, just to remind readers

and, sorry, to remind viewers and listeners... Same shit, they're gonna buy your book. Absolutely. What are the names of your books, by the way? Let's put those links in the description. First one, so I've got Red, sorry red sorry triple agent was the first that was the one about this the spy operation black flags was number two and then i just uh yep hold this bad boy up for the camera right here link in description and just last year came out with one called red line which is also in the middle east but it's about uh serious chemical weapons program and how we uh

managed to get it out of the country in the middle of a civil war which is a great little spy yarn all by itself just finished it and it's phenomenal people should go get it links are in description awesome but anyway i cut you off thank you for that but the so jordan is this is country that's it's it's small landlocked country of about 7 million people in the middle of the worst neighborhood in the world, but happen to be some of the best friends that America has. It's a monarchy, so you have a family of kings that actually trace their lineage back to Mecca and to the prophet Muhammad. So there's a very ancient family. But when this country was created out of whole cloth after the end of the First World War, this family called the Hashemites were put in charge and put on the throne. And so, King Abdullah is the current king

of the country, and he's the fourth to hold the throne. And he's a really interesting guy. And what makes him attractive to me as a leader is, as you said, he's not someone who grew up expecting to be king. It was always going to be his uncle. He was one of several sons of multiple wives that his father had. And so he was just preparing for a job as a military guy. He went into service and actually did it the railway and and became an officer and participated in military operations was he not the oldest son he was he was not he actually was the oldest son so in that sense that is it's but it's it's complicated in jordan but it's not like the

british royal family exactly because the crown prince until he became crown prince uh in 1999 was going to be his his uncle and that's just the way things have been set up over there. It has to stay in the family, but there's some, the king essentially decides who's going to follow him. And he had years ago when he was a little boy, it was just decided that this uncle was going to be king. And then the father, the King Hussein, this sort of revered old man who'd been on the throne for decades decided that he wanted his son Abdullah to be king instead. And it was completely out of the blue, and he was not prepared for it mentally, psychologically, but suddenly he was told this was going to be him, and a few months later his dad dies

and he ends up being on the throne. But here's a young man who'd spent a lot of his life in the West. He'd gone to school in the United States at a private school, gone to military academy in Britain. So the rap on him turns out not to be quite true, but people would say of him that he spoke better English than Arabic. But he doesn't come across at all as someone who grew up in luxury or spoiled. He's just very sort of hard-nosed, very sophisticated thinker, a very good speaker, and really wanted to try to figure out a way to make his country survive, even though it has so

many disadvantages. It has no oil. It's like this one country in the Middle East that doesn't have any mineral wealth. It has no water. There's not enough water to sustain the population. They don't have any rivers to speak of. The only sort of big body of water that exists is the Dead Sea, which you really can't use for drinking water. Hence the name. Yeah, so they're very much dependent on things like tourism, which they've got some amazing places to visit, such as Petra, one of the great wonders of the world, which you can see in the southern deserts of Jordan, and all these other cool things. But really, it's a country that has to figure out how to make it on its widths. And so this is the guy who's been in charge of trying to figure that out year after

year. And he's also decided, you know, strategically that he needs to be good friends with the United States. So Republican presidents, Democratic presidents, whoever it is, he develops good relationships, his security services work hand in glove with ours and he's been able to kind of walk this this just careful balance and being sort of a sovereign in the middle east in a country that sets fairly poor uh and mineral poor resource poor uh and and yet you know be friends with the united states without being necessarily controlled by us. So it's a really difficult thing to do, but he mostly manages to pull it off.

We like to control things around here. But his father was also pretty friendly with the U.S., right? He was indeed. When did that happen? You mentioned this. Jordan became one of the first countries to have normalized relationships with Israel. Yes. And that was a huge step, very controversial.

Many Jordanians still don't forgive the monarchy for that because – When was that? So that was in – I'm getting my dates wrong. I'm thinking 78. I'll check it. 70s. 70s, yeah. And before that, you know, just 10 years before that,

they had fought in a war with Israel. They'd been involved in one of the Arab countries involved in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel, and they lost some of their territory in that war. So they have every reason to have animosity and differences, and they still do. But they decided for multiple reasons, including security reasons, that it was better to have at least a working diplomatic relationship with their closest neighbor, and they still do. But the king is someone who's very savvy. If you talk to him in a room, just you and him, and I've done that a number of times.

Yeah, you're like friends with the guy now. It was my pleasure or privilege that when I would come after a certain time, it turns out that one reason that this went so well is because he liked my first book. It involves a Jordanian. Which was not a good look for Jordan. Not necessarily a good look for Jordan. And he liked it.

He liked it. And his folks told me that when I want to do my second book, if it involved Jordan, then just let them know. They try to make things happen and make sure I get introduced to the right people. Black Flags could not have happened without that because the entire story of Zarkawi, have happened without that. Because the entire story of Zarqawi, the sort of the main character of the book, takes place, his story is in Jordan,

all the people who dealt with him and fought him in the early parts of his life were all Jordanians. And those people were suddenly accessible to me in a way that I could not have imagined under normal circumstances. But because the king said it was okay, they agreed to talk. Yeah, and what is, just for context, in different royal factions across the world, obviously they have different levels of power as it pertains to government, but in Jordan, obviously they do have a government as well. Who's... the king is the one making the most decisions and has the most power politically within the state, no? regional and local administration, you know, the kinds of things that sort of, you know, state governments and town councils do, while the king is essentially in control of the sort of the security infrastructure of the state. And he is an absolute ruler in the sense that he's, you know, he has the ultimate veto over everything else. And if there's a problem with the prime

minister, he has the power to pull out that guy and bring in a new one that happens fairly regularly and it's cool that he respects your reporting too because even within black flags like it doesn't he's very likable i will say that and i researched the guy a lot after your book and i think he's i think he's a pretty cool cat but you know he made some mistakes and you outline that in the book. And one of the first things is that whole – when the rise to power happened, you pointed out, I think in the first chapter – first or second chapter – you talk about how there's this tradition in Jordan, like an amnesty tradition. And he didn't check the list, and the list had a person we're going to talk a lot about who was effectively the king of Jordan, Hussein, dies, there's this tradition, as you say, that a general amnesty is granted mostly to political prisoners, but who's a political prisoner? That's a little bit of a, you know, you can fudge that a bit. So tribes and families who are influential will kind of lobby to have

a certain person released. And so a few thousand people get released from prison as the new king, Abdullah, is taking the throne. And of course, he doesn't know everybody on the list. And one of the people that gets freed turns out to be this guy who becomes a monster. He was a terrorist figure at the time. He was a bad guy who ended up being in prison because of terrorist offenses, but ultimately becomes a much bigger problem for jordan in the world after he gets out so we're going to be talking about king abdullah throughout this and we'll fill in more context there but to get to the beginning of the story and the heart of it you know when when we look in regular you know everyday person pop culture about isis and what it was what we all remember obviously is

the summer 2014 suddenly there's people chopping off heads off in the Middle East and like it was crazy and all these black flags and stuff hence the name of your book but the the basis of Isis it felt like the way it was almost reported in the media like it came out of nowhere and you know had just started now you had this whole caliphate thing but really The history went back a lot of years and that's the story you tell and it all starts with Alzaqawi who you spoke about so just to begin like you just laid out that he was a

Lower level terrorist who had been in prison for some violent things and he was mistakenly let out under this amnesty thing but but who was he like where did he come from and and how did how did he grow up into becoming someone who had these delusions of of grandeur power in a way that he also wanted to fight a war against the west yeah yeah 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 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 Cowley was none of that. He was a street thug. He was the kind of guy that when he was in school, he cut other kids with razors. He got involved in drugs. He got a tattoo. He was just a street tough. But he had a lot of swagger and a lot of charisma. Think of just kind of like a junior mafia guy who just thinks he's everything.

And layered on top of that is this religious zeal, which makes him this really powerful combination of utter brutality and absolute religious zeal, piousness, but in this really strange way that he kind of creates for himself. So he becomes this uniquely dangerous person. He's someone who can rally people around him. The people he brings around him, though, are criminals or people who are like him, people who are from the lower classes who want to break things and make a commotion, but they're not very smart about it always. He sort of brings that energy together into something that's very different, and it becomes a terrorist movement that's much more violent much more uh just about blowing up things for their for its own sake and not necessarily trying to achieve some great strategic uh objective because they're at heart very very violent people it's just part of their their personality it was certainly part of zarkawi's did he grow up like what, when, when did he become very religious

with it, you know, under this veil of religion for his terrorism? It's a really interesting story. So here's a guy I mentioned, he was a, he was a street thug, but he actually grew up in a, in a middle-class family. His father was like a civil servant, but he was the ne'er-do-well in the family. He's the guy who was always getting in trouble, always having to be, you know, gotten out of prison. And then his family had this intervention for him when he was a young man and tried to kind of force religion on him. They started to send him to mosque and he went to prayer groups and he started taking it somewhat seriously. But then right around the same time, it's when a lot of young Arab men were going off to Afghanistan because there was this

big holy war going on there. And it seemed exciting and glamorous. And so, Zarqawi signed up for that. And so, as a young man in his early 20s, he heads off to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. And he gets there too late. Soviets have already left. But then he tries to connect with bin Laden and skipping ahead a little bit. Bin Laden looks at this young guy from from jordan this rough you know crude foul-talking um violent young man and decides that he's too crazy for al-qaeda so he gets rejected he gets it well you can't be part of our group you can start your own you can go to this other place and do your own camp if you want to but you're too nuts for us and that actually becomes a schism that we'll see later

between al-qaeda and isis which hate each other now well that's that's the dark comedy here you have al-qaeda who we grew up you know 9-11 and all that and suddenly isis happens and they're like listen listen yo we're not that yeah we're not cutting people's heads off and just killing shiites because they're shiites you know, all these things that they felt were just way too inflammatory, too dangerous, and just too brutal. But that was the Zarqawi way, cutting people's heads off. That was Zarqawi. That's what he liked to do. And al-Qaeda was horrified by it. So, it is amazing how this schism developed, and it really was a reflection of one man's personality, a man who just loved to bust things. And interestingly, he becomes a cult figure and still is.

I mean, who do young jihadists look at? Whose videos do they like to watch? Whose face do they like to have on posters and T-shirts? It's not bin Laden, who's this old, pious guy with a long beard and likes to give long sermons on videotape. Zarqawi is this man of action. He's the guy who who kills Americans with his own hands He looks like a ninja warrior with his like his do-rag it is it is sneakers And and it's a completely different kind of terrorist character. You look the part. I mean he just those eyes You look at that. It's just it's it's scary it's eerie and shooting machine gun from the hip and and um in in this the most the thing that made him famous to americans was one

day he picked up a an american businessman off the streets of baghdad and puts him in front of a camera and zarkawi beheads him with a knife who was that so it's a young man who's um and i'm gonna blank on his name so we'll have to check that out. Nick Berg? Nick Berg, I'm sorry. Thank you for remembering that. So Nick Berg was a guy from Philadelphia, actually. He was a young man who had this vision of being one of the businessmen who was going to rebuild Iraq. So he moved himself there, tried to start a business, didn't get very far, but ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And Zarqawi's people picked him up and decided to make an example out of him. Put him in an orange jumpsuit, which everybody at the time was kind of associating with Gitmo and with Abu Ghraib and all the scandals about the Iraqi prison that were coming out at the time. And sort of did that deliberately to send a message to the Americans. And Zarqawi stands in front of him and says, you know, this is what we're going to do to your people, and takes a knife out and essentially chops his head off. Yeah, that's, I was a very little kid when that happened, but I do remember that. It was. Because it was so, it was, I mean, there's an the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, we were sort of used to America going into a country and triumphing, like we'd done in the early months of the Iraq War.

Then it gets bogged down into an insurgency and becomes very violent. And then in the middle of this, you have these horrific acts of terrorism committed against Americans. And you could sense, you know, the country's, you know, attitude shifting at that moment when everyone's looking at this ugliness and saying, what in the world are we doing here? What are we bringing on ourselves? And suddenly popularity, support for the war just plummeted after that. Yeah. And to go back, because like you said, you went ahead to when he first met with bin Laden and bin Laden was like, no, not this guy. But when he went to prison for lower lower level violence but it was it was terrorist related i guess right yeah but it was sort of

clownish stuff because these guys they went off to afghanistan to fight this great holy war they got there too late they couldn't join bin laden so they come back to jordan they're just looking for well how are we going to do this terrorist thing or how are we going to be jihadists or holy warriors in our own country? Oh, he met Bin Laden before prison, too. There was a brief interaction, but the big one was after his release from prison. Okay. But the things that he tried to do, you know, in Jordan was stuff like trying to blow up liquor stores because they see liquor is evil. And the funniest one was they they uh they decided that that

pornographic theaters were an abomination and they should go after them too and in one instance they had this young guy walk into a porno theater wearing a bomb and he's supposed to blow the place up but he sits down in the theater he starts watching the movie and he gets totally engrossed and forgets all about the bomb. So the bomb blows up at his feet. It blows both his legs off and he survives. Nobody else gets hurt. But these are the kinds of knucklehead things they were doing back in the 90s in Jordan.

And that's what got him arrested ultimately. You described this as a – you described prison for him very similarly to how a lot of us in America looking at our incarceration system unfortunately describe things, which is it becomes like a school for criminals as opposed to like doing any correcting. So in prison, he essentially deepened his ties, deepened his religious aspect of his life. And who was the guy who was his mentor in there what was his name again there's a guy named Mac Deasy who was sort of a scholarly jihadist someone who was uh was not really a fighter but had sort of the ideas and was considered sort of the brains but Zarqawi in prison it goes from being kind of a nobody just one of the one of the gang to becoming someone who clearly has leadership ability he's clearly sort of the leader of the gang to becoming someone who clearly has leadership ability. He's clearly sort of the leader of the gang, even beyond the spiritual advisor, the guy, McDeezy. He's

the one who everybody respects, everybody looks up to. And he forms really his posse in this prison and they become his crew once he gets out of prison too. And they become the core of what becomes Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, this gang of people from around him in prison. What attracted people to him, like as a leader in prison? Part of it was just raw charisma. And there's a scene in the book, there's one of the first time you see Zarqawi in the story itself is when he's in prison. I got a chance to meet a doctor who treated him. He was like sort of the prison doctor. And years later, he agreed to an interview with me and,

and told me about the experience of going into this terrible prison. It was one they actually reserved just for the jihadis, just for like the sort of the terrorist characters. They put them way off in the desert by themselves. And then in this little prison that was, you know, fairly small and really isolated, they had developed this discipline, like a military discipline of just with Zarqawi being the leader and telling everybody else what to do. And the doctor remarked how he would watch Zarqawi command people just with his eyes. He would lock eyes with someone, nod his head, and the person would do whatever zakali wanted them to do so there was this fanatical devotion to this man that developed in prison and that became you know part of what

made him so successful it's just sort of this animal magnetism that he had and so he leaves prison deep into what he views as religion you pointed out he goes and meets with bin laden sits down but laden says nah fam you're crazy but laden still gave him a little bit of funding though to send him to another plate where was it in afghanistan so out in the sort of far western part of afghanistan so you could go way out there on the border uh with iran and do your own thing out there and make this little organization just for people from the levant so uh jordanians le, Syrians, people from that part of the world. And you can have them and you can do what you want to do, but you're not al-Qaeda and you're not part of our brand.

So he's basically a cast-off, essentially. And bin Laden thinks he's probably going to hear the last of them. This is – because he got out of prison, what, in 99? Yeah. So this is also like 99, 2000? So creeping up on 2001 so getting close to a very fateful time in american history because at this moment al-qaeda is planning what becomes the 9-11 attack so kawi had nothing to do with he's off this his own little thing nobody probably ever would have heard of heard of him again he was just kind of

off by himself and then 9-11 happens and there's this diaspora all these guys just kind of off by himself. And then 9-11 happens, and there's this diaspora. All these guys go kind of scoot off their own way. You know, bin Laden goes into hiding in Pakistan. Zarqawi goes across the mountains into Iraq, into this sort of a no-man's land between Iran and Iraq, and tries to restart his terrorist group there. And probably would have, again, faded into obscurity, except for the fact that the United States was making great plans to invade Iraq yes and that was sort of the the moment sort of the turn of history that that made him again rise to the world stage so he became in all the wrong ways he became the right guy in the right place at the right time because of where he went but still

after 9-11 it's not like at least it seems to me it's not like this dude was anywhere near the top of any list of like terrorist watch lists at the cia or in or in intelligence organizations no he was still yeah pretty outside small potatoes yeah but in fact and this is another of the ironies in this little enclave that he developed and in the the no man's land between Iraq and Iran, the CIA knew where he was and knew he was a bad guy, knew he was affiliated with terrorist organizations and wanted to take him out. And a plan was developed in late 2000, to get my years right, late 2002 to go after him in this little place where he was in the mountains and

the bush administration essentially vetoed that idea because they wanted to have this invasion in iraq they were afraid that if they did something they would alert saddam the same to their plans or just kind of disrupt the invasion schedule for some reason so decided not to do it so they let sarkali essentially get away and it's also off-brand because they were trying to sell like al-qaeda and and saddam got along which saddam was an awful guy but that was not true at all he was not part of al-qaeda he had no no friendship with al-qaeda to speak of and then they end up using zarkali as a i'm skipping ahead a little bit but around this time essentially they don't take this shot. And then we invaded Iraq in March 2003, right? Okay. So what was the thing again where in the famous speech, infamous speech that Colin Powell gave at the UN ahead of the invasion, I guess like february or early march 2003 he spent i don't know maybe

it was like 15 20 minutes of this very long speech however long it was talking specifically about al-zharqawi as one of the reasons why why an invasion was going to be merited what yeah so what what happened there because now you know the tifo hats out there go oh so they didn't take their shot at this guy and then he gets used in a speech fucking three months later yeah yeah so they missed their shot like you say but then in in february of 2002 the united states is trying to make the case for the invasion of oh three oh sorry of three correct and so colin powell goes to the u.n security council makes this big presentation talks about the weapons of mass destruction, which we know in hindsight didn't exist. Yikes.

But the other thing, the other reason for the attack was this alleged association between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. He was trying to argue that these two were in collusion and if Saddam Hussein gives al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction will make them much more dangerous. And they didn't really have any evidence of that, but they'd had this one strange guy, Sarkawi, who was physically located in Iraq. He was up in the mountains where Saddam Hussein couldn't get to him because he was in the Kurdish area and it was in the no-fly zone. But he had once met bin Laden. He had once tried to be part of al-qaeda and so it was enough of a sort of a thread of evidence that powell felt comfortable going to security council and saying see this guy's our cow he's he's our evidence here's a guy in iraq who's in cahoots with al-qaeda this is the connection that we've been trying to tell you about turns out it was all bullshit there

was no connection um zarkawi was you know hated Saddam and Saddam hated him if he even knew it existed. He just didn't like these little offshoot groups in his mountains. But it became this sort of one of the reasons we went to war in Iraq in 2003. And while this is all going on as well, another major revelation I think in your book – I don't know if it's also been reported other places, but I did not know anything about this. The King of Jordan was all over the United States in the build-up to Iraq in those two years ahead of that saying, do not fucking do this. And you also outline this quickly when we first talked about the King, but I don't know if we got all the way into it. So I want to make sure everyone has context, but

there used to be like Jordan and Iraq used to be a part of the same country know if we got all the way into it so i want to make sure everyone has context but there there used to be like jordan and iraq used to be a part of the same country or something so he the king of jordan understood their culture very well and was pounding the table to u.s intelligence and and the president saying like hey this you don't understand what's going to happen here the he he basically called the entire power vacuum situation like can you just give some of the background there for everyone one of the king of jordan's many roles has been as kind of truth teller to to our government because he knows what's happening in his part of the world very well and you're right there's sort of tribal they're sort of tribes straddle the border

between iraq and jordan some of the same tribes are on both sides. They know each other very well. The intelligence services communicate very well with one another. The Jordanians knew there was no significant weapons of mass destruction program. More importantly, they knew that Saddam Hussein was essentially keeping the Iranians in check, which was very important from their point of view. It was sort of maintaining stability in the region. If you take him out, all kinds of bad things could come in his place. So Abdullah was taking it on himself to speak to President Bush personally and others and say, not a good idea. This is going to backfire on you. Of course,

you're going to have a military victory, and that's not going to be much of a challenge for the United States. But once Saddam Hussein is gone, it's a Pandora's box. All kinds of bad things can happen. He turned out to be absolutely right about that. Yeah. And it's wild to think about because he was an awful dude in every way. Like there was nothing good about Saddam Hussein. But it's the same problem in so many places throughout history where you have that strong man leader and it's like, well, who replaces him? Yeah. I mean, that's the question I've been asking people with Putin. I'm like, you know, know all right we've known this guy's bad for a long time but also like who's going to replace this guy like are they going to be as bad i mean

i don't think it can get worse but can it yeah you know or is it not going to be one guy and it's going to be just a total vacuum and and it's a mess everywhere and there's there's tribal violence like we got but when when we did finally go into Iraq after all the build-up and and it happened one of the things that I feel like isn't really outlined in in the American viewpoint retelling of it or it's not that's not outline it's just not highlighted nearly enough is like the key issue at hand here but you know you have in the middle east you have sunnis and shiites as two of they're the most powerful factions of the islamic religion and

there's been sectarian violence as they call it between the two forever in all different types of places there's some traditional religious disagreements and tribal things whatever but when saddam was in power he was a sunni yep his party was called the bath party right and they they were all sunnis and so when we went there i guess it was bremer paul bremer who was named like the head of iraq for the the ambassador. He made a rule in almost immediately that said, anyone who's a Ba'ath party member, therefore any Sunnis, cannot have any role in the government we are now going to set up. So, he completely, I know this wasn't his intention, but didn't work well. He basically made, scarlet lettered the entire sunni community

and even though saddam and al-qaeda didn't like each other they were both of sunni background so now the shiites are all the ones taking power in this new vacuum government yeah and you have this guy al-zakawi a sunni terrorist leader living in the hills of ir, suddenly coming in and saying, oh, you guys are all pissed now, join me. Yeah, exactly. And this is sort of another just accident of history that works out in Zarqawi's favor. Because you're right, the one thing Saddam Hussein did was kind of maintain stability between the Sunnis and Shiites in his country. Iraq is a majority Shiite country, but the Sunnis were centrally in control. And then when the US comes in, the coalition authority with Bremer in charge, deciding to

disband the army and then outlaw the Ba'athists, then suddenly all the guys who ran the country weren't in charge anymore and didn't even have jobs and pensions. And so they're all not just disgruntled, but furious. And they're looking to fight back. And into this environment comes this young hothead named Zarqawi who has a plan to create an insurgency, to fight back against the Shiites, to fight back against the Americans. And so he ends up getting all these former Iraqi army officers and intelligence officers joining his side. And that's what made him so powerful so quickly because he had, you know, a third of the country was very much in sympathy with his objectives. I mean how quickly – I forget exactly. I can Google it while you're answering the next question, but I regular people on the street who are Sunnis, how quickly did we suddenly see a ton of what used to be perfectly normal law-abiding citizens now living in a war-torn zone who suddenly say, fuck it, and become pretty radicalized as a result of the policies we put in. So we take over the country, and by April, pretty much most of the fighting is over. By late summer of 2003, things are starting to blow up.

Already. Already. And by 2004, it's full-on insurgency. So it didn't take very long at all. And it's really not any mystery, because you do have a very large part of the population that's sort of used to living a certain way and and used to have the levers of power suddenly they don't have it anymore but the guys that they used to beat up on are now coming after them the shiites and so there's and zarkawi very smartly saw this this potential and he very deliberately tried to get fighting started between the two sides one of the his objectives was to go blow up things that Shiites cared about, their mosques, their marketplaces, their communities, their schools, with the deliberate intention of setting off fighting between Sunnis and Shiites.

And within that chaos, that was going to be his moment in which he was going to come up to power himself. And so obviously he had been completely on the radar in this post colin powell speech world to the intelligence people i'm saying so did the cia immediately put a priority one on him to take him out and i mean they didn't right away so what what went wrong in the chase and in a small world situation i actually actually had Ryan Tatin here, I was telling you about, who ironically was one of the Marines. I didn't know this when we were recording the podcast, but he told us on air in episode 117, he was one of the Marines who was a part of these many wild goose chases for al-Zaqawi in Iraq. It was intense. Now that was right before we got al out of Zakawe, right?

Yes, and I actually, I chased them too. This was badass. So we have this vehicle checkpoint and out of nowhere, and it comes in on the radio, and then there are Amtrak tanks, the amphibious tanks, just flying over the Euphrates River. Yeah, by late 2003, the CIA has figured out, and we get into this to some extent in the book, that Zarqawi was behind a lot of the bombings that they were seeing, and he was big trouble. And by 2004, early 2004, they were going after him full time. And it became a number one priority for the President of the United States. There were meetings at the National Security Council about Zarqawi, how do

we get rid of this guy? And so they quickly grasped the sort of the danger of this new insurgency that was bubbling up. And yet, it took a very long time because his operational security was really good his network was really good and he could you know zip from town to town go undercover he had a small entourage he didn't talk on a cell phone so it became very very hard for him to track down but he seemed to be everywhere at once as he gained a lot of power too i'm sorry i just want to make sure i understood this right did al-qaeda suddenly starts reluctantly saying oh well this guy is kind of a part of us, so we need to give him more funding. Is that also happening? Yeah, exactly.

So bin Laden reaches out to Zarqawi and says, look, we'll make you an official franchise. So this is the first Al-Qaeda franchise. You're going to have your own separate division. It's going to be called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And that was really just the Zarqawi enterprise. And so it had sort of the stamp of approval of al-Qaeda, of bin Laden himself, which made it much more powerful for some of the extremists. But it also had autonomy. So Zarqawi had the ability to do things that, you know, without waiting for bin Laden's blessing. And he certainly did. He became

as violent as he wanted to be. And do we have any numbers of how big his official organization became at its peak? Well, just to give you a sense of numbers, we think about 10,000 foreigners came from other countries to join the organization. Wow. And sort of his army within Iraq, mostly Sunni ex-soldiers, just Sunni people from the street, was probably three or four times that big. Wow. we are yeah yeah and i told you so there's a big slice of that i'll bet i'll bet it's it's it's crazy to see how quickly it happened it's it's scary but it goes to show you what bad policy moves can create so he was moving around as you said with at least somewhat freedom because he had a lot of protection but you know what did this like? He had been up in the mountains when this started.

Is he, do they now have, you know, safe zones in Baghdad that are under their control where he can operate freely or in Raqqa or other places like in Iraq? Like, geographically speaking, like, where did he, where did his power stretch to? Yeah, so he had certainly organizational support within Baghdad itself, within the Sunni community, but more in sort of the Anbar province, a little bit to the west of Baghdad. I'll stick that map in the corner of the screen. Places like Fallujah, Ramadi, places that sort of in the Sunni heartland. Fallujah was essentially a Zarqawi compound. We ended up, the Marines ended up going into Fallujah in 2004 to try to kick out these guys. They were fighting essentially Zarqawi's little private army. But they're – I meant to say Ramadi, by the way, not Raqqa.

Right, right. But there are some communities, some neighborhoods, some villages within Anbar province that were essentially no-go zone for the Iraqis because they were controlled by al-Qaeda. It became sort of the model for what we saw later under ISIS proper it, if I remember correctly, the head of the team tracking him. Yeah. Correct? She became the targeter, as the CIA calls these jobs, for Zarqawi. It was her job to track him down and find him. And try to get rid of him.

And try to get rid of him. Cabalist, for sure. Yeah. him and trying to get rid of him and try to get the violence for sure yeah so not to take the lead and bury it out front here but alza kawi people can google easily did die in 2006 but between 2004 2006 he wreaked a lot of havoc and one of the stories you told is a very specific mission where we missed him that ryan was on ryan Tate was on when he was chasing him. And it had to do with, I think it was like his laptop or something.

Does that sound familiar? Yeah, his laptop. Where they tracked it? Like what happened there? So it was just an intelligence tip about his movement. And so roadblocks were set up to try to intercept him. He ended up, there was this crazy chase, you know, across half of Anbar province that took place with helicopters

and all kinds of Marine vehicles in pursuit. He ends up veering off into a little town and dumps the car in an olive grove. And that's where the laptop was. They actually found his laptop, his personal laptop on the vehicle. He disappeared in the bushes and they never found him. But from that laptop, they were able to figure out what he'd been doing all these years to figure out where some of his network was based.

And Stanley McChrystal, the special forces officer I mentioned, uses that essentially a guide to how we're going to go after him and i try to roll up his network and from late 2004 to 2006 when he's finally killed they the americas became better and better at finding his hideouts and finding his lieutenants and rolling them up and going after his nodes communication nodes until they finally zeroed in on the man himself yeah and before this next point by the way this mic here if you can just keep it like pointed yeah so wherever your mouth goes just kind of keep it pointed like that okay but when they did finally kill him where did it happen again and and what was what was the full extent of that mission like who officially did it was it was it a giant marine force or did they drop a drone in

there how'd it go down okay so he had a safe house and we didn't know about it at first but this is town called bakuba which is a little bit northeast of baghdad but the way we got to that was that through different intelligence leads we were able to figure out the name of a guy who was his spiritual advisor, somebody who met with Zarqawi regularly to give him spiritual insights or to talk to him about the things he was doing. Interesting thing about Zarqawi is he wasn't, he didn't even know how to read and write that well. He wasn't particularly literate and he didn't understand the Quran at all. And so he would essentially make up whatever rules he thought were appropriate, but didn't really care what the actual teachings of Islam was.

But he did have spiritual advisors who would come in and essentially give blessings to whatever he was trying to do, including things like burning people alive or killing innocent women and children who are Muslim, things that are forbidden by the Quran, but he would get a dispensation by these spiritual leaders and they'd say it was okay to do, you know, and remain a good Muslim. So anyway, the Americans were eventually able to track this one spiritual advisor and followed him for weeks wherever he would go. And eventually, he led them, as they hoped, directly to this safe house where Zarkali was staying. And so, we watched the safe house for a while. At one point, drone footage shows this man walking out the door who looks, it's a dead ringer, it's Zarqawi. They were 80, 90% sure that it was him. They kept circling around just to make sure. And eventually,

an F-16 comes and drops a 500-pound bomb on the house and destroys it. That'll do it. That'll do it. and were marveling over the fact they had caught Sarkali after all that time. Tough way to go. Yeah, tough way to go. But he dies. And the reason that this is so critical to me is because this is years before ISIS. And yet what you're not arguing, you're pointing out in this book as a fact, is that he was the godfather of what technically became ISIS because of those things like the the brutality that you

laid out with a guy like Nick Berg doing things everything on camera trying to trying to show that anything that goes against the most extreme religious doctrine is going to be destroyed and beheaded and all this stuff but you have now a seven to eight year period we not one person knows the name ISIS because it doesn't really exist yet. And what was it? It was ISIS and then there was – they also sometimes called it ISIL because they'd say Levant instead of Iraq and Syria, I guess. Yeah. So they kept changing the name.

After Zarqawi died, the organization went from being called Al-Qaeda in Iraq to the Islamic State in Iraq. And they decided that they were going to – it was very deliberate. They wanted to make it more Iraq-focused and bring in more Iraqi leadership. And so it was just a rebranding attempt. But al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't very successful. They had been essentially squeezed to a handful of villages. The Americans were coming after them pretty strong. So not much was left of

them group but they were still there they didn't go away completely and then the americans went home so in 2011 we left iraq last troops left sometime that year and this was the opportunity for for al-qaeda and i'm sorry for the islamic state of iraq to come back and try to try to try to reconstruct itself and And who had taken over? Like when he died, did he have a succession plan in line or did someone just rise through the top? There were two or three people who took sort of interim roles. And then in 2012, this figure named Baghdadi,

someone whose name we recognized, who had been one of their sort of theological advisors who kind of was a backbencher during Zarqawi's time, ends up becoming the leader. And while he was head of this group, this thing we call Arab Spring took place. And there was uprisings throughout the region, including in Syria next door. And within a few months in Syria, a civil war breaks out. And Baghdadi looks across the border in Syria and sees an opportunity. Here's a chance for us to really kind of latch on to a cause. We're kind

of flailing around here. We don't really have, you know, much of a reason to exist. We're going to become part of the Syria fight, and we're going to change our name again. They changed their name from the Islamic State in Iraq to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which is another word for saying sort of the Palestine, Israel. Because they wanted to expand. They wanted to expand. They had sort of territorial ambitions to try to include the Syrians as part of that. And that's where we got ISIL or ISIS, as we also call it. Okay.

There's a lot here. I want to make sure we lay some context, context too before we dive all the way into that. So as you said, Baghdadi was more of a theological type who was lower level, I think you said, during al-Zaqawi's reign. But he's another one who went to prison for, it sounded like, maybe it was like four or five years, something like that, and essentially came out like a hardened hardcore like let's kill everybody yeah what became that advices yeah it's a very common story and it's we see it again and again in the story of not just was our colleague but a lot of his followers was his experience of being in prison and so during the American

occupation in Iraq there you know there'd be these roundups of guys who were either caught during raids or they're suspected jihadists. And so they got arrested and they were put in these huge outdoor prison facilities. There's one called Camp Buka, which just became famous and it was built for 10,000 sometimes they had up to 30 and it became essentially a jihadi university within these compounds uh you know networks developed training took place uh and guys like baghdad he went from being you know really nobody's just uh kind of bit players in these terrorist groups to becoming leaders and he rose from you know from that prison camp to become one of the senior members of the organization and so back to where you were 2011 ish arab spring which that even like

that that includes all of it including the whole like mubarak was it mubarak and in egypt and that whole thing because he left yeah he left power but then you had over in syria there was syria's a mess i mean syria has like that that's what your book your next book outlines like all these different factions are fighting and they're not friends but they're all fighting against like the same thing it's very weird but baghdad he puts in was it called al-nusra front yeah in syria yeah so what was the story there were those comprised of a lot of ethnic syrians who were already kind of aligned or did he inject a lot of guys who had come from all different places or specifically from iraq who were working for the islamic state in iraq and

just sent them there yeah so the story of these groups are a story of factionalization so these they they they're allies and then suddenly they're fighting each other. But Baghdadi looks into Syria, sees an opportunity, and decides to start his own little militant group. And at first, it's this mostly Syrian organization that's called al-Nusra Front. But they don't take orders very well from Baghdadi. They're not violent enough. They don't have this jihadi vision. They're more about fighting a dictator and sort of creating a new Syria and not about jihad proper. And so he finally just breaks with them, Baghdadi does, and decides, well, I'm going to lead this thing myself. powerful military factions in the country and probably the most fearsome, taking over huge chunks of territory in a way that no other group could, including some of the secular groups that we were backing. And they have many more people than say, you know, like the 10,000 strong from

other countries that you were saying Azakawi got to. This organization, I take it, had been at least behind the scenes growing excessively over these years. And in Syria, they managed to have explosive growth. And you saw something like 40 to 50,000 people from other countries, from the Middle East to Europe to the United States, coming to Syria to join ISIS. And that's what made them so internationally dangerous, because suddenly they have a cadre of tens of thousands of trained and highly motivated fighters who are willing to do anything from you know do street battles to carrying out a terrorist attack in in paris um and this was something we'd never seen before al-qaeda never approached that level of of sophistication in terms of the size of this network yeah i'm one of the things that like i can't relate to because i i can't understand it

period but you know these organizations al-qaeda isis in a huge way but absolutely al-qaeda famously they convince people young men often who are joining that their life here doesn't matter and only whatever you know they made-up bastardization of religion afterlife does you're going to get your 72 virgins and everything so you're going to go blow yourself up yeah and yet they operate in a world where the leadership factions of these organizations are never the ones to blow themselves up because they're needed here yeah you know it fascinates me how a lot of people would come from other places including people who aren't say like an al-zaqawi type where he's not a very smart guy not educated like you were

getting people who were smart as and yet they're blowing themselves up and and coming for something that they view as larger than them do you think all that comes from at that point like the anger of say u.s and western intervention in iraq specifically and now they just use that as a boogeyman to create this fake prophecy that they want to get or is it is it also like an amalgamation of years and years and years of trying to find the opportunity like the crazy people trying to find the opportunity to say we're going to do this so we can create a caliphate or something like that yeah that's a really good question and and there's multiple pathways but so the operation of recruiting people who become suicide bombers is quite sophisticated and part of it is sort of

appealing to people in other countries uh based on the atrocities that they're seeing on TV. They're seeing on the nightly news that Assad, this dictator in Syria, is killing Sunni Muslims. And good Muslims should rally to their defense and they should leave their home and come help fight to defend these Muslims from being butchered. And so there's some of that that's going on, some of that, you know, spreading of propaganda propaganda in some cases but some of it's just like appeal an appeal to help your brothers in a foreign land but once you're on the train once you're within the network then this the guys who are being recruited to be suicide bombers are kind of kept separately they're not allowed to have a lot of interaction they get a lot of daily um sort of brainwashing frankly uh they're taught that, yeah, if you become a suicide bomber,

it's an instant ticket to heaven, not just for you, but for your family. So this is a thing that's not just going to help you in the afterlife. It's great for your mom and your dad and all your relatives because everybody gets to go to heaven because you took this step of becoming a martyr. Now throw this on and get in the square over there.

That's right, get in the square. And just to make sure you don't screw up, we're going to sort of sew the, the sort of button to the suicide vest into your clothes or sort of tie it to your finger. So you just can't wriggle out at the last minute. Or we saw guys who were literally had their hands handcuffed to the steering wheel of,

of the vehicle that's being sent to the suicide bomber bombing. So they can't chicken out at the last minute. And they're not thinking about that when they're getting handcuffed. Like, oh, why are they handcuffed? No, no. They're just so deep. Yeah, I'm doing a service for my family. The toughest is when they do it to little kids.

Yeah. That's true. They have no concept of anything. You know, when you hear it, and it's not like two people. I mean, this happens far too often. You hear about like a nine-year-old blew people up you know what he was doing you know it's it's just it's so sick to me but when like you're reporting in 2010 and 2011 in preparation for your first book this is when they start to i guess

as you pointed out use the name like the islamic state in in Iraq. When did they come on your radar, though? Like, when's the first, even if they weren't yet called like ISIS or ISIL officially, like, when were you first like, ooh, the remnants of this al-Zarqawi guy are becoming the main problem? Yeah. It's, you know, my journey on the Zarqawi story really started with that first book, which was the book about this pediatrician who becomes a suicide bomber. And as I read his writings, because he left a lot of material, left videotaped interviews, sort of self-taped himself,

kind of describing his own journey as a jihadist. And he kept talking about Zarqawi as being this inspirational figure. He talked about having dreams about Zarqawi. And Zarqawi was the guy that sort of was the beacon that he was being drawn toward. And I became, because of that, more and more fascinated by Sarkawi's story, because it's something that had been covered in the press. Everybody sort of knew about the beheadings and some of these horrible atrocities that were connected with him. I didn't really understand the person. And that led me to get deeper into the personality of this guy who was behind all this. And as I was putting this together, you know, in the background, in Syria, a country that

I was covering for the Washington Post, we're starting to see his old organization surface there for the first time. In 2012, we start to see the first bits of that with al-Nus then in 2013 you see isis proper moving into the country and i'm saying to my colleagues what do you mean by isis proper so like the main organization once that isis back in in iraq decided that we need to get directly involved in the syrian fight that happens in early 2013 and i'm thinking and i'm telling my publisher, this is a really big deal. This group is something else. They're extremely violent.

They're very dangerous. They have a lot of abilities. And I was arguing that somebody needed to tell this story because this is becoming very important. And nobody really had heard of this group until 2014. So it was quite an argument to get my publisher interested in this idea that this was going to be something to watch. I had in mind that I was going to write the story about Zarqawi, but I had no idea how big ISIS was going to become when I started on the book. And it just happened as I was literally writing it. And it made it a challenge because, you know, I mostly finished the book and I'm not sure how the story ends because when the story when the book was finished you know ISIS was

still in control of big chunks of Iraq and Syria and nobody really knew what the outcome was going to be so when did you officially agree and sit down start like agree with the publisher and sit down start writing 2014 2013 so 2013 yeah that's when the work first started and and again we didn't really know where it was going but i i just knew that it was going to be a huge huge story and wanted to be wanted to tell it just kind of felt was important because just going back and reliving it and i was trying to follow that full answer before so if you had already said that about when you started i'm sorry but 20 summer i remember remember my first exposure to ISIS like on a major scale was that late summer 2014. I think it was – I get the names wrong.

It's not Daniel Pearl. James Foley. James Foley. That's it. Because you had the guy, Jihadi John, who was a British follower who had moved there, one of the people, like you pointed out, who chopped this dude's head off. And it was – the internet, unfortunately, shared a lot of. So you're a year into writing this at this point. Like how much of the book was done when that happened? It was probably about half the reporting was done and maybe a third of the writing. And it was exciting because you felt like you're on the crest of a wave in terms of telling a story.

But it's also terrifying because you're writing a story and you don't know what's going to happen six months from now. Maybe ISIS won't exist then or maybe, you know, things will turn in a completely different way. But there is nothing like great timing. And I happen to kind of be ahead of the curve in understanding what the problem was, what the risk was. And by the time most Americans were really figuring out who ISIS was and the threat to Americans, I was well on my way to telling the story. And the book came out in 2015 and we went on from there. And when did they start publicly using the term like we're creating a caliphate? And can you also tell people like what that was and what they meant by that?

Yeah. So this is really Zarqawi's idea too. So he had this vision of not just being a terrorist group, but he wanted to recreate the ancient caliphate, which is kind of the theological kingdom that existed way back in Islam's antiquity. And his view of the world was that, you know, this was, you know, our birthright. We had this wonderful paradise on earth that was a caliphate back in the ancient days. Western governments and others, corrupt rulers took this from us. We're going to reestablish it. And he wanted to do it now and not wait for, you know, 100 years like bin Laden talked about maybe a caliphate in the far future,

but he thought he could do it in the here and now. And he felt he was sort of destined to be the one to bring it to fruition. And Baghdadi shared that idea. And once they were able to get an army in Syria and seize and hold territory, then here was his moment to claim the caliphate, which is declare it. We're now in charge of the city called Raqqa. This is like the capital of this new caliphate that's going to be God's kingdom on earth. And that did a lot of things for him. One of the things he did was to excite a lot of Muslims around the world in thinking that this caliphate thing might really happen. And here's a real place where, you know, faithful Muslims will want to live. And so, you saw this phenomenon, not just fighters

from around the world coming to be part of this organization, but ordinary people, just husbands and wives thinking, we want to be part of this. This is very exciting. And some of them just left their homes and moved to Raqqa to be part of this new caliphate and take jobs as a bank clerk or a postal worker or just anything to be part of this thing. And that's what's so confusing for like someone in America like me. We've never been invaded. Country's been the same in that way as far as like I can move freely, go to Wawa, get whatever I want every day. And we have a government.

We vote for it. We fight over it. But it is what it is. In these places, it's this suction sound at all times like we've been talking about today. That vacuum where guys just drive in on trucks and they can take over a city if they're powerful enough and so i i always try to picture that in my head and i'll admit sometimes even when i'm reading great books like yours or some other ones i've read on the topic it's hard for me to imagine you know whatever it is a thousand dudes in these trucks rolling into raka and suddenly like

oh the post office is now the isis post office the the restaurant is now owned by isis the business here you don't do that anymore because we don't agree with that so we're going to kill you and then someone else is going to take that building yeah but that's essentially like they they a lot of these places the way i understood it the blood that would happen would come after because they just kill you know ethnic minorities or people who weren't muslim but the rest of it would just be like all right we're here and the armies ran yeah like the the the nations who were supposed to protect these places essentially didn't put up much of a fight in a lot of places yeah and a lot

of the guys that welcomed uh these jihadists their community, some of them thought, this is going to be great. They're going to save us from the Shiites, and they're going to let us have the kind of freedoms that we want to have. They're going to restore a religious order that we want. But once a group like ISIS comes in, they're very brutal rulers. They bed people in public squares and leave the heads on fence posts, that kind of thing. If you get caught smoking, you're flogged. If your wife walks down the street and somebody thinks that her dress isn't quite long enough, she can get beaten or you can get fined. Thugs from this organization are going to come to your shop and want to extract money from you.

And if it's not enough money, they may beat you. And so there's no recourse to the law. It's very barbaric it's very medieval and not many people want to live in a system like that yeah what was the the rules are obviously like strict crazy beyond islamic rules that like what's the what's the word again Sharia that's what I was gonna say sorry so they're like the worst of like these old Sharia laws that give no rights to anyone who's not like a firmly devout Muslim man everyone else's you know the women have to be completely covered the kids have to go to religious school and be trained with whatever they view as this bastardized religion. They also want to get the kids inducted early to be fighters for the state, so to get little jobs and things.

But you have a bunch of other people in these areas they're going into. I talked about how they'd kill some of these people, but the first one that comes to mind is in the middle of all these places, you have, I think, the largest group of people in the world who don't have their own country, which is the Kurds. And so what's happening – the Kurds are a confusing one to me. I'm very, very interested in that. But, like, where are they and who are their command posts? Like, because they don't – they have, like, these armies, but they don't have a country and they're in syria they're in iraq they're in turkey they're all over like what how many of them are getting genocidally killed by isis coming in versus like they're able to stay away from where where isis is and stave them off yeah yeah some of these ethnic groups and we

think of the yazidis in particular which is going to bring them up. We'll talk about them. Who were just – because they weren't considered – their faith is considered heretical by ISIS. So they were fair game to butcher and to enslave. So you saw ISIS come in and make human slaves out of women who were of marriageable age. And some of those women were held and brutalized for years. And men just killed outright. And some of the kurds suffered this fate as well and the kurds have had the bad luck of history of being scattered amongst among multiple powerful countries from the iranians to iraqis and syrians and uh don't have

their own country and but they're very kind of close-knit and and ferocious fighters, as it turns out. And so once the Americans start helping them in 2014 and 15 push back against ISIS, they become our main asset. They became sort of our strongest fighting allies on the ground was these Kurds fighting back against Iraq, fighting back against ISIS and trying to reclaim their homes and villages from this terrible group and eventually succeeded with our help with the help of military you know air power and and intelligence support uh became sort of the shock droop groups uh that that eventually drove isis out so here's what i don't understand and maybe you can help me with this but like let's use an example of a kurdish stronghold area where their army is. And let's say that – I think this is a real example too.

Like the southern part of Syria – put the map in the corner and I'll draw my own stupid line right there. The southern part of Syria has all these Kurdish armies who are supported by the US, other places, and effectively they have their autonomy where they are because that's their base. They're not paying taxes to Bashar al-Assad, right? Like, no cops are coming or military are coming from Syria into there. So effectively, Syria has a segment of the country that's not really Syria. Yeah, yeah. Assad, so the dictator of Syria, only controls a fairly small part of the country still. It's Damascus and some of the coastal cities, but the northeast is Kurdish area.

It's all autonomous, essentially Kurdish run, and the big chunks of the southeast, as you said, up in the northwest, it's a town called Idlib, which is essentially a jihadi stronghold still. It's the one place in Syria where groups aligned with al-Qaeda still run that part of the country. And so it's this crazy quilt of factions all armed to the teeth, all at war with another. And ISIS essentially remaining there with thousands of fighters that are still loyal to that cause, you know, essentially having gone back to their villages and towns, but still part of that army and ready to be called up again. That's crazy to me because then I think about what if – and I think this is a real thing where you have some of these bordering countries like Syria and Iraq and stuff where the south tip of Syria and the north tip of Iraq have large spaces where the Kurds are in charge.

So why at no point have they not just declared this a country and put their own borders? Because when you think about it, the borders you're describing in the cases where that's not the case, and let's say in this southern part of Syria, the Kurds control it, but then the northern part of Iraq is some faction of Iraq. Like the only reason that border is there is because of Iraq. It's not there because of Syria, but Syria gets credit on the map that we draw of, oh, this is Syria, and it's not. It's just – that's a very foreign concept to me. Yeah, and the reason that exists the way it does is because colonial powers back right around the end of the First World War decided to draw up the countries, essentially recreate whole countries that didn't exist before. So before all this had been part of the Ottoman Empire, which is essentially greater Turkey, They controlled all of Levant, Iraq, a good chunk of the Middle East. And they were the losers in the First World War along with the Germans and the Austrians. So after the armistice, there's this thing called the Sykes-Picot Treaty,

essentially a French and a British diplomat sitting together with a map and crayons and decided, well, here's going to be an area of French influence. This is going to be a British area, paid no attention to tribal barriers. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? And it's funny because this becomes part of the sort of animating force for ISIS later on is they would argue to people in Syria and Iraq, you're not really Iraqis or Syrians. You're all Muslims. You should be part of this caliphate because these are artificial countries that shouldn't really exist. And they had a point about that because when the colonial powers divided up the region, they weren't really paying attention to where the Kurds were or where this part of Iraq, where this tribe existed and where real meaningful boundaries were.

They just kind of carved it up because it looked like a nice map. It's crazy. And it goes back to what was the other thing in 1917 that has to do with Israel? The Balfour Decorations. It's another example of this where you're just like, oh, let me send a quick memo. We'll promise you something from over here in england and like not think about all the different cultures who no one's ever going to get everything they want right but how do you not suddenly tip the scales too hard towards

this culture right here that culture right there and then piss off these cultures more and create this never-ending cyclone and that's really when you look at the 20th century the first half of it in particularly we all point to world war one and world war two and i think sometimes we forget about the word war or the word world in there yeah because we think about okay nazi germany and japan in and the pacific you could say in world war two and we think about once again germany fighting them and all their fronts in world war i but all the downstream effects of this affected literally everywhere yeah including south america where nazis went to afterwards right and the middle east is right there you got europe you got the middle east and the cultures are nothing like

each other yeah so all these you know old white dudes chopping it up in the Treaty of Versailles and everything, they had no concept of what the people in that part of the world who their interests are being represented, whether they like it or not right now, what they even want. That's just so careless to me. There's an careless to me. that everybody wants to be like us, that we can overthrow a dictator and everybody's going to automatically want to have a democracy that's just like America's. And A, that's not always possible. And B, it's often not what's wanted. People have very, very different ideas about how society should be organized and how they should live their lives.

And they often look at us and their image of America is really warped a bit because they see Hollywood movies and they think that's how we live over here. But they don't really want what we have for the most part. They want our prosperity. They don't want to be just like us. And we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that we're sort of the ideal society and everybody should be just like us and just not everybody thinks that way yeah i think the 20th century obviously has shown completely that they don't necessarily get

behind that but you know there's actually a pattern that you could even relate to our democracy over here in some ways when you look at the institution of the president and how people are so tribal about that and particularly because it's supposed to be the head of like open government with all these levers and it is but we look at the president as the be all end all i say that because in the rest of the world there's there's this pattern that seems to have always existed beyond the most tribal times all the way up to the modern day within our connectivity where people are inclined to get behind you know some strong leader yeah it's no different without bag daddy or like a guy in in the early days like i was a kawi before him but it's not just the middle east it's pretty much everywhere but in the middle east because that's what we're talking about what why why do you think there's so many situations where

there is some sort of extremist strongman that even normal people like we talked about some of the normal people who had their lives torn apart in iraq who were just sunnis don't get behind a guy like al-zakawi and then fast forward looking at al-Baghdadi and Isis. There's people who may just be Normal citizens of Syria and Iraq and suddenly they come in and and they're like, you know what? This isn't the worst thing ever There's some people obviously hate it. But you know like what makes people just suddenly you think be like, you know what? I like this guy. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting phenomenon and we've seen it often in the Western history. In my experience, and particularly in these countries that I visit, often the draw of a strongman is it's rooted in fear and anxiety. another group is going to gain advantage over yours. You want somebody who can kick ass and protect your people, and you don't care if he's not a nice guy. He may, you know, be rough around

the edges, but he's going to keep our family safe. And I see that actually a lot in Syria. Syria is a strange place where you have a dictatorship that's from a very small sort of minority religion. It's called the Alawites they're sort of a not exactly an ethnic group but it's a it's an offshoot of of Shiism that's um this is this is where Assad and his family come from and yet there are all these Sunnis and Shiites and and Christians and other groups in the country that have just hitched their wagon to Assad, no matter how bad he is, how brutal he is, and how he's wrecking the economy, and he's completely destroyed their country.

But they're protecting, he's protecting their little thing. He's keeping their business from going under. He's keeping those bad Sunnis from coming into our neighborhood and doing awful things. So a lot of times it's out of fear. For the ideological leaders, for the Zarqawis of the world, there's a different dynamic. And I've noticed something that it's really hard for us to get our heads around. When we see the kind of violence and extremism, the brutality in someone like Zarqawi, we think it's, gosh, that's horrible. Why would anybody support somebody like that or want to be like him? What you find instead is that people see that kind of willingness to take action, even brutal action, as a good thing if they're in a world where nothing seems to change and

everything's kind of gloomy and hopeless and you always feel like that you're on the losing side. Here's Zarqawi who's going around and standing up to the Americans and not just, you know, taunting them or arguing with them, but actually fighting them and killing them. And it's surprising, but you do see a lot of young Muslims applauding at that. There's, you know, sort of African groups, offshoot groups of ISIS in Western Africa and other places, they play video recordings of Zarkawi and the applause lines and the moments they love are the moments when he does something really brutal because it's for them, he's striking a blow on their behalf. He's a man of action and not just somebody who's going to say great words and not really do anything about it. Yeah, that anxiety point towards focusing on people's wallets more than anything,

like their livelihood, is pretty spot on, I think. Because people, like I try to study it, especially in America, what we've seen over the last 15 years especially it's like people will make their political decisions based on the one two or three things that are most important to them and a lot of people will go back to what has the most in it for me and that does come to economically because they want to support their family and things like that and it's weird to think about but even with some of the ideological stuff in this case you know if you were a a member of of sunni islam and these guys came in and you had a business and you're like well now you know our people do have power they do a few things i don't like but they mean well yeah you can make that like as crazy as that sounds to you and me i'll bet i could see some normal people making that leap and then

what gets weird is when you then have to ignore the really obvious like insane signs like when we say obvious signs around here we're talking about like when people didn't like trump's tweets or something like that or he said something and people got pissed off and went to the capitol which all bad but you know when what we're talking about over there is people putting heads on an actual spike yeah and this is like a tuesday yeah you know and and they find a way to be like yeah you know that well they were against islam oh by the way those yezidis who we just made all sex slaves right there well they're not a part of islam so this you so this is God's way of punishing them. Yeah.

And I also get to have sex because of it. Yeah, exactly. I get to rape them, excuse me, because of it. Like, that's where it gets to, I don't know how I could go on and miss that myself. I've had some interesting experiences with that. One of the most fascinating interviews I had for this, my latest book, Red Line, was a guy who became part of ISIS. He lived in Iraq. He had like a government job.

He was a bureaucrat. ISIS comes into Mosul, takes over the city, and he has a choice. I'm going to either work for them or I'm going to be unemployed. And he decides, well, these guys don't look that bad, so I'll take a job with ISIS and ends up working in their chemical weapons program. He has to kind of wrestle with how he feels about that.

But the interesting thing about his personal journey with ISIS is he's a little bit afraid of them at first. He sees these beheadings and these crucifixions, just every kind of brutality and depravity that you can imagine. And instead of being sickened by that and thinking these are horrible people, what does it for him is the fact that they cleaned up his street. He had a big pile of trash at the end of his street.

It had been sitting there for years, and the government of mosul would never do anything about it and isis comes in with a bulldozer and they cleared up the street and they made things pretty and safe again he was willing to forgive them of everything else because they had they'd made his neighborhood safe they cleaned up the city and they got rid of the shiites that he didn't like so he was everything they did was fine with them and he didn't even mind making chemical weapons for them because that was his one thing that was his one thing he just wanted wanted to have a nice suburban life and and um isis did that for him and you would say because i now mentioned it and as a side note here and you mentioned it a few minutes ago but for people who have never heard of it the yazidi culture can you explain the background there? Because I will admit, I actually just found out about this,

I'm embarrassed to say, about 13, 14 months ago and was blown away. I also want to talk to you off camera about an idea I had for someone I want to have in, but crazy, crazy, crazy story as to what happened to them, particularly under ISIS. Yeah, this is probably the group that got abused the most because they're vulnerable. They're small.

The Yazidi is a strange group in the sense that their religious beliefs are like an amalgam of all these different things that they kind of brought together and kind of interpreted in their own way. They're a different ethnic group. They live in sort of this mountainous area away from the big cities of Iraq. And for most of their existence, they've been able to kind of be isolated and be okay just being Yazidis.

And they're not, to make it clear, they're not Muslim at all. It's totally different. Most Muslims would not regard them as Muslims as they would think of it. So they have their own thing. There's lots of lots and lots of strange little offshoot groups. I mean, they're just look at any in the Middle East, and there's a lot of Iraq, and sees them as, A, prey,

so they can sort of take their stuff, they can take their women, and B, as non-human. They had every right to kill and, you know, essentially butcher people, and they did that. So they went into these mountain towns and just emptied them out and slaughtered people. And the women became slaves, and years later, were still living in parts of the caliphate as slaves. Some of these women never have been returned to their homes. And it's interesting, I've seen videotaped interviews with ISIS people in the caliphate, sort of justifying it to themselves. And they'd be able to find some passage in the Quran or something in this, the Hadith, which is sort of justifying it to themselves and they'd be able to find some passage in the quran or something in this the hadith which is sort of a collection of religious writings that are sort of one step below the the quran itself and they would always find some way

of justifying it that it's okay to capture a foreign you know an enemy's town and to take his women as as as prisoners and and and as your wives. And it felt completely justified. And they would have discussions about how much this woman might be worth. And I had her last month. Are you going to take her now? And it became sort of systemized within their culture. And they would, like a lot of the Yazidis, it's a very close-knit culture and they Believed in their native Yazidi religion so much that a lot of them wouldn't force convert like when they were taken over

But even the way I understood it is even those women who under insane pressure obviously Did convert to Islam? They would still put those women in sex slavery I say nothing of like arranged marriages with some crazy caliphate dude yeah I mean it's just you know the brutality of it is unfathomable and again like in America like we even know about that group and there's like a million or two million of them over there and they were just they were a little ping pong ball in the middle of this and i even saw like another interview with a guy who fought isis for on behalf of the us and some of our missions there

and you know he talked about seeing on the drones where they were following watching them around them all up yeah and shoot all the men and teenage boys try to recruit some of the young boys and convert them and make them soldiers and then just they'd watch the women be sent off on buses to slavery and it's like you're sitting there as an American in this case it's obviously is if you're anyone a human being this is all wrong but you can't you're watching it you can't do anything about it that's that's crazy to me it became funny funnily a turning point for america's involvement in this this conflict because in the beginning if we can remember this you know isis is marching across iraq and taking over towns and we're trying to prop up um the government the Iraqi government and try to help them fight off this challenge, which they did a terrible job of. But it was the slaughter of Yazidis and American military officers and intelligence officers

watching this butchering going on that finally persuaded, you know, the administration that we've got to get involved militarily. So our first big missions in Iraq to fight ISIS were saving the Yazidis and sending, you and sending helicopters into their cities and helping them fight back, taking out refugees. That became the thing that really sucked us into this war, which became extremely successful at the end. We managed to defeat ISIS within three years, destroy the caliphate at a loss of something like four or five American soldiers. It was almost bloodles for us yeah what did it look like because as you point out we pulled out our soldiers from iraq like i believe like for the most part in 2011. so then this all happens because of the vacuum that was left behind

but it's not like we had a full-blown iraq invasion at all again like we did the first time so as far as like tactically taking them down losing so little lives so few lives is great obviously so things went well and and it was actually this is one thing that when trump came in he did a pretty good job with with isis and and and getting rid of that threat there were a lot of other foreign policy issues but that was one i think he got right like what did it what did the tactically like what what did it look like did we were we sending over similar like intelligence-backed paramilitary operations or was there some official military deployments like what what was the strategy there

yeah it was a pretty remarkable campaign i can't think of anything maybe the first gulf war had had elements of this, but A, was bringing together a true international coalition. And so at the end, this anti-ISIS coalition involved more than 80 countries and a lot of Arab countries. And when we put together sort of a military force, it wasn't just, certainly wasn't American ground troops in any great degree. It was Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish ground forces, and a lot of air power, American air power, but also Jordanian jets, jets from Qatar, from other Arab UAE, other countries actually putting skin in the game and flying daily sorties against ISIS. With the Americans centrally sort of coordinating everything,

you know, supplying the fuel and the refueling capabilities, supplying the intelligence, the satellite stuff, all the SIGINT that we're so good at. And eventually, in a pretty significant way, special forces guys who would do a lot of training, do sort of close in targeting, direct airstrikes from just a couple hundred yards away. There was this big battle in a place called Kobani, which is in northern Syria, that becomes sort of the turning point for sort of high watermark for ISIS. We end up knocking out, you know, killing thousands of ISIS fighters in this one battle. And it was essentially done by Kurdish soldiers,

really brave men and women, because their women are fighters there too, with special forces operators just outside the city, calling in drone strikes, calling in artillery, calling in, you know, airstrikes, and just blew them back. And essentially, ISIS at that time thought they were invincible. They kept throwing more and more soldiers at Kobani and ended up getting chewed up. And they never regained momentum after that. But it was essentially the perfect sort of model for how to fight a foreign war,

which is to let people who are invested in protecting their own communities do the ground fighting for how to fight a foreign war, which is to let people who are invested in their, you know, protecting their own communities, do the ground fighting, and let us do what we do best, which is to serve provide intelligence and air power. Well, not that it's our fault, because in that case, we're responding to what's already happened, which we could trace back to the war and everything. But even in doing this, and getting rid of a lot of them obviously there's there's still elements of isis that exist they're just severely decapitated no pun intended at this point but you look at ramadi you look at other places in iraq you you look at raqqa in

syria i mean you can see drone video this this stuff. These places are oftentimes wrecked. They will never be the same in many or other things forming right now that are able to easily prey on people's dire situation with a shitty life that doesn't seem to have any hope in these places? Yeah, that's it. That's the perfect question. It's something I've been kind of going on about lately, because you look at a town like Raqqa, and just to remind our listeners and viewers, Raqqa was at one time the sort of ISIS capital in Syria, and it was a completely ISIS-run place.

And it was demolished through airstrikes, through sort of a ground campaign. The place was completely ruined. And other cities like Mosul and in Iraq had similar fates. But those cities, particularly ones in Syria, are not being rebuilt to any significant degree, partly because we don't want to give money to the Syrian government that they could, you know, siphon off and kind of use for corrupt purposes or against us in some way. So these cities aren't being rebuilt. And meanwhile, you have a whole generation, how many years has it been now since ISIS took over? It's almost 10, where, you know,

kids don't go to school, they don't have a functioning city, they don't have any real hope of going to a university or having a normal life. So what happens to them? They're perfect, very susceptible to radicalization if they're not already there. And we worry every day about the seeds for the next terrorist attack, for the next terrorist organization, the next Sarkawi coming out of places like Raqqa and it's it's almost inevitable because we see the same cycle repeat in places like Afghanistan which was became a basket case for decades out of Afghanistan we get Al Qaeda and I do have to worry

that same kind of phenomenon is going to happen in places like Syria or in Iraq in the next decade or so to come yeah we actually side note here but we did just finally get zawahiri the second in command of Al Qaeda for a long time the doctor who you mentioned at some point earlier in this podcast but that seemed to be a really small news story when it came out but to me I mean i've been into this stuff for a long time like trying to track what's going on because it's horrible and and it's also been a core part of my history of america growing up but i wondered for years like we got been lying but we never got the other guy yeah and and now we got him and and i gotta think obviously that's a good thing but you know is it like everything else and you know

there's somebody else next man up yeah possibly but it also is a big blow and i have to say 2022 was a was a was a big year in the war against the terrorist groups in general because we got zawari the number the number one leader of al-qaeda we have to remember he was the one standing next to bin laden when they were the planning went on for the 911 attacks, everything else that that al Qaeda did. He was one of the forming members, a really important figure. And after bin Laden was killed, he was the guy who was at the helm of this, this still very powerful international terrorist organization. So the fact that we were able to take him out in Afghanistan even after our forces left was pretty significant. And we have not seen, I must say, up to this point, al-Qaeda being able to reorganize or even appoint a successor.

So the core that essentially created what we know as al-Qaeda is really at least on its heels and perhaps fatally wounded. That may be a bit optimistic but they really have taken a serious blow and and we do have to you know sit step back for a minute and and just reflect on our capabilities to do something like that we're able to track this guy down he one of the most well-hidden people on the planet who managed to avoid this fate for 10 years after becoming the leader of al-qaeda and were able to find him in a in an apartment building in downtown kabul and take him out with a drone strike that killed him and took the balcony off the side of the building but didn't

hurt anybody else and didn't didn't cause any structural damage to the building itself from you know half a world away i'm sure the the guy who was operating that drone strike was sitting at a base in Nevada or someplace else doing it all by remote control. So our capabilities are quite something. Problem is we can't be everywhere and it's hard to anticipate where that next big threat is going to come from. Well, to go on what you just said, because I forgot to ask about this earlier, so i don't want to miss it this time but the whole drone warfare thing is often spoken about because it's this in a way amazing innovation that you can fight a war from the sky from a whole world away and not

put boots on the ground to take care of things but it doesn't come without its baggage too which is not the example you just gave but in plenty of other examples the problem has been oh we see a guy we think it's him uh let's let's shoot it and then you take down a whole building and all the people around and you want to talk about a reason to politicize something for for radicalization i mean you're giving it to them like when you speak with your people at the cia obviously i know this is a critical tool that they care about and want to use for all the reasons I laid out. But, you know, is there, do you find some moral and also tactical wrestling with this situation and perhaps how drone happy we've been across a bunch of presidents now

in the conversations you have with them? Yeah, it's funny. No administration has wanted to get rid of it, a Democrat or Republican, because it's worked and it hasn't been all that controversial. And that's been a bit of a surprise. The guys who first sort of developed the idea of standoff drone strikes in other countries that we're not at war with, assume this is going to be hugely controversial

and probably wouldn't survive. But we've been able to do such successful things with it that now it's just considered, you know, people don't bat an eye when things like this happen. But you're right, it is something that happens without any sort of judicial review. There's no judge that looks at, well, is there good evidence that this guy committed crimes and we need to kill him because we can. There's no real transparency about, you know, in terms of, you know, who's looking at the CIA's checklist for whether or not they know this is the right guy. You know, it gets approval often by senior members of the administration. But, you know, the public certainly doesn't have any insight.

There's no checks and balances on who gets on the kill list, for example. Just a few years ago in Yemen, we killed a guy named al-Waqi, who was an American citizen. And so that was actually crossing a different kind of line, because he was someone who, you know, ostensibly had the protections of any US citizen. But we essentially executed him without a trial, without a judge, without a jury. and that's commonplace now. That's not something that's all that rare. When we see a chance and the agency feels there's a security threat to the United States, they take unilateral action, and that's become something that we've all become accustomed to for good or ill. Yeah, he was a guy on that goodbye list, right?

Yeah. That they talk about he was uh they kind of this he was behind a couple of of significant uh terrorist plots such as the underwear bomber which remember from this that was 2008 or 9 uh guy got on a plane and had a bomb in his drawers literally and and didn't blow up fortunately but uh was a true menace but uh once we got an opportunity to take him out we did it and weren't thinking too much about his constitutional rights when we did so yeah and he's in another country when you do it i mean it was a slippery slope situation for sure and i remember that one yeah and some of these

allies aren't too happy with the fact that we do it now the pakistanis do complain when we when we got a lot of complaints about that though that is That is true. But you can imagine how we would feel if another country decides to send some robot weapon into our country to kill somebody that they don't like. It's not polite manners among nations of the world, but we do it all the time because we feel like it's in our vital interest to do it. Pakistan's a weird example because the ISI and a lot of people there it's kind of like highest bidder goes that they're different in my book at least but when you're looking at the greater middle east and say like ally countries or loosely allied countries whatever it is you know how much coordination goes into hey we're going to take some people out with a drone i mean i gotta think like when they're doing this in some countries like I can't think of an

example right now but maybe I could find one online let's say the u.s. drones some dude in Jordan you know sometimes they might not be the one pulling the trigger maybe in that case they just tell the honey said again mukabara yeah mukabara mukabara they tell them who Kaabra to do it with theirs or do they do it themselves and just get the okay yeah like how much of that goes in versus oh we see it we're going to shoot them we'll we'll apologize later yeah so the drones tend to be used in places where we can't get good access on the ground if it's in a country like jordan where we have an ally we can feed information to them and they'll send their own people after them they're pretty good at

finding people who are bad guys and dealing with them in their own way. But if it's in Syria, a place where we can't operate, certainly if it's in parts of Iraq where we don't really have good access, or we maybe do that with permission of the Iraqis, Yemen frequently, other places it gets a little trickier because these countries are supposed to be our allies and we don't want to operate unilaterally without their coordination. And that happens though sometimes too. It's a whole new universe. It's far less controversial than it probably should be, but it's just the reality of the war against terrorism as we know

it right now. And you mentioned Yemen a couple times too how much how familiar at least like in the course you're reporting are you with that proxy war situation that's been going on over there somewhat it's uh it's not something i it's a specialty for me but i do spend a lot of time looking at the this one so the group called the the hooties who are backed by the ir Iranians, and they're fighting the Saudis and UAE, and also a big faction of the Yemeni population for control of parts of the country. But what's been interesting about Yemen and their insurgencies is they've allied themselves with regional powers. The Houthis become best friends with the Iranians, and the Iranians give them missiles, which they use to attack the Saudis and blow up oil facilities and even bomb their cities. And so here we're seeing what was at first an insurgency group now having international reach and ability to kind of you know blow things up in neighboring countries and that's that's created a huge problem and and um and we're still wrestling with how to deal with it and the u.s essentially i don't want to say like oh they're all cool with it but they don't

this isn't one that they talk about much or get involved with because it's that kind of proxy war between saudi and iran who again even though we have some issues with saudi right now like they've historically been an ally and iran is not yeah and we've given weapons to the to the saudis and in the course we have and they've used these weapons to go after yemeni so even if it's not direct involvement we're we're generally up to our eyeballs in these fights in some way that's a mess i mean in the middle east though right now because next time i bring you in here we're going to do a real deep if you're willing to come in here we're going to do a real deep dive on your latest book red line which again link in description all the books are in the description highly recommend it is all about syria and the chemical weapons over there and al-Assad. It's incredibly interesting.

But in the Middle East as a whole, what is the status thing here what's number one on on your red light list of like oh if this happens big problem yeah i think the the biggest thing that that we worry about and we being my my colleagues at the washington post as we look at at the world and what's about to blow up and what we think about at night um the situation iran is is is reached a new level of danger, and there are a couple reasons for that. For years, the Iranians, with their nuclear ambitions, were somewhat controlled by the nuclear agreement called the JCPOA, which was approved under Obama in 2015. And the JCPOA had its problems and issues. It certainly wasn't perfect, but it did keep the Iranians' nuclear program in check for a long time. And then when President Trump unilaterally withdrew from it, the Iranians said, okay, well, screw that. We're just going to create as much enriched uranium as we want to. And so they've been amassing a lot of it. They've got enough uranium to build a nuclear

bomb pretty quickly if they choose to. It's always the question of whether or not they intend to do it or not, or whether they just want to have the capability and sort of threaten the world that way. So that's created its own danger. And you have now a more conservative government in Israel, a more hawkish government, a government whose leaders have a tradition of wanting to go after Iran in a much more aggressive way. There's a fear that they're going to want you have Hezbollah, this huge militia group next door, and Lebanon that could respond with tens of thousands of rockets fired into Israel. Other countries in the Middle East could be pulled in. We now see that Iran and Russia have become extremely cozy and our military allies sharing military equipment, at least, and maybe more. So that part of the region has become super worrisome right now. And I'm just really afraid that things could go, you know, sideways for reasons that we don't really think about right now. Could be some incident that, you know,

maybe an accidental shooting in the Persian Gulf, you Gulf, a collision between ships, any number of things could touch off a real firestorm, and that's something we can't predict but we should be prepared for. lady who died of a heart attack huge air quotes there in prison because she didn't shoot she wasn't dressed properly in the eyes of the religious solitary and it turned into all these protests and we even saw at one point there's a report like they imprisoned like 15 000 protesters or something like that more died and i've heard less about it over the past few weeks but i had been hearing that you know this might be a real turning point yeah and when i had jim lawler in here who was a cia nuclear spy for 25 years he told me quote i'm not aware of any missions the cia has going on in iran to which i said i thought you were retired jim but anyway he was he was saying he doesn't think there's involvement there i of course don't blame him for saying that but i think the opposite like

do you see a similar type intelligence operation not just the cia but other places and other allies around the world maybe including in jordan where you know you're gonna look to put the power of the people over the top to get the wildest places like Iran's leadership out of control. I mean, I don't know what the involvement was in Mubarak and things like that in 2011, but I got to think there were certainly some intelligence-related missions to make sure that happens. Do you see something similar, or are these protests successfully being

beaten back down yeah at this point so the protests are still going on they've they've kind of fallen out of the news here but there's they're very active uh and they they kind of come and go in waves but uh the this huge number of young people in iran are still quite intent on challenging the government and they've won won some concessions on supposedly pushing back the morality police who are the ones who are arresting women for having their hair showing and things like that. But that's still a thing. And to the extent that we as Americans are involved in that that situation it has to be done so subtly that it is invisible if it happens at all i'm not sure what the cia is doing i haven't really seen any real evidence of their involvement but if they are involved the last thing those protesters need is any whiff of america being behind that protest movement because the regime

is already saying that every day they're saying this is all done by foreign agitators and they blame us for being behind it when really it's it's organic it's something that uh pen up frustration of a whole generation of young people who don't like the way their government is run and would like to change it we have to be very much behind the scenes and and just you know wish these guys all the luck and give them all the moral support we can but not be seen as directing it or supporting it actively because that could be deadly for the protest yeah and that's why like even if a guy like jim knew something i'd never expect them to like not say what he said on camera i fully understand that because you don't want not that this is a huge podcast but something could get out right so you don't want any whiff of that

it just feels like you know iran has always been gung-ho on doing things but they're always like a day late and a dollar short and in my the way my head works being paranoid about stuff it's like well until the day they're not yeah you know and we have such a focus now on nuclear weapons because of what's going on in russia righteously so they have the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. But, you know, it does make you think about the rest of the world, too, as you're thinking about this existential overhanging threat. And I'm kind of at a point where I'm starting to wonder, I'm starting to worry a little less about, like, Putin using a weapon for some reason. Hopefully, I am right about to not worry

about that. But, you know, when you look at some of the really extreme places like in Iran, do you, you're worried about them getting one, but do you actively really worry about them like sending one here? No, not so much that. What I worry about is the fact that if they get one, if they test one, or if everybody believes they have the capabilities, it's worrisome for the neighborhood, it's worrisome for Israel, which might be tempted to act unilaterally to stop it. But it's also, it could trigger a wider arms race, because the Saudi is going to look next door and say, look, these are our mortal enemies. If the Iranians have a nuclear weapon, we have to have one too.

They can certainly pay for one. And they could even buy one from the Pakistanis. And there's rumors that that may have happened already, but no one knows for sure. The Turks have been restrained in their sort of nuclear ambitions. They have commercial nuclear plants. They don't have a nuclear weapons program. Why wouldn't they have one if the iranians do so you can see that you know just that that one development or a perception that the the iranians are nuclear

armed could change the calculus through all entire neighborhood about whether or not they need nuclear weapons as well because it's a domino effect exactly and in this day and age sort of getting a nuclear bomb is is not the challenge it used to be. Any country, modern country like Turkey, if they want one, it wouldn't be that hard for them to do. But there's a sense of like mutual self-restraint that nobody wants to escalate in that way. All it takes is for one person to decide to kind of break the rules and become a nuclear power. Everybody else is going to want to have one too and then we have a much more dangerous world yeah it kind of surprises me that like iran's never gotten their hands on one yeah i mean i totally don't know i'm totally outside the situation but it would seem like at this point when they've been around in the world for 80 years and now they're allied with like russia like it wouldn't be that hard but somehow and for in this way a good way it has been that hard so i hope it stays that way yeah and the one limiting factor for them is is the lack of what we call fissile material enriched uranium or plutonium that's hard to make in it if you make it it's it's pretty easy for the outside

world to see that you're making it there are certain signatures that we can we could tell with satellites that yeah there's a there's with satellites that, yeah, there's a nuclear enrichment plant here. There's a reprocessing plant over here. We know what those look like. But they have every other part of the bomb that they need. Because up until 2003, they had a pretty active nuclear weapons program. now because the Israelis had sent spies into Tehran a few years ago and brought out millions of pages of secret documents that were part of their nuclear program. And we could see what kinds of technology they mastered and what they tested and essentially all the main components

of what a bomb looks like. So the implosion device, there's certain kinds of of mechanisms that you need to build a nuclear bomb and they figured all that out they just were waiting for the moment when they had enough thistle material to to make the thing blow up now they've got enough they've got everything they really need uh down to putting in the last screw and they've just haven't made a political decision to to go ahead and make one because they know it'd be huge consequences if they do cross that line it's shocking to me because like they don't see you know you read this guy's tweets he doesn't exactly seem like a measured dude on twitter i don't know about that but you also keep talking about israel in the middle of this because obviously they are the one that's not like the other in the middle east because it's not

an islamic country and and for a long time everyone around them hated them for that and now at least they do have some allies but you know i'm not i should be way more familiar with the exact i guess like makeup and and process of the israeli government but i'm not and i look at this and i'm like how the hell does this guy netanyahu like he just left power and he was like on trial or something two years later he's a year later whatever it is he's back in and the guy's essentially been like in charge of the government for 25 30 years like how is this different from a let let's just say an optics standpoint, than like a Putin? Yeah, yeah. And the worrisome thing right now is that the government, the coalition that he's assembled, has some very anti-democratic members, people who have ideas of creating a greater Israel and essentially negating any rights of the Palestinians, which is not a long-term recipe for stability.

And so, there's, you know, we look at the flaws in our own political system over here, and it's certainly not perfect. And we're watching just in real time this week, how difficult it is to kind of have a functioning democratic government as we know it, because of, you know, Congress's struggles in the moment. But the weakness of the parliamentary system is that these governments tend to collapse very quickly in order to reform one. A guy like Netanyahu has to reach across the aisle to some really unsavory groups in some cases, some real extremists, and some of these hardline religious parties that don't really have, you know, very democratic ideas, really, at all, and ask to give them cabinet positions and give them

positions of power and authority and put them in charge of the education of the country. Things are really controversial. And it's hard to imagine how something like that can exist very long in Israel before people start to push back and it all falls apart again well yeah and that that would be total chaos and it's that's the most that situation israel palestine always put my hands up like this because i'm like i empathize with everybody yeah and it's a horrible you know like unsolvable type thing but i just optically speaking it's like the people who are left and the people who are right in this world right now in politics, the pattern is they're just getting pushed farther and farther to whatever their end is. So this guy was, you know, I guess like a rightward politician in the 90s, like what you think he is now. And he keeps on finding a way back.

And what even is the deal with that? Like, what's he on trial for or something? Or is that even going to happen? There's a corruption thing. Yeah. And now that he's prime minister again, I don't know if the process goes forward or not. I was told that's one of the reasons that he wanted to get back in power because few years of getting involved in some kind of corruption scandal and having to face charges, sometimes criminal charges. Well, that makes them like every government in the world, in fairness. But still, it just seems a mess. And Jordan still remains a heavy ally of theirs. Who else do they have in the region? Who's like Egypt's a friend? Who else?

The Gulf states now, some more than others, but the UAE, essentially, you can fly now from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Something wasn't even imaginable a few years ago. So they've essentially decided that because the Israelis are anti-Iran as they are, and because the Israelis offer a lot in terms of technology and trade, that it makes sense to have relations with them. And so we've seen countries like Bahrain and Qatar and others decide that we're going to get along with the Israelis, even though we ostensibly don't like what they're doing with the Palestinians. These other issues are more important to us. And so they get along. And one thing I forgot, because we're almost done here we're coming up on

three hours this has been great by the way so i really appreciate you doing this but we have been talking earlier about your good relationship with the king of jordan which is so cool it's like guy pulls up to america he's texting you like pull up that's that's great but he did get you as you mentioned pretty much unprecedented access to sit down with their intelligence organization and the highest up people there so when you did that did you learn a lot of things about the intensive ties between the united states and jordan that you didn't even suspect previously? Or was it kind of exactly what you thought? I kind of understood it going in. And it's, it's really something. This is probably, I don't know if it's our closest, maybe our closest, you know, security

relationship besides Israelis. And of course, the Europeans are traditional allies in Europe. But it's extremely close to the extent that they don't just help us in the region, but they go other places in the world to help us out. In the first book I wrote, The Story of the Triple Agent, we had a Jordanian intelligence component to that mission of getting this Jordanian spy into Al- know, into Al Qaeda's tent to try to define bin Laden and others. And they lost one of their senior people in that suicide bombing that took place in 2009, because they were that close with us actually working in Afghanistan. They punch way above their weight in terms of their securities apparatus. They get a lot of money from us to help

them do that. But there is well wired in the region and well integrated into kind of figuring out what these bad guys are up to really in just about anybody else the israelis are extremely good too because of their signals capability they've got some of the best eavesdropping equipment some of the best ability to kind of like for example the israelis discovered a plot a few years ago to to uh to use to turn a laptop into a bomb so there's a brief brief period of time where we couldn't bring laptops onto a plane because the israelis had tipped us off on a pretty pretty significant isis threat to you to put a bomb inside oh isis had figured that isis had figured it out and the israelis figured out that isis had done it so they're really good at that kind of eavesdropping the jordanians are peerless in their what we call human which are the ability to infiltrate um terrorist organizations get people

on the inside um listen to what they're doing and and then provide information share information that we can then take action on they i might be remembering this incorrectly from your book so correct me if i'm wrong but didn't they like run the intelligence gathering and solving of like that lawrence foley case they were yeah they were of course that happened in uh and who was he maybe so yeah if lawrence uh sorry i mean you mean like lawrence it was j Foley, right? You mean the guy who was beheaded or the? No, different guy.

The one who was killed. The diplomat, that's it. Yeah, so they were the ones that saw that case and figured out that Zarqawi was behind it. But he was a diplomat based in Jordan. He's kind of a middle-level guy, not like their ambassador, but somebody who was kind of running one of the organizations within the embassy. And one of Zarqawi's people targeted him at his house, followed him out to his car, and essentially just shot him in his carport. And the Jordanians were able to solve the crime and figure out who had done it, who was behind it. And that was back in like, what, 02?

Yeah. Yeah, it was right after the start of the Iraq War, before the Iraq War, after 9-11. Wild times over there. Well, listen, this has been absolutely great. Like I said, your knowledge of the entire region is pretty absurd. I mean, how often are you getting over there these days? Well, COVID kind of put a stop to it for a while. The way it worked before is I'd go over for sort of long trips.

I don't sort of live in the region, but I'm able to go for a couple of weeks and spend time traveling around um and then come back and kind of decompress and especially on book stuff that's really important to be able to do to to just really kind of immerse yourself for periods of time and then come back and figure out what to do how to how to process it how to turn into a story or turn into a book and that's second part of the challenge and sometimes the most difficult part you know on top of all your reporting is still doing everything that's i don't know how you guys balance that it's crazy it's it's a two jobs at once and they're

both more than full-time are you working on a new book right now yeah so i'm working on a couple of ideas and i have to say the often the most challenging thing of all is figuring out the idea because the first book was a natural because I happened to cover it in real time. So the, the CIA operation, but everything else is, is finding a topic that you are sufficiently enamored with, that you'd like enough,

that you're going to live with it for, for years, that you're going to eat, sleep, breathe this one topic, but also finding something that is going to appeal to a wide enough audience that people are going to care about it. People are going to want to know what happened, not just in an academic environment, but also just ordinary folks are just going to want to know the story. And then the third challenge is how do you tell it in an interesting way?

How do you make sort of historical events feel almost novel-like in the amount of realism and detail that you could bring to a story. And that's a lot of fun for me when you take real events and recreate them in a way that without making up a word, turning it into something that just feels compelling and fresh and like you were there. And that's the most exciting part of the job for me. And it's something that takes an extraordinary amount of work, but when it comes together and it works well, it's something to be proud of. Yeah. And like, obviously, Isis, it's lightning in a bottle because you're writing it while it's going on. It's not like people need to be warned about it, but you end up writing

literally the modern history of it. I mean, I think you have the Bible of it right there. And then when you look at other books like Redline that we'll talk about next time, I'll have you in later this year if you're down. But, you know, to me, that's something like you cover a lot of the chemical weapons thing going on in Syria and what happened there and the history and where it stands because al-Assassad's still in power and it's like this is not something we talk about in this country a lot and it's a threat in that it could be the other type of thing where something goes wrong we get stuck in another endless war so being able to package a story like that and put it out to get the everyman like me to read it and understand like oh wow this is what happened this what's going on it's a very important thing and it's to me it would be the most gratifying part of

of the job if i did and i i hope you do enjoy that because your books are great and and they're really they they really provide context for for guys like me who are just interested to know what the hell is going on thanks so much for that it really means a lot awesome well everyone can get those books linked down in description of all three. Would highly recommend the two I've read. And I am going to go back and read The Triple Agent as well because love that story. Pretty wild. Joby, thank you so much, man. It's been an absolute blast. Thanks for having me. And we will do it again. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.