Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/20/25 Gary Vogler on the Haifa Pipeline and How Oil Drives Middle Eastern Geopolitics

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Scott interviews Gary Vogler about the book he published last year with the Libertarian Institute: Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War. Vogler explains his background managing oil in Iraq on behalf of the Pentagon. They then dive into Vogler’s insights about how the oil trade—especially the secret oil trade between Israel and its regional neighbors—lies at the heart of the geopolitical dynamic in the Middle East and all the American interventions there in recent decades.    Discussed on the show: Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War: Undue Influence, Deceptions, and the Neocon Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler Iraq and the Politics of Oil: An Insider's Perspective by Gary Vogler Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew Cockburn “Plan B” (The New Yorker) Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll Gary Vogler is a 1973 West Point graduate, retired army reserve lieutenant colonel, retired ExxonMobil executive with 21 years, five months of Iraq oil planning at Pentagon followed by 75 months in Iraq under DOD - appointed Oil Minister during first 10 days in Baghdad in April 2003. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archives. for you there going back to 2003. And follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton Show.

All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Gary Vogler. He wrote the book, Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, published by the Institute, which is in the middle of our fund drive right now. If you want us to keep publishing great books, we could use your support.

And we've got matching funds. So stop by Libertarian Institute. slash donate. But welcome to the show. Gary, how are you doing? Great. Great. Thanks. How you doing, Scott? I'm doing great. Very happy to have you here. And I'll never forget checking the Amazon reviews of enough already and seeing your review. Hey, I was in charge of the oil over there. And this guy's right about what was going on with that. So that was really great to hear and see. And then Grant Smith put us in touch. and I had the honor and the privilege of publishing your great book here, which I've just sat and re-read, which is just fantastic.

And so, yeah, so let's get into it. You already had written a book, Iraq and the politics of oil, and you explained in your new book that it was some things that you had learned toward the end of that process that really got you started on the research for this one. So, in other words, you had a role in running Iraqi oil during the war, but you really didn't figure out what was going on until you looked at it in hindsight. Is that right? That's true. We were so busy over there during the pre-war planning and in Iraq that, you know, we didn't have time. As Jay Garner said when I approached him in 2017 and let him know that I failed him. He said, Gary, don't beat yourself up.

He said that we were so busy doing tasks back in 2003, we didn't have time to sit back and figure out who was telling us what to do and why they were telling us. We were just hit with tasks. And if we were able to complete 50% of them in the day, we felt like we were doing well. Yeah. Yeah, so it was constant back then.

Before I get into this, let me, I've got your book provoked here on my desk. And I just want to congratulate you on a phenomenal, phenomenal book. I've started reading it. I'm a little bit slow because I had cataract surgery here a little bit ago. But this is fantastic. And yes, I first noticed you, Scott, several years ago when I read your book and I said, this is the only guy that got the Iraq oil sector right of the books that I've read on Iraq. And this provoked looks like it's along the same line. So congratulations on that. Job well done. Awesome. Well, thank you very

much for that. And yeah, it was great, as I say, in enough already. It's been great to have people who fought in those wars contact me and say, yep, you're right, all right. And here's another thing I learned about it, which is a lot of what happened here. So take us back. Who are you? What do you know about oil and the oil business? And why would anybody give you a job running a rocky oil during a war? And what exactly does that mean? Yeah, good question. Well, let me back up a little bit. I graduated from West Point, in 1973, spent my time on active duty, and then I joined Mobile Oil and Exxon Mobile for 21 years and left Exxon Mobile in early 2003, or 2002, after 21 years. I was still in the Army Reserves

as a lieutenant colonel, and I got a call from my Army Reserve Unit to ask, me to go to the Pentagon and interview for a contract job in OSD, Office of Secretary of Defense, and I agreed to. I started the next day there, and that was October 2002, and we started doing some pre-war planning. And there were several people, it was an interagency team. We had a guy who was a senior person within OSD that led the team. I was the second and the second Command. We had people from the Department of Energy, Department of State, CIA, and other folks. And so we spent the next five months planning for this war. And so 22 years ago today, we were in Kuwait. And I caught a plane down to Qatar to the CENTCOM headquarters with Ambassador Robin Raffel, who was one of the

senior people on our team early on and got a name of Lieutenant General Ron Adams. And we met with at the time it was General John Abizaid, who's my West Point classmate. And I can remember, I'll never remember or forget that day. We walked into the meeting room. We were a little bit late. And I was looking for the CENCOM Marine Colonel that was my oil contact, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Sheldon, trying to trying to get an update on how the war was impacting the oil sector. And I found him and I said, Paul, give me a quick brief on what's going on. He said, Gary, the third ID is north of the oil fields, close to Nassaria.

We only have seven well fires right now. He said things are going really well. And about that time, the Abizade wanted to get the meeting started. So I sat next to General Abizade. Ron Adams was across from me and Ambassador Raffel was next. to me and I started thinking, boy, only seven oil fires. We were planning for 500 to 1,000 oil fires. We thought we'd be doing nothing but putting out fires for the next six to nine months. If we only have seven fires, I said, what am I supposed to do? Where in the plans? Do I need to

insert myself? And about that time, someone said, Gary, General Abbasid asked you a question. And I looked at John and I stood up and I addressed the group. I said, I don't know whether you guys realize this or not. But from what I've just heard, I said, we are six to nine months ahead of schedule for oil production. I said, this is phenomenal. And about that time, Lieutenant Colonel Shelton said, Gary, I didn't give you the bad news. And I said, okay, what's the bad news? And he said, well, we said we had a CH-46 full of Marines go down on its way off to the oil platform.

and we lost all 20-some Marines, they're all dead. And I sat down, I felt like someone just kicked me in the gut. But that's the way it was. You know, you'd feel like you've gone two steps forwards, and then all of a sudden you get kicked back to your seat. And so I looked at General Abbottet. They said, okay, sorry, what was your question? I said to it, and we started the meeting at that point.

But, yeah, I'll never forget that day. That was a real eye-opener for me, but we were able to continue with our plane. We flew back to Kuwait and got ready for our movement into Iraq to link up with the leaders of the oil sector. And we were able to get oil flowing again in the south, again, six to nine months ahead of schedule. We weren't planning on having any oil flowing out of the Basra until late in 2003. But we were able to start what day was, at April the 23rd, 2003. And now what exactly was your title, Gary, and did that change? Well, I was, I was, Jay Garner was the first civilian lead of our group, of the Orha was what it was called, Office of Reconstruction and Humanity.

humanitarian assistance. And there were about two or three hundred people in that group. And I was the senior oil advisor to Jay Garner. And so when we went in the bag, by the way, do you have any insight into why he was cashiered and replaced by Paul Bremer so quickly? Well, it was he was supposed to be replaced all along. That was part of the original plan. But it was a lot quicker than then certainly we were anticipating. We thought we would have the pleasure of working for Jay for a few more months. But it was a surprise when it happened so quickly. And I was told that it was because he did not follow. He was, he irritated Doug Fythe so much, is what I was told. That was one of the reasons. And he was the undersecretary of defense for policy. Correct. Correct. And Fythe told him, well, he told, told Jay the day before, he wanted Jay to turn everything over Doc McChalaby when we got into Baghdad. Okay. And you know what? Let's take our time. We're not in a hurry here. I'm certainly not. My next interview isn't for two hours. And we don't have to go that long. But I want to go ahead and let's take our time through here. So let's introduce some of these.

characters. Tell us a little bit about Ahmed Chalabi. Well, Ahmed Chalabi was an interesting character. He was in exile. He headed up the Iraqi National Congress for the 1990s. And a brilliant guy, but he was an opportunist. And he had made the enemies of Saddam. He made the enemies of Saddam. and he made it a lot of enemies in the Middle East. He was a banker in Jordan, and he was able to sneak out of Jordan before they arrested him. And this was in the late 1990s. Well, he figured out that in the late 1990s that Israel had a very serious energy security problem. They had lost their supply of oil that had been coming from Iran.

since the 1960s, and in 1995, they lost that source. And Akpachalibi figured out that, hey, they'd need another source of oil because they were paying a premium for what they could get on the spot market, and they wanted a more dependable source of oil to help with their energy security. And so he approached the Israel lobby in the late 1990s and convinced them that if they helped

him by getting the U.S. military to overthrow Saddam and put him as the first prime minister of Iraq, that one of the first things he would do would to reopen the old pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa that was constructed in 34 and was the first export pipeline out of Iraq, and it ran until 1948 and was shut down when Israel. came into existence and had not been used since 1948. But he convinced some very naive neocons, Paul Wolfwitz, Richard Pearl, Doug Fythe, that, you know, he could do this. And they believed him.

And so they got on board, and he was their guy. He was the guy that they were going to help after Saddam was. deposed to help ahmachality become the prime minister so that they could get this pipeline open to hypha and as he would say turn hypha into the rotter dam of the eastern mediterranean which you know it is is certainly possible but but anyone that those pipelines knows that the that was a pipe dream but but you had people like benjamin not natchew believe that too. In fact, Benjamin Nottingahu was the Minister of Finance at the time. And in June of 2003, he went to London to talk to the banking community looking for a few billion dollars in order

to expand the pipeline, not only reopen it, but to expand it to export over a million barrels a day. And that's four months into the war. He still believed in it and was raising money for it. Exactly. Exactly. It was, yeah, he was, he was still, in fact, that was, that was June in, and that word was getting out. Apparently, that was, that was being written up in Heretz. That's, I eventually caught up to Harat's newspaper, which is the, as you well know, is the, the Israeli press that's been around since 1917. And it seems to be about the only press in the West that's allowed to criticize the Israeli government from, when I've learned. It's sort of the New York Times of Israel, the sort of very center-left liberal paper daily there and extremely, you know, supposedly authoritative one. And they do, you know, high-quality work for what it is, you know. They did a very good job in 2003 of reporting on what was happening in the oil sector. It's just that I didn't read it until 2015 or 14, yeah. Okay, so wait, so let's rewind just a little bit because we're already, Netanyahu's given this speech, it's important that you mention that, that you have the finance minister, obviously the current prime minister and longest serving prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu here is an extremely important character in his role. But so, you know, it's, it has been a long time. There are a lot of new people who don't know this stuff and there are a lot of old people who forgot. So let's see if we can remind them a little bit about.

the role of, you know, who the neoconservatives are and who Ahmed Chalabi is, because it's not just that he sold these neocons the idea of this alliance between the new Iraq and Israel and particularly on energy. But he was also the guy, he wasn't fooling them, he was working with them to fool the American people. And it was the INC were the guys who came up with many of the lies, including the biological weapons laboratories and the warehouse is full of chemical weapons and an ongoing nuclear weapons program and all of these things about the weapons of mass destruction. And we know, especially from the whistleblowing of the great Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Katowski and a hell of a lot of great journalism about it, that it was the

neocons in the Office of Special Plans who were laundering those lives. doing a stove pipe and run around the CIA, which they were torturing lies out of other people, so they played their role, mostly on the al-Qaeda part. But on the weapons especially, these guys in the Pentagon were laundering all these lies from the INC into the intelligence stream and straight to the White House. And according to Karen Katowski, Bill Lutie, who worked for Douglas Fythe and for Abram Shulski running the Office of Special Plans there, he would say, oh, this is a good one. I've got to get this to Scooter.

And she came to find out that meant Scooter Libby, the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. So can you tell us a little bit, Gary, about Scooter Libby, who's he? And what difference does that make who the chief of staff of the vice president is, of all things? Yeah, Scott. You mentioning those names brings back memories. I knew every one of them. I didn't get to meet Karen while I was there. Bill Lutie, Abe Shulski, I knew all those guys.

And Scooter Libby, good old Scooter Libby. Scooter, interesting, we were putting together policy papers as part of our team. And we would send those up to Doug Fythe, was the first guy that would review them. He'd send them back. And I remember two or three times he'd write in the margins. He said, run this by Scooter Libby. And I can remember going to our lead, who was a guy by Mike Mobb. and I said, what scooter?

Is that another classified group that we need to run this by, thinking it was another classified group in the Pentagon? He said, no, no, no, that's Scooter Libby. He said, we need to get on the phone and give him a call. Well, Libby, I would find out years later. We called him, and the guy knew a lot about oil. I was surprised that he was a lawyer working for Cheney who knew a heck of a lot about oil.

Well, come to find out years later when I did the research, for my first book, that he was the lawyer for Mark, the famous Mark Rich, who helped, I told you that the Israel got all their oil from Iran from 1960 to 1995. Well, the guy, Mark Rich was the guy that helped make that happen. And Scooter Libby was his lawyer. Wait, something really important just jumped out at me about those numbers. When the Iranian revolution be like just two-thirds of the way through that? You're exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. It, they stopped, the oil stopped flowing for about a week. But Mark Rich had such great contacts in the Iranian oil industry, and they just wanted,

they couldn't find anyone to sell their oil to. And so he and Scooter Libby were able to put together some great contracts, great deals to keep people's names, keep it very, very confidential, and keep that oil flowing from 1979 until the end of 1994. Right. And even in the books that I read, the Israeli folks that are, there was a guy but who was a member of the Mossad who gives Mark Rich full credit for being his, his relationship with the people in the Iranian oil ministry helped to make that happen. And so, yeah, Scooter Libby was his lawyer. Okay. So everybody pull up the map of the Middle East that you have in your head. And, of course, the Arabian Peninsula is that giant peninsula shaped thing between Africa and Persia there,

right? And so on the right side of it, the eastern side of it is the Persian Gulf. And on the western side of it is the Red Sea, of course. And at the very north of the Red Sea, you have the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, right? Everybody picturing that or pulling it up on your phone if you can't. But then the Sinai Peninsula is called the Sinai Peninsula because it sticks down into the Red Sea, basically, between Egypt and Saudi Arabia there. And if you go to the west, you go through the Suez Canal. But if you go to the east, that's the port of Akuba and it's a little cul-de-sac there it ends but it goes pretty far and it's that Gulf of Akuba is where the Iranians had this secret oil pipeline to Israel now of course

everyone remembers that when Ronald Reagan switched sides temporarily in the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s and he wanted to sell some missiles to the Ayatollah in an attempt to get some hostages released and to make some money for the contras in Nicaragua that he used Israel as a cutout to do it. And he said, listen, you guys sell the Ayatollah missiles and I'll pay you back with more missiles, right? And so, well, there's a clue. What was going on was the Israelis still had this ongoing relationship with fundamentalist Islam, Shiite, Iran, under the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini, far more intimidating of a guy than the current guy, Kameney. And they got along just, freaking fine until 1993, 1995, right in there. Everybody read Trees

a Parsi's great book, Tretcherous Alliance for the real lowdown on that. But this is crucial. Oh, here's another anecdote. You mentioned this in your book, Gary, for a little touchstone for people. Everybody's seen the famous picture and sometimes even a short video clip of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983 when he was acting as a special emissary for Saddam or for Ronald Reagan. And this is in the book Rumsfeld by Andrew Coburn. He does the best job, I'm 99% sure. This is where I got this from. He does the best job of explaining how virtually the entire purpose of that meeting was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll give you money and weapons. But anyway, what we really want from you, Saddam, is for you to open up an oil pipeline

to the Gulf of Akuba. So can you talk a little bit about what was going on there? They're already And that's obviously on Israel's behalf, too, right? They're trying to basically link Iraqi oil to that same Mark Rich secret Iranian-Israeli pipeline, right? No, you're absolutely correct. In fact, the pipeline that we're talking about is the Elat Ashkelon pipeline that was built in 1969, 1970. It goes from Elat, the port of Elat, which is right next door to the port of Akaba. and it goes up to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean side. And it was referred to as the top secret pipeline. And I will tell you that I was working in Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea side of Saudi Arabia and working on shipments come out of our refinery. And I did not know that that pipeline existed.

And in fact, when I first read about it in 19 or in 2015, I approached the guy. with mobile oil, who was our Middle East oil manager for a number of years. And I said, hey, I said, if you were running a cargo of oil from the Red Sea to the Med, how would you do it? And he said, Gary, there are only two ways to do that. You either put it on light ships and run it through the canal or you put it, run through the Sumed pipeline through, through Egypt. And I said, no, there's a third way. And he said, no, there isn't. And I said, yes, there is. I said, there's this pipeline through, through Israel. And his jaw dropped. he said he said that's the first he'd heard of that so that's how well they kept that it was called

the top secret pipeline and in fact Israel passed the law in 2017 that said if if anyone talks about or or makes public any information about that pipeline today there it's it's considered treason and and you're you're you could get 15 years in prison but it's it's it's a pipeline that ran Iranian crude oil from there to the Mediterranean and Mark Rich's customers in the Mediterranean, Italy and Spain and some of the other countries, would get most of the oil, and then Israel would get whatever they needed, which was somewhere less than 200,000 barrels a day, or around 10% or 15% of the throughput, and they'd get it at a nice discount. And so from 1970 until 1993, 94, 95, whenever it started stopping, they were getting, getting, they had great energy security because they were getting a steady flow of oil and getting it at a nice, cheap price.

And then all of a sudden it stopped when Mark Rich lost his company of Mark Rich A.G. and Glentor took it over after Rich lost a shirt on another commodities deal. I think he was trying to corner the zinc market and lost hundreds of millions of dollars and he had to sell out his share of Mark Rich A.G. It was taken over by Glencore. And then Glencore didn't have the contacts that Mark Rich had in Iran. And so Israel was left to get their oil on the spot market, and they were paying a 25% premium, according to Joseph Pritzky, who was the Minister of Infrastructure in Israel in 2003.

A 25% premium for your energy is a pretty good premium. Compared to the discount they were getting before, you're saying? Well, yes, yes. You can see how impacting the economy, the fact that they're from getting a great discount to, you know, let's face it, the economies in the Western world depend on a good supply of energy at a nice price. And that pumps their economy. And that's, that's that. And so in the late 1990s, when they had to go out there on the spot market, yeah, it was hurting the Israeli economy back then. Yeah. And I'm sorry, this is really just a parentheses in your story here, but it's got to be noted that, you know, officially the relationship between Israel and Iran was broken by 93. And you're saying that they still had this oil deal going on through 95. And it wasn't until just Mark Rich got himself in some economic trouble for some other reasons that the business deal broke apart. And that to me is huge. And I'm not saying it's scam. other than the fact that they deny that Israel and the Ayatollah can never get along, but n'uh, because I got scientific proof that they can too. You know, Scott, I learned something during my time, my 75 months in Iraq, is people that are

sworn enemies when it comes to making money, they can get along quite easily. We saw it time and time again. Yeah, in Trita Parsy's book, he says the Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah, Khomeini, would be saying, debt to Israel. I'll get you. And then that same day they would be taking a shipment of Israeli missiles. And that was the reason that he was talking tough was just to cover for their covert relationship. Get out of here. That's the way the world really works. I wouldn't be surprised if the Heidzhol and Netanyahu are secret tea party buddies right now, you know, with their little doilies. All right. So here's another neocons name. Michael Mikovsky. Who's that?

Yeah. Yeah, Michael Makovsky. He's no Paul Wolfowitz. Most people haven't heard of this guy. Yeah. Well, Mike, Mike was, he was on our team. He was the only guy on our team. We had five people on the team. He was the only guy on our team who, in the first week, Clark Turner and I, Clark was the Department of Energy guy, and he was a senior oil guy. He and I were sitting there and time, we said, okay, we understand everyone's role on this team. But what's this guy, McCavsky? What's his role? He was a young guy. He was the time probably 35, 36 years old, had no experience in oil that we could figure out. So we went to him in his cubicle and we said, Mike, we're trying to understand what your role is going to be on our team. And he said, you mean, you want to know why I'm on the team. And I said, yeah. He said, well, I'm Doug Fights brother-in-law. And then he ignored us. And so I looked at Clark. We walked away and I said, aren't there nepotism wrong? rules against this and he said he said he just didn't want to share with us well we would i would come to find out that uh and it was uh it was reading an article years later uh that mike um was he he went to israel in 1989 to join the israeli army and to join the israeli foreign service and my contact at the cia that gave me the article said i asked him i said what's this mean the

foreign service. He said, Gary, 98% of Israel's foreign service is Mossad. He said, unless you can prove otherwise, he's Mossad. And so the, when I look back at what Mike did, because he was the only guy on our team that refused to volunteer to go into Iraq. He stayed back at the Pentagon. And throughout my book, I identify things where he would call up and ask about. In fact, he asked in July of 2003, he called out there, he needed to find out the status of the Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline as you talked to me on the phone. And that was the first I'd ever heard of this pipeline. And I said, look, I know where Kirkuk is, but he was pronouncing it in this Hebrew pronunciation of Haifa. He was calling Hafu. He said, Gary, he said, find out the status of the

Kirkukta Hafu pipeline. I said, Mike, I said, look, I said, I know where Kokuk is, but where's this hafu that you mentioned? He said, oh, it's out west in the direction of Syria. He was misleading me, okay? And I said, wow, I said, does this have something to do with Wolfwitz talking about hiding WMD in pipelines? And he said, he said, I can't discuss that. We're on a non-secure line. And so I said, okay, I said, let me see what I can find out. So the next day, I was out talking to the guy who was the oil minister at the time in the Iraqi. And I said, hey, can you tell me about a pipeline that goes from Kerkuk to hafu? And he got very, I looked at him and all of a sudden he got very serious. And he was

tensing up. And I thought, oh, shoot, he's having a heart attack or something. And he said, Gary, you don't want me to ask that question of my organization. And I said, what do you mean? said, well, he said, there are a lot of people in this country and certainly a lot of people in the oil ministry that think the only reason why you guys came in here was to take our oil and ship it to Israel. He said, if I go and ask about an old pipeline that went from Kukukuk to Haifa, he said, we will only be confirming their thoughts on this. And when he said, Haifa, I immediately said, oh, shoot, I've been deceived by Mikowski. This is a, this is a a political question. So I said, don't do a thing on this. I said, let me check with the people

and see if I've got the question right. And I went back and Mike called me. He said, okay, what's the status? And I said, Mike, I said, you didn't tell me it was Haifa Israel. I said, you let me to believe it was hafu. I said, this is a political hot potato. I said, you put in writing what you want from me and why you want it. And I'll sit down with Ambassador Bremer before I go and get it, and all of a sudden I heard the phone hang up. He, well, he went around me. He got the phone number of the oil minister, and we had given cell phones to all the key people,

and the old minister had a cell phone. He was able to get that cell phone, and he called him up after talking to another contact and asking him the question about that, pipeline. And well, you know, about two weeks after that, the pipelines in Baghdad started blowing up. The oil pipelines that fed the Baghdad refinery blew up. And all of a sudden, we had lines in the middle of the summer that were several miles long in Baghdad. We had shortage of gasoline and diesel. And I learned years later, we didn't understand. I didn't understand why they were blowing up their own pipelines. And years later, I talked to the refinery manager at the Baghdad refinery, and he didn't understand it at the time either.

And so he called in the only people in his organization that knew where those pipelines flowed. And it had to be an inside job because they hit the pipelines at the right area. And so he called him in and he said, tell me, what's going on? Why is this happening? And he said the five or six people, he had it and looked down at the floor and went shifted back and forth. And he said, come on, we've been going to the same mosque together for the last 30 years. Tell me what's happened. And they looked up and they pulled out an Arabic newspaper that was quoting Horat's in saying that the Americans were taking Iraqi oil and shipping it through a pipeline to Israel. And so the members of the Iraqi oil ministry were destroying their own pipelines because they didn't want their oil going to

Israel. And I said, you're kidding me. I said, I didn't know that. It's taken me all these years to learn that. I said, what did you tell these guys when they told you that? And he said, I looked at him and I said, you idiots? I said, if the Americans were taking our oil and sending it to Israel, I would personally help you blow up our own pipelines. And I looked at the guy and I understood exactly what he was saying. But that, that, when they started blowing up pipelines, that told the neocons, the Pentagon, it told Ahmed Chalbi in Baghdad that his original plan of sending oil through the Kirkukta Haifa pipeline would not work, that the Iraqis would never tolerate sending that oil through to Israel. And so they had to execute plan B. All right, wait, hold on,

on plan B. That's funny. I don't know if you know this, but that was what Seymour Hirsch called it in The New Yorker. Did we talk about that before? No, I don't think we have. I didn't know he covered. Man, you know what? I'm criminally negligent on that. I just, Justin Romando's article about it was called The Stab in the Back, and I should have sent you both of those at the time because Hirsch did cover this at the time. Plan B, the pipeline thing didn't work. Now we're doing this. Man, Gary, I'm so sorry that I did not think of that. And I haven't even read it since back then. I don't even remember exactly what all is in there other than, well, I know basically it's

about the Kurds and all that. But let's get to that in just a second because you've already said so much that's really important here that I want to talk about. So first of all, look, what are you going to do with Bob Woodward? The guy lies about what people say, but also he gets access to very powerful people and he quotes them and usually they don't dispute it. And so, like, I don't know. he wrote in his book and it was quoted in the Washington Post and Powell never disputed it.

He, and it seems, you know, these don't seem like words that Woodward would put in Powell's mouth. You know, he said that Colin Powell, who was the Secretary of State at the time, former four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former National Security Advisor before that, that he said that the guys who lied us into war, it was the Jinsa crowd. So can you tell us what's Jinsa? And you may have mentioned it that, or I'm not sure if you did or not, that that Mokovsky was a part of that. But Colin Powell supposedly told Woodward, yeah, they set up a separate government inside the government. And as Hirsch also reported, the neocons, they called themselves the cabal.

That was their joke, that Cheney had appointed very powerful. and important neocons to his office, to the National Security Council. Oh, did we mention that Scooter Libby was also a special advisor to the president? But then also to the State Department and the Defense Department, where they all operated as this extremely tight and loyal group, you know, centered around PNAC, AEI, and GINSA and Vice President Dick Cheney. This was the group who lied us into war. Yeah.

No, you're right. And the ginsa craft, I remember back in 2003, the name ginsa came up, and I remember asking our CIA contact. I said, who's ginsa? What's this ginsa organization? He said, oh, Gary, that's just a front for Mossad in D.C. And I didn't think anything of it until 2013, where I read that Mokovsky became the new CEO of ginsa. And I said, okay, in looking back, I said, this all makes sense. If he, he, he was a, a Maasad contact back in 2003 when he was on our, on our team.

Well, let's stipulate very likely, right? Okay. Right. Very likely. Yeah. Yeah. But, anyway, go ahead. Okay.

But the, and so years later, he, he, he, he shows up as the CEO of GENSA. And you're right. The, when one of the groups that, um, Akman Chauw. Salaby spoke at in the late 1990s and made the promise was a meeting with Jinsa in D.C. And that is, it's the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, although they change it to of America at the end there, as you know in your book. But that's the group. And by the way, there's an article from back then by a journalist named Jason Vest for Mother Jones called The Men from AEI and Jinsa. Yeah. And oh, by the way, people ask me, have I gotten any threats

in the last five years. And yes, I did. Six months after my first book was written, I got a threat from a guy, and I hired a PI, gave him what information I had. And he traced him back to an organization in the same building where Jinsa is located just a few blocks from the White House. You don't say. Yeah. So it, yeah. So we're on to something here, in other words, Gary. But the, yeah, so Mokovsky's, he's been the CEO of JNSA for since two, for over 10 years now. Okay, now, so I want to stop at this to go through the sources, your own anecdotes and things like that that you've already talked about and still will talk about in the interview, but also all of the other journalism, the other anecdotes, the other things that you know to demonstrate for people that this is not speculation. We know that Chalabi and the neocons and at least some of the Israeli government were sure that this was what they were going to get out of America going to war in Iraq in 2003. Can you talk about some of the more sources that you've gathered that really explain all this?

Yeah, certainly I saw a lot of things while I was at the Pentagon and out in Iraq for the first couple years anyway, things that didn't make any sense to me. For example, when Paul Wolfowitz ordered the destruction of a pump station out in Anbar province, that made absolutely no sense to me. And I had generals that would approach me in 2008, 2009, 2010. And Gary, why did you destroy that pump station out in Anbar province back in 2003? I said, I have no clue. You'd have to ask Paul Wolfowitz. He's the guy that ordered that pump station, destroyed.

And it was destroyed because it was a pump station on the pipeline that took oil to Syria, that it operated up until Wolfwitz decided to destroy it. And that was the pipeline through Syria. It was the one that replaced the old Haifa pipeline back in that was shut down in 1948. You know, the Iraq Petroleum Company, which was the old company back then, when the king had them shut down the Haifa pipeline, they had to immediately build this pipeline through Syria for their exports. And that started operating in 1952 and operated every year until Paul Wolfowitz decided to blow up the major pump station back in April of 2000.

and three. And that thing, the story on that was when we were going through the planning process at the Pentagon, we just, we put it together the plans that were approved by the president's cabinet. Okay. And the policies that they, that they approved included that there would be no oil infrastructure intentionally attacked during the first part of the war. And so we we were going forward with that and that was that was the policy and then late in the the process mccowski called a meeting of our entire group and he said hey i know we've said this but we need to have one exception we need to blow up this pipeline or this pump station in anbar province that takes oil to syria and he says the reason why we need to do that we need to hold

Assad responsible for taking or smuggled oil from Saddam and bypassing the oil for food program. And so we need to blow this thing up. And I said, Mike, I said, that makes no sense. He's what do you mean? It makes sense. I said, well, I said, that pipeline was paid for, constructed. It's operated by the Iraqis. I said, if we blow that up, the only thing that Assad will, his pipeline, his pipeline,

punishment will be the tolls going through that pipeline, which is less than five percent of the value of the crude oil that goes through. And everyone on the team agreed with me. And so Mike lost that battle. Well, about a week before I was due to get on a plane and deployed to Iraq at the middle of March, Mike approached me, said, Gary, you need to be in the tank for a meeting at 1 o'clock today. And I said, for what? I said, I'm busy. I'm going to be deployed here in a few days.

I've got things I need to do. And he said, no, you need to be in this meeting. I said, who's going to be there? He said, well, General Tommy Franks is going to be on the other end, along with his generals, and then Paul Wolfwich is going to be on this side. And I said, what are we going to talk about? And he told me, I said, heck, we've gone over that stuff 50 times. I said, we know that.

And he said, no, no, no. He said, you need to be there. I said, okay. So I showed up. And it was myself, Mikowski, Wolfowitz, on the U.S. side. And then Tommy Franks and his generals were out in Qatar. And they went through the same thing. We had gone through many, many times, the classified stuff. And then at the end, Wolfowitz, he leans forward, and he gets very, very serious with Franks on the other side and he says general he said when you get into Iraq I'm going to tell you something I don't want another drop of oil to ever flow through that pipeline to Syria again do you get me and general Franks gave him a sharp salute said I got the mission sir and then Wolfowitz said good meeting over and get up and marched out of the the meeting room and I sat there thinking what the hell just went

down. And I walked away from the meeting saying, what's going on? And, of course, I didn't have time. I was busy doing other things. And what had just taken place is McCowski had just gotten Wolfowitz to give Franks the order that countermanded the policy that was written by or agreed to by the president's cabinet that no oil infrastructure would be attacked during the war. But, but Wolfowitz just countered that that that policy and gave the order to to destroy that pump station and so on april the seventh 2003 it was it was uh the 75th rangers got in there and totally destroyed that pump pump station to this day they can't pump any oil through that pump station it was so well destroyed and as you say in the book some of the guys in the

75th were killed in that mission too, right? Yes. Yeah, there were three, but there was a captain, an army captain, and two NCOs killed in that supporting that operation. And then you're saying that it's clear to you now that the purpose there was to eliminate the competition for the other pipeline that they wanted to go further south and on to Israel. Yeah, that was, that's my conclusion, but that was also the conclusion made by

an article in The Guardian that was written about the same time that I didn't discover until 2015 where they were interviewing a former CIA guy essentially saying the same thing. Do you remember who wrote that? I just read that in your book a minute ago, but I didn't check the footnote. I'll have to go back.

My memory is not as good as yours, Scott. You've got tremendous memory. But I forget the guy that wrote it, but... I'll find it. I've seen it a thousand times, But, yeah. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable.

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and I drink a lot of Folgers and things over the years, but I'm never going back now. Moondos is so good. And they have great wholesale deals for all you restaurant tours and Quickey Mart managers out there as well. They're now doing online commercial sales to coffee houses, coffee trailers, restaurants, and bakeries. So help support this show.

Drink anti-war coffee. Click the link in the margin at Scott Horton.org or just go to scothorton.org slash coffee. Seriously, buy some. And thanks. Well, okay, so in the book, you cite this other guy's book, David Phillips, wrote a book called Losing Iraq Inside the Post-War Reconstruction Fiasco. And he had a whole bit about the neocons and the hypha pipeline. Is that right?

Yeah, he wrote extensively in there about Ahmed Chalvey. In fact, that was the first time I had learned that Chaliby had come up with that. And I read that book while I was still in Iraq in 2011. And I approached, there was a lady that I worked with who had worked with Akhma Chalaby in London before the war. And I approached her. And I said, did Chalbby really make promises like this? And she looked at me, she started smiling. She said, Gary, she said, he only told them what they.

They wanted to hear, and they wanted to believe him in the worst way. So they did. So, yeah, that was Ahmed Chalabi. He was a scoundrel that the neocons. Hey, that was their guy. He was going to be the first prime minister, and he was going to start trading with Israel and open up the Middle East. And you've got to be pretty naive to believe that.

I've lived in the Middle East 11 years. And I, you know, when I heard that, I just, I said, anyone that had any experience in Middle East know, you'd have to be pretty naive to believe that what those guys were believing. Well, and here's the thing of it, too, for, you know, this is, you know, a little far afield from the book, but it's, well, not exactly, but it's adjacent to it essentially is that the whole clean. break strategy comes from Chalaby in a clean break and in the companion article coping with crumbling states both principally authored by David Wormser but then also co-signed by Richard Pearl and Douglas Fythe well the first one was I think the other the other one the other one coping is just by Wormser but then Wormser wrote the book Tyranny's ally which is just the book length version or booklet, you know, monograph-sized version of the same thing with a forward by Richard

Pearl. And Chalaby's name is littered throughout all three documents. At least, you know, he's mentioned at least a couple of times and he's thoroughly mentioned in the book. And he's the one who told them, you know, I'm convinced, I don't think there's any question that he and they were working together to lie us into war based on those weapons that they knew that was all lies and they thought that was hilarious deceiving you know everybody's mom and dad into being afraid of Iraq of all things but he's certainly deceived them

not just on the pipeline but on the whole concept that yeah super majority Shiite Iraq is going to be one compliant under the rule of a Hashemite king the cousin of the king of Jordan which all that you know, fell apart because the king died and things changed. But it was based on a complete, you know, hoax of a misunderstanding, right, mal-information that the Shiites of Iraq would just bend down or bend over and obey the rule of any old king who claimed to have the blood of the prophet in his veins, even though the Hashemites are just British sock puppets and are Sunnis. And when they had a sock puppet king in Iraq in the 1920s, the Shiites didn't obey him. That was why his rule didn't last because they're the super majority there.

And they had a fought against doing what he said. They're Shiites. And while they revere the family, the descendants of Muhammad and all of that, it doesn't mean they worship them as like high priests on top of some pyramid that get to, you know, tell everybody what to do in that totalitarian kind of a way. But Chalabi convinced them that they would have either a Hashemite king in there would tell them what to do, or then failing that, Chalabi himself would be the president or the prime minister and would take over the country. And then this compliant Shiite supermajority would have then the religious authorities in Najaf pull rank over the Iranians and over Hezbollah and make everybody, well, first of all, make Hezbollah be nice to Israel and stop. listening to Iran and then Lord Iraqi Shiite power over the Iranians. It's completely crazy and

stupid. I mean, I always feel foolish just telling people what the plan was because it makes me sound foolish just reciting it for you. They're like, yeah, the new Iraqi Shiites are then going to boss Ayatollah and Iran around and all of this stuff. And he did sell them all of this. And you cite in here this great article in salon.com but it's by I know that sounds you know very comie to people

but salon.com used to actually publish real journalism. This is from way back a long time ago and it's by John Dezard who was a journalist for the Financial Times and is a good guy so don't be too prejudiced against the salon.com web address

on this thing. It's a good article. It's called How Ahmed Chalabi Khan the Neocons and I wanted to find this quote because if I'm going to put this quote in your interview, I want to not paraphrase it. I want to make sure and see if I could get it right here by reading it word for word, but now I'm stalling for time as I page down. Yeah, it was the interview with Doug Fight's law partner. Right, no, this is worse. So that's in there too, and I'll let you talk about that in a second, the Mark Zell thing.

I'll turn that over to you. but I wanted to point out this paragraph here. This is me quoting a good journalist, quoting a guy that he interviewed. So don't anyone get this twisted about what I mean by it. The point is what he meant by it. So everybody be a grown-up about this. When I read this paragraph, Chalabee's admirers say they knew he'd never make good on his promises to a lie with Israel.

Quote, I was worried that he was going to do business with the Zionists confesses Maude Assad, the managing director of the Amman-Jordan-based international investment Arabian group, an industrial and agricultural exporter, who is one of Chalabi's Palestinian friends and business partners. Quote, he told me not to worry that he just needed the Jews in order to get what he wanted from Washington and that he would turn on them after that, end quote. So that's what's going on there, is as you said,

Richard Pearl and David Wormser, these idiots, they wanted to believe that they could put the Iraqi Shiite supermajority in the service of Israel if only they would get rid of Saddam Hussein. And that's why, even though it sounds crazy on the face of it, it made sense to them that if the problem is Iran uses Syria to back Hasbala, that the solution to that is to get rid of Sunni Saddam in Iraq, even though he's the roadblock. in that so-called arch of power. But don't worry, because once we get rid of him, we will completely pown the Iraqi Shia, and then they will then have total dominance over the Shia in Lebanon and ultimately in Iran as well. Crack pipe dream, but that was what they thought.

Yeah. Yeah. In the other article that Desard wrote was the interview with Mark Zell, who was Doug Fythe's law partner in which Zell finally came to the conclusion that the Chaliby had just condom. And that was in, I think, March, April of 2004. And you could tell that Zell was really pissed off that this guy had condom because he'd probably put up several million dollars to build up his law practice in Israel and anticipation of all the business he was going to get. he had no feeling for all the U.S. soldiers that would die then up till then and over the next several years. 4,489 KIAs, 33,000 wounded in action. No feeling for those guys at all.

He was just concerned about the money, the money that he lost. He, Mark Zell, the law partner of Doug Fight. It blew me away. I was reading stuff. like that in 2015. I just became so angry. People had come to me and said, Gary, you need to write the story about the U.S. forces support of the oil sector. And when I saw this and realized that I had been duped by these characters, I said, I've got to, I've got to write the book back in 2000 but I I didn't know the full story then but what I knew I could put together and I put it in the book although I had several people tell me to take out that section chapter 20 in that first book they they they advised me to take it out and I said why I said it's the truth it's it's

why we went to war in my opinion for this oil agenda and they said just take it out they said they will make your life miserable for you if you don't take it out well I said I said I'm not taking it out. I kept it in there. And yeah, yeah, the book had some, I had some difficulties getting the book published, but it was published. And of course, the publisher refused to market it. Once the word got out that it was published by a fairly well-known press out in the Midwest, but they refused to spend any money marketing it. But it sold fairly well. But the story did get it out.

And then thank you to you, Scott, for allowing me to write this second one that's much shorter and to the point that truly goes in and identifies the key facts that support this Israel oil agenda from that war. Because we truly, in my opinion, and I was the oil guy, and from my opinion, we fought that war for to get oil to Israel. And I think I lay out a pretty decent case in the book that's less than 100 pages that you published for me. Yeah, I think you sure do. And as I said, I just sat down and read it over an hour and a half to prepare for this interview. I mean, I had read it before, but I wanted to freshen up on all of this stuff. And I'm really glad I did, too, because it's short and sweet to the point. And I already know you're right anyway, but then also you have all this extra stuff to add that I got to learn about the whole thing.

including one of them was, if I ever knew this, I had forgotten it. I don't think that I ever knew about this guy. And you mentioned him earlier in the episode today, Joseph Perritsky, the infrastructure minister of Israel. And he was an authoritative source on some of this, too. Do you remember what he had said about it? Yeah, he was interviewed by Heretz. And he was interviewed March the 31st.

So he was interviewed, and he was taking. he was doing a victory dance in his office, apparently, to the, to Heretz, saying that, hey, the, the, we're going to get so many benefits from this war that the U.S. is, U.S. is undergoing here in Iraq. Heck, on March the 31st, our guys hadn't even taken Baghdad yet. They were still dying on their way to Baghdad. And this guy's taking victory laps in, in Israel, because, because, He said, yeah, we're going to have Iraqi oil by the end of 2003. He said, we're going to be swimming in oil. And he said, you know, our economy is going to be doing so much better and, you know, making all these promises. And although he did say the Haifa pipeline, Plan B had to be implemented, but they did get Iraqi oil by the end of 2003. Wait, hold that thought. One more moment.

We're not quite there yet. I promise we're going to pick up where we left off, but I still want to knock out a couple more of these notes for people because it's so important that people have confidence in what they're hearing, too, because they might be hearing, you know, they heard war for Israel and they heard war for oil. But this is probably the first time they're hearing, oh, war for Israel, huh? So Steve Kahl, who is a very prominent and official and established journalist up there in establishment land who's written massive books about, for example, Pakistani intelligence. He wrote Ghost Wars about Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan in the 80s, and he wrote this book on Exxon. And I didn't realize this because I have that book on the shelf, but I never have gotten to it yet. I'd like to someday. But you say, you talk to him for that book. And he wrote a whole chapter or a whole section on this in his Exxon book.

Is that right? I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. Steve Call is, as you said, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author, worked for the Washington Post. He was the dean of journalism at Columbia until recently. I'm not sure if he's still there in that job or not. But anyway, Steve, I got a call saying, Gary, you by Phil Carroll, who was the guy from Shell that I worked with in Baghdad. And he recommended that I talked to Steve Cole. So Steve showed up at my house in September 2008. I was back from Iraq for just a couple of weeks. And we sat in the kitchen here.

And he asked me one of the best questions that, and I talked to probably several hundred reporters in Baghdad over the years. But Steve asked me the best question that any reporter could ever ask. He said, Gary, I know you went into Baghdad early on. He said, tell me, was there some unusual event or forget the word he used? but something unusual there in the first couple months that you remember from your time in Baghdad. And I said, no, I can't think of anything. I said, we were working our tails off, but I can't think. He said, come on, there's got to be something unusual, something different that happened. And I said, yeah, I said, the Haifa pipeline. And he said, what the hell is the Haifa pipeline?

And I smiled at him. I said, those were my words exactly when I was told by Mike McAll. calling from the Pentagon that he needed to know the status of the Haifa Pipeline. It was people at the top, the civilians at the Pentagon that needed to know the answer to that question. And so I told Steve, I said, look, Steve, I said, let me tell you what it was. And I said, look, I said, when I left Exxon Mobil, I said, my understanding of what drove decisions in our government. And I said, I was very, very naive. And I said, after working for the government for the last five or six years,

I'm still very naive, but this is what I know. And so I told him that Mike had called out and asked about this pipeline. And it was a high priority. And I walked him through that story. And so Steve asked me some other questions. And then he wrote the book on ExxonMobil. And I think it's chapter 11 in the book. If you go and look at the book, it says the Haifa pipeline.

And in there, he talks about everything I told him. And then he says that he talked to Makowski to find out what his, get his comments on it. And the only thing McCowski says in the book is that it wasn't any senior person at the Pentagon. It was just the Israelis that were interested in it. And so my question is, what's a junior analyst at the Pentagon doing, talking, directly to the Israelis unless he perceives them to be his boss, you know, and that's what I put in the book. Why is this guy talking directly with the Israelis? He should have been going through at least two or three other people above him before in responding to them and not taking his orders

directly from Israelis. And then presumably he followed up as well and verified all the things that you told him and found other sources and everything else, too, for his book, right? Steve, yeah, Steve did. Yeah, well, that's a, it, it, the book, yeah, he, he, he, if you read chapter 11, it talks about the hypha pipeline. And, yeah, he talked to me, talked to, I don't know who else he talked to, but he, he felt like that was important enough that he dedicated a chapter to, to, to that pipeline. And look, I mean, who knows what is in the guy's mind, but it's a fair speculation that

he might think twice about doing something like that. and maybe that would be picking a fight with people he don't want to pick a fight with about a thing that, you know, I don't know, he could let slide and not bring up if nobody else knows about it anyway and he decided that he wanted to so that's presumably courageous

on his part, I would think, for a guy of his station, you know? Maybe he never thought twice about it because he don't give a damn because he's just a journalist, in which case, that's great too. But, you know, I like that he would go for it. And of course it's true.

It's an important part of history. And then, so here's where we left off is where we pick back up again, is three months into the war, then finance minister and fellow member of the Lekud party with the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, although his sort of political rival inside the Lekud, he goes to London and he gives a speech to who now? to the London financial groups, investors, probably in the city of London, I would guess, the banks and the financial folks in London. And then he's trying to sell the fact that he needs investment dollars of at least one or two billion dollars to go through and not only, He maintained this pipeline, but to expand it to a million barrels a day capacity or more. And in fact, as part of his marketing, he said, and this is no pipe dream, is what he was telling these investors. And that was reported in several places, but certainly I read it in Herat's, and that's what I use for my source document in the book.

Okay. Now, I'm sorry. Please continue telling your story about now you're there in Iraq in the summer of 2003. And in a sense, you are, as Mike Morel might put it, an unwitting agent of the Israelis and their neoconservative fifth column in the United States, or they're at least trying to suborn you to their plans. and it's a fun, complicated story and of course involving Syria in numerous ways and so I guess as you already kind of stipulated first of all it was just kind of old and run down but secondly

the people we were even fighting for said no we'll keep blowing up pipelines if you try to build one to Haifa that's never going to happen never mind the Sunni insurgency in the West where the pipeline would have to be but even the Shiite forces, the United Iraqi Alliance, I guess, the government that America was installing in power, so we'll never let you do this. And so then what happened?

Oh, wait, when was that? Am I skipping ahead too far? Go ahead. No, that's probably right. That happened in, I think it was a third week of July of 2003 when I got a call from from Thammer Godbun and said, Gary, we've got a serious problem. I said, what do you mean we got a series? He says, well, two pipelines supplying the Baghdad refinery were blowing up yesterday. There were two different locations in Baghdad. And all of a sudden, within 24, 48 hours, we had gas lines in Baghdad in 110 degree heat. Gas lines were one, two,

three miles long. And it became the number one issue with the U.S. forces, because it was, the population was becoming very unstable, you know, at that point, as anyone that's gone through the gas lines of the 1970s will tell you, sitting in a gas line for two or three hours before you fill up your tank, your car can be irritating and you start taking out on people. Especially in the desert in the summer. Yeah, you're right. It was truly, it was hot that summer. It was very hot out there. And so it was making life miserable for the U.S. forces. There were attacks on the U.S. military because people were just taking it out

on them. And, you know, I tell the story in the one book where the poor 101st up in Mosul, you know, they were trying to maintain the peace around a gas station. in town, and one of the guys got dismounted from his vehicle and went over to help sort out some problems, and someone came up behind him, put a pistol between his blackjackjack and his helmet and blew his brains out. And, you know, so Petraeus was the commander of the 101st up there, and he was trying to figure out how I could get more gasoline and diesel into the population to try to keep things under control. And I can remember he, he, he wrote me, he sent me an email one night, and he said, Gary, I need your permission to cut a deal

between the governor up here and the Syrians. And I wrote him back, and I said, General, I said, if I gave you that permission, the Makowski, the neocons back at the Pentagon would have me fired within 24 hours. I'd be on a plane back out of here. And he said, well, he said, my soldiers are dying because of this lack of fuel. And I wrote him back and I said, hey, we learned in our plea year at West Point that the commander has inherent authority to do what he needs to do to protect his troops. I said, you've got more authority than I could get you. And he said, I got it.

And I didn't hear from him. And then two weeks later, I get, I was walking through the hallway and this guy came up to me And he said, Gary, he said, he said the governor of Nineveh province has signed a contract with the Syrians to send them crude oil in exchange for gasoline and diesel up there. He said, you need to stop that. And I said, I knew exactly what happened. Well, I wasn't sure, but I suspected I knew what happened. And I said, I have no authority over governors. So I walked away from the guy.

and then I got a call from Mikowski that night saying, did you give permission for this to happen? I said, no, I knew that if I did, you'd fire my, you'd have my butt fired within 24 hours. And he didn't say anything. And then he said, did Petraeus? And I said, I don't know who gave permission. And I really have no desire to find out where, but I said,

I said, why. He said, well, if we find out it was Petraeus, he's going to be one sorry general. And then he hung up on me. and he refused to even listen to the fact that U.S. soldiers were dying. All he was interested in the neocon agenda of the next war was supposed to be with Syria. They didn't want us trading crude oil for gasoline with Syria. They wanted the military in a fight with Syria.

And so that was what we were faced with that summer. But anyway, we eventually got things calm down. We were able to get things going. But the, can I go to plan B yet? Scott. The floor is yours, sir. Okay, plan B, when when the, they couldn't open the pipeline to Haifa, the Chalaby and his people had to come up with Plan B because he was getting a lot of pressure from his neocon buddies back in the States to get oil to Israel. And so he, in September, Remmer, had assigned Chalaby to be the, into the senior position, kind of like a senior Iraqi position out of his governing council. And one of the first things he did was to ensure that a guy by the name of Ibrahim Bar al-Lulam, was appointed to the oil minister position. And so he did that. And one of the first things that Ibrahim Bar Al-Lamuom did was he called in the guy who was the director of the state oil marketing organization, the guys that sold crude oil, a guy my name of Mohammed al-Jabori. And he told Muhammad, he said, you need to start, or Chalabi called Mohammed in and said, you need to start selling your oil to Glencore.

Well, Glencore is the new Mark Rich company that came into existence in 1995. And we had agreed that there would be, we being Bremer, Phil Carroll and myself, had agreed that there would be no oil sold to traders to brokers like Glencore. Wait, let me stop you right there just on a point of confusion there about because you mentioned Glenncore earlier as the company. that Rich had to sell out two back in 95. So then he later took control of it, or what happened with that? No, no, he, hey, Mark Rich went away. The financial group in London, led by the Rothschilds, bought out Mark Rich. So it wasn't Rich anymore, but I guess Chalaby was still close to him, though anyway, huh?

I mean, not Chalbby, Libby. I get those two confused. Well, I don't know whether Libby was still involved. with Glencore or not at that point, but I would get, well, at that point, Glencourt, they used a lot of the same employees. They just changed out the, the leadership. And so they were still trying to get oil to, and to this day, they, they deliver a lot of oil to Israel. And so the Chalabee and the Neacons knew that if they could get Iraqi oil to Glencore, it would be delivered to Israel. And so the Chaliby told Muhammad al-Jabur, you need to start selling to

Glencore. And he refused because he, Muhammad agreed with Phil and myself and Remmer's order that selling to traders like that only encourages corruption. And he didn't want to be part of that. So Chalabee had Barlalum, the oil minister, fire him, and they brought in a new director that would start selling to Glencourt. And so in October 2003, Glencourt started picking up oil at the port in Chehon, Turkey, that they could deliver to Israel. And it was after that, we started getting the pipelines delivering oil to Chaihan. the Port of Chehan in the North kept being attacked. Gee, it seemed like every week they would attack them.

That pipeline could deliver up to 700,000 barrels a day to the Port of Chehan. But in late 2003, 2004, they were lucky to average a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. And so, and they kept attacking that. Well, that was in 2004, 2005, the neocons got back in action. What they did was, and Mikowski got was involved in that. And just so I understand, the key to this is the oil was safe to go because it was in Iraqi Kurdistan protected by the Barzani gang or the Talibani gang and therefore able to go from there straight through Turkey and where the Iraqi Shia or Sunnis couldn't. get at it to blow it up. Is that basically right? Well, that, that oil flowed in start until 2013, Scott. I'm talking about 2003. In 2013, they're just going down to Kuwait, to the Gulf?

Well, in 2003, there was oil that flowed down to the Gulf, to the Gulf, but the way Israel got theirs was, it was, it went through the northern pipeline through Turkey to the port of Chehon, okay and and what was happening was the Iraqis knew that that was how Israel was getting their oil so they just started attacking all the pipelines in the north oh I see I got you sorry and so but that went on from 2003 until until 2013 and that's when the Kurds started doing their own production and exporting out through that same pipeline and and they were able to to to build a pipeline from Erbil out to the Turkish pipeline. And they were consistently able to deliver half million barrels a day to Glencore and

Trafigura and the Israeli oil trading companies. I see. So that was Plan C. That was Plan C. So Plan B, in other words, they took a more northern route and didn't go straight to Haifa. They just took a long cut through Turkey, but then they're still selling it to Israel anyway. But then that pipeline faced the same problem that the pipeline to Haifa would have is that people kept blowing it up. But I guess they just kept repairing it. And that lasted for years, I guess. And we had no idea back why they kept attacking that pipeline. And in fact, the, the, the, Mikovsky and the Neacons had a special bill passed in

Congress authorizing something like $270 million to put in greater security for the Northern Pipeline. And they actually put in a fenced area. We spent, you know, a lot of money putting in a special secure area to secure that pipeline up there. But they continued to attack it. And it wasn't until 2007, 2008, when Petraeus came out in the political situation, situation was getting so much better that the oil started to flow to Chehon at a much higher rate. But the... And then, but now the Islamic State invaded and conquered all of Western Iraq in 2014. So what happened then? Do you know? Well, that's what, yeah, when they, when the ISIS came through, they took over all that part in, and the northern part in Mosul and down

to Beiji and the northern part of Iraq. They controlled all that, but the Kurds still had their area up in Erbil in that, and they were able to build the pipeline from there over to the Turkish pipeline in 2013, 2014. So at that point, they were the only oil production that was flowing to Chehan. And it was only, it was probably not until about seven or seven, eight years ago that they were able to the Iraqis were able to start back up the production in the north but they were they they couldn't get the pipeline flowing again through through the northern part of Iraq and even today they can't get that that oil flowing so they have to run the oil up to Erbil and they send it out to Chehan and that route in that route but but from 2013 14 all the way up

until about two years ago, there was roughly a half a million barrels a day going out to the traders that would pick it up from Chehan. And then it would go to Israel. And the problem was that the Baghdad government refused to allow the Kurds to export that. And they considered it to be smuggled oil, even Iraq. And so any country that received that as an import, the Iraqis would try to seize the cargoes. And in fact, they were very successful down in Galveston with a cargo that was coming in from Iraqi Kurdistan. And the judge ordered a seizure order for the cargo, but it was still offshore, and the word got to the captain, so he reversed the ship and took it back to Israel and offloaded in Ashkelon. There was another ship that tried to offload in

Canada, and the same thing happened. There was a seizure order up in Canada, and so the ship was able to get it offloaded in other ports after they turned off their transponder. But what I'm saying here is that the Israel was the only country that could accept oil from the Kurds for for several years there because the Baghdad could not execute a seizure order from from Israel and so so all that oil roughly a few hundred thousand barrels a day was going to Israel and so they were they were a wash in real cheap crude oil for several years, and in fact, they had so much oil that they were exporting the oil. They'd take it in to Ashkelon, send it down that pipeline to Eilat in the Red Sea, and export it out of a lot to other customers. And that way it would lose its source of the product

being Iraqi Kurdistan, and Baghdad couldn't execute a seizure order at that point. And so that went on for several years, and the Israeli traders and essentially Israel did very, very well with that because they were getting cheap oil, heavily discounted oil, and all they wanted. and that lasted until 2003, so about 10 years they were able to get this access to this oil. And then unfortunately in 2003,

the Turkey shut down the pipeline because there was a international arbitration squabble between Turkey and Baghdad and Turkey lost the battle, so Turkey just, they shut down the pipeline and there's

still in negotiations right now as to when and how they're going to start back up. All right. Now, you have a short section in the book about the troops that have been left in Syria since the end of the war against the Islamic State, Iraq War III, as I call it, which also took place in eastern Syria until the liberation of Raqa in, what, late 2017, early 2018. So the troops have remained. Trump talked about the oil. Biden kept him there. At least part of their mission was keeping the wheat out of the hands of the regime as well.

But what role do they play in your story here? Yeah. Yeah, Trump decided to keep them there in the eastern oil fields of Syria. In the northeast section of Syria, they've got small fields, But they can produce, they were producing 30,000 barrels a day, which, and the U.S. State Department sent over some people to help them get it up to 40,000 barrels a day. And I think that even today, they can do 40,000 barrels a day. And what was happening to that, our soldiers were put in harm's way to secure that oil there in the oil fields, protect the oil fields. And then they were providing convoy service. There were roughly 200 tanker trucks a day that convoyed from those oil fields over to Iraqi Kurdistan.

And the U.S. forces were supplying that security for that oil. Again, in harm's way. And the oil was being delivered to a refinery in Urbiel, Kurdistan, roughly 40,000 barrels a day, and that's the refinery could handle it. and and so that that oil was was our guys were kept there they were they were they were Russian troops that were out there that were harassing them that could have exploded and people getting getting hurt at any time but we had guys out there and they're so well I'm sure that the the Pentagon's official mission for them was not protecting this oil because the oil

didn't belong to the Kurds. The oil in that part of Syria belongs to Damascus, the government, the officially recognized government of Syria. Okay, so this was smuggled oil that was leaving Syria going to Iraqi Kurdistan. And at the time, when they first started doing it, it was going in there so that Iraqi Kurdistan could export more of their oil out to Chehan that would eventually go to Israel or certainly to Glencourt Trafigure or any of the other oil traders that handled that. So it was to benefit the same people that were benefiting from Iraqi Kurdistan oil, but at higher volumes. The timing was good because the Kurds were losing volumes from their production. And so to get the 40,000 barrels a day in from Syria helped them to increase.

their export volume so that so that they could maintain the higher volumes. But, you know, the point being is we've got, and I think it was something like 900 troops there in eastern Syria in arms way protecting a smuggling operation that had been going on for several years. And so that was the only reason for being there. From what I I could see. From my contacts at the Pentagon, their primary reason was to protect that oil for the Syrian Kurds. So now they called it the land bridge, and they said it was all about preventing Iran from shipping weapons to Hezbollah through there, because somebody turned Iraq over the Shiites. So, and of course, also hunting down and fighting the last of the Islamic

state terrorists there. was their other excuse. But you know what? Your explanation makes a lot more sense, I think. Yeah, because you can get caravans of guns or weapons or anything if you pay off the right people. Well, they can fly planes into Damascus up until last December when America helped al-Qaeda take over. Those troops were there just to protect the oil. And in fact, in fact, I read something where what was the name?

the name of the group, the Russian contractor, Wagner, Wagner, yeah. Wagner was sent in to attack that installation because they wanted to get access to the oil, and apparently we called in the Air Force to wipe out the Wagner group, as they were assembling, massing to attack those oil fields. Apparently, we recognized what was going on and uh and we sent in the air force and and killed them all you know i always wanted to learn more about what happened with that episode um so yeah all right well tell me gary uh are there any other major important points that you want to make about this story before i let you

go here i think it's such an important one i'm so appreciative of your time here well the only thing that i you know when i look back at this and i say it makes me angry because I was so naive, and I would tell you, and I say it in the Chapter 1, I had a retired senior general who wrote me after he read my first book, and he said to me, he said, Gary, and this guy was mentor to people like Dave Petraeus and John Abizaid and several other infantry airborne, some of our best generals in my generation. This guy was their mentor. And he said, Gary, he said, you were naive. during your five months of pre-war planning and your 75 months in Iraq. And he's right, I was naive. And he said, but don't take offense to that comment. He said, I was naive during my entire 38 years on active duty.

And he said, every general officer that I ever worked with was also naive. And I guess my message is that we've got a lot of naive military officers. When I went to West Point, you know, and I graduated, you know, I had this fairy tale belief that I was looking out for the best interests of my country and not for special interest groups like I learned after I learned why we were in Iraq. You know, and I'm convinced today that one of the primary reasons why we fought that war was to help Israel, to help them with their energy security, help them with other security.

It wasn't for American interests. And if you look at the people who have benefited from that oil, the U.S. hasn't benefited a bit. It costs us over $2 trillion out of our treasury, and the only people that have been benefited are the military industrial complex that has got access to that $2 trillion. Yeah.

So the 4,489 kill in action and 33,000 wounded in action, when I think of those guys, when I think of these guys that lied to us back in 2002, 2003 to get us to go into that war. Yeah. And a million excess deaths in Iraq. I don't know exactly how many of those were directly killed by American forces, but it would be in the hundreds of thousands at least. and then many more in the civil war that the American invasion caused

and all the repercussions from that and then later the Islamic State which America also had a role in helping to foster in Syria and all of this stuff it's you know the cost of war project says it's four million overall created there

yeah and for zero benefit from what I could see to America there's zero benefit to us and the whole not just century but the whole millennium all started off on the wrong foot, you know, it sucks, all of it. It's just terrible. I agree, Scott. I agree. And, you know, it just, I mentioned, I think I mentioned in my book,

it was, I was so angry when I started reading these things in 2015 that I couldn't sleep at night. The more I read, the angrier I got, and you can't, I can't sleep when I'm angry. And it eventually started affecting my health. My wife rushed me to the hospital. one Sunday afternoon, I thought we were having, I was having a stroke, but it was just high blood pressure. And I've learned how to control it, but every time I get into these discussions, I feel it just taken off on it. So I better, I better calm down. I'm getting, I'm getting angry again. Yeah. Smoke more pot. That's what Jeff Phillips would say. Well, I've never done that. I don't plan on doing it, but, but, uh, oh,

I take deep breaths. All right, I was just playing. All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time and your expertise on this. I mean, your part of this story is hugely important, and now it's a permanent part of the record. So everybody, the book, is called Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War,

Undue Influence Deceptions, and the Neocon, Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler, published by the Libertarian Institute last year, and it is our fun drive, and so you know what you can do? You can donate to the Institute, and you can get this great book as a kickback. How do you like that? Just go to Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thank you again so much for your time, Gary. Really appreciate you. Thank you, Scott. And I appreciate all you've done. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News, as

Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.