The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Pocast – The Syrian Sunset by Howard Kaplan

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

The Syrian Sunset by Howard Kaplan A sweeping novel of international intrigue about the Syrian Civil War, the failure of the West to save the Syrian people, and how that inaction against the Russian incursion in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to attack Ukraine. In 2012, President Obama declared that if Assad used chemical weapons in Syria, that would cross a red line. A year later, Assad murdered a thousand people in East Damascus with sarin, and the West did not respond. Soon after, the Russians vastly augmented their presence in Syria, built a huge air base to add to their warm water port on the Syrian Mediterranean and from those runways bombed the Free Syrian Army across the breadth of Syria. Based around these true events, THE SYRIAN SUNSET tells the tale of a fictional Syrian Military Intelligence general who wants a better Syria, and the events that led to the death of 500,000 civilians, 5 million people fleeing Syria, another 15 million being displaced internally.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. And now, here's your host, ladies and gentlemen, I'm your host, Chris Voss. Welcome to the Chris Voss Show. We certainly appreciate you guys being a part of the show today. You guys are a part of the show, an integral part of the show,

part of the family, as we like to call it, the family. It's not a multi-level marketing. You don't have to have five people in your downline. It's not one of those things. It's just a family. But the great thing about the family of the Chris Voss Show is we're kind of like dogs. We have unconditional love for you.

So we love you, and you're part of the family. We don't judge you as harshly as your mother-in-law does or your mother for that matter. Anyway, go clean your room. Anyway, guys, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate being here. We have an amazing author on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his extraordinary multi-book authoredom that he's done.

Is authoredom a word or did I just make that up? Well, someone contact Webster or Miriam or whoever the hell does dictionaries nowadays. Remember the old days when we used to have dictionaries? You could hit people with them and it would hurt. And now it's hard to hit people with a webpage. I don't know.

But technically, it gets hit squarely between the eyes. This is the ramble, folks. We make it up every time. I don't know what it's going to be and I don't know where I'm going. Anyway, guys, he is the author of the newest book, The Syrian Sunset. November 22, 2022 came out. Howard Kaplan is on the show today. He's going to be talking about his book. In the meantime, as always, I mentioned the family earlier. Yeah, shame people into joining the family. Don't do that. You can tell them, refer them to youtube.com forward slash Chris

Voss, goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss and LinkedIn forward slash Chris Voss. So we'll be talking with Howard today about his amazing book and his insights that he's put in the book. That's somewhat of a journey through his life and how he lived it. Howard Kaplan is a native of Los Angeles. He's living in Israel and travel extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. At the age of 21, he was sent on a mission into the Soviet Union. This is going to be a great discussion and story, I'm sure, to smuggle a dissonance manuscript on microfilm to London.

Wait, was that the plot of The Russian House? His first trip was a success. On his second trip, he transferred a manuscript to the Dutch ambassador inside his Moscow embassy. A week later, he was arrested and interrogated for two days there and then two days in Moscow before he was expelled from the USSR. So we're going to talk to him about what his thing is and if he likes to visit Russia after this.

Welcome to the show, Howard Horry. You know, over the many years, people have told me Russia changed. You can go back and see the new Russia. I said, I'm not going back. It's not that changed. And I don't trust them. They had me once. They let me go.

I don't care. I'm not taking any risks. So I've not been back. It's best not to tempt fate. I mean, I think the only thing that changed was they changed the name of the KGB to the FSB, I think. Is that correct? I think that's about it. That's about it, really.

So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you, on the interwebages that rotate through the sky, all that information. The best place is HowardKaplanBooks.com. It's pretty easy. And Instagram, KaplanHow, just the how and i answer if people ask questions facebook too you can just look me up and you write me a message i'll answer it there you go so you're the author of a bunch of different books uh kind of uh on this sort of area in the

world israel and other things uh what motivated you to want to write about uh this sort of area in the world, Israel and other things. What motivated you to want to write about this sort of area? I mean, it seems obvious, but it's best to hear it from the authors. On a dare, I was at Berkeley as an undergrad. On a dare, I went to Jerusalem for a year. I'm a junior abroad. I had a kind of wild friend. He was a little bolder than I was. And he said, why should we study for finals? Let's go to the Arab countries. Let's have a look and see what the other side is like.

So I said, OK, I can do that. We went to Cyprus. The American embassy was before 9-11. They were very cooperative. They took our old passports with Israeli stamps in them. They gave us new passports. We flew over to Beirut and we had heard in a youth hostel in Cyprus that there was an American from University of California, Santa Barbara, staying there. I was at Berkeley. So we knocked on his dorm room. I was a student. He was gone for the weekend, but he had a Syrian roommate. And his Syrian roommate said, you're from the same state. Come in with your sleeping bag, stay for the weekend,

and he'll be back on Monday. And that was my first introduction to Arab hospitality. Nice introduction. Yes. It comes from the desert culture where in the sand and the tough times when anybody happened near

your I want to make sure this is closed. Anybody happen near your tent? You were welcomed in. So the Syrian said to us, which I didn't know, is Damascus in Syria is only 50 miles away. You can take a shared taxi from Beirut and they'll give you a visa at the border. So we had the weekend free. Kerry wasn't back yet.

So we went to Damascus and that's how it started. This is my second novel of Syria. The first one was belatedly made into a motion picture, but I had a real love for an interest in the country. People think of Syria maybe as desert. But it's actually the oldest inhabited continuously city on the planet. Because it's an oasis. There's an underground river that comes up, branches into seven branches. So it was on the caravan trade route from China to the Mediterranean. And the whole city is surrounded by orch interesting locale to write about and describe the city and the area and the politics.

There you go. There you go. And you've written books about others in that region as well, too. I wrote three novels about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My first book was the Damascus cover, the one that was filmed many years later. And The Syrian Sunset is the new book. So the three Israel-Palestinian novels

are framed on both sides. A lot of the books are sort of historical fiction. I take fictional characters and move them through real history. For example, in The Syrian Sunset, there's a scene that actually happened where President Bashar al-Assad and his supermodel wife,

who's on the cover of Vogue, she's British-Syrian. They invited Nancy Pelosi to this beautiful hotel in eastern Damascus, a redone boutique hotel. And Bashar says to Pelosi, why are you giving me such a hard time about my civilians. When in the Iraq war, you wanted people interrogated offsite by the CIA. I opened my doors to you and my prisons and emptied these people dry. So those are the kinds of backdrops I have to the fictional characters that move through the story.

And it's intertwined with history. So, you know, you're talking about President Obama's decision in 2012, the red line statement he did. And so it's kind of set in that whole setting. Exactly. Obama, well-meaning, said, if there's a red line, if you use chemical weapons, that's crossing a red line, we're going to do something. It's in 2012, exactly a year later in 2013, with the UN chemical inspector sitting in the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus. He launched a huge sarin chemical weapons attack on the rebel stronghold in Damascus, in East Damascus, and killed a thousand people. And the West was confronted now with a decision of what to do. I have a friend who helped me on

some of the research. He's a British member of parliament. And he was very much advocating that the West go in, if not with boots on the ground this time, but with cruise missiles to destroy the barrel bomb capability of the Syrian government. The barrel bombs are fertilizer bombs, fertilizer and diesel that they drop on civilian areas, very much like what Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the FBI building in Oklahoma City. And there was a real belief that if you took out the barrel bomb capability, that you could give the Syrian Free Army a real opportunity against the government because the people were behind the revolution. But the West couldn't master the resolve.

And the reason they couldn't master the resolve, they wanted the British to help come in there at a joint operation. And British Parliament said, we followed, Tony Blair followed Bush into Iraq. It was a total disaster. And we're not going this time. So Obama was kind of stuck on his own. Angela Merkel didn't want it, because she was afraid even more refugees would come out. And John Boehner of the Republicans said, you know, you can't do it without a congressional act of war. And so in a sense, we fought the wrong war in Iraq and achieved next to nothing. And we failed to fight the good fight in Syria, which we could have done without soldiers in order to protect the people.

So I wrote a novel around all these events. I show the UN people in the Sheraton Hotel while the chemical weapons are down. And I had a Zoom a couple of weeks ago because there are a few people around talking about trying to make a film from the new book. And so the UN wants in. And I spoke to the head of the communications department at a Zoom with a few of his people because they want to see the script and the novel. And they wanted to see my sources because I wrote about the UN and they will

not back the film financially, but they'll back it with their name if they feel it's historically accurate. And that's one of the things I'm best at. The one thing I've always loved about these sort of things in history is history is destiny.

The one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and uh you know the you see you know like you talk about the motions of what we do and how that laid the groundwork for uh ukraine and i think i think putin felt it would be emboldened so talk to us about the chief protagonist in the book uh Okay, so the main character is a Syrian general who has risen to be the head of military intelligence

by doing some awful things through his life. And some of the reviewers have said, you know, initially they didn't warm to him too much because, you know, he got to where he was, but he's also at the level where he can try to do something. So he teams both with Israeli and CIA agents

and a Russian oligarch to try to do something that will help the Syrian people. And what I wanted to do, although it didn't, it wasn't so conscious, but it kind of came out that way. A lot of the book is funny. The oligarch in particular is, who lives in Monaco when he's not in Moscow, is very funny because I have some friends in Moscow through, you know, the internet, not through going there. And they explained to me one of the big things going on is they're knocking down all the old Soviet movie houses and building entertainment centers.

Ice rinks, beauty salons, movie houses, video games. So I created a character who, his job is to build these big entertainment centers. So he's an oligarch he's very wealthy but he loves movies and he particularly loves tom hanks because in the movie castaway if you remember it begins with tom hanks working at fedex in moscow and the plane that goes down that lands him on that deserted island is a FedEx plane. So this oligarch says, I don't believe that the great Tom Hanks would work for FedEx.

I believe he would save Private Ryan, but he would not work for FedEx. It's kind of a running joke. At the end of the movie, the oligarch says, when they make a movie of this novel, but he would not work for FedEx. It was kind of a running joke. At the end of the movie, the oligarch says, when they make a movie of this novel, I want Tom Hanks to play me. So now we're trying to get to Tom Hanks to ask him if he will participate in a future film, which is not yet arranged, but it's in the beginning steps. So I think it's funny.

And you know, he's the kind of guy who can do whatever he wants. If he feels like doing it, he'll do it. That is very true. I mean, I want, if when they do a movie on my life,

I want Tom Hanks to play me. Well, if I meet him, I'll tell him. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

He's like, tell him, tell him that it's like, it's like Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam, and he can do the Christmas show. Whatever. Shut up, Chris. Anyway, so now does the protagonist in your book, this particular book,

is it a carryover from any of the books or any of them a series? Not the main character, who is the Syrian general. Though he is the main character, there's a minor character who's the deputy director of operations for the Mossad. His name is Shai. And he's been in all the three previous Israel-Palestinian novels. He's kind of an older guy. Some women have wrote me that they're in love with him. You know, he's overweight, trying to get his weight down. I have the same. You know, he has trouble walking. And the oligarch takes him to St. Petersburg to a real meeting,

which was the G2 meeting where Putin and Obama met in 2013. So they go to the Gulf of Finland. And the oligarchs worried that if they go swimming in the Gulf, that the Israeli will drown. And the Israeli goes running in and jumps in the water, because he hasn't told anybody in the middle of the night when he can't sleep in Jerusalem, they open the public pool for him to do laps, because he hasn't told anybody in the middle of the night when he can't sleep in Jerusalem, they open the public pool for him to do laps because he has a lot of clout. And it's funny, you know, the oligarch wants to drown him because, so that's what I tried to do.

These kind of, because there's barbarity in the novel, I did research on the main prison, which is out in the desert. It's interesting because it's right in the valley below this enormous historical monastery. That's a pilgrimage site for Christians all over. It's called Sednaya Monastery and Sednaya Prison. And in the foothills below this prison, excuse me, below this monastery, which has been there for hundreds of years, and they come from all over the Middle East and all over the West to visit, below it is this god-awful prison where they take meat trucks out every night to bury the people who died that day. and nobody's ever been able

to get in it to see it no new in visitors but there are people who have survived and gotten out and they've given testimony and did drawings and recreations and with the wonder of the

internet I'm able to get a hold of all those things that is all these things are really exactly as they exist there you go there you go well it's really interesting to talk about this in the historical context of it um i mean a lot of your books uh playing that same sort of genre uh you of course can't tell us the middle part of the end because that would uh that kind of blows novels from what we understand well i can give you a kind of a moral dilemma that and maybe you'll sort of tell me what you think okay part of the argument when they decided not to go in to take out the barrel bombs is is Obama and Putin, and this is actually factual, made a deal that if Obama wouldn't go in,

Putin would get Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, to get rid of all his sarin, all his chemical weapons. And that happened. So the question the novel asks in places, and the question I'll ask you is, does it matter how you die? Meaning if you get rid of the sarin, but you leave all the barrel bombs for him to bomb neighborhoods and kill

civilians, have you achieved anything? That's a question that's asked. I can tell you what i think what do you think i think you haven't changed much i have a character who says the israeli spy asked this neurologist do people care how they die and the neurologist i don't remember who gave this to me some physician he said and it, he said, people care how they die up until the moment they're dead. And then they don't care about anything. And I suppose what I think is if you

remove the horror of chemical weapons, but you kill those same people with fertilizer bombs and incinerate them. You haven't really achieved much. That's what happened in Syria. They left Assad in power and the West got rid of the chemical weapons. I mean, they didn't get rid of all of them. Of course, he kept some behind and used them later. So there is a great despair about a lost opportunity. And, you know, you mentioned Putin, and let's talk about that because it's important and important to the novel. When they made this deal, Putin had a big naval base already on the coast of Syria. So he turned around,

and without any pressure from the West now, the West having backed down, which is everybody, that's Merkel, the British, and Obama, and Boehner. So it's a bi-political thing. It wasn't like the Republicans wanted to do something good and the Democrats didn't. Obama wanted to do something good and everybody wouldn't let him do it. And he didn't have the courage to go in and do it on his own, which is too bad. And that's the kind of thing about Obama. I'm a Democrat, so I'll say that. that, you know, he wrestles with all these great ideas, but in the end, he wants consensus. He wants support. I think he wants to be loved. And instead of just saying, the hell with all of you, this is a moral imperative to save these civilians.

And I don't care that Bush messed up in Iraq. I'm going to do the right thing. But he didn't. Yeah. And you have to have that Bush messed up in Iraq. I'm going to do the right thing. But he didn't. Yeah. And you have to have that support to go into a war. Anytime we've ever gone into war, you know, we have a coalition of countries and leaders that are backing us. And then one of the other issues he had was he had an American public that was sick of the Iraq and Afghanistan war and the draining money of it and the dread of it. No, you're absolutely right.

And so he had that pressure on the bodies. That's where I'm sort of back to the tragedy is we fought the wrong war in Iraq and maybe in Afghanistan too. Instead of fighting a more surgical war in Syria. So Putin, what ended up happening is Putin built big airfields and military bases adjacent to his naval base in Latakia in Syria, brought in his heavy bombers

and then said, okay, I'm going to bomb ISIS. And he bombed ISIS a little bit, but he mostly bombed the Syrian Free Army to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. And we let it happen. So my characters are faced with some dilemmas. I can't tell you how they solve them or resolve them or what they do. But basically, the Israelis and the general and the general son

there's a father-son thing in here i have a son who's 29 and i used there's a the general has a son who he's insinuated in the chemical weapons industry in syria to be able to utilize that position. And so a lot of the father-son things, for example, they're out hiking when the kid's young and he says, Dad, I found you a great discovery, a rattlesnake hole. And that actually was sent to me by my seven-year-old son in New Mexico. Oh, wow. We were out hiking with friends.

So I steal liberally from myself. Oh, there you go. But we let Putin run wild in Syria. And if you're Putin and you see the whole West didn't stand up and you want to go into Ukraine, what do you think? You think it's going to be another cakewalk? It turned out not to be. And the West, maybe it was a little

slow, but they have stepped up real support for Zelensky in the Ukraine. But Putin probably believed he had a cakewalk in Syria. He probably had the same thing in Ukraine. So I think that if we would have

stopped Putin in Syria, and this is what a lot of the novel is about, he might have had second thoughts about going into Ukraine. We can't know for sure. It's not apples for apples, but it's a

fair argument. Definitely a fair argument. Anything else we want to tease out on the book? No, the only thing I could tell you is maybe about the other Syrian novel, the Damascus cover. Okay. It's quite a cute story. My first book was published when I was in my 20s.

You can notice that I once had a red beard, so I'm not so near my 20s anymore. And four decades later, a director wanted to do a Middle East film. He went to a friend of his, said, do you know any good books? She was an acquaintance of mine, not a close friend. And she said, let me get the Damascus cover from the shelf. She pulled down the book. It took 10 years to get the financing. Fortunately, my father lived to 103 lucidly. So I seem to be still around. And finally, they got money. And the way Hollywood

works is if you can get the money, you can get the actors. And they got Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Sir John Hurt, the famous British actor from Elephant Man, 1984. Oh, yeah. To play the role. He played a role in the John le Carré novel with Gary Oldman, Tinker, Taylor, Soldiers. Oh, yeah. Gary Oldman. He's so great. Yes, he's an amazing actor. There's a show on Apple TV, Slow Horses, he's in that where he's just fabulous.

But the role of the head of Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, was similar to the role of the head of British intelligence. So Hertz said, I know how to do this. I'll be in your film. And he plays the head of the Mossad. So 40 years later, I got two well-known actors

to star in this old book, which has had a bit of a resurgence because the film's around. It's on Tubi, actually, at the moment. It's a free streaming network. That's resurgence because the film's around. It's on Tubi actually at the moment. It's a free streaming network. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Well, hopefully the same happens with this book.

I hope it doesn't take 10 years that I really get out. I may have no beard left. I'll be dribbling into it by the time that happens. There you go. There's lots of different ways. We had one of the Baldwin brothers on with a project that they're trying to do and find financing for. And they're doing a thing where they're using NFTs and comic books and

online sales to help fund the book, the movie. And it's a, it's pretty kind of interesting what they're trying to do. It's a, you know, everyone's trying to find different ways. You know,

there's now there's, you know, Amazon and Netflix and all these people that are doing uh books yeah they're doing tv yeah they're doing tv movies and hollywood actors you know will do tv movies yeah uh apple tv and and other things it's just it's become great because it just it i don't know if it's democratized movies but it's definitely made it so there's so many different outlets where there isn't so much control over one body or power. Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

Definitely, definitely. Anything more we want to tease out of the book before we go? No, other than, you know, the reviews have been very good. It's a 4.7 out of 5 on Amazon. One person gave it a 1. It used to be 4.8. There's always that one person. So you never know, you know.

Sometimes it's political. You might get a Bashar al-Assad supporter. I've seen those things happen. Yeah. No review, you know, just a 1. And, you know, there's a Kindle. There's a paperback. And, you know, we're off in the sunset with this.

You know, the title came to me pretty easily. I just felt the Syrian country was setting. You know, nobody helped them. And now they've had an earthquake, you know, and somebody asked me in an interview, what do I think about the earthquake? And I said, it's just, it's like what happens in the real world. It's misery upon misery. People who are enduring misery often just have to endure more. It's a shame. It's a darn shame. That's what I think of it.

But I'm not in the position to change the world except in my own little own backyard. So Howard, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate you being here today and sharing all this with us. Give us your.com so we can find you on the internet, please. Howard Kaplan Books. You probably have my name up somewhere. K-A-P-L-A-N Books.com. Same thing on Facebook, just Howard Kaplan.

And on Instagram, it's Kaplan Howe just the first three letters of my name and as I said earlier I'm happy to chat with anybody if they have questions or want to tell me they love the book I don't mind there you go so thank you for coming on the show Howard

thank you for having me it's a new world you can do an interview from your chair. Isn't it great? It's awesome, Sauce. It's just good how you used to have to fly around. I know. I've actually had people say, can we come there and film? And I'm like, no, it's my house. You can

just come on the thing. Most people that consume the podcast listen to it on audio. It's audio only on iTunes, where you can subscribe. There's the plugs. Goodreads.com for us, Chris Voss folks. YouTube.com for us, Chris Voss, LinkedIn, and all those great places. Thanks for tuning in,

everyone. We certainly appreciate you being here. As always, be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you next time. That should have us out.