The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East by Daniel Levin

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East by Daniel Levin ​“Truly thrilling. Daniel Levin brilliantly conveys both the menace and the evil of Middle Eastern intrigue, and some victories of human kindness over cruelty and despair.” —Daniel Kahneman, New York Times bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow “In laying bare the raw human toll of the ferocious and cruel Syrian conflict, Proof of Life asks the reader to make a choice between cynicism and compassion.” —Ayaan Hirsi Ali, New York Times bestselling author of Infidel Daniel Levin was in his New York office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a miss­ing person in Syria over twenty tense days. Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotia­tor, chases leads throughout the Middle East, meeting with powerful sheikhs, drug lords, and sex traffickers in his pursuit of the truth. In Proof of Life, Levin dives deep into the shadows—an underground industry of war where everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. He offers a fasci­nating study of how people use leverage to get what they want from one another and of a place where no one does a favor without wanting something in return, whether it’s immediately or years down the road. A fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir, Proof of Life is a cinematic must-read by an author with access to a world that usually remains hidden.

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. 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 hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to further show to your friends neighbors relatives tell them to sign up they can go go to the iTunes or a million different places that were syndicated

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He is the author of the newest book that's come out, May 18, 2021, Proof of Life. 20 Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East. His name is Daniel Levin. And it's going to be interesting to talk to him today because this is a quite suspenseful story to my understanding so we'll get into that and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature is a top of the range desktop transportable dac and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound eradicate noise distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com he is the son of a diplomat he spent his early years in the middle east and in af Africa and then trained as a lawyer.

Currently is a board member of the Lichtenstein Foundation for the State Governance. He has, for the past 20 years, worked with governments and development institutions worldwide. He focuses on economic development and political reform through financial literacy, political inclusion, and constitutional initiatives. He is also engaged in track three diplomacy and mediation efforts in war zones. His first book, Nothing But a Circus, Misadventures Among the Powerful, was published in Germany, Japan, Russia, and the UK. Proof of Life is his first book to be published in the United States. He lives outside New York City. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Daniel? I'm doing well, Chris. Thanks for having me. How are you? There you go. Thank you. And it's an honor to have you. Congratulations on the new book.

That's quite the feat always to get a book out. So congratulations on that. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. So I'm not on social media, but I have a website, daniellevenauthor.com. You can find plenty about the book, all links to anywhere you can buy it from Amazon to all the indie bookstores. And you can obviously get the book anywhere books are sold. So shouldn't be too hard to find it. There you go. Now this is called a fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir. What motivated you to want to write this book? The book, this is a book that took place in 2014 and i ended

up running into some victims of the syrian war in particular two girls one of them and you'll see this at the end of the book made me promise to tell her story it was the main reason i decided to tell it that's powerful that's powerful it's a hell of a war it's just astounding it's still going on but you look at afghanistan too and how no one, I don't see any reporting on that war. So give us an overarching view of the book and what it entails for the people looking to buy books out there. Okay. I was asked in 2014 by an acquaintance to meet him in Paris. And he opened up his heart to me, told me that the son of one of his best friends had gone missing in Syria.

And the reason he approached me was that I had spent a few years in Syria through the foundation and had been approached by families and governments with requests to find missing information hostages because our work in the region, we were really mediating between the warring sides and working with some young people trying to rebuild Syria for the killing stop. This is early in the war where people thought this war might end, actually. And so we had a pretty extensive network of relationships in the region. So in some instances, we were able to help get information on missing people, even negotiate the terms of a release. Whereas by the time this person approached me in 2014, the war was really tipping into an extremely ugly place. It was before the Russian intervention in 2014, which tipped the war entirely in the favor of the regime.

But at that point, it was just pure slaughter, and it was very hard to help anybody. And I was not inclined to help this person, but he appealed to my compassion before I really had a chance to say no. So I found myself following that request for 20 days, hunting through the Middle East, just trying to find information on this person. And what stuck out on you in that compassion? What was the trigger for you, if you don't mind me asking? It's real hard when you talk about a war theoretically

or read about it in the newspaper, watch a documentary. Even when you read horrifying stories, we're just wired to compartmentalize. It would break our heart otherwise it's if you are a pediatric oncologist if you if you take that stuff home you're just going to have a broken heart you have to figure out a way to do that and so the same thing is true here if you're approached with the request to find a missing person and the conditions are such that you think you can help and the whole bunch of conditions we can get into later one of

the most important thing is not to spend too much time with the family because it becomes emotionally extremely draining. They go through hell and they suffer. And so what had happened here is I spent a whole evening with this person watching him suffer and realize how it affected him. And it just is very hard to walk away when you're locked in that way. It's a different thing if you get a request or request through a person and you you don't know the person who's asking you, and you're not having a direct conversation, you have a chance to say, I don't think so. I just don't think I can help here, or this may just be too hard. Whereas in this case, I was really drawn in before I even had a chance to reconsider. That's wild. Now, is this kind of a Liam Neeson sort of thing, where you have a particular set of skills that's no I will find

you no none of that there's a reason those things are all fiction same with Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher and all that no this is real different first of all your chance of being successful in just even getting specks of information let alone proof of life let alone negotiating release are extremely slim it very much depends on who has the person. People who have been taken by groups that are close with the regime and militias with the regime have a really slim chance because the regime can never admit that they have a person because if something happens to them, then they're held responsible. And then you have groups all over the country, from terror groups to secular opposition to the regime who often want ransom and we're precluded

from negotiating ransom payments and paying ransom payments. So the area, sort of the sliver in which you can be successful, even just get proof of life and then figure out a way to get a person out. In other words, offering something that's not a ransom payment, some kind of a favor, a medical treatment for someone's mother abroad, things like that, or medicine that they otherwise can't get. Something very small like that, those chances are really slim. So unlike any Liam Neeson movie or Matt Damon movie, your chances of even having even tiny success

is really slim. But sometimes even when you have to deliver bad news for the families, it's a sense of closure that would otherwise not have. Despite having this high failure rate, sometimes you just have to do it. That's sobering when you really think about it. The one thing I know a lot of people suffer from is if they don't get to see or they don't know whether someone's alive or dead, it can be just this open wound for decades until they get some sort of confirmation. So it's sobering to think

that sometimes they're just going to get closure and know that at least with the results of what happened with their loved one, which is astounding to think about. Yeah, everyone reacts differently. I know families who almost beg you to tell them that their son has died just so they have some closure and others don't want to pick up the phone when you call them because they don't want to hear bad news because they live for that moment of hope every day. And you never judge anybody. People react very differently, but everyone reacts with just so much heartache and so heart pain that it's really, it's very hard to go through mainly because of dealing with the families. Wow. So you compress, this is 20 days where you're racing against time in a thriller sort of setting, where you're negotiating with all these people. Give us some different insight into what that

was like or different things that you can tease out for the story for readers to want to go grab the book. Yeah. So the reason I wrote this also is because it does take place over 20 days. Usually these kinds of situations take much longer. In some cases, I've been involved with cases that are still ongoing that take years. These are often individuals where the names haven't even been made public, because once you make the name public of a hostage, the people who have him think that he's worth a lot more than he actually is, and so ransom demands go up. So depending, in almost all cases, it's not your friend to make something public, because the more value a group thinks their hostage has, the less likely they are to release him for something that you might

be in a position to offer. That's one of the filters that if I know that there has been a whole lot of publicity around something, I very rarely get involved because I don't think I can help. In this particular case, I didn't know it would take only 20 days. It just, that's how the story ensued. What happened was after this request, I went back to New York. I actually spoke, I called a friend of mine who's in the Saudi, who is extremely well-connected in the Middle East, a very dear friend I've known for many years. There's no commercial aspect to our relationship. If he can help me, he does. If he can't help me, he tells me he can't. He's straight up, a really great person that way, honest. And I called

him up and said, listen, I got this request for this guy. Have you ever heard of him? And he said, no, never heard, but let me see what I can find out. And then he called me back and said, listen, I may have a lead, but you're going to have to come to the Middle East. So if you want to do this, come to Istanbul, meet me in Turkey, in Istanbul. And it may be that night that you come, I'm going to put you on a plane to Beirut. And you're going to meet a head of a militia based in Beirut, who's going to direct you to the group that has this missing person. I don't know yet if you're going to be able to do it. I don't know if he's going to talk to you. But that's the only way we're going to get it. I can't get that information for you. So I flew to Istanbul, met him there. And

that night, a couple, we had dinner together a couple of hours later, in the middle of the night, I was in a flight to Beirut, actually together with someone that this warlord had sent to fly with me to figure out whether he'd even want to talk to me. If the answer had been negative, he never would have taken me to him. And so I spent essentially a night or almost a day, a night and half a day in Beirut, with being filtered out and tested by these guys. And they send me to the next person. They say, okay, now this person is going to get you closer to the group that has.

And the problem I had is that the group that had captured this young man at some point was one of the largest drug gangs in Syria. So at that moment, you're really chasing some really unsavory characters. But if you want to know what happened to him, whether he's alive or not, and if he is where he's being held, those are the people you're going to have to start interacting with. And so I'm chasing,

trying to catch up with these guys from Beirut. And then at some point to Georgia and from there to Dubai, until I finally catch up with the individual who can tell me. And then I have to figure out how do I get this guy to actually tell me that because he's not going to do it just because he's a nice guy. Do you ever imagine, it has to cross your mind, that you could end up in a situation, I think it was Daniel Pearl who was beheaded and different press people that have been killed or held hostage themselves by traveling and trying to get a story on something. Have you ever, I imagine that has to be an issue that you have to be a contemplate in your industry. Yeah, I obviously, I'm very careful. I'm not a journalist. Daniel Pearl, James Foley,

Stephen Sotloff, Daniel Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan. He was working for the Wall Street Journal, others in many in Syria, unfortunately. In fact, in 2014, just weeks before the events took place, there were these gruesome beheadings of James Foley and others. And so this was very fresh on my mind. Now, I was very careful in how I traveled. I don't talk in the book about my trip to Syria in that because I was asked not to mention it by the Syrian friend who helped me in Syria. But I'm very careful about getting assurances. I never spend the night in those places. And there's no there's some risk. But the only time where I really surrendered essentially to that kind of risk was the night in Beirut, where I was asked to give over all my cell phones, we had to go through metal detector to make sure I'm not wired

or otherwise have any kind of GPS chip or anything like that. So I'm really going cold or black, if you want to use that term, in that moment for that night. That was definitely something where I had to make a conscious decision. But I knew that because the meeting had been set up by my friend in Istanbul, my Saudi friend, and I trust him 100%, I knew that I assumed I'd be safe. And then the only other time where I felt I was actually taking that kind of risk wasn't in Syria, but actually in Dubai. Once I came face to face with this drug lord because this was a person who was known for his cruelty. And I knew, obviously, I had to trick him into giving me information or in that specific case, almost flatter him into revealing what he knew.

And this is really interesting to me. There's the U.S. law or whatever it is that says we don't negotiate with terrorists. You can't negotiate on behalf of the foreign of the U.S. government. And so it's really surprising to me when you said there's different ways that you do trade and different things. Do you want to expand on some of the different ways that you guys use to grease those wheels to get people released? Yeah, you really can't offer ransom payments. I know that there are certainly instances also of U.S. hostages who have been released with ransom payments. Usually the U.S. is US is a wink wink situation where they allow other governments like the government of Qatar to make those payments. The moment I know that may be

involved, I step away. There was one case where I was asked for help if I had any information. And then actually the same person I mentioned in my book, Khaled Al-Mahri, told me not to touch it because he had heard through the grapevine that there was a ransom payment done behind the back. So I really do walk away from that. It is illegal. And I certainly don't represent the U.S. government. It's a violation of U.S. law. So you have to be very clear whom you're representing, if at all.

I usually don't act as an agent at all. I'm asked to find information. If, in fact, it turns out that you get proof of life and the person is alive and then you move to a next step of negotiations. I don't do that without interfacing with the intelligence community and the government, because you're running into all kinds of minefields there, literally and figuratively. The favors that you can do, you're not giving cash payments. And this is, I discussed this extensively in the book, because some of the sleazy intermediaries were trying to squeeze me for payment. And in fact, one of them threatened me. It's actually an American of Palestinian origin from Dearborn, Michigan,

whom I talked to in Jordan. He said he wanted payment just to lead me to the next stop, to the next individual. And when I said, I can't do that, he said, I'm going to spread a rumor about you that you took $10 million. And I said, well, that's not true. a rumor about you that you took $10 million. And I said, well, that's not true. And he said, that's the price you're going to have to pay unless you pay me. And I had to extricate, I'm not going to give away the spoiler, how I tried to get out of this, but I had to essentially bluff my way out of that to make sure he wouldn't spread that rumor. So it can be devastating, not only because it's an illegal act, but also if there's

ever word on the street that you are offering ransom payments, you can never negotiate ever anything again without a ransom payment, which is why we have that principle that we don't pay ransom is because every time you pay, 10 more people get kidnapped for ransom. Yeah, I get one guy out, you're getting 10 more potentially killed. So when I talk about favors, I'm talking, let's say militia in northern Syria has a hostage or has information on a hostage. And the person you're talking to says, listen, I understand you're not going to give me a million dollars for this hostage. Here's the situation. I have a cousin in Damascus who's in stage three or his wife has stage three breast cancer. The guy's on the U.S. sanctions list because he's considered a butcher. But his wife's innocent and we can't get her out

of the country for medical treatment. Is there some way you can arrange that? And that's the kind of favor that you can arrange just in return for some information where you speak to friends of friends in Beirut, it could be a hospital in Beirut, it could be a hospital in Jordan. We try and arrange for medical treatment for someone in return for that kind of information. So it's a network of favors and counter favors. But I want to mention another thing, because I don't want to create a wrong impression that I'm going there with a goodie bag, and I can hand it out as I please. This only works if you've established your relationship of favors years before that. In other words, you better have people who owe you one for other things that you've done for them years in advance. Otherwise,

you can't succeed. It's a little bit the analogy is if you're a surgeon and you have a patient you're going to operate on, you better stick that infusion before the surgery. If you wait for the surgery, the blood pressure drops, you can't find a vein. It's too late. In other words, you better prepare all that before you need it. And it's the same thing here. So when I'm talking about a network of people who might owe me one, they might be the one doing the favor for the person who's demanding. It might not even be me. And I have to compensate them in different ways at different times. I probably have done it in the past. This is a result of having grown up in that region and having worked in that region now for a long time. I'm just putting that context in there. I don't want to give the impression that I'm the smart guy who walks in there and knows exactly what I can do

for everybody. It usually doesn't work. And then you have to figure out, do I know someone who can help me out here with some kind of a favor and I can help him in a different way, or I have helped him in a different way. So it's a much more opaque kind of network of relationships. So in the book, you talk about the war economy, and it thrives on trade of cash and weapons and different things. Is that why these people are motivated to kidnap people and hold these people if they hold them? Yeah, I think I'm often asked what's different in Syria. Is it just like all the other wars? You mentioned Afghanistan, like Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Congo, Vietnam, you want to go back?

And the answer is, in some ways, wars are similar in the sense that there's always suffering. Most people get wiped out. A few people get rich. And it's always about power. But Syria, for me, is different. And I've been in several war zones, really, in Africa, Middle East. And I've served in the military myself and experienced war myself in the military and combat. So the reason Syria feels so different to me is not just because of

this ridiculous brutality. There are other brutal wars and there are genocides that happen. But Syria feels like it's just been 10 years of burning the place to the ground. And what I witnessed in Syria, even more than in other wars, even though I'm sure there's corruption and war economy everywhere and drug trade everywhere, I've seen in Syria, including in this drug gang trading in an amphetamine called Captagon, which is being mass produced in Syria and sold all over the world, especially in the Gulf and North Africa and Southern Europe, is that the profits that those who benefit, and we're talking a few handful of people here who just benefit astronomically, both within the regime and the opposition groups. Those profits are so enormous that as long as that's the case,

you don't really see this war ending. Look, you look at the regime, they've committed so many war crimes. It's not like he'll really be ever admitted back to polite society he has nowhere to go if he leaves power now he's going to last three seconds they just had a sham election in syria yesterday was re-elected with 95.1 percent of the vote so we're going through those motions but in fact he has really nowhere to go as are others on all sides of this conflict and in that world you have groups like the ones I talk about, a guy called Anas, who's the ringleader who I catch up with, who make the kind of money that they can't go anywhere. And don't only think that it's only the Syrians in Syria who are enriching themselves. If you have a drug trade or a human trade or sex trafficking of little girls taken from villages, sold, 14-year-old girls sold into prostitution and sex slavery all over the Gulf. When that happens, you have cash profits.

You have financial institutions, including Western financial institutions, including blue-chip banks, publicly traded banks, who make astronomical profits, who send their own couriers, who pick up containers full of cash. Each container has $25 million in cash. They count it. They make sure it's not counterfeit. They put it in the vaults and then give 70% or 65% of that in the SWIFT system.

Now they do it increasingly with cryptocurrencies to hide the beneficial owner in the origins. When we talk about war economy, this is not just the drug traders on the ground or the weapons traders or the pimps. This is also the entire economy that benefits from that. And so until you disrupt that and really change it and go after bankers who are involved in it the same way you go after the drug dealers and the murderers, you're not going to change this kind of war. This can go on forever until they run out of people. Is this one of the reasons Russia and Iran are supporting it is for the drug, the drug trade, or is it just they're just being dicks?

Everyone has a different interest. Everyone being dicks is a good assumption for people who support wars. That you can apply across the board, including for us in some of our wars. That's a technical term. Yeah. I think that, I mean, beyond the generality of it, yeah, that's definitely true. Everyone has a slightly different interest. So for the Russians, it's basically a return to the glory days of the Soviet Union. They lost the Cold War in the late 80s, early 90s. They had to retreat. Putin has never forgiven the U.S. for the victory dance that we did, saying, you lost, we won, too bad for you kind of thing.

And probably a mistake of the U.S. to not realize that you're keeping a monster alive there. And what for him, Syria was a return to the Soviet days of presence in the Middle East. He now, because of Syria, has access to a naval port in the Middle East, a Western Syria, in Tartus, Latakia, in that area. These are all Syrian bases, including submarine bases, including nuclear submarine bases. In addition to that, Syrian mercenaries like the Wagner Group have secured rights to oil fields in Western Syria. So it's also always about the money, too. But for Russia, it's really that kind of geopolitical part. The Iranians, completely different issue.

The Iranians, for their leverage, and this they did through their old Quds Force, which is part of the elite force of the Revolutionary Guards. It was led by Qasem Soleimani until he was killed in January 2020. But the strategy continues. They have four satellite countries they control. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, thanks to our help of removing Saddam Hussein, and Yemen with the Houthi militias. For them, Syria is the most important. And the reason it is because controlling syria means they can control a border with israel and see so so southern syria is the northern israeli border and for them that is critical and so that is their particular interest there's no love putin doesn't

like assad probably because assad is really tall putin's really small and he doesn't really like people are much taller than he is. And the Iranians don't like Assad either. For them, the Assad regime, even though they're Shia Muslims, they're an Alawi sect of Shia Muslim, they're a secular nationalistic kind. There's no love lost there.

They actually feel closer to the Sunni Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as an example. So it's not about religious ideology at all, but it's really about that power presence. And then the US, they're catching the US in these years where we're trying to figure out, what do we want? Do we want to be present in the Middle East? Is it really worth it? Shouldn't we focus on China a little bit more? So they're catching US essentially in a moment of weakness, where we're still trying to figure out whether we should be there or not be there. So for every country, it's different other than the general statement that you made

earlier. Yeah, it's quite the thing. I guess they can't shut down the money laundering by the banks. That would probably be a key way to shut this down. I imagine they try, but imagine there's banks somewhere in the world that do business to somebody. You actually could shut it down. You obviously have to enforce it. We've become so accustomed. I'm not trying to rail against banks. That's not the issue. You have more ethical bankers and less ethical bankers. But essentially, we've come to understand that financial institutions are part of polite society. So when bankers cause a collapse of the global economy, as they do in 2008, by selling crappy financial products that they know are crap and they're selling it.

The whole thing, when the music stops, everything collapses with the collapse of Lehman at the time. There are no bankers in the West that are being walked out in handcuffs. You get fines. And these are banks that make billions of dollars of profit. And those profits have become so huge. I'm not trying to sound some populist kind of left-right thing. It's just a reality. In the mid-90s, the largest banks in the world were the Japanese banks. They had the balance sheets of $800 million, $900 million, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.

Now a Western bank can mess something up, insider trading or something else, and pay a fine of $2 billion in a quarter and smile. Because J.P. Morgan Chase just made, just during the pandemic, just an overdraft over a billion dollars in fees. So this is just a smile. So we've become accustomed to banks not really, bankers, I should say, not being prosecuted for these crimes.

And even when banks pay fine, they move on. So unless you start going individually after bankers who have been involved in that there are tons of examples but this is just one aspect of it but you can we have the laws to prosecute it and enforce it but there has to be a willingness to do it the same way you march perps out in handcuffs and you have their little march and with the mug shots the same way you could do the same thing with all the helpers not just the bankers i'm not trying to vilify that profession but yeah until you start to do that's not going to stop yeah i remember there was a lot of stuff that took place with wells fargo just hit after hit there for a while and it's extraordinary it's like no one goes to jail for

anything what are your thoughts on you've written a lot of different articles and things on that what should obama have done if you want to talk about that and what should biden do now with syria should we have gone to war with somehow gone into syria with that? And what should Biden do now with Syria? Should we have gone to war with somehow gone into Syria with Obama? And what should we do now? Do you think? At the time, Obama, he famously in 2012, made that red line statement. We said that if the regime ever moved, let alone used chemical weapons, that would be a red line, and it'd be a huge price to pay. And then of course, the chemical weapons were used. There are some conspiracy theories whether it wasn't the regime. Cy Hersh talks about that in his book. There's no doubt that many parties in Syria have used chemical weapons. And actually,

the president, when he went to vote day before yesterday in their elections in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, he made a point of voting at a place where the regime was alleged to have used chemical weapons. It's like rubbing our face in the suburb of Damascus. What happened was there was no reaction under President Obama. John McCain at the time said that red line must have been written in invisible ink because obviously there were no consequences to it. When a year later, obviously the attack did happen exactly a year later in August 13. What the US should have done at the time, I think that the question always is, do we really, are there real consequences to it? And that depends how you go about your foreign policy. Same is true for Biden now,

whether it's Syria, whether it's the Israel-Palestine conflict. What are you really thinking about? Is it our job to just narrowly consider very narrowly American interests, and we should pare down all those foreign adventures and only limit it to where our interests are really threatened. In which case you could easily argue Syria is not a problem. Why is Syria a problem? If anyone wants to worry about the flow of refugees, why don't the Europeans worry about that?

They're the ones being flooded. And you take that approach and you say, we're not touching it. Or do you keep on saying listen we still have an obligation as the world's preeminent superpower even if you consider china now the second superpower as the preeminent superpower the one that emerged from the cold war to make sure that these types of abuses aren't repeated or if they start that they're stopped and if you take that second approach yeah then you have to have a military intervention and you can't bomb a regime out of power. It doesn't work. You need troops on the ground. That hasn't changed. Yes, to some extent, warfare has changed with the

proliferation of drones, but you still need troops on the ground. And if you do not put troops on the ground, Israel just learned that with the Gaza Strip. Yeah, you can bomb the place. But if you really want to change the conditions, you need to go in there with troops. And Israel is not willing to do that. And so that's a question we have to ask. But it's not so much what should Biden do or what should Obama or what should Trump have done? It's really about what is our interest? We need to speak with one voice. What is our interest? The Congress and the president need to decide and obviously the American people. Is it our interest to remain that kind of policeman? Because if we don't, Russians are happy to step into that, and the Chinese are happy to step into that. They don't have our values. If that's our position, we have to maintain that presence.

That's been our position since the end of World War II. Now, if that's different, if we say either that's not affordable, or we're not going to do that without our allies being part of it. The same goes for Iran. What's our interest really with Iran? Are we really threatened or is it just Israel that's threatened? Is Israel really threatened or is there another way to go at that? First, ask the question what our interest is. And then when you answer that and if you say our interest is really to have troops on the ground for ABCDE reason, then go through with it. But the one thing you shouldn't do is what we are doing, which is make these bombastic statements, how you want human rights to be respected,

no matter which country, China or another place, it doesn't really matter. And just leave it with bombastic statements because you look silly. No one really takes it. We just become the country that makes these statements through media and social media. And we use it just for our election purposes, but we don't really actually follow up. That's not healthy. And so basically you have two options. Make a decision what your interest is, and you either really get involved and commit to it, or you don't. But you can't do it. And these wars aren't video games. You don't entirely. So there obviously is a huge price to pay if you do get involved. I've watched the videos where they have the drones that have flown over the cities that have been just bombed out of hell,

I think in the South, where it just flies and it's just rubble. And you just think of people who used to live in these buildings or what used to be buildings and used to be thriving cities and marketplaces and people going about their daily lives. And these cities are just leveled and destroyed

and people have left. You just think about just amazing. But the drug thing does explain why this war keeps on and how they're still able to hold on to power you dedicate the book to two people hopefully i pronounced this correctly reem and samar two young victims of sex trafficking that you follow through the pages do you use pseudonyms for these people and then what happened to those citizens that helped you on your journey is tell you telling your book so to answer the last question of the second to last question i use synonyms for the victims so reem and summer are two young girls i bumped into the younger of the two who's pretty

much exactly the age of my daughter she was in 2014 just a young teenager she was 15 years old at the time and she was being dragged by her hair by a man who just was treating her like a prostitute through one of these bars. And I got into physical altercation with the guy that described in the book. And then her older sister Reem, whom I call Reem in the book for her protection, came up to me to thank me. And in fact, without Reem, I wouldn't have been able to solve my case. I wouldn't have found my way to the main drug dealer who had the information on the missing person. She took a huge personal risk. And she was the one who said, listen, when I asked her what I could do for her, she said, we're just

lost, but do me a favor. If you want to help me tell my story, because we're being told we don't matter. We're nobody. And I want to make sure we do matter. That's to answer your question. So to protect them, I used pseudonyms. I only use pseudonyms for the victims. All the perpetrators and everyone else in the book I mentioned by their full name, they're totally outed. All the drug dealers, all the butchers, all the torturers in the regime, they're outed by their full names with all the information and evidence provided in the footnotes. The victims I protected by that. And in this case, without giving away a spoiler of what happened to the missing person I was looking for, but Reem and Samar, I can tell you, are very much still in my life today. They are two who got out. How they got out is described in the epilogue of the book.

And they are still in my life today and have started a life that I couldn't be more proud. So yeah, you really do connect to them. And to go to your first point earlier, you saw you're talking about aerial views from drones of these cities. I'd been to Aleppo, for example, in the north of Syria many times before the war. And in one of those unbelievable places, a site where there's so much history in Aleppo, history going back 2000 years, history of the Crusades later. All the global cultures going through that town, history of the Crusades later, all the global cultures going through that town, the most beautiful historical heritage sites there,

by the way, same in the east of the country in Raqqa and Palmyra and so on. And then you go into Aleppo now in the war, and you've never seen a place like that. It's rubble doesn't even describe it. And the creatures that survive there, the children that come out of open sewage in the morning, because that's where they're spelled at night, rats the size of dogs. It's a place you can't even, and because I have in my mind impregnated the before and after picture, you just, you can't put to words. And I'm even hearing myself talk to you now. And I'm saying, yeah, for a listener, it's okay. This place just sucks. It was destroyed.

But you can't really put it into words. Imagine where we're living today. And it's not just our houses being gone, just wherever you go, it's as if this giant bomb hit and all you have is a crater with some rubble. And you walk through it and every once in a while you bump into a photograph of a family or a picture that's half torn up. So no words can put into reality the kind of devastation that exists. Wow. That's heartbreaking, man. That is heartbreaking. Yeah. When I watched the drone videos, I was imagining what it must've looked like. And I think I saw a video where they had side-by-sides of what the town used to look like and then what it looked like after being bombed

out. And I just thought of all the people. You have a home like many of us do. You have a place where you have all your pictures and your family things and the things that are important to your life. And then one day it's all gone and wiped and maybe you've lost family members and then you're on a track somewhere as a refugee. And it's just horrifying to think about. What do you hope readers take away from the book and the conflict in Syria? I want readers to really spend just spend a few days reading this book and just understand what it's like. I write in the book that I, for me, felt like my head was being held underwater for 20 days. I want readers to feel that for once.

You come away with hope. You know what? What I really took away when it's all said and done is this feeling of there, but for the grace of God go I, but for the grace of my parents who luckily enough raised me and then I was born in different circumstances and not like one of these unfortunate, maybe it's not bad for us once in a while to have some perspective. And you don't have to go to Syria for that. It can be in our country, in our neighborhoods, but just once in a while to just have a little bit of understanding and empathy for those who don't. Because we talk about these things really like board games or video games, and this suffering is continuing. So you and I are having a conversation

right now, there are kids being beaten to death in Syria as we're chatting. And so it's not like the killing has ended. And it's every killing senseless, every war is senseless and benefits only a few. But you look around Syria and you say, what are you guys even fighting over? This country is done. Ten years ago, Assad said to his people, you either get me or I burn the country to the ground. And in the end, they got both. They got him and he burned the country to the ground. Maybe some perspective on that before we just run our mouths about all these things.

Oh, that's Middle East is hopeless. Who cares? Just lock the door and throw away the key. Maybe just understand it's really there but but for the grace of God, go away. Wow. And the refugees spreading across different places to take them in gave rise to this populist method in government and almost a fascist sort of thing,

where it became racist and attacking these people who are just trying to get to some sort of safety and some sort of place where they can call home or just be able to have a square meal and a roof over their heads, which is what most people I think are going for. Do you see an end to this war anytime soon? Is this going to just go on for decades? Or do you have any anticipation or projection for that? It's not going to end just like that. And obviously it can go on for decades for our lifetimes if we don't end it. But whenever we talk about refugees, then depending, like you make the statement you just did, then you're going to get attacked from people on the right who say

they're changing our culture. We can't allow for that. And then people on the left come and say, we have to show empathy and we shouldn't only care about our culture. And then it becomes, everyone's already tribal. It's just, everyone's just signaling which group they'd like to belong to. That's really not the right way to talk about it because there's truth tribal. It's just everyone's just signaling which group they like to belong to. That's really not the right way to talk about it because there's truth in both points. Of course, if you take two million Syrian refugees into a Western European country, Germans admitted one million in one batch. It's going to change that society. It's going to lead to conflict.

Whenever there's crime coming from any refugee, immediately you're going to have the counter reaction. And the result is going to be you're going to have right wing governments come to power. And then you have some real cynical players like the Turkish president takes the refugees from Syria. Whenever someone in Europe pisses him off, he just releases a few thousand into that country to create a problem in that country. It's affected Hungary, it's affected the Czech Republic, Poland, countries that have really gone through political turmoil as a result. So if you really care, even just because you don't want to take refugees, the only way that stops is if you end the killing in that country.

And that stops if you put pressure on all the outside powers and players who keep that conflict alive. So, yeah, the moment does come and say, let's say at the United Nations Security Council, why do we even have it? If we pass a resolution blacklisting Syrian killers, doesn't matter which side they're on for now, and that resolution gets vetoed by the Russians, right? Or we pass a resolution against discrimination in another country, and that resolution gets vetoed by the Chinese,

or they pass a resolution of the Palestinians in Gaza, and the U.S., and that resolution gets vetoed by the Chinese, or they pass a resolution, or the Palestinians in Gaza and the US vetoes that resolution. If we're going to keep on playing that game, then we got to look in the mirror and say, okay, this is not working. This whole UN thing, we don't have the tools anymore to end this fighting. And if we do care about ending it, even just self-servingly, so the refugee flows stop, we have to start rethinking it differently. We have to start realizing that we have a benefit from that. But as long as there's so much money to be made in these wars, and by the way, the money also extends to those selling weapons into those regions. And those include some publicly traded US companies. And every time you go after that, they say, that company employs 100,000 people, you really want them to be jobless, it gets everything gets

interconnected. So unless you're willing to follow that trail all the way down to the granular level, you're not going to end this. It's just all interconnected. And it's not some great conspiracy theory. It's pretty easy to see how that works. So no weapons, no wars. That's not complicated. And the usual excuse that if we don't sell it, someone else will as well, then we'll go after those who do sell it. So that's the only way to really put some teeth in there. And then don't admit the killers into polite society. We don't have diplomatic relations. They're not allowed to come to New York for the UN General Assembly in September. They're not allowed to send their ambassadors. They don't get invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Stop treating murderers

and thieves as if they belong in polite society and yeah you're willing to start doing that you can affect some changes if you're not willing to do that that's fine and then you just have these wars that can last forever it's just insane man and the arc of history when you study these things it's the citizens of the human beings on the ground like you say there's a few people who profit off of this, and then everyone else has to suffer because of it, which is just an extraordinary sad fact. I remember someone said to me, I think it was Neil Peart from the band Rush. He wrote, when the wall came down in the 80s, 90s, with the Berlin Wall, he said, who's going to pay the price for all those people who suffered? Yeah, it's great the wall came down, but for decades, people were killed, they were murdered,

they lived in this bread lines and everything else. Who gets to be accountable for that? And sadly, these things never get to happen where somebody gets held responsible. Read any history books on any war. Look at the books. There are amazing books on the First World War by Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, or Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Young Infantry Officer. They write about the trench warfare. They suffered themselves in those wars. And literally, you had millions of people in trenches with planes and gas

flying over them, killing them. And people would basically just drop like flies. And essentially, if you wanted to know who won a battle, you'd count who had more people standing afterwards. And life was so cheap. And then obviously the history of the Second World War. Every war you want to look at, life becomes so cheap. Look at the genocide in Rwanda.

Just over a few days, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just hacked to death and butchered. So we've lived with these kinds of... Look, millions of people have died in the Congo in the last 15, 20 years. Millions, okay? Some say 3.6 million, some pay a much higher number. That doesn't even make a little tiny blurb on page 12. You have to have some crazy kind of massacre for that to even get a little blurb somewhere. So human life has always been cheap that way. And I understand that. What frustrates me is double speak. We have all these highfalutin conversations about what we're going to do and all these great conferences to create peace. And then in the end, the killing

just continues. And in fact, if you wanted to kill the killing, there are things you could do. There are things you could do, but you got to do them. So maybe the answer to that is maybe we talk a little bit less and do just a little bit more. There you go. There you go. Daniel, it's definitely enlightening and insightful to share this, to have you share your book with us. And of course, a great book that takes us through a thrilling experience that you're going to do that I don't think I would want to be doing it. So it'll be easier to read the book. Thank you very much, Daniel, for spending your time with us today and And give us your plugs, if you would. Okay, again, so the book is Proof of Life, 20 Days in the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East, Daniel Levin. And you can find more information on my website,

daniellevinauthor.com, and get that book anywhere books are sold. And thank you very much for spending time with us and the work you do. I think it's just incredible what you're doing. And of course, the people you're saving. Chris, thanks so much for being very kind. I wish I had a real success rate here, but I really appreciate your kind words and the chance to talk to you. Thank you very much, sir. Continued success in what you do.

To my audience, be sure to go see the video version of this at youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. See all the groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different things. And you can follow us over there and what we're doing. We'll see you guys next time. Take care of each other and see you then.