The Rest Is Classified - 6. The Real Godfather: Assad’s Syrian Mafia (Ep 1)

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

How did Bashar al-Assad become one of the Middle East’s most feared dictators? What role did Hezbollah play in the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister in 2005? And how did Assad’s rise to ultimate power mirror the ascent of Michael Corleone in the Godfather? As the new millennium dawned, Bashar al-Assad prepared to step into his father’s shoes as the next authoritarian president of Syria. While he enjoyed a smooth ascension to the top job, trouble was brewing over the border in Lebanon as the Lebanese Prime Minister sought to escape the debilitating control of its Syrian master. What follows is a story straight out of the Godfather canon with a mafiosi state fighting for ultimate power and a network of spies working to neutralise opposing gangs. Listen as Gordon Corera and David McCloskey discuss the Syrian plot to assassinate the Lebanese Prime Minister at the turn of the 21st century. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Asad was tall and slender, but there was something very awkward about his appearance, like he was constructed of random body parts that did not belong together. Some of the rebel graffiti called Asad the giraffe. He had a long neck that stretched into a weak jaw, topped with a faint boyish moustache. His ears looked more elfin than human, but all of his weaknesses, his appearance, his lisp, the cerebral medical background played in his favour. For they led observers and enemies to underestimate him. It was a costly mistake. The president, like all of them, was a murderer. Welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

I'm David McCloskey. And that was a quote from a book called Damascus Stationed by Chex's Notes. David McCloskey! Who'd have thought? How did we manage to get that in there? Oh, goodness. That was from your novel set in Damascus, based, of course, on your experience of having been in the CIA and served out there in Syria, explaining the character of the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. But Bashar al-Assad, as we know, is no more. We did an emergency pod the other day looking at news of his downfall. But today, we're going to be looking at a story which talks more about the nature of his regime, I guess.

I mean, what we described as a mafia state. And we're going to look at the story of the assassination of the Prime Minister of Lebanon back in 2005, and how that really perhaps changed Syria and the Middle East and what it tells us about Bashar al-Assad. Well, and I think, Gordon, that this story, although it's going to take place in the early 2000s, it's going to give us, I think, a picture of really the kind of dark corners of espionage, gangster spy services, some really kind of human themes around revenge and betrayal, and family. This is a family story, but it's not a normal family. It's the Assad family of Syria, and the story about the spy services they use to maintain their really brutal and murderous hold on power over decades.

And it has, for movie buffs out there, I think some tremendous parallels to the story of The Godfather, part one and two. It is really a mob story, Gordon, I think at its heart. And it shows us, I think, something about both the nature of the regime and also, frankly, the seeds, I think, that were laid a generation ago that contributed to its destruction that we just saw this past week. Yeah, because The Godfather is a film about family, about succession, I guess, who takes over when the Don dies, about revenge, about murder, and eventually about destruction, isn't it, of that family and its empire.

And that really is the story of the Assad family that we're going to be looking at. So when I was at the CIA, I was a Syria analyst for my entire time there. We had a running conversation, sort of tongue in cheek, but with enough connection to reality to be useful analytically to say, is Bashar Michael, Fredo, or Sonny, the sort of three sons of Don Corleone from The Godfather, which one is he? Is he Michael, who is sort of this, I guess, relatively unassuming character who steps into his father's shoes over time and is maybe the unlikely successor? Is he Sonny, the sort of charismatic but brash and violent, hotheaded, older son, heir to the Don, or supposed heir to the Don? Or is he Fredo, the sort of meek, younger son who ends up losing everything

and perishing? So which one is he? And I think this story is going to show us, I mean, we could have this bigger discussion about which one in the end was Assad, which I think we'll come to. But I think to set this story up, this is really about Bashar becoming Michael in the first few years of his reign. And we're going to look at it particularly through this lens of the relationship between Syria and Lebanon and an assassination in 2005, which I towards what his regime will become in the subsequent years, leading then eventually to its kind of decay and eventually, you know, its downfall, as we've just seen. Yeah, I think that we could say that the seeds of Bashar's destruction, the very early sort of kernels of that, are going to be laid in this period of the story we're going to talk about today. Because this is a period in which Bashar will have a

choice about whether he is going to run his regime like an organized crime syndicate, or whether he's going to attempt to turn this government, this regime, Syria, into a more, I guess, normal government. And what we'll see very profoundly here in the story is that he chooses the path of violence, and he eliminates rivals to consolidate his power and becomes the Don. So let's set the scene a little bit. Bashar becomes president in 2000. What kind of a regime is he taking over? I mean, it's a family regime. His father has been governing it for decades. And it's a security state, isn't it? Already at that point, pretty heavily. I think there's probably four critical elements for listeners to understand to grasp the regime that Bashar

takes over in 2000 when he becomes president. So his father has died, had a heart attack. Bashar takes over in June of 2000. Number one, this is a regime that is run by a very, very small group of men. It's a family business. And a lot of these guys, and they're all guys, have been around for decades. So there is an old guard, a generational gap between Bashar and a lot of the people that are in his government. The second thing is that not the entire regime and not the entire government, but really significant pockets of it in the military and in the security services and kind of the strategic sectors of the economy are run by Alawites. Now, Alawis or Alawites are an offshoot of Shia Islam. It's kind of a secretive group.

They've been seen as heretical by most Muslims throughout their history. They've been intensely persecuted, pushed into the mountains of northwestern Syria. The Assads are Alawites, and they have basically built a regime in which Alawites hold the key positions in the military and in the security services. They have been tested unbelievably over the course of the three decades that the Assad family has been in power. There's been an insurgency. There's been coup attempts. The Alawites are in Damascus running Syria. Third point, these security services are, and we've seen this this week, Gordon, with a lot of the footage coming out of these prisons. They are absolutely brutal, paranoid, deeply cynical, amoral organizations. And in fact, the seeds for serious security state, one of the guys who helped

Assad develop this is a former Nazi who actually trained a lot of these security services. There's a massive network of prisons. There is what Syrians refer to as the wall of fear that these security services, no one would go out and protest or even speak against the regime because they were so afraid of what would happen. And I can tell you from having watched these security services at CIA, that these guys, many of them in these upper positions are psychopaths. You saw them up close, didn't you? Did you sense the kind of violence they were capable of? I mean, was that because you were there in the 2000s? I mean, was it something people were aware of? What

was keeping this kind of group, this family in power? These organizations were really the only thing keeping them in power in the end. I mean, it was a security apparatus staffed by people, especially at the upper levels. Not everyone was like this, of course, the foot soldiers, but who I think you could properly describe as psychopaths. I mean, the ideas that they would propose for putting down unrest. I mean, it was things like, we're literally going to murder everyone in the square. Let's light the squares on fire so that no one can protest or that people will be burned alive. I mean, there was a deep, I think, cynicism that infected these organizations and that made them

extremely capable of using violence against their own people. Now, the fourth bit here, which is really important for the story we're going to tell is that Syria in this period, it's hard to imagine now what's happened over the past 13 years of civil war, but Syria in the early 2000s had a colony and that colony was the neighboring country of Lebanon. Now, Damascus is just about 30 kilometers from Lebanon, an hour, hour and a half drive from Beirut to Damascus. It's very close. Syrian leaders over time have tended to see Lebanon as kind of part of Syria. And during the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s, the Syrians invaded, occupied Lebanon, and over the course of really the 1990s, turned it into a vassal state.

So when Bashar takes over, Lebanon is kind of a piece of sort of his crown jewel. It is a piece of his father's legacy, really, that he is keen to protect. And then let's talk a bit about Bashar himself. I mean, from that quote from your book that I read at the start, I mean, you get a bit of a sense of the man. You know, we've all seen these pictures. He does look a bit kind of awkward, a bit kind of gangly. He's also not, he's not originally supposed to be president. I mean, he's the kind of, you know, the third child in the family, the, you know, the second son, he's not the chosen heir,

and he heads off to London. You know, I find it extraordinary. He's a kind of eye doctor in London. If you'd been a cyclist in London in the early 90s and fallen off your bike and, you know, maybe kind of hurt your eye or something like that, he was the guy who would go and kind of, you know, deal with your eye injury or something like that. I mean, that's what some of his colleagues said were the kinds of things he was doing. I mean, he wasn't a man intended for leadership, was he? No, not at all. And, you know, it's very interesting to now go back and read some of the accounts of Bashar

in the 80s or early 90s, before he's ever in line to be the president. And you get this picture of a deeply awkward, shy, soft-spoken young man who really doesn't like the limelight, terrible public speaker. You mentioned he's the third child. He's got an older sister who doesn't like him very much. He's got an older brother named Basel, who also doesn't like him very much, makes fun of him in front of others, including on things as sort of mundane as making fun of his ping pong game. The two brothers kind of don't get along very well. But then in 1994, Basel is driving a Mercedes on the road out to Damascus International Airport. He's trying to catch a flight to Germany. He's going about 100 miles per hour. It's very foggy. And he slams into the sort of centerpiece of a roundabout on the way to the airport.

Now, I've actually driven on that road. I will say that Syrians drive like maniacs and drive as though they only care about the front of their car in general. They don't treat the rest of the vehicle as their responsibility. Driving in Syrian sort of Damascene traffic is an absolutely terrifying experience. And Basel this morning is going 100 miles an hour to the airport, car rolls over, he's killed, he's apparently not wearing a seatbelt. And Bashar, as you mentioned, he's in London. And Bashar gets called back to Damascus in 1994, to essentially cancel his ophthalmology career and take over the family business, which is running Syria. Yeah, I love the detail that he lived in a rented flat in London,

kind of played down his parentage. And he listened to Phil Collins and Whitney Houston records, seems to have been one of his main pastimes. But then suddenly, he goes from that life in a rented flat to heir apparent. And in 2000, when his father, Hafez al-Assad, dies, he's suddenly there. I mean, as a relatively young man, relatively unprepared, he's the president. He's the big guy. He's head of the family. This is worth mentioning because the chronology here is important, and it tends to get a little bit lost in the story about his ascension to the presidency, because he does go through a crash course between 1994 and 2000 to learn the family business. He's sort of rushed through military training. He is given increasing

sort of responsibilities inside the regime. And by the late 90s, he is given responsibility for the Lebanon portfolio. So he starts to become somebody who is deeply involved in Lebanese politics, running Lebanon in the 90s. So Bashar is not, he's not like brought back, and then put on the throne right away. His dad kind of runs this course over six years to train him. The other thing that happens is he gets married in 2001 to Asma. And I mean, this is another fascinating bit of the story, I think. I mean, she's born in Acton, West London, not the most, no offense to listeners in Acton, but it's not the most glamorous suburb of London.

And, you know, a kind of pebbleash house, educated at a Church of England school, then at Queen's College, discovered a friend of mine had been a few years after her at the same school. And I don't think, you know, she'd made a huge impression there, but she was doing computing and then goes into banking. But then she gets married. And I think she is part of this question about Bashar at this point, isn't it? Which is, is he going to be a kind of modernising figure? Who would this kind of wife who is seen as very Western in many ways, despite a Syrian background, is he going to be seen as a kind of modernising figure who's going to turn to the West? And, you know, they go on a visit to London and they meet the Queen and, you know, Asma kind of walks around and she's compared to Princess Diana at one point.

Later, there is this very famous Vogue cover story about her, where she is described as the rose in the desert. And it's interesting, this became so embarrassing after later events that it's almost impossible to find the article. Now it's been kind of scrubbed up the Internet, but I found one and it just, you know, it kind of gushes over her. She's breezy, conspiratorial and fun. Her accent is English, but not plummy. She's a rare combination, a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Parry Match calls her the element of light in a country full of shadow. I mean, you know, it's ludicrous now, especially looking back. That was published, I believe, in February 2011, just before, you know, kind of violence erupts in the country. But I think it also speaks to that period in the early 2000s,

when people wonder, are this couple going to change Syria? Are they going to modernize it? And I guess that's the open question at that point. Yes. Is she going to just become, you know, an acting girl done good in the world, right? And, And I guess that's the open question at that point. kind of glamorous. She's going to have the Vogue article in the future. And there is this question of, you know, are they closet reformers? Is he going to become Hafez's, his father's son, right? And sort of rule Syria with an iron fist? Or is he just in over his head? And is he going to be unable to consolidate power and really run Syria? Now, I will say, what is absolutely true in this period of kind of the first few years of Bashar's rule is that he has a bunch of massive problems. You think about the region at that time, and in particular, the pressure that's coming from, you know, these are the George W. Bush sort of freedom agenda years, right? We're in the run up to and then, you know, after the

invasion of Iraq, the neocons in the White House are sort of talking about Syria as though it's what they call low-hanging fruit after the collapse of Saddam's regime in Baghdad. This is a period where US envoys would go to Damascus, which is great diplomacy, Gordon, as you show up with a list of grievances and basically tell Bashar he needs to address each of them before you can improve relations. There's a ton of grievances and basically tell Bashar he needs to address each of them before you can improve relations. There's a ton of US pressure, there's sanctions. And critically for Lebanon, right about in 2000, as Bashar is taking over, the Israelis, which have

also occupied part of the country during a civil war, withdraw. And so you start to have this feeling in Washington, in Western capitals, and frankly, in parts of Lebanon, to wonder, well, why are we being occupied by Syria? The Syrians should withdraw too. So he's got big geopolitical problems. And he's also got problems domestically. You know, this is an era, it's now almost impossible to remember this, but it was called the Damascus Spring. There was this hope from Syrian civil society activists that there would be a political opening in Damascus. Assad encouraged this a little bit. There were salons, there were groups of these lawyers and activists that would meet, talk about the future, put together political programs. And inside the regime, Bashar has not yet consolidated his power base. He's still got

these old guard guys who grew up with his dad, who built the regime with his dad, many of whom look at Bashar and say, this guy's a punk. He should not have been the leader. It's the hard men who basically think he's not tough enough to run this family, and he's not good enough. And this is going to come to a head, isn't it, over Lebanon, and over this issue about how much kind of freedom, how much independence Lebanon should have with the West is obviously pressing for Bashar al-Assad to kind of release some of the hold he has over this vassal state. And it's really going to come to a crux over one particular person in Lebanon.

That's right. And I think it's good to set up a little bit here of, okay, how were the Syrians actually running Lebanon in this period? Because one of those hard men that you just mentioned, one of these guys who grew up with Bashar's father, is a guy named Ghazi Kanan. He is kind of the definition of an old guard figure. He is a contemporary of Bashar's father. He's sort of this wily, brutal, ruthless guy. He is the Assad regime's pro-consul in Lebanon, right? He runs Lebanon essentially as if he's the governor. He has basically been running it for almost 20 years. By the time Bashar takes power, he's been running it since the early 80s. Ghazi Kanan kind of has these, I think, a sign of just how futile this relationship is. He has days on Saturday at his intelligence headquarters in this little town called Anjar,

which is near the Syrian-Lebanese border. Well, he just kind of holds court. Members of parliament, businessmen, cabinet members, governors, mayors, security officials will come and they'll just cycle through asking for favors, advice, they need intervention in a dispute. And so Ghazi Kanan has been this kind of power broker in Lebanon for a generation. And over that time, Lebanon has become the Syrian regime's cash cow. It is kind of the golden goose for Bashar al-Assad and all the men around him. It's a place where unskilled labor goes from Syria to work for low wages, but send back a lot of money. It's kind of a financial hub for the Syrian elite. They can get access to Lebanese banking and global markets. It's kind of like a bit of a stretch of an analogy, but it's like Syria's

Hong Kong. It is a way for Damascus to get access to the globe. In our kind of mafia analogy, I think of it more like Syria's Vegas. It's the cash cow. It's the party place, isn't it, for those Syrian leaders? Absolutely. And it is 100% a place that Syrians go to party. The nightlife there puts Damascus to shame. There are proper casinos. The first proper casino in Syria wasn't built actually until I was an analyst on the account. And I was actually able to go there and spend a little bit of pocket money at this casino outside Damascus. I will say it was the worst casino that I've ever been to in my entire life. And I would include a lot of what I would say were sort of low rent casinos in rural Minnesota in that tally. The

casino in Damascus was terrible. It was understaffed. There were not enough blackjack tables. You were like four or five people back from the table. And you had to gamble because there weren't enough seats. You had to gamble on somebody else's hand. So you couldn't even get a spot at the table. You had to bet on the guy who was playing and how he was going to do. Anyway, I lost all my money there in about 20 minutes and I never got it back. So Lebanon, Beirut is kind of this flashy jewel and Syrians love to go there to party and gamble. And the mafia bit here is key because the Syrians are basically running a monstrous protection racket in Lebanon, right? They're taking a cut. Syrian intelligence officers

and officials are taking a cut of everything. You know, they're siphoning funds from development projects. They're kind of building import monopolies for themselves. In some cases, they're actually just taking direct payments from the Lebanese. You know, the Lebanese politicians would show up at meetings with bricks of cash to get what they wanted from the Syrians. And the Syrians, to take the casino analogy again, they're actually literally just skimming cash right off of the casino. There are these stories about how every night at around 3 a.m., Syrian intelligence officers would show up at the casino and take about half the cash away. So tens of millions of dollars every year from that casino alone. And the best estimates, and I should

commend here a book on this period in Lebanon and Syria by a wonderful journalist named Nick Blanford. It's called Killing Mr. Lebanon. He has sources in here who put the value of all of this racketeering to the Assyrian kapos at about $2 billion a year, meaning that by the time Bashar is kind of in power, maybe up to $30 plus billion have effectively been skimmed off of Lebanon and dispersed to the Syrian elite. And I think worth mentioning, as we see these videos of Assad's palaces and garages and all these crazy sports cars that he's got, is that this is where that money was going in many respects, was into the pockets of a very small group of people around Bashar al-Assad. And I think there with this sense of the mafia state of Syria kind of parasitically devouring parts of Lebanon and perched upon it, we should take a break as we come back afterwards and look at how that develops into a major crisis. Welcome back. We're looking at the story of Bashar al-Assad and a dramatic assassination in Lebanon, which tells us a lot, I think, about how his regime operated and the kind of mafia

state it was. And we're in the early 2000s. And there is a challenge, isn't there, David, to the way in which Syria has been able to control Lebanon as a vassal state. The personification of that challenge is going to be a man named Rafiq Hariri, also nicknamed Mr. Lebanon. So Rafiq Hariri is Lebanese prime minister. He was the Lebanese prime minister for six years in the 90s. And then he is the prime minister again when Assad takes over Syria in 2000. And he's the prime minister at this point in our story. Now, Rafiq Hariri, I think he looks like sort of an older kind of silver haired version of Mario from the Mario Brothers video game. He's got this kind

of big bushy mustache, a really big smile. You look at pictures of him, he looks like an exceptionally friendly human. He's got this wide face. So for all of our listeners out there, just picture an older version of Mario after he sort of hung up the sort of plumber's overalls and is in control of the Lebanese government. Now, Rafiq Hariri, he's a Sunni. He grew up quite poor in this kind of coastal city of Sidon. He is, though, extremely entrepreneurial, energetic. He works for almost 20 hours a day. He is hugely charismatic. I mean, in all of the kind of writing on Rafiq over the past couple decades. I mean, you get the sense from people that he just had a really deep impact on them. And he is a construction billionaire. He got his

big break in the 70s, actually doing construction projects for the Saudi royal family, becomes their preferred contractor, which turns out is a very lucrative gig. He's a billionaire. So he is the wealthiest guy in Lebanon. He is a Sunni, not an Alawite, not a Shia. He's a Sunni. And he enters politics when the Lebanese civil war is over and really takes on this economic program in the 90s of reducing inflation, rebuilding the country, privatizing a bunch of key industries. And by the time Bashar's in charge, Hariri is kind of the man in Lebanon. He's Mr. Lebanon. And Bashar and Hariri, Gordon, they don't like each other very much. There's actually stories from their first meeting in like the mid-90s where Rafiq Hariri,

sort of, you know, again, kind of portly plumber, sits on the edge of Bashar's desk and says, don't worry, Habibi, I'll take care of Lebanon. And Bashar and him, there's just instant dislike between these two guys. I encountered Hariri once in Lebanon. In March 2002, there was an Arab summit in Beirut, which I went to, and I was working there. And I produced an interview with him. And one of the things I remember was, he had all these incredibly young, quite glamorous kind of westernized aides around him. You know, the summit was also at the Phoenicia Hotel. It was kind of extraordinary occasion where leaders from all the Arab world were coming. But he was the kind of big man who was also projecting this image of Lebanon as being kind of more

pro-Western, or at least willing to kind of engage with the outside world in a different way. And you could sense some of the tension that some of the other Arab leaders felt, and I guess, especially Bashar al-Assad, like, she's like, you know, who is this guy? And especially if you're Bashar, you're like, this is my vassal state. And who is this guy who is pointing in a different direction from the one I want to point in? And at the same time, Bashar's got all this pressure from Western governments to modernise and to westernise, but also tensions within his government. And so you can see why this is a problem for him. If he's got a prime minister, he thinks he can't control,

or he thinks he's taking the country in a different direction. Maybe he's worrying about it more than he needs to, but that seems to be his kind of slight paranoia. Well, he probably does have some reason to be threatened. I mean, Rafiq Hariri in this time period is sort of casually referred to as Mr. Checkbook. He's throwing money around. There's this great story about how Rafiq Hariri wants to go to Damascus to meet with someone in the Syrian government, and there's no helicopter available.

And he's talking to the US ambassador and says, you know, could I get one from you guys? And the US ambassador says, you know, absolutely not. And Hariri offers to buy three helicopters from the United States right on the spot. You know, he's got this kind of media empire. He's building a TV station. And he's kind of, you know, his detractors in this period will say, this guy's trying to run Lebanon like a Saudi prince. And he's also, and I think it's important to note, he is really the face of the Lebanese sort of economy. He's more or less, I mean, the Syrians had kind of seen him as their money guy to run

the economic structures in Lebanon. But he's also, he is involved in the corruption there, right? I mean, there's stories about him, you know, bribing ministers of parliament with cash to sort of approve construction projects and things like that. And as you mentioned, Gordon, you know, very threatening to Bashar, I think, and something that feeds the resentment is that Rafiq Hariri has this very interesting Rolodex of foreign friends. You know, he's close personal friends with the Saudi King. He's close personal friends with the Saudi King. He's close personal friends with French President Jacques Chirac. And so he's

kind of positioned himself as a broker for Lebanon and Syria's foreign policy in a way that I think is deeply offensive to Bashar and upsetting. And of course, if you're Bashar, and back to our model of being a kind of mob boss, you don't want to lose your turf. This is your place. This is your kind of Vegas. You don't want either someone else thinking they can run it, someone else bringing their influence in, or some guy you thought was your guy taking it over. And so, I mean, that's the way Bashar reacts, isn't it? He's also maybe got to show to his people around him that he is the tough guy, if you're Bashar.

You know, he wants to show to the hardliners around him that, hey, I can be the tough guy and I'm not going to be pushed around by this Hariri in Lebanon. I can do the tough stuff as well. I'm not some weakling that you think I am. I mean, that feels to me like what's going on with him at this point, which is going to kind of draw him into confrontation. And, you know, there's just Hariri, as it becomes very clear, has a very different vision for Lebanon than Bashar does. He kind of sees Lebanon as being an equal to Syria. He wants

Lebanon to be independent, or at least for him to sort of be able to dictate when it's independent. And he's also, I think it's impossible to, you know, sort of overstate this too. Again, you kind of have this generational gap that appears. I mean, Bashar is the age of Hariri's sons. And so it's deeply offensive for Bashar, who's like, I'm the Syrian president, you are a Lebanese vassal, you will listen to me. But then on Hariri's side, he's thinking, I'm kind of a self-made man. I'm a billionaire. I'm friends with Jacques Chirac. I'm helping you. And by the way, you're my kid's age. He's known Bashar, seen Bashar since Bashar was a kid. So there is, I think, a deep kind of resentment that starts to form here. And the other

thing that becomes really critical to the story, and again, continues the sort of mob theme, is that Hariri, as that money man, has been building financial connections, or frankly, just buying off people inside Bashar's regime. We mentioned Ghazi Kanan, who's the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, before the break. Hariri and Kanan have made a ton of money together and have built this kind of symbiotic relationship where they're actually quite close to one another. I mean, Gazi Kanan has actually gone to bat for Hariri politically inside Lebanon. And there's a great quote from, again, this wonderful book called Killing Mr. Lebanon

by Nick Blanford, which has, you know, around the kind of time of Bashar taking power, maybe a few years in, it kind of Bashar loyalist saying, you know, that son of a bitch Hariri, he's buying up the regime around us. He's bought up Ghazi Canaan. He's bought up some others. It's starting to become this feel of, this guy isn't protecting our interests in Lebanon. This guy's actually reaching his tentacles or coming from Beirut into Damascus to try to actually impact our turf. He's taking over our turf. And so at that point, I guess, Bashar decides he's going to do something about it and decides he's going to put some pressure on him,

but also perhaps take more dramatic action. And of course, Syria has a crucial ally, doesn't it? I mean, the Lebanese political scene is fiendishly complex, different groups, different sectarian groups representing this kind of very complicated country. But among them is Hezbollah, the kind of party, which is effectively an ally of Syria, as well as Iran. And they are going to be the kind of group that President Bashar can turn to, to put some pressure on, on Hariri. Yeah. And I think, again, let's take the mob lens. Bashar starts to put his kapos to work to squeeze Hariri, right? So Bashar has gotten closer to Hezbollah than his father ever was. His father sort of had this kind of suspicious relationship with the group. Father kind of saw them as, you know, they're another element of this kind of vassal kingdom I've got, and I'll let others handle it. Bashar becomes more intimately involved with them, and starts to lean more heavily on Hezbollah to sort of enforce Syria's

diktat in Lebanon. He also does something critical, which is he removes Ghazi Kanan, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, from Lebanon, plucks him out. Guy had run the place for almost 20 years. He takes him out to really try to sever, I think, this link between Hariri and a lot of his friends in the Syrian regime. And he replaces Ghazi Kanan with this very thuggish character named Rustam Ghazali. He's a Bashar loyalist. He'll go on much later to run one of Syria's big intelligence agencies. He's this kind of chubby guy with a massive forehead. He's got expensive taste, loves kind of fitting his very large body into tight suits.

And he's seen as very heavy handed, much more so than Ghazi. Kanan was maybe a little bit more uncomfortable kind of navigating the Lebanese scene because he's new to running the place. And they start to squeeze Hariri. They actually start, they probably in this period, have recruited Hariri's head of security as a spy. Hariri becomes convinced of this and starts to feed his head of security information to see if the Syrians end up with that information. It's something that's called a barium meal. Of course, they do, and Hariri fires the guy, but then he gets rehired elsewhere in Lebanon by the Syrians. Hariri becomes deeply paranoid that his residence is being bugged. He's kind of putting the TV on for conversations and taking politicians into a small bathroom and turning the water on to talk

to them. Kind of classic spy stuff where he really does feel like he's... I mean, but he's right to be paranoid. I mean, they are out to get him. I mean, this isn't paranoia. They've decided, do you think at this point, they want to get rid of him that he's done for? I don't think so. Not yet. By 2004, it's true that the relationship between Bashar and Rafiq Hariri is deeply... Really, trust has been severed, right? I mean, they never liked each other. But four years into Bashar's rule, things are coming to a head with kind of this dance between both sides. And the most visible symptom of this dispute is that the Syrians are trying to push through an extension for the term of the Lebanese president.

President at this period is a guy named Amir Lahoud. He's a former army commander. He's kind of a Syrian toady. He's very close to Bashar al-Assad. And his term is going to be up in November of 2004. The Syrians want to extend him because they see him along with Hezbollah as being kind of another ally in Lebanon. Rafiq Hariri hates Emile Lahoud. Emile Lahoud hates Rafiq Hariri. And the dispute between the two of them starts to really upset this delicate balance that the Syrians have tried to run in Lebanon, where Hariri is the money guy and Lahoud is kind of the security and military guy. And you now have these two pieces of your machine starting to work against each other. And so at what point though, do you think that Bashar and the Syrians decide

we can't deal with Hariri anymore? He's got to be dealt with. I mean, because they're going to go for the most dramatic option, aren't they? I mean, they are going to go for it, which is out of the kind of bounds of normal behavior here. Normally, you'd kind of maneuver someone out, but they make a decision that they are actually going to have to take him out. I think they're not quite there yet in the middle of 2004, because there is this very critical meeting that happens in the middle of that year, where Hariri is summoned to Damascus, he goes to Bashar's office, which now we've all seen the pictures of that have come out of, you know, rebels tromping through there. And Bashar tells Rafiq Hariri that, you know, we're going to extend the Lebanese

president's term. And Hariri says, well, we got to, we must discuss this. We've got to talk about it. And Bashar basically says, look, there is nothing to discuss. I am Emile Lahoud and Lahoud is me. I would rather break Lebanon over your head than break my word. And Hariri, and I think a sign of Hariri is like, hey, I'm actually above you or we're at least equal. He says, you've got to listen to me, you know, and pay attention to what I'm saying. And Bashar says, I've only known you for four years. You go back to Lebanon and you give me your answer within 48 hours of whether you're going to comply. Meeting lasts for 15 minutes, goes terribly, of course.

Hariri goes back to Lebanon and eventually calls one of Bashar's enforcers and says, you win. And then, of course, promptly does what a good billionaire would do. He gets on his yacht and flies out and goes to Sardinia to hang out for the weekend. And when he comes back, he's still, he's trying to figure out, can I get out of this? Because you need the Lebanese parliament to approve it. And he calls Rustem Ghazali, this sort of dome headed Bashar enforcer in Lebanon, and says, I will give you $20 million if you tell Bashar that I cannot pull off the extension of the Lebanese president.

And here, now get your bleeping cannon ready, Callum, because apparently Rustam Ghazali tells Hariri, go f*** yourself. No, you got to push this thing through. And he does. And here is where, Gordon, as you mentioned, I think we start to see the Syrians saying, maybe we cannot actually twist this guy into doing what we want. Maybe we're going to have to take some more dramatic measures because they start turning Hezbollah to watch Rafiq Hariri. Because if you're a mob boss who wants to show you're tough and someone doesn't do what you tell them, then you've got to bump them off. They've got to sleep with the fishes. And I guess that's where we're headed with Rafiq Hariri and Bashar al-Assad. And so maybe they're Gordon with Rafiq

Hariri being stalked around the streets of Beirut, unbeknownst to him by Hezbollah. We'll leave it there. And when we come back in our next episode, which, by the way, listeners will be very excited to learn will drop tomorrow, the exciting conclusion of Syrian mafia politics and the Godfather will drop tomorrow, we will see how Assad and Hezbollah take really the ultimate step to eliminate the threat from Rafiq Hariri, and will conduct an assassination that will absolutely change the face of the Middle East, of Syria, of Lebanon, and we'll see if Assad succeeds in his bid to become Michael Corleone and step into his father's shoes. See you next time.