The Team House - CIA Covert Operations in Ukraine | Zach Dorfman | Ep. 138

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Zach Dorfman is a national security journalist who has written extensively about the intelligence community. With Team House host Jack Murphy, they published an in-depth article about the Soleimani assassination in Baghdad. Dorfman's recent work has been about CIA activities in Ukraine. Today's Sponsors: Chill Boys Undies https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ Save 15% on your first order by using our discount code TEAM15  And keep the boys cool! https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ Ten Thousand Apparel  https://www.TENTHOUSAND.cc/TEAM The brand believes in being Better Than Yesterday, a stoic dedication to continuous improvement, not overnight success. GO TO : https://www.TENTHOUSAND.cc/TEAM for 15% OFF YOUR PURCHASE! Thank YOU for supporting the companies that support the show! For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #Ukraine #Russia #CIABecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations. Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to The Team House. This is episode 138. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. We have D producing here behind the scenes.

And our guest today is Zach Dorfman. He's a national security journalist, written for a number of different outlets. writes for Yahoo News currently. Zach and I even collaborated in the past and wrote an article together about the Soleimani strike, which we'll get into later. He's also been writing a lot about the CIA, who writes a lot about the intelligence community in general, including some of the things going on in Ukraine at the moment. We'll get into that as well. But first off, I mean, Zach, thank you for joining us tonight on the show. I appreciate you spending your Friday evening with us.

No, it's great to be here, guys. I couldn't think of a better way it's been Friday night. That sounds like a lie, but we accept the compliment anyway. It is a lie, but you know what? It's still early here on the West Coast, so I actually get to have a night after this. So, Zach, if you can start off telling us a little bit about yourself and, you know, what your upbringing was like and kind of what your path was into journalism. Yeah, I mean, I never actually necessarily wanted to be a journalist, to be honest. I mean, I think I always really liked history. And so I always viewed, I always like journal, the idea that journalism was like the rough first draft of history.

I mean, I grew up in Westchester County, New York, north of New York City in the 90s. And, I mean, I was like a skate rat, and I played in a bad jam band. We thought we were good, but we were bad. And, you know, I never really, I mean, I liked, Again, I liked English. I liked history. I was always really drawn to like U.S., particularly like U.S. history and the aspects of it that were not necessarily on the front pages or were only on the front pages because it was clear that people had done a lot of digging to get them out there. And so, again, I never wanted to be a journalist. I just didn't know. I mean, I was like a philosophy major in college.

And 9-11 happened when I was a senior in high school. And I was in college for the Iraq War. And like those were obviously for like millennials, those are all the, I mean, I'm just checking boxes and elder millennial basically. Right. You know, you and I are the same age and both Westchester County dirtbags from the same area. So it's funny. Yeah, I was a senior in high school too when 9-11 happened. Yeah.

I mean, I just remember, I mean, in hindsight, looking back on it now, like, now that I'm creeping toward 40, like, it's, I feel very lucky that I had this period of my life before that, like, the whole 90s was pretty, I mean, I don't want to overstate it, right? Like, there were wars. There was lots of bad things happening in the world, but, like, it was pretty carefree, you know, like geopolitically. It didn't have this weight to it. And all that stuff happened when we were seniors, and it was, you know, terrifying, catastrophic. I mean, I'm sure, like you. You know, you had the same thing. I'm sure that you, like me, new people. I mean, everybody was commuting into the city once parents lived in this, you know, you know what I mean? Like it was hit very, very close to home because it literally was close to home. Right. And so all of a sudden, everything just went like that, right? Like it was, it was like that.

And so then when the Bush administration, you know, started to pursue its policies in the war on terror, there was a wave of really extraordinary investigative journalism, right, that arose. And for me, as like somebody in my 20s reading that kind of stuff, I mean, that was just like, oh, this is the most amazing thing in the world that you could do, basically. What was some of the stuff that sticks out in your mind that you were reading at that time? I mean, the Cy Hirsch reporting of the period, the reporting on black sites that came about, I mean, anything that had to do with the more unseemly aspects of the war on terror was, it was impossible to like turn away from. And I mean, the mainstream reporting on the, you know, how to do it.

don't want to go down. This is an extremely, you know, deep rabbit hole. But like, anything that had to do with the Iraq war and the predication for the Iraq war was something that, like, I couldn't stop reading about, you know, because it was clear at the time that there was something that was occurring, like American government, like the reality of American government was working in a different way than the way that I had been taught in civics class. Right. Right. post work to put it lightly, right?

And so investigative journalism always struck me as like where that, to fill that gap, right? And I don't want to ennoble it too much because it's like a very imperfect profession. But like, for me, that was always the kind of highest, the highest manifestation of it. But I also didn't, I wasn't working as a journalist then, right? I mean, I didn't start working as a journalist until, you know, I had a, I worked in, I worked in a think tank for years and I was like in a much more kind of glacial and I don't know, gentlemanly pace of things. But like I always felt like I wanted to do something that was like more in the arena. And there was nothing more, there was nothing more like immediate to me than the world of national security reporting. But it also seemed completely impenetrable too, right?

because it's not something that you just like, you don't go and get your like national security reporter stamp, you know, and, you know, and like, or your merit badge and then you're doing it. So, you know, I started fairly late. I was already past 30 when I started doing that work. And I just started thinking about stuff that I thought was fascinating that people weren't reporting on. And finding those stories that are kind of hidden in plain sight was the thing that I realized that I could try to do with some, with varying levels of success.

And that's kind of how I've tried to approach reporting. So what was kind of like your big break then, you know, breaking into national security journalism? I mean, it's difficult from your background and now you're going to try to dig up the U.S. government's secrets. How did you even go about that? What was like the first piece that you got published? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is honestly just being like stupid and persistent and lucky in a lot of ways. It's all those things. The first story that I remember thinking, okay, now I can actually get some movement was a story I wrote for Foreign Policy Magazine, which I have a really soft spot to this day for because of, you know, an editor there.

you know, I had a real problem getting editors to return my emails, right? Like, it's not something, like, you're just like a guy, right? And you may have had a background in something journalism adjacent, but they're just like, okay, cool, you have no record. You're not, you know, you don't have the right, you don't have the right resume for it, right? You don't, you didn't already work. You're not freelancing after you already worked for a, you know, for a publication that everyone's like, oh, you worked on the York Times.

Okay, sure, great, whatever. So it took some trust, right? And I had been working on a story for months in my spare time that was about the closure of the consulate in San Francisco, the Russian consulate in San Francisco. The Trump administration closed the consulate there in 2017. And I don't know if you remember, but at the time, the consulate in San Francisco

is a spectacular mansion set atop a hill in one of the most prestigious and expensive neighborhoods in San Francisco, and it has a direct line of sight out to the water, and it was a very, very important domestic facility for the Russians for many, many decades, and when they closed it, it was considered a big deal. And the Russians, all of a sudden, right after they closed it, the Russians started burning up documents. And so, you know, imagine this like, you know, rarefied environment, beautiful mansion. And on top of a hill and all of a sudden there's just smoke emanating from the top. I remember that.

And it was like, yeah, and it was like, well, okay, just because there's a station here, right? There's a resident, there's a resident tour, you know? And I just thought, okay, well, this is a story, right? Like, I'm out here. There, you know, we know that there is espionage on the West Coast. We know that the Russians have had a presence here for decades. We know that other countries are also intensively interested in intelligence gathering in Silicon Valley and the West Coast more broadly. And it seems like people aren't really covering it because people are really focused on,

DC. I mean, reasonably, but it's bigger than DC. I mean, this counterintelligence story is much, much bigger. And so that's that, that I realized was maybe my way in. And then I just started reaching out to people. I started reaching out to people and reaching out to people and reaching out to people. And like my, you know, my heart would beat, you know, every time out of my chest because I was just like some guy who was calling somebody who had worked in a position that was relevant to this, who, you know, could have and sometimes did tell me to like politely fuck off, you know, which was totally reasonable, you know, but other people actually were like, no, this is an important story. And I'm glad you asked, you know. And that just ended up being a story about the kind of stuff

that counterintelligence folks believed that the Russians were doing in San Francisco and some of the mysteries in terms of what they were doing and how they were trying to understand it. And since it had been shut down, and it's still shut down, it shut down in 2017, it is still shut down. Folks started talking to me about it. And I went to FP, and I told them that I had been spending months and months and months trying to, you know, get string on this story. And I had gotten enough for something that was, I thought, a really great spy story. And they agreed. And that was the first, that was the first, like, investigative piece that I ever published.

And it took a long time. and I was really, I couldn't believe it, right? It just was like, I couldn't believe that anyone actually talked to me. I couldn't believe that they published it. Like it was, you know, I tried to like, you know, you tried to play it cool at the time. You're like, I have this piece of it. You know, but like I was. Yeah, I was thrilled.

You know, I was thrilled. And it taught me a lot. And things got a little easier every time I published something after that, you know. So that was the first big story. And I haven't written about it as much lately, but like West Coast espionage stuff is like totally near and dear to my heart. And I will write about, I mean, if I could and I hope, hopefully one day I will write a book about like, you know, so. Excuse me. Because I think just, I don't know.

I think it's, again, totally fascinating. It's got more attention in the last three or four years, but it's still totally underreported, in my opinion. So that was kind of your big break into. national security journalism. And since then, you've been writing for, you're a Yahoo News staff writer, correct? Yeah, I'm a, yeah, I'm a national security correspondent, I think, is the actual title at this point. Yeah. Well, you know, speaking as somebody who really does not understand, like, the business or the environment, the human environment of the field of journalism, you were actually somebody who helped me out a lot, too.

when I needed somebody to listen to me. Yeah, thanks, man. Well, I mean, I think part of it is also just like, you don't have to, you got to find like a small group of people that understand what you do and like return your calls and emails. I mean, I remember, like my wife told me once,

like I had forgotten this. I think in like a moment of like despair when I was trying to start doing this, I think I just said to her like, I just need like three editors who will return my emails, you know, because it was just like sending shit into a black hole, right? You'd be like, I have this amazing pitch where I have this story, but I don't know how to frame it.

Like, can we, can we talk, you know? Can somebody, you know, from the organization who works on this, talk to me about it? And it was just like, it was really, really, really hard. And I think it's difficult if you're not a staff writer in these places and you don't, you haven't been through that system. to get people to like, I don't know, to stop what they're doing and actually listen to somebody from the outside who's like, no, seriously. I have an amazing story.

Or like, I have the sources for this. And I actually think it's been really bad, not just because it affected me badly. I don't want to just say that to personalize it, but I think it's been bad for national security journalism in general. because I just think that like it's been narrowed down because you don't have you know folks who are not staff writers like you who obviously know a lot of people and get stories that other people don't get you know like editors should like no I don't know it's just it's been it's been a pet peeve of mine for a while you know and I don't know how to solve it honestly because you need you know editors like Sharon Weinberger who's now at the Wall Street Journal who we both work with a lot. who, you know, you text her and you're like, I have an amazing lead, you know, like, you want your editor to be more excited than you are, you know, about this thing, right? And like, to be able to talk it over with you. And I think it's, it's hard. It's hard to find somebody like that. Yeah, I know, Sharon's awesome. And, you know, definitely improved the quality of my work. Like, I mean,

and the story we did together, too. I mean, our thoughts can be really jumbled and, you know, And when you work on, I think I told her this, like when you work on a story for a long enough time, like your perspective gets kind of skewed because you're so hyper-focused on this thing. And it's like I read the story for myself. And it's like, well, she can kind of like broaden the picture and explain to me like why this matters to the public at large and how to frame it. I think that was the term you used. Yeah. I mean, that you get extreme tunnel vision and you actually stop at a certain point on investigative stories. And this happens to me every single time I do one.

I lose the plot at some point. I'm like too close to it, you know? And like a great editor helps you zoom in and out in ways when you're like, this is overreported or underreported or there's too much detail or there's like something that you think is so obvious. but like the average reader that hasn't been thinking about this one little thing for eight months of their life doesn't understand or like you need to front load. And I think a great editor in the national security world can do that. And I think it's also about the translation function. You know, I mean, I think another thing that, you know, I doubt Sharon is watching this. But, you know, shout out to Sharon again, you know, like one thing that she always, she has said to me multiple times is you're not writing.

for intelligence professionals. Yeah, exactly. Like you have to write for people that care about this stuff, but it didn't spend their professional lives thinking about this every day. Because like, yeah, you want all these cool details

and you want all this, like, technical language, but, like, it has to be something that, like, you know, a dentist on the Upper West side like, we'll read and understand and enjoy and maybe be troubled by, you know, and, and like talk over dinner with his wife about. And I think that was really important, too, because for me, I always, I don't know, I think my, the way I approached it was way too much like the other way, you know, and so that was also a learning curve.

We try to be cognizant of it even on this show, because like Dave and I have these people on, and we can have a total like insider baseball sort of conversation with some people that like, it sounds like to everyone else like we're speaking in alien language. So we try to, we try to be. I don't know. I don't know the special operations language as well as you guys do. So somebody will be like, you know, I was in a sock and I was on J. Wix.

And I'm just like, what the fuck? I can't, you know, like, I had a drink with a reporter friend the other day. And I was probably really annoying. I won't say his name here. He's actually a really good guy. But he was talking to another reporter. and he was like, okay, so all Navy SEALs were in J-Soc. I'm like, okay, stop.

I don't like make him stand down like five times. Like, no, that's not. Like, this is how the CIA sheep dips military. No, stop. That's not how that works. It's a good guy, a really good guy. But yeah, doesn't speak the language. Yeah, it's confusing.

And I think different reporters have different, you know, I'm not like a Pentagon reporter, right? I've reported on military stuff, but I'm much more comfortable in the, And I understand the institution of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA far, far better than I understand the Pentagon, which is like this massive unwieldy beast that like the acronyms like confuse and terrify me. And like I just don't, you know, I know that I don't know a lot about it. And I understand completely why people spend their entire career only focused on that. Zach, I mean, I was in the military and I've now reported on the military for 10 years.

And what keeps it interesting is that I wear new stuff all the time because like you said, it's so huge. No, I mean, does anybody even really have a full picture of what the hell is going on in the Pentagon? I don't think so. I mean, I see I see acronyms all the time that I have to look up. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, but there's always like some new subject that you can jump into. And it's like, I knew nothing about this until now. Yeah, between that and like, you know, Saps and the black budget, like, it's actually impossible to wrap your head around by, I would say, in effect, if not by design and probably partially by design. Actually, definitely partially by design.

Yeah. I mean, that's why that budget exists as the way it does. And so it is, and it's interesting, too, because when you speak to folks in the intelligence world, you know, there are folks who come from military. intelligence background. I remember speaking to them and I would talk about CIA, CIA, CIA, and I had one guy once to tell me once, he was like, stop talking to me about the CIA. They're tiny. He was like, I don't care about the CIA. He was kind of like, do you have any idea how small their budget is compared to our budget? Like, you know, don't like, you know, you're making an error, a fallacy of making them 10 feet tall, you know, meanwhile, we're 100 feet tall. Right. So, you know,

I just realized, like, in a second I had to be like, okay, there's like, there's a lot of truth to what he's saying there. And you get very focused on the narrow lane that you report on, right? And so I thought that wasn't interesting. I mean, that definitely like shook me for a second, you know? Zach, I want to hit up some of your greatest hits here. And I was wondering if you could start off by telling us about Christine Fong. Who was she? Sure. Yeah. That's a great West Coast story, actually. Christine Fong was, so there's a story that a fantastic China reporter from Axios, Bethany, Alan Ibrahimian, and I wrote about Christine Fong.

Christine Fong was a suspected Chinese intelligence operative who lived in the Bay Area in the mid-2010s. and she, early 2010s, mid-2010s, and she, you know, FBI counterintelligence believed that she was trying to kind of infiltrate local politics in the Bay Area. And so she just was kind of like, she was one of those people who was everywhere, right? We kept hearing this over and over and over again

from folks, civic-minded folks in local democratic politics in the Bay Area, which is, you know, whether, that's the only politics that matters here, right? There is no Republican politics to speak of in the Bay Area. So she tried to infiltrate local democratic politics, which are complicated and very, very competitive internally. So she just started showing up at all these events and trying to intern with different political candidates.

and she was a student at a local college in the East Bay. She was Chinese National, and she became associated with the campaign of a city councilman from an East Bay city at the time named Eric Swalow, who later was elected to Congress and became a member of the House Intel Committee. And when he was running some of his earlier campaigns, she, according to sources we spoke to, bundled donations for his campaigns. So I think at least one of his campaign cycles,

and bundlers collect donations from other people. So they raise money from other people. the person who throws a party and then gets the checks and then hands the check over to a, to a campaign. Now, she herself could not donate to his campaign because she was a foreign national and there was no evidence whatsoever that we found that she had done so, and that would have been a, I think, an FEC violation. I don't want to reiterate again. No evidence that was done. But she was bundling, according to folks that we spoke to. And she also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell's Washington, D.C. office.

And additionally, we had learned that, according to some of the intelligence folks that we spoke with, that she became a subject of an intensive FBI investigation, intensive, intensive. And there was some bugging that occurred. and there were, you know, there was at least one instance where she seemed to also be initiating sexual relationships with at least a few mayors. And there was one instance where she was caught in her car in performing a sex act on somebody, and the FBI caught that on at least audio, if I recall correctly from me. the story. And so, you know, it was kind of a tawdry case, right? Because you had somebody who was a suspected Chinese intelligence operative who was like getting into local politics and, you know, potentially, you know, having sexual relationships with some, you know, some potential targets and had

actually gotten close to somebody who later on became, you know, he, you know, she was in the orbit of his campaign when he was a, you know, a congressman. And then later on became a, uh, the congressman at a very, very sensitive, uh, committee. So, you know, according to our reporting, she, you know, at some point the, you know, the bureau gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Congressman's all else campaign and said, you got a problem, you know, basically like, you got to watch out for this person, you know, this person is, you know, should not be anywhere near the orbit of your offices or your campaigns. And again, according to our reporting,

that was the first day they had any understanding necessarily that she might be bad news and they immediately severed all potential connections. So he has not been accused of wrongdoing in the story. But it's, you know, the reason, the way that we told that story was specifically about, influence and political influence and the way that, you know, Chinese intelligence agencies, if the allegations are true and she is, in fact, an intelligence operative, the Chinese intelligence

agencies have sought to work operatives into American politics. And most people think about this. It's like really sexy to think about it at the like national level, right? You know, I mean, there's another story I reported on where there was another suspected intelligence operative in the Bay Area who worked on Diane Feinstein's staff out here. I broke that story too. And like, so that's a little bit more like, you know, Feinstein was already a senator, right, with a long history of being on Senate intel too. So she was, I mean, she was a very prominent, she was very, very prominent for a very long time by the time that happened. But most people don't think about the more like work-a-day aspects of it, which is that like it's a long game.

you have operatives that are trying to understand the rising stars of today because every 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 people that you seek connections with now, maybe in 10 or 15 years, one of those guys gets elected to Congress. And then maybe he becomes a hipsy. You know, he sits on hipsy, right? Which is exactly what happened with Swalwell's case. And so it's about the modus operandi of the Chinese services and like, you know, I spoke to other counterintelligence officials who are like, this has been a problem going back to the 90s in the Bay Area. The Bay Area has always had Chinese services have always focused on political influence in the Bay Area because they understand that it's important for Washington. It's important for California. And, you know,

it's important for bilateral relations for China and the U.S. I mean, the Bay Area has a has an old and large and very settled and very prominent community of Chinese descent here, folks who came way before the People's Republic even existed, you know, and waves and waves after that. And they have always also viewed it a little bit as a threat because there's a memory that, like, exile communities can produce opposition movements to those in power in China. And so there's always been that aspect too, of a little bit of like concern about that those politics here can bounce back in ways that the Chinese Communist Party does not want to happen. I don't know if you saw Zach, but last week, the Department of Justice unsealed indictments

for five people. They were charged variously with stalking, harassing, and spying on U.S. residents on behalf of the Chinese secret police. So these are people who are suspected to work for MSS. And one of them, one of the people that they were stalking was a, um, a guy who was running for Congress here in Brooklyn. And apparently this dude was a Tiananmen Square survivor, immigrated to the United States, served in the U.S. Army, got out, was running for Congress. And, um, one of these, one of the alleged MSS operatives hired a private investigator.

And first he was asking to, um, find up, find compromising material. if not create compromising material, failing that, actually discussed hurting or killing him, like running him down with a car. I had heard a little bit about that story. I mean, it's shocking. It's one of those like shocking but not surprising stories where, I mean, one, other than San Francisco,

New York is the other major center of where the Chinese are doing this. I mean, again, huge, prominent, longstanding Chinese and Chinese American communities. and there have been these stories over the years of, you know, for instance, you know, apparently, you know, they used to have, I forget where this was reported, but, you know, they had people who were operatives who were just spying on Falun Gong folks in New York. You know, I mean, they were very, very involved in that stuff.

You've heard some stories of people being stalked or surveilled in Washington, D.C. there's a story I published foreign policy maybe 2018 or so about the wave of like Chinese renditions or soft renditions all over the world it depends on the definition gets a little bit fuzzy but you know there were cases that I was told about from U.S. counterintelligence officials

where you know it gets again it becomes a little semantic like a semantic distinction where when you're talking about kidnapping because like imagine somebody knocks on your door and they say, hello, you're going to come with me right now. I have two tickets to SFO on a flight directly to Beijing in six hours. And you say, no, hell no, I'm not going to do it. And they say, if you don't do that, then your uncle or your parents or your sibling back on the mainland

is going to be thrown in prison for the next 30 years. And I promise you it's not going to be pretty. And like, that's the kind of thing that was happening, especially after Xi Jinping rose to power and I did the anti-corruption campaign. And so there's this kind of like long arm of the Chinese state that it's very much, like, it's a very real thing in the U.S., and particularly New York and San Francisco. When I was at Columbia University, I kind of got exposed to a little bit of that and some interesting situations. And there's one time where I was in a group with three Chinese students.

And we were having a little bit of a conversation back and forth. And I asked something that was very naive in retrospect the way I did it. I asked what their thoughts were about Fu Long Gong. Like, you know, for real, just tell me, what do you think? Do you think they're good? Do you think they're bad? And brother, you could have heard a pin drop in that room. You could hear the second hand on the clock ticking.

because they're all afraid that somebody's going to inform on them. Like there's four of us in the room, which one is going to call back home and say, hey, you know, this dude is, you know, maybe a sympathizer. I mean, that's a real, that is a real thing. I think people, you know, there's been a lot of nasty shit around this topic in the last three or four years. And a lot of stuff is strayed just into like straight racism and xenophobia. It's really unfortunate because it's so important to underline that the number one victims of this stuff are like mostly Chinese students in the U.S., you know. And like they're the ones who are living in fear of being ratted out, right?

I mean, I was told I have to go back to. But like some Chinese students associations, you know, they like. like you can't, you can't speak freely because there's, there's a sense that at least one person who is attached to it has a relationship with an MSS officer, you know, stationed at a nearby diplomatic facility. Like, I know that was the case in, in San Francisco. You know, I know that there was, you know, they specifically, they specifically put an MSS officer in the position, in the consulate here, at least this was the suspicion of FBI counterintelligence, was that the guy whose job was outreach, the local community, and particularly students,

was an MSS officer. I mean, that tells you something about the priorities of that country, right? Like, your intelligence service is like, we only have X number of slots, right, in every diplomatic facility, like, what do we care about, right? And they'd be like, to give up a slot because you want to make sure you keep an eye on students and on the diaspora, it tells you a lot about them. Right. Zach, what publication did you publish both, you know,

the articles on Swalwell and Feinstein's on those two people on? So the Swalwell article was an Axios. Okay. And the Feinstein story, the Feinstein story was actually part of just a big, big story that I did on spying in the base. Bay Area. And so it was about, you know, Chinese and Russian, mostly Chinese and Russian, the history of Chinese or Russian espionage in the Bay Area. And so those, they were kind of

different publications. So I don't think people kind of piece them together because they were, you know, but they're really kind of a series. Honestly, there's, there's kind of like a quasi series of kind of spying in the Bay Area. Did you have a hard time finding publishers for those? I think after the original FP story on the Russian consulate here, which did really well for FP, got a lot of eyeballs, I think there was this understanding that like, oh, this is a topic people care about. People want to read about this, you know. And so Politico was actually pretty enthusiastic about that story. In hindsight, maybe the fine science stuff shouldn't have been in, you know, paragraph eight or nine or ten because it was actually you know in hindsight it was like a very it's a very serious thing to have happen um the axios story no the axios was very very supportive of it and it was an intensive process because it was such a sensitive story sure i mean any i mean a young a young chinese woman alleged by you know by u.s officials to be working as an an ms.s.

who gets close to a sitting U.S. congressman and his campaign. And it's just, it was one of those things that we were kind of like dancing to the raindrops on it. And now, we tried to do it in a non-sensation, a non-sensationalistic, non-sensationalistic way is possible. But, you know, it got, it took on a velocity of its own. Well, I'm curious, and I don't want to throw shade here. So I'm going to ask you sort of, Why do you think that like a major publicist, like the New York Times, would never cover either of those stories? Do you think that they didn't think they were sourced well enough? Do you think that it was because they wanted to fly top cover?

Or do you think it was for some Chinese, you know, like the whole Mao, he was a great revolutionary type thing? Or do you think they just didn't think it was newsworthy? I don't think it was the last. I don't mean, I don't think it was the any kind of, I don't think it was because of any ideological. you know, fellow traveling at all. I think, I mean, you'd have to ask the New York Times. I mean, I've asked myself this question a lot after the Christine Fong story, which was like why there wasn't follow up from other major outlets,

because it was 100% true. I mean, not only was it 100% true. I mean, it was, we actually got like, I mean, the, I believe, if you go back, I mean, Ratcliffe, when he was. was acting DNI gave a briefing about the case to Kevin McCarthy and Nancy Pelosi. I mean, that was public. I mean, it actually, they acknowledged that the story was basically, it was true.

I mean, nobody denied any of it. The sourcing was impeccable. And I was a little confused about the lack of follow-up from, some of the major papers. I think there's maybe some, there's a couple of reasons for it. One is like, I think the major public, major papers, they like match each other and they don't really view anything that's not in the other one to be worthy of their time to an extent. So, you know, the Times will publish a really, really excellent explosive story and then the posts will have to, like, match it. But if it, but if it appears in a publication that's like not as prominent,

Sometimes they don't do it. That's just built into the media ecosystem for better and for worse. People have only so many hours in a day. They're a great journalists and these publications that are chasing their own stories. I don't want to, like, I don't know, throw too much shade on it. But I was like, when I publish these stories a lot, the Fong Fong story is a really good example. I want other journalists to keep the story alive. Every journalist wants other journalists to operate in a pack, you know, which is kind of like how, you know, Watergate occurred.

I mean, people always associate Woodward and Bernstein, but like there were many other good journalists, great journalists that were, you know, engaged in Watergate scoops. And so you want other journalists with other sourcing networks to keep the story going. And there was more to that story, to that Christine Fung story. There was absolutely more to that story than was published, than we published. And I was really hoping that other folks would pick it up and they didn't. The other explanation is that, and this is true sometimes, and I don't think it would have been true in the Christine Fom case, but it is true. Sometimes you do like a six-month investigation and you just grind a story to its absolute bones

and nobody can really match you. Nobody can really, can like really do what you've already done. And so there are internal discussions when outlets are just like, should we invest the time and resources into it? And then they're just like, no. It's not worth it. You know, like we can't, it's just, it would take too much. But yeah, I mean, the post, I think, covered the story in terms of the fallout a little bit.

And they covered the story once it got into Congress and they got the briefing. And it was like clear that the story was 100%. you know, correct. And I don't think the Times ever wrote anything. No, I don't think so. Not a word. But, you know, but, you know, I was just to get it up. And the post did cover the, what about, you know, in depth about the, about Feinstein. But I don't think the times ever. Yeah. So. They just didn't do it. And I have no, I have no great insight. I mean, I would, You always look, you always want these stories to get as wide a coverage as possible, and it's always surprising to me when things get picked up and when things don't.

And, you know, it's just part of the ecosystem, I think. I think institutions are having and have had a lot of complex and difficult conversations about how to cover Chinese espionage, you know, especially in the environment surrounding the Trump administration. And you know what? Not Trump administration. Really Trump himself, right? Because like, especially when you had COVID arise and you had folks just like outright calling things like Kung flu, just like obviously racist stuff. it just made it I think people got skittish about certain kinds of coverage and you know we like to think as journalists that we don't we can operate outside of that like larger social environment you just pursue the truth fearlessly but like in reality that's just that's just not true like as anybody who studied media coverage of the Iraq war and it's a run-up can tell you like we are creatures of the countries that we live in you know we are And so there's a lot of negotiation that I think goes on as social conditions change and then as political conditions kind of change as well. Well, yeah, I was just curious about that.

I mean, I have like I have my own like biases where I think that they didn't do it because it reflected poorly on Democrats during an election term. But but that I had nothing to prove. That's like my own bias and I recognize that. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I have no insight into it. I think that they, look, the New York Times doesn't need me to defend it or defry it at all. It has plenty of resources and lots of very good journalists working for it.

I think that, you know, I think that resource decisions and decisions, decisions about what you don't, cover is as important decisions about what you do cover. And it says a lot about those institutions. Like, I don't think that there's necessarily like a, you know, a group of people who decide, like, we're not going to cover any of this, you know? Right. I think that you look in hindsight and you can see about the kind of coverage that institutions, especially major and important institutions provide at any given time and get a good sense

of the kind of the climate in those institutions. And, like, again, the run-up to Iraq and the way that the Times reported on Iraq and didn't report on Iraq, it tells you a fair amount. Or, I mean, you know that, you know, James Risen, the, like, probably the preeminent investigative reporter of the Bush years. I mean, actually, you know, to go back to your first question, I mean, Jack, like, like, Risen and Risen's reporting on, like, warrantless wiretapping. and a bunch of like Bush era covert action programs for me was like, that shit was a revelatory, revelatory. I mean, it was such good and fearless journalism that it was like, this is what you can do.

But Ryzen has written about this. He wanted to write about, he had the warrantless wiretapping story before the 2004 election. He had it. He had it buttoned up. He had the whole story that could literally press publish, or in those days more people would have read it in Dead Tree Edition, but still, like, it was done. It was there. It was ready to go.

And the administration, the executive team at the Times dragged their feet. They're like, do more reporting, do more reporting, do more reporting. They're like, no, we have it, we have it, we have it. And they held it. They held it all the way through the election. And the only reason they published the story was because Risen threatened to publish it in his forthcoming book. They said, if you're not going to, he's like, if you're not going to publish this story,

I'm going to publish it in a book. And finally they relented and published it in the paper. I think they held it for over a year. It might have been eight months, nine months. Like, don't, I don't know the example. But they held it for months and months and months. So, you know, I'm not trying to say that that institution is inherently more political than any other. They obviously do extraordinary work.

I just think that, like, those lessons are, like, in hindsight, you see those things. And it's, like, important for sophisticated, um, sophisticated. like readers who kind of like to understand those kinds of stories and hear them because you actually get a better sense of how these institutions work and don't. Zach, I got to take a quick moment here to give a shout out to one of the sponsors of our show. It's chill boys. These are underwheres made for men. They make super comfortable boxers and boxer briefs to keep the boys cool. Chill Boys boxers, they come in a couple different styles. They offer a relaxed fit bamboo and performance boxers

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parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Some other Zach Dorfman greatest hits here. You've also written about how during the Trump administration, cyber operations, kind of took a more aggressive tone based on some reinterpretations of past authorities and such. Can you tell us about some of the work you did on that? Yeah, so that was part of a really great team effort at Yahoo. and basically the story revealed that, you know, there was a very bureaucratic process during the Obama years that went up to the NSC and interagency when they would decide to do offensive cyber operations. And if you viewed it more positively, folks would say that it was in order to ensure that there weren't, you know, catastrophic unintended effects, right, of a cyber operation.

And I think there's a reasonable argument to be made for that. Because there's a question of like, when is something espionage? When is it an act of war? I mean, cyber just has all these kind of like really complex and opaque aspects to them that were being worked out in real time, actually, by the Obama folks. And then there's another school of thought that it had gotten overly bureaucratic, hyper-lawyered. and by the time, sometimes things actually got the go ahead, they were no longer desirable.

And so there was some work done within the Trump NSC to create a new covert action finding that would give the CIA more powers to launch cyber attacks or offensive cyber operations, I should say, because they're not covert action in cyberspace. That is like the most precise way to say. And I have to be precise here because this is one of those things where

if I'm not, I'll be open to misinterpreted, and focuses in them, the Infosec community will have my head. And the, you know, this is kind of part and parcel of a bigger effort at the time, which was then led by Mike Pompeo, to bring everything down to the lowest possible decision maker. So it was like, you want, it was meant to empower people to, you know, decide to commit more, you know, operational acts, basically, and to not have to kick everything up to the funnel at NSC. Again, a lot of folks within the community were excited about this. They thought

it was really valuable. They thought that, you know, the pace on stuff that had stuff had been glacial in the Obama era and they wanted to, you know, they wanted to do operations like the directorate of operations does. And, you know, it's like, you're the DO, what are you going to do? That is like the phrase that I've heard before. So this finding gave the agency the capabilities to do this, and they did. And they started committing more, they started conducting more covert action in cyberspace. And, you know, if I recall correctly from the story, we identified not specific acts. Our sources would not say that specific document dump was, you know, a CIA covert operation, but it was certain kinds of things. You're talking about things like the Panama

papers? Not actually those, although there's obviously been a lot of like smoke around those for years. I've never, I have to be clear, I've never heard anything about this. The Panama Papers being a CIA covert operation and if I had a reportable story on that, I would have reported it because that was, you know, I mean, whether or not we did it, whether or not the CIA did it, Vladimir Putin thinks we did, right? So, no, it was more like hacking and dumping of Iranian banking data, you know, those kinds of things. Again, I can't point to a specific leak because we weren't actually given, you know, confirmation of a specific one. But, you know, things like that, or the dumping of things related to Russia online in those years, you know, like institutions that had nominal

cover as private entities, but were in fact working for state entities. So, you know, it's like less sex. Some of it, it's like less sexy. Everyone thinks about this from the perspective of like Stuxnet, right? Like things blowing up. And there was during, the, during the Trump era, there were a lot of things in Iran in particular that stopped functioning the way they were supposed to. And attribution has always been a little bit fuzzy about that. Although I've spoken to Trump administration officials that basically said, but that was the Israelis. I mean, they literally said, you know, we had conversations with the Israelis and we said, you go be the covert action arm. You know, you go do that stuff. You know,

Like, go with God, you have our blessings. So, again, they didn't point to specific acts, but that's the general arrangement that I was aware of occurring during the Trump years. And that was, like, pretty liberating. You know, this idea, though, that you could start to commit more hack-and-dumps, for instance, was considered like an important evolutionary move for the agency. I mean, you have to also think about the timeframe that we're talking about, right? So 2016 has like just happened, right?

There was just this, you know, this hack and dump accompanying a Russian covert action campaign that was executed on U.S. soil meant to affect the American political system. And it was incredibly successful, right? Like you, I don't think it's controversial at all to say that in terms of the expenditure and effort of the Russians that that campaign in 20, 2016 was like a runaway success. So you have that going on and then you have like a very bureaucratic process for the US and you obviously have people within the agency who are won. They want to be unleashed, right?

They want to be able to like do stuff that they're seeing their adversaries do to them with great effect. And so this covert action finding was developed and it was signed and those authorities were put to good use. And that was a, that was a really, again, mostly still almost entirely in the shadows, but that was a kind of watermark, Trump era watermark in terms of covert action. Let's talk, well, no, before we start to get to that, what's first talk about the Soleimani story before we turn our focus and attention towards Russia and Ukraine, because I think you're reporting, actually we can follow a bit of a trajectory there. But let's jump over to Iraq and Iran and talk about the Soleimani strike.

You and I worked on that article for Yahoo News about it. Why don't you kick it off and tell us about how that developed? I mean, I dug up some information. I mean, you really got some incredible details, I think, from the national security side. Yeah, I mean, it feels funny. You asked me about an article that we co-wrote. that you were the primary author on, but I mean, I think, you know, there was something that I think we discovered over the course of our reporting was both the tactical details of the strike itself,

which I think was really interesting and revelatory. And then also the larger context surrounding it, which is that the conversation around killing Soleimani went back to the earliest days of the Trump administration. and there was, you know, the agency paramilitary folks were also tasked with thinking through potential modalities for killing Soleimani. And so you had these two tracks that were occurring. You know, you had the folks at Special Activity Center thinking about ways to do this deniably under Title 50 and coming up with apparently some fairly elegant ways to do this. ways that would have hidden the hand of U.S. involvement. And, you know, then you had what actually occurred, which was like a very big, bright, overt strike. And, you know, I think what our story revealed was the, like, the length of the process of deliberations over this that, I think, called into question to an extent the rationale that we were getting,

from the administration at the time about a kind of like new wave of a new campaign of chaos in the Middle East authored by Soleimani himself because it was clear that this was an objective of the administration going back years. And, you know, in our reporting, it was clear. Some folks said, no, there was something qualitatively different in what we were picking up from our, from intelligence sources about what Soleimani was going to be doing. But there were other folks who, you know, over time just basically said, I mean, yes, but also no. You know, this was like this was a policy objective. This was something that, you know, we wanted to do.

You know, Soleimani had American blood on his hands and we had the legal authorities in place to do it. And so we had an opportunity to do it and we did it. You know, it's interesting, though, for an administration that was populated by many Iran Hawks, I think they would describe themselves as that way. So I don't think it's any, I'm not describing them in a way that they wouldn't describe themselves, including folks like John Bolton, obviously, and a long time ultra-Iran hawk. I had somebody recently say to me who was very involved in this process that they didn't believe even until like five minutes before the strike happened,

that like it was actually going to happen, that Trump was actually going to give it the okay. Because their interpretation was that Trump was equivocating a lot about it. You know, you have to remember, I mean, he turned back that strike on Iran, right? I mean, mid-flight. Right. Like, I think he tweeted about it. He turned back to strike and then he tweeted about it and was like,

I'm not going to do the strike. And so there was this sense that like he might get cold feet again. And so for the more hawkish, Haukish Iran folks in the administration, I think up until the last minute, they weren't sure that it was actually going to go down because they weren't sure if Trump was going to change his mind the last minute again.

I thought one of the things, this is not in the article, but not really, but I think one of the things that I learned during the process was that this was part of a larger decapitation strike across three different countries. And from that perspective, the operation actually failed. However, you know, the high value target number one definitely got taken out. That part of the operation was obviously a success. But in what they were trying to do

across Yemen, Iraq, Syria, there were, as you recall, there were later, there were some airstrikes way later on Iranian targets inside Syria. And I always had to wonder, were those the targets they were after that night? And I was never really, clear on why they weren't struck. The one in Yemen happened, but they missed the guy they were after. And then one of my sources told me that J-Sach also hit a couple Shia militia targets in Baghdad that night. And that's never been reported anywhere other than in our article. Yeah, no, I mean, that was one of those details that you're like, you want people to follow up on, right? Yeah, yeah. I think your framing was the way you're thinking about it is right.

And I came around to that through, you know, talking with you about it and also reporting. I think the Washington Post first broke the Shalahi strike, the failed Shalachi strike in Yemen. But we confirmed it. Shalahi was on a target list for the USG for a long time because he was responsible for the explosively formed penetrator rat lines in southern Iraq in the mid-2000s. So he was like 100% responsible directly for like the death of US service people. And so I think there was a long, there was people had wanted to get him for a long time. And he was, was and is an important operator because he got away.

And I tried to get details on why that was and how he got away. And I just, I kept hitting a brick wall. People just did not want to talk about it because they wanted to. to maintain more secrecy around it so they could get them again in theory. Obviously, that opportunity did not come again for the Trump administration, or they didn't act on it. But I think, you know, I think you have to look at the, you have to look at the Soleimani strike in the perspective of the totality

of the Iran policy of the Trump administration and maximum pressure. You know, pulling out of Jekpoa, the Iran deal, putting in place extremely punishing sanctions. designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and then the kind of covert dimensions to that, which we actually wrote about in that piece about covert action in cyberspace, which was this idea that there were these longstanding preexisting findings involving Iran, including like a counterproliferation finding, and I believe a malign foreign influence finding that just date back decades. decades, get updated, right? But like, they're the general legal framework for, you know, Title 50 activities against Iran. And they interpreted them very aggressively, right? And so it really became a kind of like implicit regime destabilization campaign where they couldn't say regime change, even though obviously folks within the Trump administration have been kind of proponents of it,

very public proponents of it in, you know, different parts of their careers. But they didn't have the legal framework, they didn't get a signature, right, as far as we know and as far as I was able to report, that actually just got a new fine that says go forth, you know, do that, you know, because there's a lot of like, you know, there's a big hangover on regime change, right? I think it's like a very complex thing and you've got to be very, very, although Bill Clinton recently admitted to signing a regime change finding for Milosevic in the late night. He just admitted that to like a reporter. He was like, yeah, I'm not the fine.

Okay, boss, you know. Sure, you were president, you know, whatever. So I think the Soleimani strike was an attempt by the folks in that administration who were actually thinking, you know, there were some, you may agree with their strategy, you may disagree with it, but there were some, there were some folks who really thought very, very intently and hard about Iran policy and had a vision for it. And some of those folks had spent long periods of their career thinking about Iran. And when they finally got into a position where they could affect Iran policy at very high levels, they were thinking about the different

levers of power at their disposal. And I think, I can't speak for them, obviously, but I've spoken to a lot of them for a lot of hours about this kind of stuff, that the Soleimani strike was part of this largest strategy of weakening and destabilizing Iran. And it's too soon to tell, obviously, but the Iranians do not seem to be in a position of great strength, right? And how either. And so, I mean, I will cop here. I will cop to something that I believed that has not come to pass. I mean, I thought the Iranians would strike more forcefully against the U.S. sooner after the Soleimani strike. And they did, of course, launch a bunch of missiles at a base in northern Iraq. There were folks who got, yeah, there were folks who got, I think,

TBI and like, I don't want to understate the seriousness of it. But like, I don't think a, I don't think a single American died in that strike. And there has not been much since then. I mean, there's been a little reporting. There was some reporting in the Washington Examiner about a plot of Bolton's life. In our story, we reported on a secret assassination list that the Iranians, that the U.S. had gotten hold of this list that the Iranians have put together. And but beyond that, you know,

there was both no attempt at, for instance, like, I don't know. I mean, there was a lot of, there was a lot of speculation at the time, and I thought it was completely reasonable given Iran's history that, like, somebody in Paraguay was going to get a, you know, blown up coming out of an embassy or a consulate, you know, like, they have a, they have a reach. Hesbollah also has a significant international reach in West Africa and South America. And, you know, I thought there would be a faster response. I'm very happy there hasn't been, but I'm also like, I don't expect them not to respond either. And because the U.S. killed the second most important person in their regime.

Right. There hasn't really been anything close to a proportional reaction, and they are much weaker than we are as a country. But, like, you know, there's an internal constituency for revenge, right? Like, whether it's desirable or not for them to do it, there are many people within that positions of power in that regime who I'm sure want retaliation to occur. And so on the one hand, I was wrong in thinking that they would respond faster, although, you know, history takes a long time to unfold. On the other hand, this like campaign of chaos in the Middle East that was the predicate for

of the Soleimani strike also has not come to pass, which is confusing because if he was the executing authority on it as the leader of the Quds force, he himself would not be carrying out the campaign. So you would have thought that if they had had a campaign lined up in the Middle East and they were at the stages where they were going to be able to actually carry stuff off, that they would have even more reason to do it after Suleleman. was killed. And we haven't seen that either. So it's just, it's a very muddy picture, but I think it's a really interesting one, especially now as they're trying to negotiate their way back into an Iran deal with the Biden administration.

I, you also mentioned, though, that there was like, like they put together, they were pretty diligent in their justifications for hating Soleimani. They put together like a list of every death and whatnot that he had been responsible, right? Yeah, I mean, there seems to be some, there's some evidence that there was, like, in order to put together, in order to put together something like that, in order to justify killing somebody on the battlefield,

you have to show them as like a antagonist, right? And so I think they had to, there was sophisticated legal predication for it. I mean, I think we could argue, we could spend hours and hours talking about, like, whether it was truly an active war zone, whether he was an active combatant. Like, he was there on a political trip, I think. I think he was there to make different prominent Shia political parties kiss and make up.

I think that's what it was. There was some kind of rift within the coalitions that Iran had influence over within Iraq, and he was there to deal with that. I mean, the other thing, too, is that nobody else talks about this, but there was another guy that was killed that night, Mahondas. And Mahondis was like a longtime Iranian agent who ran the Iraqi PMF, the popular mobilization forces. And, I mean, he was also responsible for external acts of terrorism, too.

I mean, it's amazing. I mean, Soleimani was such a big fish that, like, you have like a somebody who in a different circumstance, we would only be talking about Mahondas because he was like sucking important figure in Iraqi politics and his relationship to Iran and external terrorism went back decades, I think. I think it was like the early 1980s.

So yeah, I mean, I think they got the predication they needed, but I think it's, you know, it brought us into like a different, like it was a really complex decision. and or at least it, you know, it should have been because you don't kill, you don't kill an opposing, an opposing countries, a general in peacetime, quote, unquote, you know, and a head of an intelligence agency without really thinking through the second and third order effects, right? I mean, we're right now in a moment where, you know, Ukrainian forces seem to be killing a Russian one star like every two days. But, I mean, it's, I mean, it's. I'm not even exaggerating. It's almost like every day. I mean, it's unbelievable. But this was not that, right? This was a very, very different case than that. And I think it's within the Iranian system, Soleimani was far more important than any one of those particular one stars who the Ukrainians have killed as important as those guys are. So, yeah, I think that story, like, that's going to be, I feel like this is going to be one of those stories that like, We're going to look back on it. And the reporting that we did, Jack, we're going to be like, oh, that was chapter one out of like chapter 10.

It's just going to have, it's going to drag on for many, many years. And I think there could be a retaliatory cycle over many, many, many years that I'm not sure how we're going to be able to get out of. I mean, I was a fan of it then. And I understand the concern with second, you know, second order and third order of facts. but it's also as if, but it's also, for me, it was like, well, he's directly responsible for the death of U.S. you know, service people. And, you know, the IRGC was, you know, was classified as a terrorist organization at the time. And had we not kill them, it's not like they would have eased up their operations against the U.S., you know what I mean?

It's not like we initiated anything in my mind. And I felt like at the time, because we talked about it. on a show when it was just Jack and I, you know, when we, I guess we had somebody on at the time. But, you know, the idea at the time, I thought that the Iranians were kind of in a self-preservation mode. Because if the Trump administration would make a move like that, you know, then what else would they do? And how much, you know, we're going to fire some missiles at al-Assad and someplace sells some rockets to show that we're not laying down, but we're going to lay down. Like, we don't, we want to, like, represent the brand in the country, but we also don't want to, you know, like, we've got the good life here in Iran as the, you know, the leadership. We don't want to risk that.

That was just kind of what I thought. I mean, I think that's a completely coherent view. And I think that, like, there, that was an argument that folks within the administration made to me. And I mean, part of it was like, look, the Iranians, people got too scared of the Iranians. They treated them like they were 10 feet tall, but they're not. Right. You know, like a regional adversary of the U.S. They can cause hurt, but like they just don't have the ability to strike us the way that people think.

And we've let ourselves get into this cycle with them where we get paralyzed by not. doing anything when they continue to push and push and push and push and if we keep letting them push they're going to push more and you know the example at the time was like and is still today is like you know well first it was Lebanon you know then it was then it was Iraq then it was Yemen then it was Syria right so it's like there was this kind of like outward outward outward march of Iranian you know either could's force folks or proxies and there was more and more influence that they were accumulated in the wider Middle East. And I think there was a view of some folks in the administration that Soleimani was irreplaceable,

right? He wasn't just some general, you know? And other folks actually interesting enough, I've tried to do the opposite tack, which is to be like there's a myth of him, but he was just like any other general. But it's funny because, you know, those two things come in tension.

They're like completely intention. I've heard antithetical views from folks that studied Iran or worked on the Iran space about this. But I would almost say that the first view has been borne out, which is that like Soleimani over 20 years built up absolutely critical interpersonal connections across the Middle East that were not replicable. And maybe he became a captive of his own. power and didn't plan for his own demise enough to have other folks build those independent relationships with folks in, you know, in all those countries that, like, were desperately needed

in case something that this ended up happening. So, you know, I would be fascinated today to get a sense of where they are, the post-Sulamani-Kuds Force. Yeah. It doesn't seem like their ascendant. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, you can empirically test this out at a point. He's been dead for a while and they don't seem to be in a position of great strength regionally. So, you know, it's not my job to like to make a judgment on it, but I think that the case in hindsight for doing what they did is probably stronger than I thought at the time. And, you know, with a big caveat that like they waited. many, many years. They've waited years before to carry out strikes, retaliatory strikes.

I mean, I think when Mugnaya was killed, when was Mugna Yaa killed? I don't remember when Mugna Yad was killed. Oh, six? Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, something like that. But Mugn Mugn Mugh was killed. And then I think that Hezbollah blew up a bus of Israeli tourists like six or seven years later in Bulgaria. right as a retaliation from Mugnaya being killed like they will wait and I guess the question is like do they have the capabilities or are they just like you know because the the Bolton the allegations about the Bolton plot seem credible and we know that they thought about like blowing up the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC right in Caffe Milano, right? Like, they, the stuff that sounds like really hairbrained, like, they'll do it. And of course, you know, there's a history in the 90s of, you know, wholesale slaughter of civilians in Latin America, in Argentina, Jewish community centers and stuff like that.

So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting because I think analysts within, like, CIA analysts working on Kud's Force leadership have probably had a real seat change occur. And it will be interesting to see how their actions change or don't if the new Iran deal fails or not. Right, right. Like they might be, they might be like holding their fire, right? Like they might be trying to like play nice before the, you know, until they get the deal. And then we'll like what their actions will be after the deal will really. really, I think, be pretty interesting.

Yeah. The thing I wonder about stuff like that, though, is like, you know, Iran was already committing acts. Hezbollah was already committing acts. And, you know, it's, they can do a bombing of seven years and claim that it was because of, you know, because of Solomonic. But, but were they going to do it anyway? You know, it's one of those things that they can attribute it to, to whatever as revenge.

But it's, it's not. not like they weren't doing bombings prior to his death. It becomes really difficult to like suss it out. I have no insight to it. Like would they have bombed that bus of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria? Like probably not. I don't think so. I mean, what's the, I mean, you're just creating international opprobrium

and potential sanctions. And then you get like, and then you ratchet up tensions. and then your adversarial governments start thinking about, like, oh, maybe we should blow up some more Iranian scientists, you know? And, like, it just, it kind of empowers folks on both sides to pursue maximalist aims. And I don't know. I mean, it strikes me, though, again, that they have been relatively,

I mean, there's still, the Houthis are definitely, have greater capabilities today. I mean, surprising capabilities, I think. but like overall or maybe it's just because Syria has calmed down and frankly Assad is one. So there's like there's that too. It'll probably happen on like the five or ten year anniversary. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like and I think folks need to be kind of ready for that. But I think we also as a country like our politics and our discourse has to prepare for if that occurs. and if something horrific happens, that we actually, like, historicize it appropriately, right? Which is, like, we might need to retaliate. No, I know, right. Yeah, it's like, that'll happen. Like, we may need to retaliate, and we may have every right to retaliate, but, like,

we have to have a discussion if they actually do try to, like, hit a senior American official that, like, that they feel like they have every right to do so because we killed somebody who is like, again, there's no immediate analog, but we're talking about somebody who's like a super secretary of state. It would basically be like if you took the Dulleses and you put them together, you know, the guy who is like runs foreign policy and is the like chief spy master and also is like a general. So I don't even, you, Eisenhower plus though, you know, I mean, it's like. If, I mean, killing Soleimani from my point of view, it's just business, right? He was just a target. you know, he was a thorn in our side, so he took him out.

He was a military target. But if the Iranians turn around and they assassinate, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, we're not going to sit back. America isn't going to think, well, that's business, you know. It's just a target. That's not how we will, that's not the context we will view it through. I don't think so. I would be, I mean, that would be a very different country than the one that I think I live in.

Yeah. And I don't want it to happen. And I think that would be horrific and might set off a horrible escalatory spiral of violence. I mean, I think the AP had some good reporting, actually, about, I think, of an Iranian, like, discussion about hitting a very senior U.S. military official. Maybe the Army Chief of Staff, I think. I have to go back and look at it. But there was some really good report. I think it was Jim LaPorta, the AP reporter, a really good military reporter.

And I think he had some reporting on this that I've ever seen at the time being like, yeah, that sounds right. But I don't think we're going to situate it if it happens. It's interesting, too. I mean, the point you're making is something that I hear, like, I had a former senior agency official. Like, there are certain folks are very, like, matter of fact about this stuff, right? And we were talking about the allegations of the bounties on U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. And he just said to me something along the lines of like, that's business. Like that's the way this stuff goes.

Like in the 80s, we were paying the muja. He was like the Muja Hadin was like ripping people's tongues out and like, you know, taking off their eyelids. You know, he was just kind of like, we, you know, We set up an insurgency to kill their soldiers, and now they might be doing something like that to us. And it's a very unvarnished and realist-oriented take on this stuff. And it doesn't mean he a, I mean, and people get like very up and arms when you talk about it like this. And we're not talking in a moral register, you know, like I'm not, it's just part of like the structure of, like, the structure of.

how this plays out. And so it's good to have a realistic view about the things that your own side, quote unquote, does. So then you can try to put yourself in the position of the other ones and not moralize excessively about what an adversarial intelligence service is trying to do to you in a third country. And I think, you know, there's the politics of it in Washington, to DC and there was a lot of politics around the bounty store, if you guys remember correctly. It was just like, everyone was up in arms. How could the Russians do this? And like, yes, is it bad? It is absolutely bad, you know. Is it shocking? It's not shocking to me at all. And it really shouldn't be shocking to people who are getting classified briefings all the time about what we are doing

to average to American adversaries around the world. Right. So that's just, I don't know, I think it's a healthier way to look at it. I have a lot of skepticism about the Russian bounty story. myself, but I'll shelf that discussion for another time. Let's circle around. Let's kind of make our way to Russia and ultimately to Ukraine here. Take us back in time to what was going on to the Trump administration and how we were talking a little bit beforehand about how publicly President Trump had this sort of like, you know, bromance going with Vladimir Putin.

was a little concerning. But as far as the policy objectives of the central intelligence agency and other facets of the U.S. government, it's like fairly, you know, hawkish, you know, leaning into the problem as far as, you know, Russian espionage and Russian influence is concerned. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think this is like the great untold narrative of the Trump administration, which is that like you had two foreign policies. You had the, you had the president's foreign policy. See, people can never say this. Were people in the administration You can never say this at the time because it sounds like subversive, but it's true. It is absolutely true.

It's true. And the truth is is that the Trump administration was populated by traditional hawkish center-right, national security folks that were more aggressive than the Obama administration and a whole variety of topics, including Russia-related ones. And then you had the president himself who, like you said, had this romance. there was like a lot of like there was just so much heat around anything he said or did regarding Russia that it became impossible to actually get a good sense of the administration's Russia policy because it was always like being filtered through the discourse surrounding Trump himself and it was basically like impenetrable right there's like there's a point where

Trump administration even would do overt things like they would like to talk about Ukraine for a second I mean, they're the ones that started providing lethal aid, right? And like, but it was impossible. It couldn't break through that they were stepping things up, you know? Well, it's interesting that someone I spoke to about the javelin program, they finally did get that approved during the Obama administration, but I was told that when Trump came in, he was very quick to say, oh, yeah, that guy was too weak to do it, but I'm the guy.

I said the javelins. But there was a continuity, though. I mean, that much is true. Trump continued. Yeah. Yeah, he could, I mean, but that was, but I mean, two things. One, the way to get, I mean, I've heard this before and this has been reported by others, like, the way to get something done was to be like, this is the opposite of what Obama did. So it was like, Obama running this and you will be strong, you will be strong.

And so then he'd be like, what is that, you know, what do you want me to sign? More missiles. Like, sure. Like, stronger. And it was less about the particular policy and more about the emotional frision of separating himself from Obama. And I mean, I think you correct identified, though, the Obama administration began, I mean, post-2014 policy in Ukraine was, you know, the Obama administration were the, you know, they were the ones who really thought about the parameters of it at the time. And they, you know, the overt training program in Western Ukraine that trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers over the years and only, only was put on pause in February of this year when the invasion seemed imminent. That was beginning under the Obama administration.

And so were the CIA's covert action programs in Ukraine. And, you know, there was a lot. there was a tremendous fear within the Obama administration I was told about seeming too aggressive, even though the Russians had literally just annexed Crimea and were supporting an insurgency in the Donbass. But like there was a lot of fear. I had a former national security officials say to me, and I like I never forgot about this phrase. And he said, well, you know, the Obama administration deterred itself all. the time, you know, and they did that on, they did that on Russia and Ukraine. Like, they talked themselves into a corner where they were too worried about, about appearing too, too aggressive.

And I don't know if this was a direct reaction to it. It may have had nothing to do with it. But, you know, so they had this overt program, which began pretty quietly. And they, you know, they did something which many administrations do when they want to pursue foreign policy, but not actually have to explain it to the American people for a variety of reasons. And they kicked up some covert training programs as well for the Ukrainians, both on the front line in the Donbass and then also in the U.S. itself. And they sent multiple classes of folks. Ukrainian paramilitary as an intelligence personnel to a training center beginning in 2015 that was run by CIA Special Activity Center folks.

and they just sent classes through. And to kind of bring this all back again, that program was expanded and given more financing during the Trump era, right? So once again, there was like this public-facing aspect to Trump, which was like standing at that, you know, a podium with Vladimir Putin and, you know, denigrating the U.S. intelligence community

and like just some stuff that's like, it's fair to say unprecedented, just like weird, you know, stuff that like is disquieting. And then at the same time, his administration is like, kicking up more money for, you know, programs that involve having paramilitaries, teach other paramilitaries, skills that could be construed as designed to kill Russians on the battlefield, right? So, like, like sniper training, for instance. So, you know, it's like a, it's like a tale of two administrations, right? It's like a very, very complex situation that you don't see a lot because you don't

don't get a situation where, like, you know, the Biden administration is far more normal in that way, right? Or, like, where I don't think Biden is saying one thing in his administration is, like, in the NSC, they're just like, eh, we're just going to keep doing this, you know? And that was going on during the Trump era. And, but the program, I mean, the CIA programs, I mean, seem to have been very, very successful, just like the training in Western Ukraine appears to have been very successful too. I mean, I think there's, like, it seems to me that there's night and day between the Ukrainian military in 2014 and the Ukrainian military in 2022. And I think vast credit has to go to the Ukrainians for their like perseverance and bravery. But like, you know, eight years of

training by the U.S. military and special activity center definitely didn't hurt. So. Yeah. I mean, that's always, it's always interesting. Like, where do you draw that line? I mean, there's always, you know, we'd always want to like try to take credit and be like, oh, yeah, look what a good job we did. But maybe it has more to do with what badasses the Ukrainians are and being willing to fight. But, you know, as you said, I mean, there are some metrics we can look at, right? If you look at the amount of armored vehicles that the Ukrainians are destroying with American and British weaponry, it seems that, yes, this training did pay dividends.

Yeah, I mean, it was trained the trainer too, right? because so it was like training them in, you know, anti-tank stuff, right? And giving them the wherewithal to figure out how to use those tools. And now those tools are like, you know, that stuff, those types of missiles and systems are like, they're like constantly flowing into Ukraine, right? And, you know, you need those guys who understand how to operate them and then can train other people to do it. And then you also have just like intelligence collection techniques, again, sniper operations.

Like they basically taught, you know, they taught the Ukrainian special operations folks, like the American way of special operations and the American way of war. And, you know, I think you correctly identified that it's, like, important not to overstate it. because, you know, what is it like, victory has a thousand fathers and failures in orphan. And like right now the Ukrainians are doing way better than people initially thought. So folks want to take credit for it. And like some should, right? I mean, again, eight years of training is eight years of training.

And, you know, again, I don't want to draw too close of a line because I don't know this for a fact. But like, how many one stars of the Ukrainians killed at this point? They've killed at least one two star, right? At least one of those folks was reported to have been killed by a sniper. Like, you know, there's enhanced intelligence sharing that's going on. We know that. I mean, the Biden folks have just come out and said it, but like, you know, I reported on it. Those relationships have, you know, developed big time after 2014.

And, you know, the ability to identify leadership and take them out on the battlefield like that is like, I mean, again, you know, I'm just a reporter, but like, those are precisely the kind of things that I was told that the agency was teaching them how to do. So, you know, without saying this is because of the agency, and I don't know that, like, this is the kind of thing that I was told they were taught. And it seems to be having an effect today because, like, it's frankly shocking what you're seeing right now. At least it is to me. I mean, along with the conventional American military and the Office of Defense Cooperation out of the embassy there and in NATO. I mean, there were a number of NATO nations who were in there helping out and, you know,

we're given different lanes and training the Ukrainians. So, I mean, yeah, I think it definitely paid dividends. I think that's pretty clear. Yeah, I mean, the training at, I think Yavariv was the name of the facility. like they, I mean, like you said, I mean, that published a story today with John Winter that was a, based on an unclassified 2016 report by the, was folks represented the irregular warfare center, which I think has been disbanded now. And it was all about, they took, they interviewed folks from the first battalion that were trained there by the Americans and the Lithuanians and the Canadians who then went back. to the front in the Donbass and then they brought them back to be like well how did the training help how did the training help how did the training help and they were all just like you know

for instance like NATO NATO style coordinate finding and I forget the name of the precise system like they were they were like talking that up they were talking up the sniper training like they were they were like and I don't think they were just trying to um like they seemed actually very, very grateful and thankful for what they had learned. I mean, they were also like, we need night vision equipment. Like, we're lacking basic things. Some of our tents date back to World War II. I mean, this is literally they were telling these American soldiers this, like,

we need stuff that's like, we need spare parts, you know. But it's clear that it was having an effect. But it was interesting, though, too, because it was like they had to learn and the U.S. helped them think through an environment where, like, they were being outmatched technically, you know, by the Russians. And they didn't have the ability to have, like, the Russians and the separatists have, like, loitering, you know, ISR drones that made it, like, impossible for them to move at certain times.

They're using the drones for, like, pinpoint artillery strikes. And, like, this was just stuff that was, like, really, they were learning through that in real time with their American trainers. both in the regular military and then the CIA SAC guys. And I know this for a fact on both. And then there was kind of like an iterative process where for the U.S. This was like unbelievably valuable because it was like you're getting direct experience and or exposure to people that were fighting Russians

and learning about the Russian way of war in real time. And so then those books would go back. and they would think through how to overcome these problems that the Ukrainians were facing on the front. And so over time, I mean, it was a big shock. I mean, I could tell you, like, I was speaking to former folks who were, you know, aware of these programs on the front line, the SAC program on the front line. And like, they were after like a decade plus of war on terror type stuff. They were like, whoa, we haven't faced an adversary like this. It was kind of like Moscow rules times Baghdad rules.

And so they were shocked at what they were seeing. They were like, oh, we can't do certain things the way we've done them before. We have to change the way we've done combs. We have to change the way we like operate in the battle space because of the ability for the Russians to target us in ways that like we just never had to worry about with the Taliban. I mean, there was one anecdote I was told about like the Russians shining high intensity lasers into sniper scopes. and like trying to blind people, you know? And like the SAC folks were like, well, never saw that shit with the Taliban, you know. Like it was a big, it was like an ice water bath for them.

And so they learned in real time. And then they learned, they kind of taught, they learned and taught at the same time with the Ukrainians. And I think that's the other thing that hasn't really gotten a lot of attention is the length of time that they had with them there. Because it allowed them those multiple cycles to just keep learning about the, what the Russians were doing and to think of countermeasures for it. You're probably seeing some of the fruits of that today. They, I can't remember if you mentioned it in your article or not, but there's also some training to like help them

what electronically mask their signatures so they weren't being targeted and things like that. Yeah, exactly, because they were like taking their cell phones into the trenches and like getting blown to bits, you know, in the early days in 2014. They didn't understand the signature, they didn't understand that their signatures were leading them, you know, leaving them as,

like sitting ducks out there. So they had to find new covert communication system that both allowed them to communicate with one another, but also didn't leave just like metadata, right, that allowed them to be targeted. And it's amazingly ironic, right? Because there's been all this reporting that the Russians, they're getting smoked because the generals are just using open lines to like to, you know, communicate with folks either back home or, you know, in the like in battlefield and so the stuff that the Russians were doing to the Ukrainians in 2014 and the Ukrainians and the US trainers learned to protect against the Russians seem to now be doing and it's really fascinating because it shows that like the Russians were really excellent at like

static more static situations where there was like kind of like a you know a relatively static line of, what they didn't call it line of control, what is it, the line of contact, where they had positions and they had material that allowed for like electronic warfare, and they were able to do this kind of ISR work. But as things have taken on a much more dynamic flow in the current invasion, they just seem to be like sputtering. It will be interesting, though, if they settle in and we start seeing a kind of dawnedass situation in different parts of Ukraine, whether that will reverse.

And then it will be particularly interesting to see whether the lessons that the U.S. and Ukrainians learned and the things that the U.S. top of Ukrainians become extra relevant. It's, yeah, pretty incredible. I mean, we're living through historic times here watching all this unfold in front of us. I mean, I think it's interesting, right? Because, like, we live, like, we're living on all this stuff real time, right? We don't know the ending of something while we're in the middle of it. But, like, this is just one of those events that, like, could easily be. as apocal as 9-11 was, or if not more. And we're just, like, we're now in this moment where

we don't really know where we're going to land, but we all know that things are never going to go back to the way they were before they did this, right? You cannot launch a massive invasion, a land war in Europe like this without reverberations for years and decades. I mean, Russia is basically, Russia is being disengaged from the global economy. is being ripped from the global economy in the last like month. You know, you have, you have a refugee crisis in Europe, but you also have like reportedly tens of thousands of Russians from the like middle class and intelligentsia fleeing the country.

Right? So like Russia's not going to be the same either and not just in material terms. You know, like there was always this kind of give and take in the Russian system where it was a authoritarian, but there were still far more freedoms in a lot of ways than under the Soviet system, where if you wanted to find external sources of media, or there was like certain kinds of like dissenting or quasi-free publications that existed, and that stuff just got shut down. It just in 48 to 72 hours, I just like, I mean, the cliche is that like a curtain descended, right, over Russia, over Russia. And like, we just do not know where this is going.

And we really don't know where Russia can or cannot de-escalate in a way that's like politically salient for the leadership there, right? Because they need to like back off in a way where they can like somebody can live to tell the tale at this point. I think we saw a little bit of that today with the Russian military briefing where you can already see them starting to move the goalposts and say, well, it was never our intent to take these cities. It was just a distraction. so we could come in from the, like, it's like, yeah, we meant to do that, you know. Yeah. So I think, yeah.

That's just fucking bullshit. I mean, like, I don't know how else to put it. Like, that is such bullshit. They wanted to decapitate the country in 48 hours. They wanted to kill the leadership. Like, they, they wanted to install a puppet government. It is, I mean, it is incredibly obvious. And I mean, they, but in a way, like, if they, if they want to change,

their stated objectives that's actually good. Right. We should let them. I mean, if they do, then we should like confirm that, yeah, that's what you guys met the whole time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to stop them from trying to level Mary a poll. Right. You know, take other cities in the Donbass. But like, if that's a better rhetorical

framework for everybody to be operating in. Because the Ukrainians are winning the war, but the Russians can win by losing. They can just throw people into the pressure for a long time, and they have a history of doing it. And the Ukrainians are going to have to come away from this conflict with, like, they're going to lose things, right? Like, no matter what, even they're going to win the war, but as the weaker party, they're going to lose a great deal. And not just in people's lives. Like, they're going to lose territory. They're going to lose claims. Like, they're not going to get everything that they want. And it's going to be interesting to see where they can find that middle space that is politically palatable, though, also to the Ukrainians.

Because Zelensky has to go back to his people and be like, you guys, I mean, he has to go back to a people that has been transformed by this war that has lost so many people, civilians and soldiers alike, and sell them on something that they're going to be able to live with. And that's going to be really hard too. Plus, frankly, I think there's a situation where foreign governments that are supporting the Ukrainians, like nobody wants the war, but also like the Ukrainians are dying and other people aren't dying. The Ukrainians are doing tremendous damage to the Russian military right now. And so it'll be interesting to see what Ukraine's partners actually think is an advisable deal. Yeah. Or whether they'll be encouraging folks to push on. in the face of like Russian losses.

Yeah. It's, I, you know, one of the things I'm curious about is you mentioned sort of the, the xenophobia that resulted against like the Chinese and COVID and then also, you know, when there are spies caught and the xenophobia that affects regular like Chinese. We're kind of seeing the same thing with Russians, the United States, though, right? we're seeing Russians, you talk about kicking Russians out of school. Like, do you feel, do you have an opinion as to whether that's an adequate response of, like, like, punishing Russians in general for this?

Or do you feel is it's more of that kind of xenophobia rearing its head? So it's interesting, right? Because, like, you know, collective punishment is a really delicate topic. Sanctions are a form of collective punishment. Nobody wants it to say that, but they are, right? You're punishing, you're punishing people who are living in that country who have nothing to do with the government for their government's actions. I mean, that's what's been going on in Iran for a long time,

and that's what's been going on in Russia right now. I mean, just to be totally frank with you, like, I don't think that that kind of xenophobia is that is anywhere near as acute because, like, Russians are white, most of them. I mean, the Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic state, but I just think that like, just like the difference between the treatment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans and German Americans in World War II, there was like a massive, massive double standard. And I think that's, you're going to see that play out. There's going to definitely be some bias against Russian institutions. But the other thing, too, that people like need to really, really keep in mind is that, like, many Russian Americans,

Americans in the U.S. came here at the fall of the Soviet Union or before it. It's like many people who like, there was actually a segment in local news in San Francisco about this where like we have a part of town that's called Little Russia and there's really good bakeries and other stuff. And like all those folks have like, you know, they have stuff like Russia is in the name of the restaurant, but they like came from Ukraine in like 1983. Right. Right. And like we just, I think you have to be very, very careful with that. kind of thing because, you know, Russian identity is so complex and people who were Soviet, like Soviet Americans identify, like, they have things that say they're Russian, but it's like,

it's, it's a lot more complicated than that. And you just don't see a lot of like, I mean, I haven't seen any. Maybe, maybe you could tell me about what's going on in New York, but within that community, you don't see a lot of outward pro-Port or any outward pro-Puton sentiment, quite the opposite, actually. Yeah, I saw on a Russian restaurant in Manhattan yesterday or a couple of days ago, Ukrainian flag, very prominent out front. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and here in Brooklyn, I've seen a lot of Ukrainian flags on just general businesses and outside people's windows and things like that. Yeah, I think a lot of people, I mean, they, you know, this is like really a fraternal war, too. I mean, that's what makes it so devastating, I think, for both Ukrainians and Russians who have, you know,

and we have to give a lot of credit to the Russian people that came out to protest this war. It's not, it's balls. It's not an easy place. Yeah, it's ballsy. You have, you know, you do not want to, you know, like, and especially now that it's basically a crime to even call it a war, right? Protesting in the streets in an authoritarian country, we take that for granted here. We take for granted how hard it is to, you know, mobilize people in a place like that. But I think it's devastating, right?

And for, I'm sure it's devastating for Russian-American, Ukrainian-American communities, too. I mean, in New York, right, you have Brighton Beach. They used to call it a little Odessa, you know. And, like, I'm sure there are so many devastated families right now that thought of themselves as, like, you know, either have family in Russia, come from one side of the border or the other side. of the border, always thought of themselves as like twin peoples in many ways. And now it's like, you know, now it says being ripped apart. So I think, I mean, in many ways, this is like a time almost to like go support those businesses and to let people know that like, you know, you're not

associating them with Vladimir Putin. That said, though, I mean, you know, my brother who, who lives in New York, he has like a, like a Soviet, Soviet American trainer who is like mainlining RT and is convinced that convinced that Ukraine is being denotified. So, you know. Yeah, we definitely have those people out there

who they've been mainlining Q&N and on and they think that all kinds of crazy stuff. They think Zelensky is blowing up his own cities and like weird shit. Yeah. Well, I mean, is it a shock? I mean, look at the text of Ginny Thomas. You know?

Like people. People get radicalized, right? I mean, people just, like, fly off the handle with theories. And it's like Vladimir Putin is talking about canceling Russia, right? Like, they're a troll or does they actually believe it? Like, I don't know anymore, you know? Yeah, what did he say that, like, they're canceling Russia like they, or something to do with, uh, with, um, J.K. Rawlings.

Yeah. They're canceling me like the way they canceled her. Is that the Harry Potter woman invade Ukraine? What the fuck are we talking about? I mean, it's like literally the most insane. It's insane to have the leader of Russia, you know, one of the world's most powerful states that is in the middle of a brutal military invasion of a neighbor talking about JK rallying and cancellation.

Like it's just like you couldn't possibly make it up. But that's a message that's tailored for Americans. It's and for the West. It's for the West. It's not for his people. No, it is. I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's maybe they love Harry Potter, which I have no idea.

But like, but again, but I don't know. I mean, you had asked me years ago, is this all, is this all rhetorical? I've been like, oh, yeah. But then like, listening to Putin's, you know, rant before the invasion about his reasoning process for going in, I was kind of like, he might actually believe all this stuff. Yeah. And that's more scarier. I think that's one of the challenging things about this is, you know, it's hard to. tell what his actual mental state is right now, you know, in terms of like predictability.

You know, we, we say like, well, what's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario right now where we are? And it's like, it depends on what, where he's at and, you know, mentally and, and everything like that. Like, will he revert to, you know, chemical warfare? Will he revert to nuke? You're like, what, you know, how, how much of a threat can he find, can he find a way out that is going to allow him to preserve his leadership because if he's not the leader of Russia,

he's probably either going to jail or going to be dead. And if that's his only option, who knows what he would be willing to do? I think that's well put. I mean, he's got to satisfy his core constituency, right? Which is like a very small circle of folks in the security sector, who, many of whom are reportedly like to his right, right? Like that's why the whole the whole conversation around like, oh, somebody should, you know, I couldn't believe that this was done, but like a U.S. Senator actually was like suggesting,

like somebody should take out, you know, Putin. Oh, it's Lindsay Graham, wasn't it? Yes, it was, Lindsay Graham. Who actually got, who actually, I think was like, I think Marjorie Taylor Green actually tweeted at him and was like, are you crazy? You can't talk like this, you know? And I was kind of just like, once again,

you know, truth is like stranger than fiction. And like, I think we have to see Putin as somebody, like we mirror image terribly, right? Like we think about social and political pressures as reflected from the American context, which is entirely different than the Russian context, right? Like when you have a robust free press, when you have some semblance of a multi-party, we have a multi-party system and you have a you have like a somewhat robust accountability mechanism that's quite deficient in a lot of ways but is also like it exists and it's real and it's important and of course you have like electoral democracy right we have none of that in Russia right now right and you have somebody that's been in power for 20 years and an ever smaller circle of people

that he trusts who has become increasingly um increasingly remote from people that apparently he even was fairly close to, you know, four or five years ago and became extra remote during COVID. And seems to have been very, like, actually emotionally and intellectually influenced by a particular theory of Russian history that emphasizes certain kind of, like, mystical elements and a story about grievance in the post-Cold War in the post-Soviet era. And, like, we don't know. I think we have no idea what he's going to be willing to do to exit the war on terms that he considers appropriate for his country, but also, again, like you said, for himself. Because, like, he's, I don't think there's a situation. I could be wrong.

I hope I'm wrong. I don't think there's a situation. Well, I don't know if I hope I'm wrong either way in this, but, like, I doubt there's a situation in which he resigns and goes and lives in a dacha. somewhere. Yeah. Like he's either in it until he's dead. Like he sits in that seat until he dies of old age

or something else horrible happens to him at this point. And then beyond there we have no idea, you know? Zach, I'm going to hit up some viewer questions here. Robert asks, do you have any info on inter-DNR L&R factional fighting from 2014

to now? Any info on what has happened to their top brass once they move to Russia like Girkin? Oh, that's a great question. And that's more specific than I think I can provide. And all I know is that there was a, I can say that like, and I think some of this is reported elsewhere, but like there was a period

in which you had folks in the initial post-war period, you have folks enter Ukraine with the approval of the Russians who are kind of irregular forces like Cossacks, and other extremist groups that then started carving out these little, these little kind of principalities within the DNR and LNR. And there was a regularization campaign that occurred when the Russian military came in, and the FSB started hunting some of those folks down for thinking that they actually had independent decision-making powers.

Like I think there was one guy who, a Cossack leader, who was killed in a car bomb the day after his wedding. or something like that. And so I think over time, those more marginal elements were either silenced or they were kicked out of the LNR and the DNR and sent back to Russia. Or alternatively, I was told, some of them were basically told, you're not in a leadership position, but you're not coming back to Russia. Like, this is your new home.

So not a great deal for those folks, but then again, they were pretty terrible folks. to begin with, so I have no empathy for them whatsoever. But I don't know what's happened since then. I don't know what's happened since the war broke out. The eastern front of the LNR and DNR, like that line seems fairly statical. They seem to have taken, the Russians seem to have taken some territory north of there.

But I'm not sure what happened to those guys, the ones that survived, although it doesn't seem like after 2016, after 2016 or so, I was told they lost their influence. Like their influence spiked in the immediate post-war period and then it dropped pretty quickly once the Russians decided they wanted to exert more control. Elliot asks, Western media suggests that Russia is only using 10% of their available forces. To me, that seems like BS. Why use 10% if the goal is a blitzkrieg? What are your thoughts? 10% of their available forces, 10% of all the forces that were arrayed at Ukraine from Belarus.

I think he means 10% in terms of the totality of the Russian military. Yeah, I don't know. That's a great question. I mean, I think you don't want to leave yourself completely undefended in other parts of your vast empire that stretches from the border of Norway to North Korea. That would probably be the number one reason, right? you're already taking troops out of like flat of ostok and the far east and you probably don't want to leave yourself too vulnerable in different parts of your absolutely massive country i mean i can't find them yeah my understanding is that 90% of all the forces that they had a raid

either in belarus or on the border they have yeah they have brought the bear i don't know i don't know and cannot say whether that's the i don't have the the the the um the the the statistics in front of me about the percentage of those forces and what they represent for the Russian military writ large. But you guys might know better than I. So maybe, I mean, please feel free to chime in there.

Yeah, no, I don't know why there as far as what percentage. I mean, that probably, like you said, they're probably deploying every available force without, you know, leaving themselves completely undefended in, you know, Comchatka or wherever else they have. Yeah, I don't know, they don't want like the Japanese to be like, oh, cool, maybe we'll. Yeah.

We'll start that up again. Yeah, exactly. Florida, Nick, thank you very much. He just had jean shorts. KGM, thank you. Counterintel stories are very difficult to cover for mass audiences. NRA Maria Butina infiltration equals so blatant, yet it was not well covered, in my opinion. I mean, do you agree with that that counter intel stories are hard to cover and not reported on often?

Yes, counterintelligence stories are really hard to cover because they tend to be very closely held for a variety of reasons. And they also tend to go on for long periods of time. And sometimes that, like without that quick, obvious beginning and end to an investigation, you know, it kind of robs folks of the ability to say, that's done now. and I may talk about that to a reporter that I trust because there's a sense that these things have gone for like 30 years and they'll take on all these crazy dimensions and they'll spin out in all these directions.

They're also not understood that well. And you have to kind of get into this, you have to get people into this like language space where I think they understand the like multi-level games that are being played. I would actually see the Batina story is like a counter example to that. I think the Butina story was like, was covered extensively because it was salacious.

Yeah. I mean, she was sleeping with a with a lobbyist, right? Was associated with the NRA? I think so. Yeah, she was a lifetime member of the NRA and was she the one that we got, we got to see her boobs in the Daily Mail? Or am I think. I don't know, but that sounds very plausible.

You might be confusing her with Anna Chapman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, here's the thing that let's be honest, like, she's kind of like a lesser version of Anna Chapman. Like Anna Chapman was actually an SBR officer under cover. Like she was illegal. And like Maria Butina was being run not even by an intelligence agency. She was being run by, she was an agent of influence being run outside of like normal

intelligence agency channels, I think. But she was also everywhere, right? She's a good, I mean, like for instance, you know, the Christine Fong story, people were like, oh, this is kind of like a Chinese version of Maria Butina. That was the easiest way for me to explain to people about why that story matter and what it was about. I was like, yes, this is like a Chinese version of Maria Butina, except for local Bay Area politics. Yeah.

So I don't know, that story was all of it. Anything that had Russia influence, I mean, at that period, it was going to get tons of play. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the New York Times are at least, you know, 10 to 15 articles about that. But again, you know, and from my, from my own personal bias, and this is not fact, you know, like where I see it, it's like, well, it's politically oriented. Like they will write about, you know, a Russian asset with the NRA, but not about a Chinese asset with Democrats.

But that, again, is me and how, you know. Yeah, I mean, didn't the New York Times just did that whole story about how Biden's laptop was legit? They just, they just put it out. I mean, it doesn't seem like something they would do if they're just trying to, like, run top cover. that's their main well unless you unless you look at it from the point that everybody denied it during the election and now it's safe to admit it like that they ran top cover during the election or they didn't have the information i mean yeah this gets into like conspiracy theories i mean it's all speculation right and we see it the way the way we sort of lean um i don't think territorial either

way i think i think there's very plausible arguments on both sides in this case where it's like Like you could make a case that it was because they couldn't, it wasn't adequately corroborated before the election or that like it was just such a third rail. And nobody wanted to touch it until after the election. And then people felt safe. Yeah. I honestly couldn't say. I don't.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's, it's, it's, it's very hard. I know for myself, it's very hard to look past my cognitive bias. And all I can do is recognize that I have it and wonder how much it's influencing. like what I see and what I read. I mean, I think, well, I mean, if I were to just think about it from like a basic, like, civics aspect, I mean, that's really how you have to, I mean, that's the best way to read, too.

I mean, read critically, I mean, read sources critically that, you know, have an editorial bias that align with you and read them equally as critically on the opposite side, right? And this gets very, very third railish again. But like, you know, editorial is one thing. News reporting is another. They're supposed to be church and state separation. It's a little more complicated. It can be a little more complicated.

Right. And there's nuance. I mean, there's nuance to almost every story. But it doesn't support, I feel, though, like the left or the right media channels are not going to cover the nuance because it complicates the issue. They want a message that's marketable to their viewers, and so generally they're going to go with a story in a way that doesn't express nuance. I think this is one of the great problems of journalism, right,

which is like getting eyeballs in non-sensationalistic ways to make people care about stories that matter, but that are presented in ways that are not going to set people's seats on fire. And I am so glad I don't cover American domestic politics. You could not pay me any amount of money to cover American domestic politics for precisely that reason, because I just think it's really, really hard to do so in that way, and you're just in such a pressure cooker. But I will say, I'm like, I don't know, I mean, I'm sure other national security reporters would say the same thing.

It's like you're also thinking about that. You have to report the facts. You just have to report the facts. But like, again, the stories don't appear in vacuums. And we're humans. Right. We're aware of the environment that is occurring into the political and social and cultural environment

that we are immersed in. And so, like, we think through that stuff. It doesn't mean that I don't, I've never not reported something for that reason. But, like, I'm aware of it. Like, I was very aware when I was reporting the Christine Fong story that, like, this is going to be construed a certain way.

But, like, to the marrow of it. of my bones, I was like, this is a story that matters and it should be reported. And like, that's it. And it was kind of like, damn the torpedoes. And I mean, that's, you know, that's just the way, that's just the way it was. I think it's very admirable. I mean, I think that, you know, everybody's going to have their, their view of the world. But then for you and for Jack and for people working in the journalism field, like the truth is the truth. Regardless, you know, yeah. I mean, you have to, I mean, you have to, at the end of the day, like, If you're like that is the, that's the difference between you and a propagandist, right?

Like if you're an actual journalist, you have to kind of like follow the facts. I mean, this sounds very like, I don't know, gumshue or idealistic because, but I think it's true. Like you have to, you have to like, you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable in the things that you're learning. even if you know that they somehow contradict things that you believe or you previously believes deeply because you have to be willing to update your ideological priors in real time. And that is like an uncomfortable and sometimes painful thing for people to deal with. Yeah. I get a man.

Yeah. I don't like to use your questions. Thank you again, KJM. What is your understanding regarding the motivation of Chinese spies versus Russian spies in the U.S.? The government claims intellectual property, DOD, info, and social chaos. I mean, definitely like IP theft is a big part of Chinese strategy. It's been theft of trade secrets has been like a huge, huge concern for FBI counterintelligence. The Chinese are the, you know, the biggest practitioner of that domestically.

I think it's actually an interesting question whether the Russians being cut off from the global market are going to start getting back. that game more, you know, and whether counterintelligence folks are going to have to start thinking about that, because the Russians were involved in it in very, very small, specific areas like microchips and night vision devices and stuff like that. But the wholesale kind of like, you know, pelfering of American IP across a bunch of different sectors and industries that the Chinese are, like, have been known to do in the past, like that we haven't seen that with the Russians the same way. Yeah, I mean, I would break it down as IP theft, political influence, and community influence campaigns, right?

Like, American influence on the American political system as one prong, and then influence and surveillance of communities of Chinese descent and Chinese communities abroad in the U.S. And that's a big, big, that's a big, big part of what they've been up to. I mean, traditionally there was this idea that they weren't as, like, slick as the Russians, that they were a little bit more like second tier. And they were like, but it was just that they were willing to get caught more. Because they just had more people from non, they had more agents that they were willing to, like, burn in a way. And the Russians, I was always told the Russians are more like us, you know.

Like, they're more intelligence officer focused. The Chinese will get people to do things. things, you know, like people from state institutions or universities to do IP theft for them, or people in graduate programs who will, you know, learn about important technologies that they can bring back to China and then participate in some kind of like state laboratory that basically replicates the research that they did in the U.S. And that's, it's just a different strategy, a different way of looking at things. And the Chinese, I think, we're just willing to throw more at the wall and see what's stuck.

Yeah, it's crazy. Let's see here. Robert, thank you. Oh, let's see. No. Michael, thank you. What are your thoughts on after the Ukraine war is done? How do you think payback for Russia on U.S.

for arming the Ukraine will and could take shape? Oh, boy. That feels like I have no idea where we're going to be at that point. I don't know. I mean, I think that like if the U.S. is involved abroad, I mean, the U.S. is still involved abroad, but like if we had another conflict zone like Afghanistan where we had significant personnel abroad, I would expect to see more targeting of them and probably through proxies. I mean, I think, although I have to be honest, I think that they have so many internal problems right now that they're going to have to deal with both their military and intelligence. services, I think you're going to have, there's probably going to be purges and, you know, kind of self-laceration that's going to go on. The analytic core is going to be put through the ringer for the,

you know, potential predictive errors in the ease of the, on the ease of the invasion that, I don't know. I mean, I think this is going to leave Russia weakened in any case. And I don't, I don't think this is like, I don't think revenge on the U.S. is going to be their top concern. They're going to probably turn inward. And we've been very open. That's the thing, right? I mean, other than these, like, relatively small agency programs that I've reported on, I mean, like, Millie just appeared at the border, and he brought around, he brought a bunch of journalists with him, like, like, a week and a half ago.

And they, like, literally wrote up articles that were like, Millie's at the border, like, you know, slapping, like, you know, basically, like, just like watching the stingers roll off the trucks, right? So, I mean, the U.S. has obviously calculated that, that Russia has bigger problems right now than retaliation against the U.S. Or all of NATO, that's the other thing, too, retaliation against the U.S., but it's NATO-wide. Right. And, like, NATO is an incredibly powerful military alliance.

Like, we really don't think about, we take it for granted, you know, but like this is not, the U.S. gets top covered in smaller countries, but this is like a mass armament campaign from multiple countries and not just NATO countries, but also I think the South Koreans have also, South Koreans and the Japanese have also lended a hand too. So this is like a lot of different countries all over the globe who have come firmly down the side of the Ukrainians. And the Russians, I don't think I could do much about it right now. Florida, Florida, Nick, thank you. A little political comment. Biden gave more equipment to the Taliban than Ukraine. Robert C., thank you very much. Thoughts on difference on Ukraine's SBU's corruption and effectiveness from

Poroshenko, yours, to current president. That's a great question. I mean, I think that one of the great, the giant impediments for U.S. Ukrainian relations has been in the sense that the SPU is both very corrupt and very penetrated. Those things are intertwined and interrelated, but they're not synonymous, right? So they have really, that's been a big, big deal. Over the years, apparently it's gotten better. it's still a problem and you know there's inter-service rivalry there too where you have the Ukrainian military I mean I was told by former official the Ukrainian military

intelligence agency her was actually considered more reliable and less penetrated than the SBU and so there's there's been really really strong NSA her liaison since 2014 but the agency also has built up important links with the SBU. And the way that it was carried out, according to the folks that I spoke with, former officials, was that they would try to isolate specific trusted units and commanders

and compartment them from the larger SBU organization. But all that said, I can tell you that during the Trump era, Trump era national security officials that were close contact with those folks had a rule. And the rule was don't tell anything to the SBA that you don't expect the Russians aren't going to find out. Like they're going to find out about it. You know, like SBAU is that penetrated. And there was this working assumption at the agency training program in the U.S. that like it was basically blown from the get go. Like it was, you know, there was just that was the working assumption that the SB, like that was kind of like

the cost of doing business with the SBA was you were going to have folks that were going to be reporting back to the Russians. I mean, I don't know if it was an intention in this particular case, but if you look back into the past, the stay behind units in Europe, I mean, the Soviets knew about them, particularly like Detachment A in Berlin, which was Americans, Soviets knew about that, but that's part of the deterrence, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it was, I don't think it was a surprise to them at all that we'd be doing it. And, um, I mean, you were talking about the difficulty of reporting counterintelligence, because then you start getting to the wheels, right?

Where we want them to know, you know, and we want them to know that we want them to know that we know that they know, you know. Like there's all these different psychological dimensions to it. And I think that was probably going on. But I also think that like SVU corruption is just been a problem. And I don't know about, I mean, when the dust settles literally, it'll be really interesting to see if what kind of desertion there was, you know, from those intelligence services. I can tell you that like nobody was paying attention to this, but like

before the war broke out, you know, the SBA has an English language website and they were like every two days, they were just rolling up networks in Ukraine. I mean, that's what they were saying they were doing. I could never independently corroborate it, but they were like, we rolled up a pro-Russian network outside of Kharkiv. We rolled up a pro-Russian network outside of, you know, Kerasan, like they, I don't know if that's precisely where, but that was just going on. Like, they were basically like, we got to pull the trigger on every, you know, Russian, every Russian network that we've been sitting on for X number of weeks or years right, right now. And it would be interesting to see if somebody has the sourcing about what was going on internally.

And whether there were internal CI guys at SBU who were like, finally pouncing on folks that they had been watching for a long time within their own service to say basically like enough you know we can't afford to just sit and watch on you anymore so yeah that's interesting uh jackson thank you very much probably a dumb question but what would it take for ground branch guys to take substantive direct connect kinetic action or is it extremely unlikely in uh in gen in general i mean in general yeah i guess yeah i guess in general. I mean, in general, I think, you know, they were much more active in like Afghanistan, right? I mean, they're paramilitaries. I don't think them being directly engaged in any way out of

the question in terms of their kind of general MO. I think in Ukraine, I was told very reliably that they were not allowed at all. It was out of the question, you know, it was like, we're not going to allow you're there to train and advise. We don't want you taking shots across the line of contact. It doesn't matter if you want to do it. We don't want you to do it. And in fact, the guys that were sent were specifically sent because they were really mature. You know, these were like folks that had been around the block. They had, they'd come up through, you know, special operations. They had a long, they had a long experience. And the idea was they were not going to be trigger happy and they were going to really try to keep things as as like anti-escalatory as possible.

Right. And, you know, I was told reliably that right before hostilities broke out, you know, they pull all those folks out because they were like, we don't want people in the country either. You know, we don't want people in the country when shit hits the fan. And they might actually have to start fighting, you know, to get out. Right. Right. So, no, this was pure train and advice.

And I think, you know, also you can, I was also told by former officials that, like, you don't want to get into a situation where, you know, the Russians can credibly say the CIA paramilitary killed a Russian lieutenant, you know, in the Donbass or a CIA paramilitary gets shot. And then they, you know, like, it's just the potential for things to spiral was, was pretty serious. Right. Yeah. I mean, it begins to, like, justify, you know, things that Putin says, even if it wasn't true to begin with. Exactly, right. And you get into that rhetorical trap

of whether fairly or not, you're then, you're then playing into their hands by providing them a reason to do more aggressive stuff. So I think they calibrated that very, very carefully. Carlos, thank you very much. Not sure if it's a silly question, but are non-state actors getting involved in a way that can influence the conflict?

I work in finance and there's chatter about deep pockets wanting to get involved. Well, great, great story. I had no idea. I mean, I think you have obviously the international brigade. The Ukrainians have definitely been encouraging people from the U.S. and other Western countries to come fight on their behalf. There's evidence that that has, you know, some of those guys are like posting on Twitter and like photos of them like running around, you know, Ukraine. So I think that's definitely happened and is happening. There was always a worry too that you would have both pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine. neo-fascists, like, flock to the conflict. If that's happened in large numbers, we haven't seen that. But that was always a worry pre-conflict that it was going to become a kind of like new Syria, but for like the far right. And, you know, beyond that, I don't know about, you know, about private groups.

I think that's a very interesting story, though. And if anybody has anything to, you know, to say on that, they should. contact you know me or jack well i don't know if it's still a thing but the that uh ukrainian magnet colomoisky or whatever was the one who kind of stood up like uh azov and like he had like three or four different units that he basically funded because and they were better funded than before before they were part of the ukrainian military uh he was funding them i see i didn't know that that's interesting i mean i know azov is still my my understanding is that Azav is still very much engaged in fighting in Maripal, which is where they were based.

Yeah. And, you know, I think there's a sense that those guys are, they're going to fight to the very bitter end. That seems to be the assessment. And so, yeah, I mean, Azav obviously, you know, neo-fascists, at least parts of it. And there was, you know, Russian neo-fascist groups, too, like the Russian, the Russian, and imperial movement was one that I think had folks that were sent to the Donbass in the early days, where they traveled to the Donbass in the early days. I don't know about their activity now, but it would be interesting to see or to find out whether those guys are also operating.

Yeah, let me just, because there were like, there were four or five units that he stood up. But anyway, yeah, it's just, I mean, it's just a very interesting situation over there, you know, in terms of, and I don't want to get into like the politics of it all or whatever, but, but yeah, I think that as, as of as pretty much in Mara pool and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, and you could see, again, nobody could foresee what happened in Syria in 2011. Like, if I told you in 2011, like this is what Syria is what looks like in 2015, these are going to be the dominant actors. This is what cities are going to look like.

You would have been like, no way, you know. I mean, I think we're. We don't know whether we're, we don't know how long this conflict is going to last and how it's going to transform over time in theory. And so we might see more non-state actors if the conflict tends to, to drag on. Is that all the questions? I think so long as super we've got anymore. Oh, that's it. Okay.

So, Zach, thanks, man, for doing this. You know, we covered a lot of ground here, I think, covered some of your greatest hits in the current situation in Ukraine. For people who are interested in reading your work, where can they find you? Twitter, Zach S. Dorfman. And then, I mean, that's the best way, I guess, Yahoo News. And I mean, yeah, I'd say Twitter is the easiest way to figure out what the news stories are. And then beyond that, you know, wherever I was going to say wherever newspapers are sold near you, but that really doesn't mean anything anymore.

So I would say, follow me on Twitter and then Yahoo News. Are there any spicy stories you're working on that you can hint or allude to? No way. Yes, but go away. All right. Folks, thank you for joining us tonight and spending some time with the team house. There's like 600, 650 people watching live tonight, Zach. So, I mean, that's pretty cool.

That's great. You know, if you guys haven't already, please subscribe to our channel. Check out our link to our Patreon down the description. If you want to help support the channel and get access to some bonus episodes and segments. And oh, there's merch too. There's merch down there if you want yourself a team house coffee mug or anything like that. And next. There's one more question.

Yeah, there's one more question. Okay. Robert, thank you very much. Thoughts as to why various, I think, Ukrainian government agencies haven't taken a lot of actions against very right-wing political groups like Azav is a lack of political will. They need everybody they can get, man. I don't know.

I mean, it's hard. You're going to try to round up people. First of all, they couldn't round up people in Mary Pole if they wanted to, but the city is surrounded. They can't even get supplies in and out of that city and people are starving to death. I mean, I think, I think, you know,

they're in a situation where they're literally asking for foreigners to come in and fight for them. I mean, so I just think it's, you know, it's going to be very difficult for them to try to tamp down the Azov people. And even then, I mean, it seems like a very small person. We talk about tiny percentage of the people that are fighting foreign and Ukraine. So it's important to keep that perspective in mind, too. I mean, it's easy to talk about the radicals is like the thing, but it's really not the thing.

I mean, the Ukrainian military is the thing and the civilian defense forces of the thing. I mean, they're the ones doing the fighting. The radicals, the extremists are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. Yeah, Azov is like 800 people, I think. thing. Yeah. Yeah, they're bad. Like, it's not the story. It's very, I mean, it's very difficult, too, when you have a unit that is effective against combating and invading army, like, what are you going to do at that point in time? Like, it, it's this, it's challenging. It's a challenging political situation for them. It was much more challenging in Syria, honestly. I mean, again,

this is a tiny group of people. And I think, you know, the Ukrainian military has conducted themselves, with like a lot of professionalism and then you have the defense forces and you just have ordinary people you know getting basic training and and doing stuff too and so yeah they you know I think it's always important to keep the proportions in mind and there's a there's a point in which talking about the extremist starts to like it starts to feel almost ideological in itself right because like why you're focusing on this tiny tiny tiny group I don't like the azopia I don't like neo-notsies but like focusing like some of the Russian media right it talks with denotification right so like focusing on Azov when you're really talking about

an entire country taking up arms against invaders is like that's a classic you know disinformation tactic or forest for the trees you know right anyway there's one more question okay uh we have one does Russia risk losing influence in central Asia to the Chinese if they agree to accept more over Chinese help uh I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, probably, I mean, that's probably part of the reason why, I mean, any alliance between Russia and China, Russia is going to be the junior partner, right? The economy is like the size of Italy's, you know, like they're a massive country with immense natural resources and a huge nuclear arsenal, but they're still, they're already the junior partner and any kind of dependence on them economically or in terms of the military fight. ahead is going to, of course, lead them to be the weaker partner. And I think that's already a big apoccal shift, right? Yeah. That's a reversal of the 20th century that we're seeing in real time, right? So, all right. This is, this is the last question, guys. I'm not, I'm not taking it anymore. Yeah, okay, because I got a run, actually. Yeah, sorry, man. Do you think Western mercenaries hired by Ukraine is a possibility? Do you feel any more over Western action as possible without

provoking Russia? I mean, we're already doing so much, right? Like, there's always the do more, do more, do more. I mean, I'm not a policymaker, right? So I think it's like not entirely my place to say, but like we're supplying, like how many we supplied like over a billion dollars in weapons? That was just the way to shipment, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we are arming them in extraordinary ways right now.

And so our NATO allies and some of our East Asian allies, too. So I mean, do we need to hire, do we need to support mercenaries? Like, I don't know. Again, I'm not a policymaker, but I think what you're seeing is an extraordinary outpouring of Western military support for the Ukrainian, unprecedented. And it's easy to miss that. But that in no way was foreordained, right? Like, Millie being on the border in Poland and then just, I mean, setting up basically a massive pipeline of arms that continues to this day is. is an extraordinary show of support. I think there's so much sympathy out there that people want to do more,

but it's also important to step, it's important to step back and look at what's already going on and realize how historic that is. All right, guys. Thank you, and we will see you next Friday. We're going to have a woman on the show, a female veteran who served in the cultural support teams, who's at CST. So looking forward to that. And again, thank you, Zach.

I really appreciate you taking some time out of your day to come on the team house today. Yeah, thanks. It was amazing. It was super fun. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. All right.