The Team House - Inside Iran's Covert Operations | Jon Hackett | Ep. 368

Starting point is 00:00:00 The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Everybody, welcome to episode 368. I am Dave. Here with me tonight is Dee, our fearless producer and sometimes host, and the host of Eyes On. Our guest tonight, again, is Jonathan Hackett. If you didn't see his first episode, it was 351. Tonight we're going to talk a little bit more about his Marine Corps background, and we're also going to talk about his book, which I have right here.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Phenomenal book, Iran's Shadow Weapons. I'm used to being able to just hold it up in the cameras there. Iran's Shadow We're going. So welcome back, Jonathan. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to see you guys. Not in the studio this time, but still good to see you.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Yeah, we're having some technical issues at the studio. So we're doing this old school. Hey, what's up, guys? I want to thank our sponsor, PIA, VPN, that's private internet access. You guys ever been at a coffee shop connected to their Wi-Fi and wondered just how secure you are? Turns out you're not very secure at all. It's like sending a private text message to a group chat. Everyone can see it.

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Starting point is 00:02:52 life. And thank you for supporting the show to all the fans out there. And thank you PIA VPN for supporting the show as well. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. So Jonathan, can you give us kind of a brief summary of your Marine Corps history? And then there are a couple things that we'd like to talk about that we didn't get an opportunity to last time before we get into the book. Sure, I'll just give you guys wavtops. So I was in the Marine Corps for 20 years. I started out doing signals intelligence, which is collecting on foreign signals, you know, communications and things like that. went into cryptography, which is a little bit of a more niche area of SIGANT,

Starting point is 00:03:29 moved over to the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Mead. I worked there for a couple of years on some special projects, kind of like tailored access operations and things for very specific outcomes. After that, I realized I was kind of getting too deep into the skiff, sometimes a skiff within a skiff, and I needed to get outside. And so I moved into the counterintelligence, human intelligence world and went to training for that in Damnack, Virginia. and went over immediately to Afghanistan after that for over a year doing HUMIT first.

Starting point is 00:04:01 And then as the mission change, we moved into CI a lot more. And then came back and I went right over to Marsock, 2013. And I was there for five years because we were only allowed to stay for five years. So I stayed for it was four months, for four years, 11 months, and I think it was like 29 days that I was there. And then had to go. So I went over to DIA and I did three years there. at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, Amman Jordan, where I worked on not only Jordan issues in the overt capacity, but we also worked on a lot of other clandestine things going on around the region.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Most importantly was Syria, because Syria doesn't have a U.S. embassy in it, so there were a lot of the Syria activities we had to handle from Jordan and from Turkey also in some other places. So I had some things to do with that. And then after that ended, I went to go be an instructor in Damnick, teaching the Marine Corps how to do special activities on the counterintelligence human intelligence side, all the way up from starting from like very basic, you know, debriefing things through interrogations, through source handling, through surveillance detection routes, all the way up to principal agent operations where the students do run full phase

Starting point is 00:05:06 denied area activities and get certified on that and become counterintelligence human intelligence specialists for the Marine Corps. And then I retired and just started up as an unemployed student at Yale Law School now, where I'm just getting inundated with stuff to read. So I took a little break to come talk to you guys. Well, I mean, I can tell you read a lot because about a fifth of your book is references. It's amazing. Yeah. That's something left behind from like the humid side where you have to source everything. You should never claim anything without something backing it up because your opinion is kind of worthless without something backing it up. And as you saw probably there's like multiple

Starting point is 00:05:44 citations on each piece, you know, kind of converging to show like, hey, this isn't my opinion. And this is what's actually happening. Right, right. So can you tell us some of the things that we didn't get a chance to get to about your career while you're in? There was a strike. There were a couple things that, you know, we didn't have an opportunity. Yeah, we talked a lot about my kind of SIGAN background and just a little bit about Marsok, but there were some parts we didn't get to, especially the Iraq deployment, 2016, when ISIS was really entrenched.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And the U.S. and coalition partners were about to retake Western Iraq from. ISIS. This is after all the massacers going on, all that stuff. And I was on a special operations task force 81 out there. And our job was to do, in part, work with the tribes in Syria, eastern Syria, and the Kurds in northeast Syria and other groups in Western Iraq to start building this kind of ring around Mosul, which was the heart of ISIS or Daesh in Western Iraq and actually Iraq, generally. And we were doing that because the plan was for the counterterrorism forces, which was the the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, they would come in later and actually retake Mosul with conventional gigantic operation. I mean, the 82nd Airborne came in there. It was a huge thing. That was after

Starting point is 00:06:57 we left. My mission there was to prepare the environment by doing air strikes or controlling air strikes, running really intense human source network. I had, for example, I had one principal agent. A principal agent is basically a source that works for you that has a subsource network under him doing things for you. So basically, there's a level of separation between you, and the actual people doing the thing. And that's for safety reasons. That's also to protect the operational security of the mission and things. And we had a very intense network like that throughout Western Iraq.

Starting point is 00:07:27 And one of my principal agents had 52 subsources working for me, which was a lot to keep track of, especially during combat operations, a lot of validation going on to make sure that what those people were saying was true and all that. And at the same time, that particular task force that I was on hadn't done any human triggered strikes yet. And a human triggered strike is when basically you have a human being sitting across the street. This is typically how it works, watching a building saying, hey, that building has got one bad guy in it or 80 bad guys in it. These are their names. We go and monitor that facility for up to eight hours because that's the requirement at the time that we had to have eight hours, what he called, soak on the target before we could strike it to make sure women and children don't come in or out for that we understand the risk profile of the strike. And I'd have one of my subsources sitting across the street.

Starting point is 00:08:15 and he'd be giving me information. I'd be passing information along. I would get B-52s or F-18s up in the sky. And whenever the moment was right, I'd be the one coordinating that bomb hitting that building. And I would hear it right through the phone because my source would be watching it happen. And the interesting thing is to make sure the asset validation was going correctly,

Starting point is 00:08:35 we would never tell them that we were planning to strike. We always had to kind of string them along so they weren't quite sure what was about to happen or when was it going to happen. You've got kind of an idea, especially after they see their first one, like they know this will probably happen. But they're always shocked and surprised the moment that bombs dropped on the building. And one that stands out to me was Abu Omar al-Shashani, who was the equivalent of like the Minister of Defense for ISIS, all of ISIS. And we have been tracking some lower-level guys, especially my source network, have been monitoring some like finance guys and some other things.

Starting point is 00:09:07 We were doing some smaller strikes, you know, killing 20 people, 30 people at a time. And we got this new piece of technology called Gordon. Stair. Gorgon Stair is like a series of pieces of equipment that are able to monitor almost everything happening based on a single target. What I mean by that is let's say you have a funeral for one of the bad guys we killed. Well, ISIS, the way they do their funerals, especially during Ramadan, they don't bring the women and children. It's only the fighters, you know, like the guys that were there that knew him. So what you can do is start tracking all those individuals of that funeral. When they go home, you can turn Gorgon Stare on and it will monitor each of those individuals where

Starting point is 00:09:44 they go on a heat map. And you can basically see these like little legs coming out. And it will continue monitoring all of them, building this gigantic pattern of life. Well, that's a new stack of targets to start looking at. And we really started maximizing the use of that. And as we did that, we started getting way more careful about which targets we picked. There were a lot of targets at the time. There was something like 30,000 ISIS fighters active, like with weapons strapped to their bodies at any time at that time. So we really could have hit, you know, you could have throw a rock and hit an ISIS guy across the forward line of troops. They were everywhere. but we don't want to waste time and resources and mission momentum by just striking whoever.

Starting point is 00:10:20 So what I started to do was trace particular activities. One in particular was when we hit a certain building, the way that people reacted to that strike started telling me something. And there was one strike in particular. We blew the building up, killed like 40 guys. And instead of coming to recover bodies, we saw them clear everybody out from the street away from the building. And they started sending guys in with plastic garbage bags, black garbage bags.

Starting point is 00:10:44 and coming out with them over their shoulder like Santa Claus, carrying out whatever it was very heavy. And we figured out that that was actually gold because we had spent the bank. And then they took a lot of that gold to another place that was very important to them. And we began tracking that place. It was a lot of these like thing after thing with the domino effect of them kind of revealing to us based on a very early instigation toward them that sets off all these patterns that we can follow. And I'm leaving out a lot of details, obviously, to protect operational security. but this is kind of the gist of it. And it turns out that one night in Ramadan,

Starting point is 00:11:18 and one of my subsources told me that, hey, there's an IED factory in this place. And, you know, back during the Iraq War, like the early years, you think IED factory, it's like a couple of guys with some cans and, you know, some explosives. This was like an industrial factory. I mean, it was actually a factory converted, like it had conveyor belts and everything,

Starting point is 00:11:34 converted to produce IEDs on an industrial scale. It was insane. And I was able to figure out who ran that facility and there were some other buildings around there. and the way that they had set up the security around this place, there was only one way out. I was actually able to get a B-52 from Syria to fly into Iraq and blow this place up. And there was something like 3,000 rocket tails that we were able to count from the footage afterward. I mean, this thing was insane.

Starting point is 00:11:58 And the way it blew up, I mean, you could hear it for miles around. People thought that it was our strike that made the explosion. It was just, it was not. It was the explosives in the building that cooked off after the smaller, relatively smaller bombs. But then the guys exited that one way out, and we followed. of that and come to find out they went over to go notify Abu Omar al-Shashani's deputy that we had been kind of moving up the food chain because he doesn't use a cell phone. It was very important. The smart guys don't use the cell phone. But we still could get him anyway. And

Starting point is 00:12:27 there was another night during Ramadan like three days later. We'd been watching this location that we thought it was actually Abu Bakr al-Vaghdadi's summer house, which was where this other gentleman was at, Abu Omar, who's Chechen, by the way, Al-Shashani. And we were able to start monitoring the location, and we counted 86 guys going in there throughout the evening and none of them coming out. And one of my subsources contacts me through my principal agent and lets me know that this is in fact one of those meetings. And it wasn't in just one building. It was like multiple compounds around. And as we're going through the eight hours required soak of the target, the subsource is reporting to me on who's in which building.

Starting point is 00:13:07 So I've got multiple high-level names of who's in what building. And then eventually we're able to get aircraft up there. And then the one-star general in charge of authorizing these strikes had to wake up a bunch of other generals that sit around a table, basically, and make decisions. Because the building that Shoshanee was in was a religious building. And in order to strike one of these buildings, we have to get a certain level of concurrence that's different than even striking a house,

Starting point is 00:13:31 which also requires its own concurrence. And it's called a Category 1 removal, which means there's this list called Category 1, category one targets that we're not allowed to touch. And we have to get the target removed off category one to be able to strike it. And so it was something like four o'clock or three o'clock in the morning. We were able to finally get approval from four or five generals that had to all give their cut on it. And there were other wrinkles in this. For example, there was a U.S. person in one of these buildings who was a legal permanent resident in the United States, but he was a naturalized

Starting point is 00:14:01 U.S. person, which required even higher level approval to continue moving forward the strikes. There's a lot risk analysis going on, but also the optics were being analyzed throughout this strike process. And I was under a lot of pressure because we knew that those guys would vacate around 6 a.m. As soon as the sun came up, because they were there for Sohor dinner, which is the meal you eat during Ramadan to break, right before you break your fast in the morning, it's that smaller meal right before Iftar. And minutes were ticking away. It was almost sunrise.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And I'm getting worried, you know, and finally we get the go ahead. And we blew it up. And turned out it was 87 guys. in their dead, and one of them was Shoshani. That's amazing. How did you guys verify that? I mean, because you can't, like, send in a team to do BDA, right? Yeah, so at the time, there were actually civilian hospitals, and there were ISIS hospitals.

Starting point is 00:14:53 These ISIS hospitals were for ISIS fighters only. They had, like, their own separation between, you know, they didn't want their fighters being exposed to the regular people. And we had sources inside of all these hospitals. And I had two particular sources that were very good that were in one of the hospitals that they usually took the higher level guys to. And every time a body bag went in, that person was there verifying with everybody and letting me know. And the thing is, they don't know who I'm looking for.

Starting point is 00:15:16 I'm only asking them for the names of every single person that comes in there. And nobody on the ground knew what targets we were after at any time. And we never gave him feedback like, oh, yeah, we did kill that guy, you know, Jim Bob. We don't do that because we don't want it to muddy up the process, right? And so sure enough, next morning we got confirmation from that person that it in fact was him. It's amazing. Any other, like, kind of big stories from that part of your career that you want to talk about that we didn't get a chance to touch on? Nothing like that. That's such a longer thing, really.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Yeah. What was it like going from, you know, SIGA into Humeant for you? It was an interesting transition because working at the National Security Agency, we are told that we have, you know, the highest clearances and the most access and all this. you know, to some measure, that's true. But going into the human intelligence world, I didn't know that there were a completely separate connection of control systems and ways of handling information. And that was a big learning curve for me because of the way intelligence information is handled from SIGM derived information is very different than how it's from human controlled systems and from source handling of human beings. Very different. The tradecraft is obviously completely different.

Starting point is 00:16:37 With SIGM, you're kind of protecting the instruments. and the methods of using those instruments, whereas with human beings, you're trying to protect them and the mission. It's obviously more human-like, which requires a lot more security considerations. It's much more difficult. It's much more, in some cases, more expensive,

Starting point is 00:16:56 especially if you're working with cover. If you've got commercial cover, for example, it's extremely expensive, and it may never get you anything, depending on how you set it up. And that's part of the game, is that some of this never produces anything. some of it produces gold mines.

Starting point is 00:17:13 Whereas with Siggint, you kind of know, like, that's that guy's phone. That's what he said at the end. You know, where with human, you've got to, because of the human elements there, these guys might not be telling the truth. They might not know that what they said was wrong. Want money, ideology. They might be under coercion. They might be doing it for excitement.

Starting point is 00:17:31 You know, there's a lot of things you have to control. Sometimes you're like a therapist with them and you have to learn a lot of this stuff that might be frustrating to some people at times. Like, why do I have to listen to how this guy feels about a spouse? house. It's like, well, that's really important because you're going to use those things as buttons to push in the future when you really need them. And that's kind of simplifying it. But that is a little bit difficult, especially from a SIGT background. But it's true from any background that doesn't deal with people. You know, you can be an infantry guy and still have and have to learn those

Starting point is 00:17:57 same things in the same difficult way because that doesn't make sense for where you came from, you know. Yeah. It's interesting. Well, you know, with your background and, you know, your operational experience, you're experienced both in, you know, SIGA and cyber. And, you know, and human that you seem like the perfect person to write this book because you you already had experience in different fields that you covered. So I think I imagine it probably gave you a better depth of understanding when you were, you know, reading the reports and all the various sources and stuff. It is, it's an incredible book. I mean, I'm surprised how much information is in this book, especially considering, you know, how closed off Iran is.

Starting point is 00:18:48 You know, and I imagine that it's a very hard country to penetrate and get information on. Well, it's interesting because although that is true, but there is so much resistance to the regime, which you see in the book. Just like those buttons we were talking about earlier with human sources, there are plenty of buttons on Iranian targets to push to get information about what's going on behind that, that walled garden, you know. Yeah. And it's because of what the regime does to its people.

Starting point is 00:19:18 It's not because of what Israel does to Iran. It's not because of what the U.S. does. It's because the regime oppressing their own people so extremely that suddenly there are a lot of people that are willing to do things they never would do before because of this pressure. And that's one of the things that I found interesting is you mentioned that that, that, The populace is actually the Iranian populace is actually the number one target of Iranian intelligence. And it has been since 1980. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Yeah. It has never changed. There's never been a moment. How did you get interested in Iran? Well, my very first interaction with Iran in intelligence context was in Afghanistan. And I was doing some counterintelligence activities there to protect some of our aircraft that we had. And I didn't really know much about Iran on a tactical level at that time or like what they were doing. I knew a lot of the higher level things because when I was working at the National Security Agency,

Starting point is 00:20:15 I worked on strategic issues like Russia nuclear stuff, North Korea stuff, China stuff, all in the nuclear level. And then with Iran on some other things related to that. So I knew the big picture, you know, this was a threat. But I'd never seen them in action. And I don't think most people actually have. And I was there in the desert at a very remote base down by the Iran-Pakistan, Afghanistan, tri-border area, which is called Balochistan. And suddenly I look up and there's a thing that looks like a skateboard flying around in the sky, kind of up ahead of us. And actually a pilot came running over to me and he pointed out to me too.

Starting point is 00:20:52 He's like, do you see that thing? I'm like, yeah, what is that? And we started taking photos of it and sent it over to some of the CIA guys that we were connected to. and they said, you know, that's an Iranian mojahadur for UAV. But what was happening, it was going in like a square holding pattern because whoever was controlling it had gotten too far outside of their control. Because at the time, they didn't have one-way attack and all this stuff. It was very much, you know, more rudimentary.

Starting point is 00:21:19 And it had lost control and went into a holding pattern over the GPS grid of where it was supposed to be monitoring. So we're just watching it go in a square over the base. And somebody knocked it down and we took it. But that was my first introduction to like an actual Iranian threat happening in front of me, which, as I said, is kind of unusual to see because usually people think of it like behind the scenes and the shadows and all that. Maybe not so much today now, but for much of the time, that's how it was viewed. And that kind of like piqued my interest a little bit.

Starting point is 00:21:46 And then when I went to places like Senegal, for example, found out that two streets over from our diplomatic facility, our team house in Dakar was a Hezbollah team house in Dekar, was a Hezbollah team house in Dakar that was working with cocaine shipments from South America into Dakar, which is the largest, the port of Dakar is the largest import point for cocaine in all of Africa. It's 54 countries in Africa, and that's the biggest import location. Wow. And it's just kind of interesting because like we weren't fighting with each other. We were both there for different things, which is kind of interesting. Like, well, why are we here like this? Why aren't we fighting each other? You know, so there's a lot more going to. So I was trying to figure out like, what's going on here, like,

Starting point is 00:22:24 higher level. It's not just, it's not just war. You know, there's more to it. It's politics involved. There are those politics. And those are the kind of questions I started asking that kind of got me down that halfway. You know, and so going, starting into the book, because you talk about the politics, you talk about the three talism, you know, and a lot of misconceptions people have about Iran's motives and how that colors the intelligence that, you know, and a lot of misconceptions people have about Iran's motives and how that colors the intelligence that. they collect and how they perceive that intelligence. Can you kind of go into those ideas? Yeah. And actually, I call them sacred talismans because that's actually borrowed from Klausowitz, who was kind of talking down on other military theorists like Jomene at the time, which was a French

Starting point is 00:23:14 Napoleonic theorist, who held these like grand ideas about the world that were all based on what they thought the world was. And it was like a thing that could never be questioned and it can only be this way. And he was saying like, that's not true. I mean, you go to, you go to war over here. It's different than going to war over here. You can't just say that the same thing. And so he called those ways of thinking sacred talismans. And that's why I call these things sacred talismans because, in my opinion, they're flawed at best, perhaps mistaken, is better way to describe it. The first one is Israel versus Iran. And I mean, even looking today, like, everyone's like, oh, yeah, obviously that's what's going on.

Starting point is 00:23:48 But if you start peeling it back, which I do in the book, it's not so clear cut that it's Israel versus Iran. I mean, who's the one doing the bombings? Who's the one killing people? who's like, I mean, I could just go on and on about the facts and how lopsided one side is versus the other. And also about the reaction to those things, it's not what you would expect if it was actually a conflict between two states as it's described. And a lot of times that particular talismans described as a ideology against ideology, which again, I think is naive. It's political. It's especially you look at political realism, you know, states are black boxes operating to survive against other states.

Starting point is 00:24:25 and to keep their interests alive. And the regime doesn't care about the state of Iran. The regime cares about the regime. So that's like a black box within a black box, making decisions about securing itself. And then in Israel, same thing. I mean, you have the Lekud Party keeping itself alive as strongly as it can as long as it can.

Starting point is 00:24:45 You know, so there's these political decisions that look like ideology, but to someone who's actually, if you removed the names off of the parties, it would be hard to actually make the same judgments we might make if the names were on the parties. That's what I call the blue talisman. Then there's the red talisman, which is exporting the revolution.

Starting point is 00:25:04 That idea came up, and you hear it in discourse a lot. People say, like, oh, Iran's exporting the revolution. There's this crime terror nexus in Bolivia or like whatever. But really, I mean, those are drug trafficking operations that generate income at the end. I mean, they're not over there with guns, shooting people. They're over there with dollar counters and bubble wrap wrapping up bales of cocaine to ship it to Africa to make money so they can survive because they're heavily sanctioned and they can't access the banking system and they're cut off from the SWIF system.

Starting point is 00:25:33 So how else do they kind of move their money around and make more money? Yeah, it's illegal. But I mean, is that a terror nexus? I don't know. Maybe if they're actually doing terror, what does that mean? And these might be like off-putting questions to people, but you have to be able to question anything. Because if you cannot question an idea, this is no longer.

Starting point is 00:25:54 a fact-based idea. Now it's an emotion-based idea. We have to be factual about how we approach this stuff, especially things that bring up as many emotions as Iran and Israel, as we just talked about. Then I get down to something called the Black Talisman, which is realism, which I kind of alluded to, where these actors are generally rational. And when I say rational, actually, Mayor Dagan, who is one of the Mossad directors, said Iran is rational. They may not be our rational, but they're rational, which I think is a great way to describe it, because it doesn't matter how we see the world. It matters how the actor sees the world. And if it's in their interest to do what they think is right, they're going to do it. Even if it's crazy and hurts people, they're still going to do it,

Starting point is 00:26:35 because that's what they think they need to do to survive, especially when they feel like they've been backed up against a wall. So that's my perspective. When I look at this book, I look at it from a realist perspective asking, you know, there's this thing, John Rawls is a philosopher that wrote a lot in the 70s and 80s, and he said that there's this thing called the veil of ignorance, where if someone dropped you down in a society and didn't tell you where in that society you fell, high class, middle class, low class, laborer, rich person, if you didn't know which of those things you fell into, how would you make the laws? You'd make them much differently than you would if you knew where you were, you know.

Starting point is 00:27:08 And that's kind of the approach that I take with this is instead of like labeling everything, let me just look at the facts and see what the facts say. And when I talk about facts, I don't just mean like looking at the news and things like that. As you said, in the back of the book, there are hundreds of declassive. classified American intelligence documents that were top secret, secret no porn, and a whole trove of Iraqi documents that were top secret and secret that had never been seen before. These things are not for the public. These are internal political documents, basically, our intelligence process feeding political

Starting point is 00:27:40 decisions of facts that were collected on the ground through human intelligence, SIGANT and other collection methodologies, with some other information to help back it up to put it into context for people to understand. So that's kind of a long way of saying what these talismans are, but it's important to question all of them, including my own assertions. People should question what I say to. And not in a combative way, but instead questioning, like, well, where did you get that? What does that mean? What does that mean to me? Because I think people don't ask those kind of questions. And that's how we end up 20 years in Afghanistan fighting the same war one year at a time for 20 years. Hey, guys, our show is sponsored by Ghostbag. Check them out.

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Starting point is 00:30:40 Check them out. I love Ghostbed. Thanks, guys. So can you tell us a little bit about then the, about the intelligence apparatus of Iran? We have the Vaja, the IRGC, CODS, and then, well, you go ahead and tell us, please. Yeah. So a lot of people, even in the intelligence community in the United States, and I've seen this, they don't know what Vaja is. This is a new term for a lot of Westerners.

Starting point is 00:31:10 this is what Iran calls their intelligence service, the equivalent of the CIA, their human intelligence service. In the West, we call it the Ministry of Intelligence. It's not called the Ministry of Intelligence. Why are we calling it that? So that's something I start out with. Like, why are we using these things that we think are true that are not true? So let's start with what they call themselves, VA, JA, Vaja, and that is their actual human element. That started out as their strongest component or their entity. In 2009, there was something called, the Green Revolution in Iran, when the country was almost overthrown. It was the most serious moment of overthrow since 1979 in the country. And the way the regime saw this was as a failure of Vaja to suppress the people enough to force them not to rebel. This is how it was viewed.

Starting point is 00:31:59 And what they did was they basically reduced the power of Vajah, subordinated it to the IRGC, and this is where the IRGC intelligence organization came out to become a thing. Before that, it was a department, an agency is a smaller thing with like less remit. It was not meant to be inside the country doing things. But from that moment forward, until today, it became this massive intelligence apparatus that now is the premier intelligence apparatus in Iran and outside of Iran. And Vaja has been relegated to kind of this political intelligence gatherer for looking at what are foreign diplomats doing. You know, like nothing that you would expect today's CIA, for example, to be doing. All the cover activity is IRGC now.

Starting point is 00:32:39 There's very small components that Vajah still does, but it's minuscule. It's mostly the IRGC. And underneath that, and in the book I have a pretty good diagram of that, there are many different things underneath that. There's like 40 different departments underneath that. It's extremely complex. And part of what the regime, and when I say the regime, I don't mean the entire Iranian government, although they're all complicit, I mean that small kernel of decision makers

Starting point is 00:33:02 who have absolute control over what happens, which is a very tiny number of people. The rest of the people in the government, which is about 1% of the 92 million people in the country, are just following along because it's in their interest to follow along. But there's maybe between 100 to 1,000 named individuals that are the regime that's actually doing this stuff. And the IRGC is not designed to protect Iranian people. It's designed to protect that small group of people, that small kernel of people. And you can see it because the Ayatollah's son, for example, can go freely outside the country. He can go to Washington, D.C. if he wants to. Why? Because he has a black diplomatic passport.

Starting point is 00:33:41 Why does he have that? Why does he need that? And if you look at who in the regime are these named individuals that are the powerholders, they all have black diplomatic passports. Kossam Soleimani had two diplomatic passports. Esmalgani, the current Kitzforsk commander, has four black passports. I mean, these guys are able to come and go as they please. The Iran Central Bank director, who's the sanctioned bank. that is the bank target of the West has a black passport and he's come and gone to Washington, D.C. to World Bank meetings. I mean, these people are heavily protected and they know how to use the system. They know how to use the Vienna Convention, which is the thing that grants diplomatic community.

Starting point is 00:34:17 And they initially relied on Baja to ensure that, and now it's the IRGC that is providing that. And it's providing it so that the Iranian people remain shut down while these small elites are able to have the maximum freedom. They're basically monopolizing freedom. and at the cost of everybody else. Right. And I mean, there's there's a lot of wealth at the top there, too, isn't there?

Starting point is 00:34:40 There is. Actually, when the Shah fled Iran in 1979, he had something like $6 billion in today's dollars, not in $1979. It's a very small amount of money. It's about the same as Donald Trump claims to have. And he had that much money. That was the Shah that was run out of the country for having too much wealth, for being too opulent, right? Well, now the ISA.

Starting point is 00:35:01 Today's Ayatollah, Chahmanee, he has as much money as Jeff Bezos, but his assets are liquid. Jeff Bezos assets are not liquid. They're tied up in equity in his businesses. Elon Musk's, something like 90% of his money is tied up in equity in his businesses. If he pulled out, his businesses would collapse. Not so for the Ayatollah. And actually, that wealth grew dramatically after 2007, which is when the IRGC was first sanctioned by the United States. And there were these series of sanctions that grew from that period forward.

Starting point is 00:35:30 And if you took a graph and showed the sanctions increasing and put it right next to wealth of these top elites increasing, they're positively correlated, which means they grow together. And especially after 2017, 2018, when we put the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, there's a dramatic spike in growth of wealth in these top leaders in Iran and a dramatic decrease in general wealth for the population of the people in Iran. In fact, that same year that the Ayatollah's money exponentially grew is the same year that there were lines outside of grocery stores because there were chicken rations. in Iran because there was not enough chicken to feed people. There were gas rations in a country that's petroleum rich. At the same time that the Ayatollah was one of the richest human beings on Earth. And that just kind of illustrates to you that this is not a democracy. It's not a country.

Starting point is 00:36:15 It's not a capitalist country that reacts to capitalist measures like sanctions, right? Instead, it's just enriching elites hand over fist. It's amazing. And, you know, later in the book, you go into like the sanctions and the effects and we'll get into that. So with the IRGC, we have the IRGCC CI, their cyberspace, their EW and cyber defense. And then like you said, underneath that,

Starting point is 00:36:42 there's just tons and tons of like different departments. Is there a lot of competition between IRGC and Vaja and then within the IRGC itself? There was between Vaj and IRGC before 2009. After that, no more. But when IRGC grew, the regime actually forced it to get so. large that it would be too large to be controlled by a single individual besides the Ayatollah,

Starting point is 00:37:05 kind of like a check and balance in an authoritarian way. Because the IRGC is extremely powerful. I mean, even if you took the Ayatollah out, the IRGC could run the country right now. They control something like 40% of the entire black market or the entire economy, which is mostly a black market thing. If you want an iPhone in Iran, it has to be purchased from an IRGC supplier. And there are many iPhones in Iran. There are many Western products in Iran that you would think like, oh, they're sanctioned.

Starting point is 00:37:29 They can't get that. No, you can get it. it's just $4,000, you know. And the IRGC was designed that way where there isn't one person. Kassam Soleimani, for example, even when he was the big guy, he couldn't run all of the IRC. He was in the Quds Force. He was a lower, relatively lower in stature compared to the others, even though he had direct line to the Ayatollum was able to get tasking from him directly.

Starting point is 00:37:50 And a lot, he'd get away with a lot more than the other two-star generals. There's only like 15 two-star generals in the entire country of Iran. Very few. And they're designed that way. And actually the Ministry of Defense is actually, it's separated from the IRGC and it's subordinate to the IRGC. So the IRGC has a two-star general commander. The Ministry of Defense is led by a one-star. So if the Ministry of Defense, which you would think would be able to upset defense policy, sets a policy, the IRGC can ignore it.

Starting point is 00:38:16 And they do ignore it. They have ignored it, which is kind of an interesting tension that was designed that way. And there's a lot of these designs where there's these tensions built throughout this system, which is, again, not a democracy, but was created from an authoritarian mind of how do we, how do we keep that authoritarian in power? And they're doing a pretty good job of it. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, about keeping, you know, them in power,

Starting point is 00:38:41 who are the top targets for Iranian intelligence operations? The number one target is the Mujahideen Iq, MECA, or the people's Mujahideen, which has been a thorn in their side since 1979. The Mujahideen has existed for a long time before since 1960s. some would argue that it's a Marxist organization, some would vehemently argue against that. There was a divide between them in the 80s. But in any case, they were the main target and they remained the main target. In fact, in June, when Israel's war on Iran started, most, if not all, of the actual action people in Iran doing the stuff that we were seeing, like lazing targets and doing target reconnaissance and actually setting off devices were not Israeli operatives.

Starting point is 00:39:26 Those were Iranians. that most of them work for Mujahidehq, the Mekha. If you remember back in the early 2000s, when it was released that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, that was released through the Mujahideenikha. And there was another set of targets, which is the Aziris, not Azerbaijan in the country, but Azerbaijan province in or a section of Iran, northwest Iran.

Starting point is 00:39:50 Those nuclear documents that were taken a few years ago that Benjamin Netanyahu held up and said, look, we have all the proof now. It was something like, I think it was a ton of paper from this bunker. That was Aziri-assisted theft out of the country. And actually, they gave Israel overflight out of Azerbaijan the country to take those documents to Israel. And there's a lot of these groups that they've been against the government, any Iranian government, for a very long time. So before there was the regime, there was the Shah. And before the Shah, there was his father. And

Starting point is 00:40:22 before that, there was the Khajars. So it was a long history. But the Kurds, for example, the Aziris, the Baluchis, the Akvasis, which are an Arabized group of Iranians in the southwest of the country and the border of Iraq. These are all separatist aligned people. Not all of them are, but they're typically an area you can go to. If you want to do something in Iran, these are the people you work with as an outsider to do things against the regime, which means these are the people the regime wants to get rid of or to control, severely control. And in some cases, that's what they do. They just go and, you know, reduce the amount of resources they have. they reduced the freedom of action. In other cases, they go round them up and kill them, like they did to the Mujahideen in 1988.

Starting point is 00:41:02 If you remember President Raeisi, who died mysteriously in a helicopter last year, he was considered the hanging judge. He signed off on something like 3,000 execution orders that Mujahideeni Khalk were most of the people that were executed under his basically by decree, saying, like, yeah, that guy's guilty, no trial needed, go kill him. And he did that in 1988, 3,000 people, again, Mujahideen people. And so there's this tension between these groups that don't feel like they are, they don't feel Persian. They don't feel Iranian.

Starting point is 00:41:32 Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. But they certainly feel, I'm Aziri. I am Ahbazi. I am Baluchi. I am Kurdish. You know, and especially when you look at the Kurds, there's 35 million Kurds. That's the largest stateless group, stateless ethnic group in the world, period.

Starting point is 00:41:49 And they're split up between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. And Iran has one called the, the people. P-Jack, P-J-A-K, which is a Kurdish separatist group in Iran that has been a constant thorn in their side that they've been blowing up, you know, routinely. Sometimes Turkey's help. And these are just a summary of some of them, but there are smaller groups, too. And the thing they all have in common is that they disagree with the regime. But there's no democratic mechanism for them to change anything with the regime. So instead of having that democratic mechanism, they have to resort to violence.

Starting point is 00:42:19 The other target you mentioned that we've seen is the Salafi, the Salafists, the Salafi jihadist. And what I thought was interesting, as you mentioned, in the 90s, that Iran actually notified Western intelligence about the cooperation between the Taliban and AQ. Yes, they were actually helping us quite a bit. And that relationship was built in Bosnia, because during the wars in Bosnia and Albania, and Albania, and Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army and some of the Bosniak groups, which are Muslim Bosnians, were working with the IRGC. And actually, that was the Quds Force first overseas deployment to do on conventional warfare was in Bosnia.

Starting point is 00:43:04 And we were there also. The I-4 and later on the K-4 were there. Then Operation Allied Force was there. Continuously, there was U.S. Western presence there with Yukon. And we built relationships with them at the time. And actually, you can read some of the stuff in the book about Clinton. Clinton did a green light and actually allowed Iran to ship weapons in there to arm the KLA through Croatia. And that was a very interesting revelation that most people probably don't know, is that the U.S. was not necessarily working hand in hand, but we weren't holding the back.

Starting point is 00:43:33 And because we were taking that relationship, they took it upon themselves to share with us something they knew about what was going on in Afghanistan. And that was the Taliban housing al-Qaeda. And if you look at some of those targets that we struck when Bill Clinton authorized strikes in the late 90s, some of those targets were alerted to us by Iran. So, you know, you break the book down into the official, well, I mean, into the three different sections. But under this, you talk about like the official cover, the non-official cover, and then the UW aspects. Can we talk about the official cover? Because you've already mentioned the black passports and the diplomatic community. How effective is that?

Starting point is 00:44:12 and what are some of their greatest abuses of that system? Yeah, official cover is very interesting because it's something that every country does and no one likes to talk about. And there are some obviously good uses of it. And then there are some abuses of the diplomatic passport is what I mean, diplomatic community. This stuff all comes from the Vienna Convention of 1961 that basically says that you're allowed to do things in a country as an agent of that sovereign power. And that means you're immune, you're inviolable, which means you cannot be searched. If you have a pouch, which could be a backpack, a box, a cargo container with a sticker on it that says this is a diplomatic pouch, that is inviolable. It cannot be searched.

Starting point is 00:44:56 And as I said, every country does this. So when we are wagging our finger at Iran, we should remember all the times that we've done the exact same thing. And every other country does. I mean, this is part of what diplomatic status is for without getting into all the details of what the West does with it. Iran has stations overseas, and that doesn't necessarily mean Vaja stations. They have Vaja stations, and they have IRGC stations. And sometimes those IRGC stations are huge. And actually, one of the very first IRGC stations that we have evidence of on the Intel side was in Vienna before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Starting point is 00:45:31 And they had a small little Quds Force element in there. It wasn't called Quds Force yet. It was called the Office of Liberation movements. They had a little typist in there that was sending codes out, you know. but they were there on diplomatic cover. They were there as a foreign ministry representative, not as an intelligence officer. Again, this is what many countries do, but Iran has certainly abused it. Dubai is a common location where they do abuse this, where they'll move cargo containers,

Starting point is 00:45:56 gigantic containers like off of a ship with a little sticker on it that says this is a diplomatic pouch. You can't touch it. And inside of that are weapons and money and whatever you need to put in there to escape scrutiny. Right. Just side note, we had a Saudi prince in Lebanon when I was deployed. there that tried to do the diplomatic pouch thing with his jet. He actually pouched his jet, and it was full of ecstasy. It had like two million ecstasy pills in it, but when he landed, the door open and they kind of all came out and it became like, now we see it thing. So he kind of

Starting point is 00:46:23 messed that up. That was a little side note. But this is a creative use of it for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But they use it for other reasons too. So in New York, for example, there's something like 25 accredited Iranian diplomats living there right now that are allowed to live there. And they're on a range restriction. They're not allowed to leave a certain area of the city. But the area that they're in, it's a good part of the city. You can do a lot of things there, which means you can meet with other people, perhaps sources or perhaps handlers, if you're being handled, you know, that's a place where everybody gets to go together. So it could be Israelis talking to Iranians. It could be Iranians talking to Kurds. Who knows what it is. It's happening

Starting point is 00:47:02 all the time. They also had an office in Washington, D.C., outside, run out of the Pakistani embassy. so that let's say you're Iranian citizen studying in the United States and you lose your passport. Well, you need to get a new one, but how are you going to get that if you don't have an Iranian embassy in the United States? Well, there's a guy in the Pakistani embassy whose job it is, and he is an Iranian diplomat in Washington, D.C. That will get you a new passport. This is the way, you know, this is the good way that this works. This is how it's helpful, right? And that's not cover.

Starting point is 00:47:33 That's declared. On the cover side, especially with commercial cover, it's a whole other animal because think about all their shipping lines are sanctioned, all the port entries are sanctioned, all their goods are sanctioned. Like I just said, the iPhone, how do you get that into the country on industrial scale? Well, you have to have commercial cover and you have to have companies all over the world that look like one thing, but there's something else. And that is what they mostly make their money off of, of how they enrich the regime and how they move people and goods and equipment around. the world very easily and with very little notice. Yeah, you went into that quite a bit in your book. The, uh, the, uh, the, uh, Banyans, uh, Banyads, Banyads.

Starting point is 00:48:18 Yeah. So, you know, when we talk about things that Iran is doing under, you know, diplomatic cover, we're talking about a lot of known bad actors. Like, we know that these people are bad actors. How come they just don't get PNG'd from everywhere? So that's something called reciprocity. If you start kicking out a person from country X, person from country X will start kicking you out. And we saw this a lot during the Obama administration when we were having some escalatory actions with Russia, where we kicked some Russian diplomats out of the United States.

Starting point is 00:48:48 Well, the next day, Russia kicked the exact same number of diplomats out of Russia. And, you know, we close a Chinese diplomatic facility in Texas. Well, the next week, there's a U.S. diplomatic facility closed in China. So there's a huge risk of if we interrupt this process that we all know is going on, the costs are higher than the benefits. So sometimes it might be better to actually, rather than neutralize, might be better to exploit that thing, which is exactly the confluence of human intelligence and counterintelligence

Starting point is 00:49:15 where you get to make the choice. Do I want to just cut this thing off and stop it? You know, if there's a drug vessel full of drugs and we see it off the coast of Venezuela, do we want to blow it up? Or do we want to capture the guys and interrogate them and find out where they came from where they're going and all this other stuff? Well, that's a choice between exploiting and neutralizing.

Starting point is 00:49:31 And neutralizing has a lot of immediate shock value that looks good politically and in the news. But exploiting typically doesn't get known to anybody. It's a secret. And it goes on for a long, long time. And it can have a huge payoff if you're smart about it. And of course, that's my bias because I did those things and I know how they work. But I will advocate for the high value and high impact that they have over a very long time. Rather than just shutting these things down or kicking these diplomats out,

Starting point is 00:49:59 wouldn't it be better to recruit that diplomat? as a double agent and then have him work for you for 30 years and then recruit his own assets for you as a principal agent that you could then further gather defectors but keep them defectors in place. I mean, the possibilities are endless. The value is endless rather than just kicking that one guy out and making the country kick one of your people out. To me, it's a no-brainer. When we talk about some of the things that, you know, Iran does in foreign countries, and in particular the United States, and they do a lot of this stuff everywhere, can we talk about Masi Alinajad?

Starting point is 00:50:35 Yeah, Masilinojad is actually a very interesting person. She wrote her own book called The Wind in My Hair, which I recommend if anyone's interested in Iran, what it's like to be a person in jail in Iran, political jail, Evan Prison, getting tortured. She wrote a book about it. The regime has been trying to kill her for a very long time. They've tried multiple times.

Starting point is 00:50:53 The first time, she lives in New York, actually. And she's under FBI protection now. But when she came to the U.S., she started talking, way more than she used to talk when she was in Iran because now she had some distance, but the regime caught up to her. They tried to assassinate her once by recruiting some Chechen guys who were kind of this hijinks group of guys that were pretty sloppy. They did a lot of physical surveillance on her home. They were looking at the way that she was walking to understand her behavior. And so they were doing a lot of early collection activity to see how this target looked.

Starting point is 00:51:26 And they were interdicted. One of them had an AK-47 in his car. They were using their phones, way too much. In fact, most of the reason we were able to catch them is because of what they said on their phones. It was very obvious of what they were doing. So we neutralized them. And a few years later, the regime still wanted to kill her. But they had a more elaborate plan this time. This time they wanted to kidnap her in New York, bring her to a port in New York, put her on a speedboat, take the speedboat to Venezuela, and then take her to Iran so they could do a show trial and execute her or torture her so that she would recant and make this number. negative message about what she was saying on the media.

Starting point is 00:52:04 We were able to catch that as well. But there have been some others as well. Our Bob Siar, who's an Iranian living in Texas, who is a used car salesman. He was recruited by the IRGC to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, who was in D.C. At the time, eating at a very nice restaurant. And he got very close to actually doing it. But there was a confidential informant that we had in the drug cartels because he was actually buying his weapons from the Zetas cartel.

Starting point is 00:52:29 And we actually had a recruited guy in the Zetas cartel recruited for something else, obviously, who was like, hey, there's this Iranian stuff going on. You guys should look into this. And so DEA and FBI looked into it. Sure enough, yes, he had done quite a few things. He was ready to go. And we were able to capture him too. But a lot of these are very interesting when you look at them because it's not an Iranian case officer or IRGC guy doing this. It's whoever they can get their hands on to do it because they have such few resources available to do these things in. the United States and in other countries that they're just kind of grasping at straws to see what sticks. They've recruited Hell's Angels guys before to organize some assassination attempts more recently. Another very interesting thing to look at about how they recruit these guys in Canada. Then they have them illegally enter the United States and then go do the target reconnaissance that they're going to do and then go figure out when the time is right. But again, confidential informant helps with that and we're able to capture those people too. So it's very interesting to see how they're doing things in the United States because they're very different

Starting point is 00:53:29 than how they do them in other countries where they have more ability to move. And that goes back to the diplomatic thing. So if you look at Iran, which countries can Iran go to Iranians without a visa? This is an important question to ask. And you should always, if you're an intelligence analyst, you should always ask, you know, my target country, what countries can they go to without a visa? Because that means those are countries that can go to and do a source meeting without being easily noticed. Countries might surprise you, for example, Ecuador and Seychelles. and Singapore, they can go there without a visa, Thailand, Georgia, Armenia. So there's a lot of countries that are not Muslim countries that they can go to and do the activities they need to do their third country meetings.

Starting point is 00:54:09 So that way they're not meeting the source in the source's home country or in Iran. They're doing it in a kind of safer area. This is how they kind of do things outside of the United States. In the United States, they're using a lot of cyber activity where they're, and also in Israel, where they're recruiting their assets through Facebook, sometimes posing as lovers and other. kind of things. And when we see these things exposed, we kind of chuckle at it, but also to ask, like, why aren't they throwing more resources at this stuff, you know? But it's because they're more concerned about their survival at home than they are about anything else outside the country.

Starting point is 00:54:41 Something you mentioned, like, that was surprising to me, because most people, I think, of an age, are aware of Solomon Rushdie and the fatwa against him. I did not know. You mentioned that there, that over three dozen people have been killed. killed trying to kill him. And it's still going on. Yeah. Yeah. Just got shot.

Starting point is 00:55:01 And there's basically, there's basically a fund for his death that was just increased. Yeah. It was adjusted for inflation, you know, because it's been around for a while. Right. Right. 3.3 million. And it's crazy to me that there's just basically like this, hey, if you, if you get him or any of these people, like you get a piece of this.

Starting point is 00:55:23 Yeah. It's basically a beef that the original Ayatollah had. And he is now dead. And the beef has survived him. Can we also talk a little bit about merchant because that's pretty recent. What's that? Was it Asif merchant? Who was that?

Starting point is 00:55:42 The, wasn't he the Pakistani, the gentleman who was going to, who was going to try and kill Trump? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So there have been a few of those. I don't know how much stock I put into that. I have a theory that these are not like coming from high level IRGC people. Even the R-Bobsyr one that I mentioned, the Saudi in 2013 assassination project, I think these are lower level IRGC. This is my theory.

Starting point is 00:56:10 I have no fact to back this up. But I think these are lower-level ways of trying to do what they can with what they can. Same thing with John Bolton and Pompeo and Trump. These are like really low-level amateur hour type things that have almost no resources attached to. them. Something like that coming from, if it was coming from the top levels of the government, I feel like there would be more risk analysis in there, some more thought about how it looks and how to do it, you know, these things. And if you compare them to other assassination operations that the regime has done, especially against Iranians, those are far more advanced methodical. They put a lot more

Starting point is 00:56:46 thought into it. They still failed a lot, but they succeeded a lot. And it wasn't this kind of like pie in the sky, like, oh, let's just go after that guy and go kill him. You know, they really thought through how do they do it? Where's the right place to do it? What resources do we need? What country should it be in? Who should we recruit? In Denmark, there were a few of these where they killed some Mujahideen guys and some ASMLA guys with very methodical ways of doing it even recently. So I question, you know, where are these orders coming from? And I don't know if those are officially sanctioned things. Like even again, back to the Arbabsiar case, when you look at the treasury sanctions that detail, you know, what was going on with that case,

Starting point is 00:57:26 They implicate Kossom Soleimani and two high-level IRGC guys in addition to the one guy that was on the phone with R-Bob-CR. But there's no, there's no link between that low-level, basically a lieutenant colonel in the IRGC and Kossum-Solomani. Like that doesn't really make sense to me. You know, I, again, theorizing that it's probably someone lower down the ranks who's like, I'm going to make a name for myself and get this big hit and then I'm going to be important. That's probably more likely. Makes sense. So, you know, then you go into covert action. Can we talk about the Iran Experts Initiative?

Starting point is 00:58:02 Yeah, it's very interesting, more recent, actually, since the Biden administration. This is kind of a classic example of, in many countries do this, Russia does this, China does this with their Confucius institutes, where countries will use their academic credentials to do intelligence things. And again, this is not a new surprising thing. This is very common in countries. But it was kind of surprising because of how close these individuals were to the Biden administration, specifically to the Iran team working for President Biden and the Syria team working for President Biden. And there was, in fact, one individual on the Iran team, the envoy's team, that was telling the envoy advice. And that advice was coming directly from Zarif through emails to that person, which is kind of interesting that emails are now in the public domain.

Starting point is 00:58:52 so if people want to go research them, they can. And all of the people that were involved in this Iran expert initiative claimed to be the ones that were providing, they said that the access they had to the regime was only for academic purposes so that they could help inform the U.S. government on the JCPOA. My thought, as an intelligence collector and a handler, well, that's probably how it started out for you.

Starting point is 00:59:14 And then the regime kept pushing down on that button and kept you on and now you're working for them, even if you don't know that you are. So sometimes, you know, ignorance is not, not an excuse for intelligence collection. And we've seen that many times with how people believe they're providing something to one country and it's a false flag and providing it to somebody else or they think it's something completely separate. And if you look at what they collected and what they did and what they said, this is a very clear-cut influence operation that actually affected

Starting point is 00:59:38 how our Iran envoy operated in the world. And when you're doing negotiations with a country, let's say Iran, you have limited information. So the information you do have is extremely valuable and you're using it to reduce uncertainty and increase your decision advantage, well, the other side wants to take control of that process to their own advantage. And we would be ignorant to think that they were not. And unfortunately, at the time, we were ignorant to think that they were not. And they did do it. So, again, I go in a lot of detail on it.

Starting point is 01:00:07 I have the actual names of the people in there and everything. But it is kind of interesting to think about how many other times does this happen? That's a question mark that should come up that people for future research should be looking into and in the intelligence community should be looking at what other things that look benign or not benign. Because that's a great intelligence operation when it looks benign. That's what clandestine activity is. The activity looks like it's something else, you know?

Starting point is 01:00:28 Right. And then, you know, there's, so we're briefly going over all this stuff. There are so many great examples in this book. I highly, highly recommend everybody read this. It's Iran's shadow weapons. But let's move into cyber because cyber has been, oh, the link is going to be in the description. Let's move into cyber because cyber has been something that, you know, Iran was nothing and then

Starting point is 01:00:58 we hit him or they were hit with Stuxnet or Stuxnet and then they became something. And it's been a real evolution for them, hasn't it? It's really fascinating. Actually, I'm not aware of another country having a similar evolution. As you said, they were nothing before like 2007, at a maximum, they were. defacing websites. Fast forward 10 years, and they are overturning billions of dollars of ransomware and banks and destroying giant pieces of infrastructure and SCADA systems, which are industrial control systems. They just, they accelerate. Well, how do they do that?

Starting point is 01:01:34 Where did they get information? Well, as you mentioned, Stuxnet happened, and Iran immediately reverse engineered Stuxnet and saw how it was made, and they made their own piece of malware that they used that now they knew this new information. Well, then they said, well, what if we're under threat by other things? Let's start investing a ton of money in this. And they started recruiting these civilian entities, which is actually not unlike the U.S. A lot of our cyber expertise is not uniform service members or GS civilians at Cybercom. It's contractors, companies that have experts in them that the government hires to produce tailored items, tailored malware. This is the way it actually works. There's a couple of really interesting books on it, like Countdown

Starting point is 01:02:17 to Zero Day, which I recommend by Kim Zetter, which goes into how Stuxnet was actually made. It was not made by the government. It was made by other companies that were sold to the government. And the same thing with Israel, like they have Pegasus that's made by a civilian company. That's not made by Unit 8200. Their second organization, right? Wait, are you saying that the government is not on the leading edge of development and conception of, I'm just kidding. They're on the leading edge of attempting money to give to those people.

Starting point is 01:02:47 Right. Because they'll pay a lot of money, a lot of money. And the regime does the same thing. And they did the same thing. And actually, when Israel wipes a bunch of servers in Iran using a wiper malware, Iran reverse engineered that and turned it into something called Shammoon, which they then put on Saudi Aramco and erased all of Saudi Aramco's data, which is incredible because, as I said, even two years before that,

Starting point is 01:03:11 the regime could only deface a website. And now they're wiping out the entire oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia out. not all of it, but almost all of it, a huge, huge amount. And it wasn't just a one-hit thing. They had carefully planned it. They chose a day during Ramadan when they knew no one would be at the place. Like, everything was carefully thought through. It was very deliberate, which is a huge change before when they looked like this

Starting point is 01:03:32 rag-tag group of little hackers, which they call Sabiris, that were just hired off the street to go do forum blasts and, you know, take websites down with D-DOS attacks. So you see this evolution, not as their innovation at the beginning, more their reaction, but as they reacted to it, they just took everything that hit them and then they turned it into their own weapon and they used it against us, which is the West, Israel, European countries, especially like Denmark, Netherlands, other countries as well, to their advantage. And after that first few years, then they rapidly accelerated and producing their own things that are now novel. That would never have existed if things hadn't happened before to them that pushed them in that direction, which is kind of fascinating to, you know, revisionist history of like what would have happened if we didn't do Stucknet. or if they didn't discover Stuxnet. Right.

Starting point is 01:04:18 And you also mentioned that when Israel used Wiper, that they uncovered a much more valuable NSA loitering tool that... Yeah. That wasn't very good for the NSA. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the NSA tool was hidden and had been hidden and was totally unknown.

Starting point is 01:04:35 And that tool was extremely advanced and was capable of pretty much destroying the entire nuclear program and a lot of other infrastructure, including much of their non-nuclear defense infrastructure. And when Israel did that wiper activity, it did it in the same kind of area of the memory of the system that this other malware was. And when the regime went to go look, they found both. And the U.S. unfortunately lost this extremely advanced tool

Starting point is 01:05:02 that now is no longer functional. Yeah. I have a question. Can I ask a question? Please. There's cyber operations. What is like the percentage between like them going out there trying to make money for the regime to like offensive operations against state actors and stuff like that, whether it's Israel, the U.S. or Denmark? The money part was earlier and it has really dramatically decreased.

Starting point is 01:05:28 And in fact, the last time they did a major financial operation, they did two that were like really huge. One was against a Las Vegas company because the owner of the company was Jewish and made a statement about Iran. And to retaliate, they caused him several hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to his infrastructure. They didn't get any money from that, though. But then in Georgia, the state in the United States of Georgia, they attacked a municipal infrastructure and were able to do some ransomware attack there. After that, which was like more than 10 years ago, they have drifted away from that and they're mostly focusing on offensive cyber activity.

Starting point is 01:06:02 Yeah, it's wild that they now have like five advanced persistent threats, at least five that are associated with them. Can you talk a little bit about the 2023 attacks on U.S. ships? Do you recall that? Which ones are you talking about? The ballast, they are remotely... Yes, this is from a group called Shahid Kabe, which is a very elite cyber unit inside of one of their elite cyber units. So you can think of it as, you know, inside a cybercom, there is an elite national mission force, the cyber mission force.

Starting point is 01:06:38 you can think of Shahid Kave as a team inside of that cyber mission force. This is kind of analogous. And what Shahid Kave did was they were able to actually steal through malware activity. They use these things called remote access Trojans or rats to get this stuff. So they created a rat inside of a computer system, extracted the designs for these ballasts. And if they wanted to, they could have basically hit a button and turn these ballasts off, which would have caused these cargo vessels to eventually sink after their machinery broke down and things.

Starting point is 01:07:07 but the interesting part about that is that these were not operations they were going to do. Instead, this was a menu of options that they presented to the Ayatollah. And this was their job was to basically come up with all kinds of ways that if the Ayatollah wanted to, they could attack the U.S. with cyber tools. Interestingly, they haven't used them to our knowledge, not just this tool, but other tools. And that kind of goes along with what they do, not just in cyber, but in intelligence generally, where they take a lot of things and put them on the shelf and they wait till there's a time when they really want to use the thing.

Starting point is 01:07:43 And that's kind of interesting because there have been a lot of opportunities that you might think would be a good reason for them to use those things. You could think of June, for example, as one of those times, and they didn't do it. And that's kind of an interesting question of like, why didn't they destroy the ballasts on all of the ships in the Persian Gulf in June? But it probably goes toward the more political question of, well, if they did that, what would happen next and what would that mean for me? Right. So they probably have a lot of things on the shelf that they'll never, ever use that are probably very powerful.

Starting point is 01:08:14 But it would mean that their own destruction may be invited from using these things. Right. Yeah. Where it turns into basically an act of war. Yes. And let's talk about, you know, we talk about these capabilities, but let's talk about like they're internal. Like they have, they're pretty devious with their own population, you know, in terms. of like the the apps that they create, the software, you know, that they create where,

Starting point is 01:08:44 well, they, they'll put out, hey, here's this censorship. Here's a way to circumvent censorship, but it's actually put out by the government. Yeah. And actually, this is all because their internet is not like our internet. You know, we think like, oh, I can put a VPN on and I can, I can use proton or whatever. Well, the problem in Iran is that they don't have an open internet. They have something called the National Information Network, which is given to them by China. This is a Chinese technology about how to create China's great firewall, which is pretty successful.

Starting point is 01:09:15 They gave that to Iran, and Iran implemented it, which means that people in Iran cannot access the Internet like we do. There are entire sections of the Internet that they can never reach. There are some VPNs that do work there, but they're not always working and they kind of come up and down, and there's a lot of volatility there. But within that special ecosystem that they've created, as you see, said, they've got all kinds of little things in there that are ready to hook you. And especially during times of protest or unrest, there's a lot of things that are designed to trick you, track you, or catch you or figure out where you are. Because what their goal is to stop protests, that they don't want them happening and they'll go to any length to do it. They were at the time

Starting point is 01:09:56 during the Masa Amini protest a few years ago. They were throwing girls off of roofs because the girls were posting on Instagram and were at the actual protest. They were shooting girls walking home from school that had no part in the protest just because they were there. Lots of lots of people were killed during this protest with live rounds. And at the heart of it was the internet. Because how else can you, in a country so oppressed and so controlled, how else can you communicate that this protest is going down right now at this location and they have to use the internet?

Starting point is 01:10:25 And the problem is they can't access Instagram. They can't access a lot of social media that we can. Unless you're a regime person, they have special access in the network to be able to go onto Instagram and post their pictures and things. But that means that people have to use all these little tools and software. And if you remember back in the 90s when you were trying to download music, I wasn't doing it because it was illegal, of course. But for those who were doing it, you sometimes would download a movie or a song and it was

Starting point is 01:10:49 actually full of viruses, right? Because we had no way of like verifying, like, what am I downloading? Because it's all, nothing's official. And in Iran, it's like that. And the regime puts a lot of stuff out there, like, oh, this is the VPN that you can use to get outside the country. But it turns out it's actually a government-controlled. VPN that's accessing your entire phone. And that's one small example, but that's how the entire

Starting point is 01:11:09 system is designed is to have total knowledge of what is every person in this country doing so we can stop them from rebelling against us. It's insane. And actually, during the June war, they shut the entire internet off for two days, not because it wasn't Israel that did that. It was the Iranian government, because they recognized how weak they were during that conflict. Like, that was a great moment. If the people wanted to stand up and take the country over, that was, if, it was then. And so the regime noticed that and they turned the entire internet off. Zero internet. You couldn't call on WhatsApp. You couldn't do anything. And that was a very scary time because imagine there's bombs falling all around in big cities, Israeli bombs and U.S. bombs. And you don't

Starting point is 01:11:50 know what they're going to hit next because you can't even know the, can't even see the news. You don't know if like this is the start of an invasion, right? I mean, you've no idea. So these people are like living in complete fear and darkness. And that's what the regime wanted them to feel, which is crazy because their own country was under attack, and they were trying to increase the fear of their own people during that time. We talked a little bit about sanctions earlier and how their wealth continues to shoot up, even with the sanctions.

Starting point is 01:12:18 Can, you know, and you have some great graphs in there, detailing like the banyards and the shipping lanes or, you know, all the interest. But can you kind of talk about how they circumvent these sanctions and why they continue gaining more and more wealth. There's a couple of different ways. One of the most tried and true methods is something called a Hawala,

Starting point is 01:12:43 which is an unofficial mechanism for moving money that doesn't actually physically move. So basically, I have a ledger and you have a ledger. And on my ledger, I say minus $100. And I send a note to you that says, hey, on your ledger, write plus $100. $100 never existed. this money is moving theoretically, but this is a very common, it's an, it's a legal system. It's not illegal. It's legal in many countries in the world because this is how they've traditionally used, done

Starting point is 01:13:09 banking for several thousand years. The regime relies quite a bit on Hawalas, especially for some of the earlier steps in their money movement process, because there's no trace from my book to your book, except from the person who said that that money moved. So let's say I want to move some money to Dubai. Well, I can do the Hawala to Dubai. then in Dubai there is money. Well, there's a lot of banks in Dubai, and in fact, something like a third of the Dubai permanent population are actually Iranians.

Starting point is 01:13:35 And that's because of the banking system in Dubai, which is hugely designed to facilitate money movement, not just for Iran, but for many countries. That's one of the things that Dubai kind of uses a selling point is that, hey, you can do banking here and we don't care what you do. And a lot of the banking is based out of those banks. There's also a lot of banks in Switzerland and banks in South America and in China. There's also a lot of goods for cash or goods for services activity where, for example, if Iran brings a cargo boat with millions of barrels of oil on it, they can do a ship-to-ship transfer to China. And China does something very similar to the Huala system where they give them goods in kind

Starting point is 01:14:15 for that oil. And there's a lot of other ways they can do it too. Yeah, it was, like I said, you go into great depth. So let's talk about, you know, you mentioned Soleimani. Let's talk about what Iran got up to after the invasion of Iraq. You mentioned that there were 31 transactions between 2004 and 2008. And those were large transactions for weapons systems or IED systems. You know, we saw the EFPs out there that were Iranian generated.

Starting point is 01:14:53 Can you go into that a little bit? Yeah, so the kind of the shocking part of that is many of those actuators and parts were either made in the United States or made in the United Kingdom. So like the radios, the Harris radios made in the United Kingdom, the actuators were made in the United States. Those companies had no clue that that's what was happening. But the way that the regime does its movement of money and material, you're not going to know that you're selling your actuators to an Iranian agent. So what they would do is they'd have a guy in the United States that would purchase it as a legitimate company, usually a cover organization, commercial cover, ship that. ship that stuff to Dubai or to another country. There's a couple of countries that I've listed in there, like Malaysia as another example,

Starting point is 01:15:30 then move it to another location in that same country and then mark the goods as something else, which is kind of tried and true method to do it, just slap a new paper on there that says grain, and then ship it over to the Straits of Hormuz or to wherever you want to bring it, and then take it out of the packages and start making IDs with it. It sounds crazy and super easy, but you have to think about these shipping lanes we're talking about are some of the busiest places on the planet, especially the Bab el-Mandav Strait, the Persian Gulf. And if you go further east in Indonesia, the Straits of Malacca,

Starting point is 01:16:01 something like 60% of the world's goods pass through the Straits of Malacca on ships. So there's no way that you could stop every ship and look in every cargo container, especially if you're paying off people at the ports in name your country, Singapore, for example, to just not even look at what the document says. Like, they don't know what's in the thing. They don't care what's in the thing. It's kind of like, you know, the New York Port-Athor, in the 1970s, right?

Starting point is 01:16:22 Like, they don't care what's going over there. They just want the cargo to move and put the money in their pocket, right? It's business. And that's what was happening where the regime was clandescently moving these Western-produced pieces of equipment over to the Middle East and then killing our own soldiers with these U.S. produced pieces of equipment. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, I, regardless of what people's political opinions about Soleimani or the

Starting point is 01:16:49 effectiveness of the strike, I know a lot of, veterans saw it as, you know, comeuppance, you know. So let's talk a little bit about their unconventional warfare capabilities. You have the, is it the Sabarin, the patient ones? Yeah. That's kind of a white soft unit. And then there's the more black soft type units as well that they have. And so what are some of the whites off and then some of the black soft up to these days?

Starting point is 01:17:18 Or, you know, in the last, say, 15, 20 years. So a really important distinction with Iran's military is that they don't have one military, they have two. They have the Arteche, which is the, like, our DoD. Then they have the IRGC, which is a completely separate military organization, which is larger than the Artech. They're about similar in size, but the IRGC is roughly larger. The IRGC's mission is to protect the Ayatollah and the regime around him. The Artech mission is to protect the sovereignty of Iran like any other army would be. And a lot of outsiders don't understand that distinction.

Starting point is 01:17:51 there's a lot of Artech people that if there was a rebellion right now, they would turn their weapons on the regime. They don't want to be in this situation. They're just kind of regular people. The IRGC people are different, right? And that's a huge distinction that needs to be made. The sovereign you mentioned are on the Artech side. And there's a lot of Artech-White Soft that do the traditional like visit board search and seizure of a vessel, for example. They'll train foreign partners across the border.

Starting point is 01:18:17 Another example. The biggest deployment of the Artech, though, was in. in the 1980-1980-18-Iraq war. Since 88, the Artesh never deployed more than a company-sized element outside of Iraq, which is crazy because you think those units need real experience, at least not just with combat, but with like reception, staging, onward movement, integration, like moving to another country physically. It takes a lot of practice and training.

Starting point is 01:18:40 They didn't have that from 1988 until 2016. The reason they got that in 2016 is because of ISIS in Syria. That was the first time the regime deployed Artec, as a military force outside of Iran since the Iran-Iraq war, which is kind of interesting because we had the whole conflict in Iraq, the U.S. did. There was many other conflicts between 1988 and 2016 that could have invited the army. They didn't send them, which is just to me, it's kind of interesting. Why wouldn't you send your army to go do something?

Starting point is 01:19:07 They didn't until 2016. And they actually had brigades, entire brigades deployed to Syria. Then the IRGC, what they're up to, they focus a lot on unconventional warfare in the ring of countries around Iran. But the way that they do unconventional warfare writ large, they separate it by portfolio or file. So there's like an Africa file. There's a South America file. There's a Middle East file specifically focused on Afghanistan. There's another file specifically on Iraq.

Starting point is 01:19:35 There's one for Turkey. There's one for the Balkans, like the Bosnia deployment I mentioned, that is part of one element of the Kud's force going there. It's not the whole Kud's force going. It's a group that specializes. It kind of like in the U.S., we have fifth group of special forces. They focus on the Middle East. They're not deploying to South America, right? And the IRGC and Quds Force has a very similar mindset.

Starting point is 01:19:55 And actually, Kassam Soleimani was the architect of that, because before he took over in the late 90s, there was only file, and that was the Balkans, because that was their only deployment. But as the U.S. started moving and saber rattling about the Middle East and then we invaded, 9-11 happened, like, hey, we need to do something around this country and separate it by task organization of specialty. The Afghanistan guys, you guys are only going to be Afghanistan. And actually, Esmel Ghani, the current Kud's Force commander, was an Afghanistan file guy. Like, he only did Afghanistan his entire career. And then when Soleimani was killed, Gani was elevated to that position. So he's kind of an interesting example of that file mentality. Something that you mentioned in the book that I forgot to mention earlier, I didn't know that Iran almost invaded Afghanistan.

Starting point is 01:20:47 Yeah, forgotten moment of history. Yeah. Yeah, that was actually Mazary Shereef. There were some Iranian diplomats there and a journalist and some other Iranians that weren't affiliated with the government. And the Taliban killed them. And this was a huge problem inside of Iran because they had just come out of the Iran-Iraq war. They were bloodied and beaten. Their only deployment overseas in the last decade before this happened, which I think was 97, was to Bosnia.

Starting point is 01:21:12 Like I mentioned, that was a very tiny thing. They didn't want to be involved with anything outside of the country at the time. They were licking their wounds and trying to focus and clamp down the country and just like get back to normal. And then this thing happens with these diplomats in Masary Sharif. And there's an element of the IRGC that wants to invade Afghanistan immediately. They had a whole brigade ready to go and they had a division also getting spun up. They went all the way up to the border. And there's this national security council like element in the Iranian government that includes Ayatollah.

Starting point is 01:21:41 And they kind of were sitting around thinking like, well, what happens if we do this? What's next? And the reason they did not invade Afghanistan is interesting. It's because Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was part of the Northern Alliance that we were allied with, would be in danger if Iran invaded Afghanistan. Well, why is that important? Well, because Iran was also helping the Northern Alliance. Because inside of the Northern Alliance were a lot of Hazara, Shia folks who were threatened by the Taliban and still are threatened by the Taliban now. And Iran didn't want to damage that.

Starting point is 01:22:11 those people that they saw as people they wanted to protect. And that went into their calculus of why they didn't invade. Again, another revisionist history question, like, what would have happened if they had invaded? Because this was, again, like 1997-ish. We hadn't bombed Camp Farooq yet, which was the Osama bin Laden, one of the training camps. Like, we hadn't done any of that stuff yet. How different would things be if they had invaded?

Starting point is 01:22:32 Wow, what a different world. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And it's interesting to you where, you know, you talked about the intelligence quartet. you know, sharing intelligence with other countries about Daesh, you know, ISIS. And I'm curious, you know, ISIS was a, you know, they were the enemy of everybody. But teams still formed to fight them. You know, separate teams still formed.

Starting point is 01:23:03 Like this wasn't this global war on ISIS, you know, it was, you know, individual efforts, I take it. or not individual, but kind of group efforts. But we didn't want to get too chummy with Iran or Russia or anybody else during that. Well, I'll tell you, we were actually doing a strike in Iraq. And we had the target was soaked for a few hours. We had aircraft getting ready to go. Like, we were going to blow this target up. And as we're watching it through ISR, this team that looks highly trained and like clearly a special forces team, not our team.

Starting point is 01:23:36 And we have the task force, like we know who's here. and we see this team coming up out in the infrared and we're like, who is that? And we were making calls, making calls trying to figure this out. Turns out it was the Germans because the Germans didn't want to say they were deployed there and they didn't want to be part of our coalition. But they were doing a raid on a compound and didn't tell anyone, or at least didn't tell us. And we were about to blow that compound up, like minutes, like as they were going in there, we would have killed them.

Starting point is 01:24:01 And it was crazy to me, like how even on the Western side, we were not fully integrated, like you were saying. Like it was, it wasn't a coalition by any means. Yeah. That's crazy. So, um, you know, there's so much to the book and I hope I haven't left out any, have I left out anything major in our discussion? I mean, there's so much stuff about the different countries that the IRGC works in, but I don't want to spoil it because it's, that was one of my favorite parts to research because it's so interesting to see like in, in Yemen, for example, like how did they get to where they are today and do the Houthis even care about Iran, which. which is a vague question because I don't, I would argue that they don't care as much as we think

Starting point is 01:24:41 they do. Yeah. Same with Hezbollah, which I also go into a lot of detail about where Hasbola came from and how it formed and Iran came in later. It wasn't, you know, like, it's a very interesting kind of thing that we just take for granted. And as we talked about the beginning of the show, there's a lot of these things that we just say, like, oh, that's the way it is.

Starting point is 01:24:57 You should ask, like, is that really how it is? Is that how it got that way? Because if we're using the wrong information and we're making decisions with the wrong information, we're going to end up with really bad results that keep. ending with failures over and over again because we keep using these biases every time we try to make a decision. Yeah. No, it's, it is, I don't want to say it's a dense book because that, you know, makes it sound dry. It's not dry. It's just packed with information. I mean, packed with information. And I said earlier, about a fifth of this book is references and sources.

Starting point is 01:25:31 It is exceptionally well, I'll show, I'll show everybody. So, the story. sources start here. If you guys can see, the sources, can you guys see this all right? Start here. Like it's massive. I was shocked by the amount of information you had in this book. I wanted to write it like an Intel report where if you want to get more info on that thing, you can get it instead of like, well, how did he come to that conclusion, you know, which is not an Intel report. You don't do that. And Intel reports are facts. They're not opinions. Yeah. No, that's fantastic. Well, if that's it, as long as we haven't left anything out, D.

Starting point is 01:26:13 So when Israel hit Iran with that wipe program and Iran came across the NSA program that we had there, I mean, what's it like when we find out that a big important program that we have had there? I'll tell you what, the guy. in the watch floor, we're pissed. So this program is called Flame, and it was like a multi-tool, you could call it, where it doesn't just do one thing. It's like a launch pad that's clandescently there that you can put a bunch of things inside of, and it will do a ton of different functions, right?

Starting point is 01:26:53 And these different functions can do pretty much anything to a system. Offensively, defensively, they can manipulate stuff to make things look real that aren't real. Like, it's incredible what I could do. If you're talking about the bureaucrats, they cared about the dollars, because the Programs like Flame are worth millions of dollars. Like I said, they weren't developed by people in the remote operation center, which is where this came out of at NSA. These were developed by civilian companies that are hired for the specific purpose.

Starting point is 01:27:19 Like, I need you to make me this thing that can do these things. And then you'll get multiple companies. They're like, oh, I can do that. And this other companies, like, I can do that too. Here's better. But I'll charge you $3 million for that. And this is how this game works, right? Well, we just dumped a bunch of money in this program.

Starting point is 01:27:36 And this program is extremely expensive. And now it's gone. And the problem is, if you take flame apart and see how it's made, you can figure out how we might access other things with similar analogous methods, which means if we had other stuff like in Russia, for example, or in China or North Korea, all those are done too. So you're talking about worldwide ramifications. And this is because Israel went in there and wanted to delete data. Again, this is the conflict between exploit versus neutralize. plane wanted to exploit. Israel wanted to neutralize, which they frequently do.

Starting point is 01:28:09 That's their frequent approach is to just destroy the thing. How much more value can you get if you exploit instead? I mean, it's immeasurable. Yeah. And it's not as if, you know, the different signals intelligence apparatus are checking in with each other to say, hey, we're getting ready to attack these guys. You got anything hanging out there that you don't want exposed? Yeah, and actually with Stuxnet, it's unique because there were five different countries involved with Stuxnet that were coordinating with each other about it. And they weren't the five-by partners. You know, it was the U.S. was the five-by partner in that partnership. And it was kind of like an interesting collection of people working together on this singular purpose, which was timed to happen right before the 2015 nuclear agreement. So that way, if the nuclear agreement didn't work out, we had this covert operation that would destroy the nuclear program anyway. But it was discovered.

Starting point is 01:29:05 Right. Typically, it doesn't happen like that. Who are the other countries? So it was Denmark, Netherlands, Israel, United States, and Germany. Which is interesting because the U.S. and Germany were two of the countries that were part of the original P5 countries that were negotiating with Iran on the 2015 JCPOA. And Germany has a history of helping Iran at times, training them in, you know, in different things. Yeah, in the early 90s, actually, the Germans trained. Yeah, actually all the

Starting point is 01:29:40 the things that were destroyed, the parts of the centrifuges that were exploited by Stuxnet were Siemens produced components. And how did we know how those seamans components work? Well, they're made in Germany, and the German government was able to obtain access

Starting point is 01:29:55 to all that material, you know. But in the 90s, they were training them on regular espionage, like human espionage, teach them how to use cameras, take clandessive photography, do surveillance detection routes, Russia was also training them too. But Germany actually gifted them a bunch of computers and cameras to do espionage. And with the knowledge, it's interesting because France also with Germany in this time period, the early 90s, they knew that Iran was going to use this stuff to assassinate Iranians in Europe.

Starting point is 01:30:22 Right. Like Bond Station was being used as a platform for assassinations and Paris Station was being used for the same thing. But the agreement was, as long as you don't kill Frenchmen, as long as you don't kill Germans, you can use those locations. to do that stuff, and here's some cameras and computers to help you do it. Wow. Wow. Jesus. It's crazy.

Starting point is 01:30:43 And again, that's all in the Intel reports. That's not in the media. That goes to the sourcing of like, this is stuff people have never seen or heard of before, probably. They're like, that's not possible. They're not friends. Well, guess what? In the intelligence community, there's no friends. There's only interests.

Starting point is 01:30:58 Right. Right. Well, Jonathan, it's a great book. We really appreciate you. Thanks for coming back. We got a couple questions from Petraon. Yeah. From JJ, can Mr. Hackett share anything about the U.S. funneling arms through the Iranians during the Civil War in Bosnia?

Starting point is 01:31:15 That's super interesting. Actually, there's a whole section in the book about that. And some of it is public and some of it I have in there from intelligence reports. And what the Iranians were doing, they were supporting the Bosniaks, which Bosniak with a K is the Muslim group that was being targeted by Slibon-Milosovich and other. genocidal leaders there. And the regime at the time, remember, this was like late 80s, early 90s, when the regime was trying to help Muslims worldwide. Like, that was kind of their banner.

Starting point is 01:31:43 Like, let's help these oppressed. That was that they were doing. And they saw the Bosniaks as oppressed because they were. They were being massacred. I mean, like, it was horrific. And so the regime went there and brought weapons there, trained them. They also taught the intelligence service of the Bosniaks, how to do intelligence collection. And this is where the clash came between U.S. helping Bosniaks.

Starting point is 01:32:04 and Iran helping Bosniaks because there was a group of them that we both were helping, and there was a group of them that Iran was helping that was harming us. And there was actually an IED factory that was discovered later on in the war that I4 discovered, which is the international force there, that was IEDs to attack IFOR, which is interesting because at the exact same time, we were allowing the regime to provide weapons to people in Bosnia that were fighting against the Serbs. So there was this like overlaying of friend and enemy in the same space because similar to ISIS where everybody was against the Serbs what they were doing at the time. And some of them were against them in different ways.

Starting point is 01:32:43 Some of those ways overlapped. It wasn't clear cut like, oh, that's my enemy. That's my friend. Sometimes it doesn't work like that. Even in Iraq, like again, back when I was talking about ISIS when I was there, we actually were careful not to strike targets where we knew IRC people were meeting in Iraq because we knew that the. sources they were working with were fighting against ISIS. So those are kind of like off-limits places. We never sent them letters or anything and told them like, hey, guys, we're not going to touch you. But it was like an understood thing, like we're going to leave these people alone

Starting point is 01:33:11 over here because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And we care more about ISIS right now than we do about killing a couple of IRC guys that who knows what they're doing. We got a couple more from Duncan, Idaho. As far as I know, there have been ops on U.S. soil sponsored directly by Iran. And there have been proxy group ops in a few of other Western countries, but there haven't been proxy group ops on U.S. soil. Is that correct? If so, why? So this is an intelligence thing where we don't know the answer completely.

Starting point is 01:33:43 And actually the FBI has come out with competing reports from their own organization. At some time saying there's like 2,000 Hezbollah fighters in America are ready to go at any time. Other reports coming out and saying, no, the greatest threat in the United States is, you know, other groups. I won't get into that. But then they say, but the Hezbollah threat's not that big. Or they'll say, well, the connections here are tenuous. They're actually like relatives of Hezbollah people that Hezbollah could push a button to like push on them emotionally and force them to do something.

Starting point is 01:34:10 There's not a lot of consensus about exactly what is going on here. And actually, I was reading a report recently about in the United States, Iran and Hezbollah, how many of them actually came across the border during the Biden administration, which is an interesting question. I saw one report that said it was like, I don't know, 600 guys or something. Well, that's a tiny, tiny percentage of the total people that came across. How do we even know it was 600? What were they doing? Are they doing money laundering? Are they doing drug stuff?

Starting point is 01:34:36 Are they actually doing plots? Because a lot of times when you look at pre-attack planning, it looks a lot like other types of attack or other types of planning. Surveillance, for example, if you don't know why they're doing this surveillance, it could look like pre-attack surveillance. It could also look like surveillance so you could go do an intelligence activity like a source meeting. It could also look like a drug deal.

Starting point is 01:34:56 surveillance for to find a location that's good for a drug deal. You don't really know until the thing actually happens unless you've got recruitment of someone involved in that network or you've got Sagan or something else like that. So that's kind of a challenge where like with the FBI, for example, how are they, without doing source operations or having SIGN, it's very tough to know exactly what is the threat. Like we might be able to say like, hey, that guy, I know he is a member of Hesbollah. Okay, what else do you know? Well, it's hard to know, you know.

Starting point is 01:35:25 So it's kind of an ambiguous answer to that, but it's important to kind of take it with a measured approach of like, what exactly is this guy doing? That way you can ask the right questions and do the right intelligence collection to actually figure it out instead of just assuming like, oh, he's a drug dealer. Well, if we make the assumption that he's a drug dealer, but he's actually a bad guy, terrorists, we've made a bad assumption. Same vice versa. If we say like, oh, he's here to do terror attacks and we're ignoring all the drug dealing he's doing, that's another problem. Right. So we need to come at this question objectively, which I trust that counterintelligence, FBI counterintelligence is, probably doing it really well. It has been doing it really well. But it's tough. It's really tough.

Starting point is 01:35:59 Not just in the United States, but any country, even when you have a lot more ability to do stuff, it's really hard to figure out what is that guy doing because you can't see inside their brain. One more from V. How much or any of the operations that they have overseas have been self-funded? And he wrote IRGC, sexy carwatch one-raiser. Well, the thing is, they have a lot of money. They can put a lot of money at it. But what they typically do to fund the overseas stuff is use money that's not from Iran. So that means drug money, black market stuff, other criminal activity financing that generates income from those activities, especially in Europe, for example. A lot of illegal immigration fund things that they'll help do human trafficking and move people and get money from that.

Starting point is 01:36:44 Or they'll move drugs like Capdagon out of Syria into the Gulf Arab countries and make a ton of of money off that. A lot of that money is used to finance these activities. Because again, it's really tough to move the money out of Iran physically, like take dollars out of Iran. and bring them outside the country. You can do it, but you want to do it for what matters. And if an attack has a risk of being discovered, you don't want to use your dollars for that. You want to use your drug money for that because that's something that you can stand to lose, you know?

Starting point is 01:37:11 I have one more question about something you mentioned before about your career specifically. When you mentioned you were in damn neck training, most people think of damn neck as like where SEAL Team 6 is. When I just clarify a little bit of what that, you know, I don't want to people. So was he shield Team 6 in the comments and stuff? That's funny because people were upset that you were calling me an operator the other day, even though that's the job.

Starting point is 01:37:34 I know. I know. I don't know. My job. But, yeah, it was the counterintelligence human intelligence course, which is the Marine Corps' Planned Dess and Intelligence Activity training pipeline. So we are a validated CIA training organization that CIA comes down there every six months to validate our training.

Starting point is 01:37:52 And we also issue a counterintelligence credential. So it's the only, the Marine Corps is the only one of the one. that does this. The other DoD branches do not combine counterintelligence, human intelligence, and they also don't train up to category one intelligence collection, which is the highest level of intelligence collection that, or clandestine intelligence collection that exists. So it's kind of, we chose that place because it's a good place to do it, obviously, because the base has a lot of, you know, it's got a good fence. And we also transform the area around it, the Damnack area, the Norfolk and Virginia Beach area, into a training zone where it's a foreign country essentially,

Starting point is 01:38:26 very similar to how the farm does it. And the guys have to go out there and operate as if they're in a foreign country and do other ops out in downtown Norfolk, you know, in the middle of the night, which is sometimes more dangerous than doing it in a foreign country. No more questions from Patreon. All set. All right. Jonathan, thank you once again.

Starting point is 01:38:48 Thanks for, you know, thanks for the book. Thanks for, you know, taking the time to write that. And thanks for joining us tonight. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to talk about it. I think it's super important topic. And everybody, thank you for joining us, and we will see you soon. Hey, guys, it's Jack.

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The Team House - Inside Iran's Covert Operations | Jon Hackett | Ep. 368

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