The Team House - Israel/Hamas Conflict & Ukraine War Update w/ CIA Officer | Marc Polymeropoulos | Ep. 250

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Marc returns to talk about the Israel/Hamas conflict happening in Gaza as well as a Ukraine war update.Marc Polymeropoulos retired from the Senior Intelligence Service ranks in 2019 after serving for 26 years in the Intelligence Community in operational field and leadership assignments. He is an expert in counterterrorism, covert action, and human intelligence collection.Marc's book:https://hcleadershipessentials.com/pages/clarity-in-crisisMarc's podcast:https://thedsrnetwork.com/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsor:Barbell Apparel https://barbellapparel.com/teamhouseGet a free stealth hoodie with any purchase over $99https://barbellapparel.com/teamhouseHello Freshhttps://hellofresh.com/teamhousefreefor free breakfast for life with your purchasehttps://hellofresh.com/teamhousefree------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#israel #palestineBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David

Park. Everybody, welcome to the Team House. I'm Dave Park. Jack can't be here tonight. Welcome our many-time guests, Mark Polymeropoulos. Mark is a retired CIA SIS, correct? You know, a big shot with a vast knowledge of international affairs with the intelligence community, and particularly on the topic we're going to talk about tonight, which will cover the situation in Israel.

We'll also talk about Ukraine. Welcome, Mark. Thanks for joining us. Awesome. Great to be here. I think this is number five. I believe so. I don't know.

I don't know what the record is, but I'm a little, I'm a little insulted Jack is not here again. I think he's avoiding me. So we're going to have to address this somehow. I can't come to the Christmas party. He's playing hard to get. Maybe that's it. Oh, yeah.

Well, he's playing hard to get. He's like, if he's not here, maybe you'll come to the Christmas party, you know. Okay. Tush. Let's go.

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So, Mark, back to you, the star of the show. For people who may, you know, be new to the show or haven't seen you before, can you give us the brief intro into your background? Sure, of course. I worked for 26 years at CIA. Start off in 1993. You know, the first two desks I was sitting on was the Afghan desk. and then went and did some stuff on the Palestinians

and then went to CTC on the Hamas desk. So talk about stuff that's relevant. I mean, nothing fricking changes. It's unbelievable. Same players, but we can talk about that a little later. I served 26 years. I did seven tours overseas, most of the time in the Middle East, lots of time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then the last two years of my career, after I unfortunately got promoted, you were very kind. I certainly was not a big wig. I just think it hung around a lot. So if you hang around there, you're going to get promoted to the country. kind of general officer cadre, but I was the deputy and the acting operations chief over what's called the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. So that really had to do with Russia,

you know, Ukraine, places what, you know, we thought was kind of calm and quiet, not really. But really it was an amazing. It was a unique career. And, you know, I kind of look back and I think about all the highs and lows. I'm very humble. I'm really proud a lot of the stuff we did. And then some terrible things happened to when we lost friends in, line of duty. And so you kind of sit back and you come on great shows like this. That's why I love coming on here. You know, someone asked me, why do you love coming on the team house? All they do is kind of drink and hang out and chat. And I'm like, that's what I fucking do all the time. That's my life now. I mean, I usually do it at a dive bar in northern Virginia called the Vienna Inn.

But I love this show. And because, you know, you guys are my peeps. And so it's a very, very comfortable place. But it's awesome to be on again. Thank you very much. Yeah, we appreciate it. Do you want to, I don't know if you want to start with the, uh, with Hamas and the Israel Hamas question. or if you want to start with any updates on Russia, Ukraine, because that's really fallen off in the news since, you know, since October 7th. So do you have a preference? Yeah, let's do, let's do Israel stuff first.

Okay. Just because it's fresh in my mind, I think some of the listeners will be interested because I had the opportunity. I'll talk about it in a sec to go to the Israeli embassy the other day and view the raw footage of October 7th, which was fucking horrendous. but actually they allowed me to take notes they're allowing members of the media and somehow I've qualified as that.

I kind of talked my way in. And I took a couple pages of notes and they're gruesome. And so I'll share that. But first, I just have to say hi to Dee, producer, because, you know, a fellow ethnically, ethnic Greek, I'm having some Uzo.

Here you go, Dee. That's for you. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate the respect. We got us got, you know, the Greek mafia, of course, runs the CIA. everybody knows that.

I've been saying it. Nobody said nobody wants to believe me. Well, it's true. Well, you know, we went, we went to a family restaurant, one of Dee's family restaurants last night, and I'm pretty sure that there were some KG individuals hanging out in shadows. Yeah, a couple people on parole for sure. Well, then they'd fit right in, the intelligence community.

No, so, you know, the, you know, Israel, Hamas, you know, war, you know, It was fast. Let me just kind of go, you know, I'll start from October 7th. And so, you know, I think, you know, Dave and Dee, you certainly know I'm a contributor for MSNBC. That's one of my kind of post-retirement gigs. And I'm on TV a lot. And so, you know, they use me as their national security analyst because of my background in the intelligence community. And I think they also like having someone who is very much in the center because I don't always kind of tow the line of a lot of what is set on air there. And that's good. You want to have just like, you know, You need some folks in the center on Fox.

You need some folks in the center on MSNBC. But I got a phone. I got a call. Actually, I woke up. I was in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It was October 7th at 7 a.m. And I had 55 text messages. And it was MSNBC saying, you've got to get on the air in five minutes.

You know, Andrew Mitchell is waiting. And I was like, why? They said literally the text was Hamas just in a Hamas army just invaded Israel. And I looked over my wife. And I think I said, I think I get on TV now. Like, I got to get my computer up. And she said, what happened? I said, I looked at, I told her, and I said, did we drink too much last night?

Like, was there too much wine that we had? Because that's insane. It wasn't, it wasn't Hamas and Israel were going at it again. It was literally a Hamas army had invaded. And as you kind of unpack it, you know, it was relatively true. It was a, you know, 3,000 man army complete with, you know, Hamas's kind of shock troops. There's special operations capabilities. And over kind of 20 different locations in Israel, you know, launched this surprise attack,

which ended up killing 1,200 Israelis. And certainly changed, you know, changed the region in the near and medium term. And then, of course, became a huge problem for the United States government. But, you know, just in terms of kind of this shock, I then I immediately thought back to, well, that was one of the first operational desks at CTC in 1996, where there was a Hamas desk. And guess what? It's not there anymore. And so then you start thinking about, you know, how did this happen?

And it was pretty clear. I take no credit for this. I said it on air at 7 o'clock in the morning on October 7th, but I said, hey, this is Israel's 9-11. And it's certainly when everyone, you know, this is not really an original thought. But ultimately, this was this, you know, kind of incredible intelligence failure in which the vaunted, you know, Shinbet, the Israeli internal service, Israeli military intelligence. You know, Mossad is externally focused. So they're looking up at Lebanon and looking at Iran. This is not on Mossad, but Shinbet and IDI, what happened?

And it turns out they, you know, they focus so much on kind of. you know, signals intelligence, intercepts, or Elymouth, electronic intelligence sensors, or, you know, they built this huge wall that even went underground. They had drones in the air, but they missed the human intelligence piece. They didn't have a human source, which is incredible that could tell them that a 3,000 man army was about to invade. And it's one of the, you know, there'll be a bloodletting on this. There'll be an official inquiry in Israel.

There always is. They did it after the 1973 kind of Yom Kippur War where they were surprised. It'll happen again. but, you know, for a, for a country which has this vaunted intelligence capability, that was a, that was a shock. So, you know, I've read in, I think one of the challenging things right now is, especially with social media, is parsing out what is misinformation, and not just misinformation from people who are on, you know, Israeli misinformation or Hamas misinformation, but, you know, people saying something, like a Hamas operative saying something, as in Israeli and then being able and then being able to debunk that and say, oh, look, it was debunked. You know what I mean? Sort of that putting false stuff out there.

Like, it's very hard to tell. But I read a couple reports that said that a lot of, like, there was reporting that was going up. But some mid-level officers were like, that's fanciful. I'm not going to report on it. So, so what it turns out what happened, I vote, and, you know, I mean, again, this is, this is my opinion based, you know, I think it's based on. good sources. I have a lot of friends, you know, who are former Israeli military, former Israeli intelligence, former members of the Israeli diplomatic corps. So I do reach back into Israel. What I don't do, by the way, is talk to my old friends at the agency. I've been

really, really kind of true to that. I don't want to call back in. I don't want to ever get crossed up with someone accidentally giving me classified information. But I have enough of a, kind of a knowledge base in this. And I'll just, you know, one thing I forgot to mention, you know, I worked with the Israeli intelligence service very closely, the Palestinian service, I've been to their headquarters in Ramallah. I've been to every city in the West Bank. I work with the Jordanians and the Egyptians. And so I really have a good sense of kind of the region.

But Dave, you bring up a great point about. And so some of these reports are true in the sense that. So first of all, Israel had the war plan. There was a 40-page plan that they, presumably it's with signals intelligence. The last one they obtained was about a year old, but it was the plan. But again, what they didn't have was a human source

to give it context because as this plan, filtered up to the Israeli analytic side of the house. It was dismissed. It was too fanciful. It was aspirational. And, you know, again, the inquiry is going to be just brutal because there's going to be people named who are going to have said some things, which turned out to be kind of catastrophically wrong, because if you think about it, you know, this was, the attack occurred on a holiday. It was also a time in which the IDF, the Israeli defense forces had redeployed a lot of their Gaza units to the West Bank, because the settlers were causing all sorts of trouble. there. And so they, you know, they really were kind of left naked. But ultimately, you know,

there was, there was warnings, not specific ones. I mean, you know, it's going to be more than, you know, the famous presidential daily brief that said, you know, Al Qaeda wants to attack the homeland with no details. In this case, Israel had the details. They didn't have the timing. But ultimately, you know, and let me just say one thing about accountability. Israelis do accountability way more way better than we do. So Ronan Barr is the head of Shinbat. He already came out and said, this is on me. You know, he will resign when this war is over. Same thing with the head of military intelligence said the same thing. This is, you know, I take full responsibility. Prime Minister Netanyahu has not done any of that. And that's a whole kind of separate issue.

But but the Israeli, you know, security establishment is going to have a lot of explaining to do. And, you know, the one piece on that that I'll say is having been involved and made some decisions that were wrong in my career that led to really bad things happening. There's no one who's going to feel worse than the leadership in these intelligence services. And one of the things I've been talking a lot about is that the Israelis are going to have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get back at it and lean into it. There's no other choice. The country's at war. And I think they have. And I think we can speak maybe later that I think they've performed very well. But there's no one who's going to kind of look back in their retirement with more regret than these individuals.

who kind of stood watch at an intelligence failure, which is one for the ages. And, you know, I just, I think it's going to be, the inquiry is going to be pretty nasty. And the Israelis do this very, very well. There will be accountability. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, a 3,000 man element of Hamas with, you know,

different units and their sort of shock troops. We saw at the Nova Festival. We saw how they paraglided in. where did Hamas, where did they get the training? Where did they get the parachutes? Where did they get all this military grade equipment? Well, you're looking at an issue that we still don't know how to kind of wrap our hands around is that certainly the Iranians have funded and helped train Hamas for years.

You know, there is a question now in the intelligence community, and I'm a little skeptical of this because I think they bent over backwards to say that, you know, the Iranians were not aware of the exact plans. And of course, the administration is saying this, as are the Israelis, because ultimately, if Iran was culpable, you know, that means they have to be dealt with immediately. But I think that clearly, you know, so much of the training, the funding, the weapons, the equipment comes from Iran. One of the things, though, as you look back, is that they were conducting, even conducting some of this training in Gaza. You know, the paraglider, you know, the issue of the paraglider is at the rave, and there's been a lot on social media. you see them coming in.

That actually is not new. An old Palestinian terrorist group called the PFLPGC, or I think maybe it was the PFLP, there was kind of a two secular, kind of Marxist terrorist groups, if you can imagine. They had some spectacular kind of hang glider attacks in the past as well.

So it's a technique that is not new, but it was pretty wild to see that. But, you know, to train a 3,000-person army, it probably took place. My guess would be both in Gaza, but also in Lebanon. And I think that the Israelis almost certainly have a exquisite, you know, idea of what happened.

You know, they've captured a great many Hamas operatives. And so, you know, obviously they're doing these debriefs. And so I think they have a pretty good idea of exactly what happened. That will come out in the future. But, you know, it just goes to show that, you know, the Iran issue, which we've never been able to tackle, you know, our government, the Israeli government, you know, the notion that we can have some kind of nuclear deal now. I think is in the toilet because of certainly Iranian backing for this for this is you know

it's in essence a mass murder and now a regional war and of course and Dave you and I talked about it kind of offline the Iranians are also busy attacking via their proxies U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. The Iranians, you know, via the Houthis, their surrogate and Yemen. It's essentially shut down, you know, kind of the major international, you know, waterway. And so, you know, I think the U.S. has this fear of. of escalation, but we still haven't figured out what to do about Iran. I will say, I can't imagine us going back to any kind of negotiations with the Iranians now. And this is in everyone in the back, certainly in the back of the Israelis mind, but in U.S. policymaker circles, too,

is, you know, how do we deal with in Iran that we thought we could have a new nuclear deal with, but that ain't happening. You know, with, you see a lot more than I do. And you were behind the scenes for a long time. The leadership in Iran hasn't changed for, you know, decades. Why did we think that Iran was any more willing to play ball than they were 10 or 20 years ago? I, you know, I think that, you know, there's a lot of wishful thinking on the part of success of U.S. administrations. But, you know, I think one thing that was inspiring to a lot of people, there's, you know, obviously there's a difference between the Iranian government, which is, you know, which kind of supports terrorist groups around the world really is thorn in the side of the United States.

but then there's the Iranian people and we saw for, you know, for months, if not, you know, a year plus of these incredible demonstrations on the streets that the Iranians wanted more. They, you know, they certainly wanted to be free of this kind of terrible, you know, autocratic rule with, you know, religious zeal. And so I think we were, we may have been fooled by that, that, you know, while the Iranian people have, you know, do want freedom. And I don't think they hate the United States at all. But the Iranian government hasn't changed. and, you know, the notion that somehow we could kind of deal with them as a partner that we could maybe trust but verify, I think that's certainly out the door now. But, you know, we'll see. You know, the other thing, it depends on the next U.S. administration. Clearly, the Democrats are much more willing to entertain. We're not getting into politics, I promise.

But the Democrats just in general are more willing to entertain negotiations with the Iranians and the Republicans. and so I think the next election, you know, matters a lot. Yeah. Now, can you give us sort of, because you worked in Israel, you worked, you worked with the Palestinian intelligence. Can you give us sort of the situation in terms of, you know, you had Arafat, you had the PLO, you know, you had the PLA, Hamas, what took over in 2007, is that right, they were elected in? elections in 2006 in Gaza.

Six in Gaza. So can you kind of give us the background of Hamas? I mean, because the PLO isn't really, I mean, once our fat was gone, didn't the PLO kind of? The successor is the Palestinian Authority now. Right. In essence, right. And so, I mean, you know, 2006 was kind of this seminal moment. Again, the mistake, I think, on the United States part, where we certainly advocated for elections in Gaza and Hamas won.

And it's the famous, it's what a lot of these Islamic fundamentalist groups do. It's, you know, it's one vote, one time. Thank you very much. There's no democracy. And there's never been an election since then. So Hamas controls Gaza and the West Bank. You have the Palestinian Authority with kind of nominal control. It's, you know, that is, that was to be kind of the representative of the Palestinian people, but it ended up being a very old and corrupt organization really hated by the Palestinians. And then the Israelis didn't make matters any better because over the last couple years, there's been an explosion of settlements. And so, you know, the Israeli settlement settlers, I think, have doubled in size.

and so there's huge tensions there. But in essence, this goes down, it goes back to, you know, what is going to happen between the two sides. And for a long time, the United States, and sometimes with an Israeli partner, pushed the idea of a two-state solution, meaning that, you know, the Palestinians would have some form of their own state, the Palestinian Authority as that representative.

But then Prime Minister Netanyahu is fundamentally against that. And what he did, which is, you know, one of the most cynical, you know, moves that has come back. And I think that's why, you know, his popularity is essentially at zero now, he promoted actively promoted a policy of strengthening Hamas in Gaza. Hamas as an Islamic terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, but he did so in order to discredit the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank

to ensure there was never any unity between the two entities, the West Bank and Gaza. And Netanyahu openly talked about this. This was the policy. And he thought, as did some in the Israeli security establishment, that they could deal with Hamas. And Hamas pulled one of the great intelligence tricks of all time. You know, first of all, the Israelis led in 19,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza into Israel. Well, it turns out a lot of them

were actually spying. They were casing for this attack. But it was the notion that Israel would kind of ease some of the economic burdens. And then comes this deal with the Qataris, who were pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza. Again, at the request and the agreement of not only Israelis, the United States knew all about this as well. But ultimately, which is kind of keep the peace. You know, they thought they could sort of, you know, in some way a peace Hamas.

And the Hamas leadership absolutely tricked. The Israelis, meanwhile, this, you know, an operation of this size, they have 3,000 man army, training that took, you know, months, if not a year plus. I mean, this thing has been planned for, you know, for a year plus. And so, you know, the feeling of betrayal in the part of the Israelis now sounds a little ridiculous because Hamas is a terrorist group. But boy, did Hamas pull, you know, a fast one over Israel? And it turns out they've been planning this for extraordinary amount of time.

Again, under the guise of, hey, there's going to be kind of this, this, you know, this, you know, this, you know, semi-piece between the two sides. It certainly wasn't it wasn't that way at all. Now, with, you know, you mentioned that Netanyahu was attempting a strength in Hamas in order to create that divide. With the U.S. and Qatar, was that money, like all the money that's gone to. Palestine, the 100 million. Obviously, that gets funneled off by Hamas and it, you know, keeps, but it's, was it supposed to, was it intended for Palestinian development or was it, or was it for appeasement? No, no, this was, you know, it was intended to help, you know, Gaza operate as a, as an entity. So it's, you know, it's, it's how to, it's good governance,

it's hospitals, it's schools, it's infrastructure. And Hamas stole most of it. You know, you know, there's, there's a lot of really good reporting on, you know, the tunnel system, there's 300 kilometers or whatever it is. I think the Israelis will tell us at the end of the day, but this massive tunnel system underneath Gaza, well, that was kind of funded by all this. And so, you know, they skimmed so much off. And, you know, there's 2.2 million, you know, people in Palestinians in Gaza living in, you know, some pretty bad conditions. This is even pre-war. Yet, you know, Hamas is a entity with hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, that's one of the, you know, one of the things that you kind of scratch your head,

some of the Hamas leadership living in five-star hotels in Qatar, you know, flying around on private jets. But again, this was a policy that was okayed by, you know, certainly approved by or supported by the Israelis, you know, Qatar was the intermediary, but the U.S. was fine with this. Yeah. You know, and so, you know, I think it's worth talking a little bit about the U.S. role.

And, you know, you have to, as if you kind of look at, you know, just like where you can criticize what happened in Afghanistan and the withdrawal, you know, for a long time under the Abraham Accords, which was this kind of peace treaty, or I wouldn't even say it peace, but normalization between Israel and several, you know, Gulf Arab states, it was done with the specific intention of leaving the Palestinians out, never solving the Palestinian issue. And the U.S. was kind of was fine with this. And so, you know, ultimately that that didn't help either because, you know, obviously the frustrations of the Palestinians are growing. And then, you know, when it comes to just this appeasement of Amman, the U.S. is right there. I mean, we act, you know, Qatar is a huge ally. There's a massive U.S. air base there. But Qatar also plays this kind of strange role of middleman with awful groups,

such as the Taliban and, and Hamas. And I think that, you know, that there should be some kind of policy discussion now afterwards. I mean, one of the things, and maybe it's a good time to talk about it now, you know, I was on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning, because I wrote a piece in the messenger, you know, basically saying, you know,

over 30 Americans died on October 7th. Where's the outrage? Right. So 32 Americans are dead. And, you know, and this is not a war just in Israel. There's also eight Americans, you know, held hostage. And, you know, sometimes, you know, there's this notion, you know, so, well, these were dual citizens. Well, that's a little kind of, that's kind of bullshit because so many, I actually did some research.

I looked into, this is one guy's name. Ariya Zering, an Israeli kid, he was serving the, he was serving the, idea, but he also spent every summer in Maine. I was a big Red Sox fan. He just was here, ran the San Francisco Marathon. He has a blue passport. These are American citizens who are dead. And Dave, you know this from serving in the U.S.

government. You know, if you have that big, beautiful blue passport and something happens to you, like, we're coming to the rescue. That's the agreement with the government, right? That's the tacit agreement that your government is coming, is going to help you. And so whether that's the FBI trying to bring. Hamas members to justice, which will never happen, or the U.S. military working with the Israelis to put, you know, a lot of lead on foreheads in Gaza, or the intelligence community using our

own unique authorities to remove people from the battlefield. You know, this is a really big deal. There are more Americans killed on October 7th and the embassy bombing in Dhar, Dar, Dhar Salam in Nairobi in 1998 by Al-Qaeda. And so why isn't anyone pissed off? Right. I mean, I think it comes back to just this notion of kind of this, you know, under- current of anti-Semitism. I mean, somehow, yeah, I don't, I mean, and these Israelis who are dual citizens, you know, guess what? They, they speak American like if you're from, I don't know, Baltimore or Philadelphia or Chicago. So, you know, you remember this. You know, you know, that's our mantra. Yeah. And, you know, if something happens, you know, we are going to, you know, when I say avenge them,

that's the wrong word, but we're going to bring those perpetrators to justice legally or remove them from the battlefield. And I can't, you know, I would imagine the counterterrorism center is, is hard at work on this helping the Israelis. I'm sure, you know, Mossad and Shindbat and IDI have that, you know, I think back to, I put it in the messenger piece. I think back to the, there was a poster that came that was made right after 9-11. And I hung in CTC for a while and it said, every day is September 12th. And I fucking love that. You know, if you don't have a step, you know, you know, in your, you know, in your walk coming in every day or a, or, what I'm, skipping your step i don't know what i'm saying but you know if you're not pumped walking in with that

and so for the israelis would be you know same type of thing every day is october 8th and so um you know there's there's work to do and i think that uh clearly the u s and the israelian intelligence services are working very well together um they always have um it's a very close ally i've worked with them very closely uh they have a different view of collateral damage yeah and we do and that was always the case i remember so i'll tell you a quick story sorry i'm rambling here i uh two things one is a good buddy of mine. He's listening now. We had served together in the, in the Middle East, and I called him right after this. And he had served in Israel, work with the Israelis, also work with the Palestinians in the past. And he said, you know what's going to happen, Mark.

You know, they're going to go in and kill everybody. And then I remember listening to Zohar Palti, who was the former chief of counterterrorism from Assad. He was on a podcast, the Washington Institute. And he said, and I remember Zohar and I worked with him. And he said, you know, we are not going to be nice. So, you know, their view of how they have to kind of reconstitue, that aura of fear and invincibility is going to cause them to do some things that maybe were uncomfortable with. But you know what? Nobody should be surprised.

Like, you know, that big embrace that President Biden gave to the Israelis when he did that, and I said, oh, shit, we're owning this. And they're going to go fucking crazy. Yeah. And I remember having conversations with Israelis about collateral. And they would look at me like at a, you know, a giant, you know, something grown out out of my forehead. Right.

And they just don't think that way. And, like, you got to understand that. That's the partner we have. So I'm not surprised that's kind of the level of Lethality that they have unleashed. Yeah. Real quick, I need to give a shout out to our second sponsor for the night and then we have a lot to cover.

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But at the same time, Israel is, they are trying to evacuate people. They're trying to use the knockers to let people know that they're going to bomb an area. Where is Israel falling on that balance? Because it's, again, it's one of those things that's getting confused in the media. think. I think that, you know, so this is a great, great point of discussion. And let me, I just want to preface that. We'll get to that one second. But, you know, after, after, you know, my comments over the last half hour, you know, some people might say, well, you know, here goes Mark. He's kind of this, you know, crazy pro-Israel guy who just wants the Israelis to kill everybody. But that's actually

not true. I mean, I'm, you know, I spent a lot of time in the Palestinian areas, you know, I spent every, every city in the West Bank. You know, I was traveling through there back in 1996 for, for several months. I've been to Gaza back in 96 as well. And I have an enormous sympathy for the Palestinians. I actually, you know, I'm one of those kind of proponents of a two-state solution. I think the Palestinians should have their state and they have been, you know, victims of obviously being under kind of Hamas rule. So I just kind of want to throw that out there. And that last point, you know, if you really want to analyze this conflict now, you have to look at the civilian damage that's happened. I mean, it is a catastrophe, you know, that has occurred. And so while I

certainly sympathize with the Israelis, and I'll go over a second, you know, about the video that I saw on on October 7th, you can't not look at what's happening inside Gaza as well. You know, you're not human if you, you know, if you don't. And so when it comes to, you know, I think, you know, there's two bins in terms of U.S. Israeli dynamic now. And the first bin is kind of in the near term. And that's, we need the Israelis to do a little bit better on targeting. You know, there is, there is, you know, there was an article in the paper today about the use

of, you know, dumb bombs. And I think that a lot of people don't have any idea what they're talking about here. but ultimately kind of this, you know, which is more kind of heavy-handed airstrikes, which is killing a lot of innocent civilians. So we're telling them, hey, you know, change your tactics a little bit. And they're listening in some sense. I think they are. And also it's the notion of letting humanitarian aid in, which they're doing as well.

And so this is all designed for the U.S. to give Israel some more diplomatic runway to keep going. Right. I think we want them to kind of wind down this kind of heavy-handed campaign. I think it's actually going to organically happen for a couple reasons. One is Israel has made a lot of progress, you know, up in the north and now moving to the south. I don't think they're going to need that kind of heavy-handed tactics. But the other part of it, too, Dave, I think a lot of people don't understand is that, you know, Israel can't go on and doing, you know, with 300,000 forces mobilized. The economy is going to fall apart.

Right. And they've never, you know, the mobilization right now is this has extended, you know, two months. And so I think they're going to go to much more targeted strikes, use of special operations forces, use of, you know, drones and more surgical capability. And I think that'll naturally happen. But clearly the U.S. has put some pressure because of the collateral because it's awful. And again, I mean, you know, I have certainly tilted towards Israel in my commentary. I think as a former counterterrorism official, it's almost impossible not to after what occurred on October 7th. But, you know, if we can somehow get, you know, if we can somehow mix, you know, some magic out of this at the end of the day with some kind of settlement in which, you know, the Palestinian Authority is replaced or strengthened.

or change in some fashion and that there's a move to a two-state solution. I don't think the Israelis are ready for that now. Even the most leftist Israeli friends I have are like, you know, it's too soon. We got you, but too soon. But we got to get to that just because, you know,

I've spent a lot of time. Palestinians are wonderful people. They don't deserve this. And then last point, Dave, and I think that you know this based on your background, too, in conflict zones is, you know, everyone thinks war is a fucking video game. Right.

You know, there was 10,000 civilians that were killed in Mosul in 2017. Right. And no one gave a shit back then either. Right. And so, you know, and I know from being in Iraq in Afghanistan that, you know, and I'm proud of my service there, we killed a lot of civilians. It just, we just did. And that's a, you know, and so, you know, when it comes to conflict, when it comes to war, these things happen. You certainly try to minimize it.

I'm not, I'm not excusing anything. But bad shit happens. Like, if you don't want bad shit to happen, don't go to war. Right. Because, you know, bad stuff will happen. And your people are going to do some. bad things too. Right. It's just, that's just the nature of conflict. I don't know if you agree with you, but I think about this a lot. I mean, I am of the mind. Like, I agree with you that, you know,

that yes, Israel needs to do the best they can to protect the civilian populace. But at the same time, we are not seeing, we are not seeing protest on, you know, the 110 or the I-10 or whatever in California or on the Brooklyn Bridge for the victims in Sudan in this conflict. Like, people very specific about which civilian deaths they're protesting right now. If someone told me the other day that, I don't know if there's 500,000 people in Sudan have died in the last several months. Is that true? I don't know what the numbers are. It was a staggering number.

Or maybe that's, it was something else too, is that, you know, several hundred thousand Ukrainian kids have been kidnapped and taken to Russia. Like, there's terrible barbarism and depravity all over the world. It is interesting that selectively, that, you know, the Israelis. are picked on. And again, I think it goes back to that issue of anti-Semitism. I'm sorry because why college kids are protesting this against all the other kind of ills of the world. Right. I, you know, you certainly can question that, I think. Well, I mean, when we saw it here in the U.S., as early as October 8th, student groups mobilizing and calling

Hamas freedom fighters and revolutionaries. And it's like, you did not watch the footage. You did not see the footage when people are joyful about beheading when they are joyful about killing civilians that's there there's nothing there's no freedom in that right so okay so it's a good time for me i'm going to get my glasses on because i'm getting old yeah um so so on you know three days ago um i went to the israeli embassy for this kind of exclusive viewing screening of the footage and they they're not putting this out to the general public out of respect for the families That's how bad this is. So I went there with some other members of the media, some think tanks.

Again, I kind of talked my way in there and used my old agency background. And they kind of, they let me in and probably get in trouble because I was saying I was with MSN. I work for MSNBC as a contributor. But anyhow, it was important that I was there. And especially, as I told the Israeli press spokes, there's two ladies there from the Israeli press shop. I'm like, hey, you know, you got to let me in because I'm going to talk about this on air. like Fox and News Macs, you got those guys or gals. Like MSNBC crowd, you know, is the one who has to hear this.

And they kind of acknowledge, you know, the idea of talking in an echo chamber doesn't make sense. But so they allowed me to take notes. And again, it's a 46 minute video. The footage is from Hamas operatives, the GoPro cameras that the Israelis recovered. It was also from live streaming that Hamas did. It was from Israeli first responders afterwards. It was from Israeli cell phones that were recovered. And it's just this kind of.

this incredible 46 minutes of total absolute carnage and brutality. And again, you know, I've both been in conflict zones. We've seen a lot of bad stuff. This was extraordinary. So let me just kind of give you a quick snippet. I think the listeners will like this in terms of what I saw. Obviously, constant chance by Hamas of Al-Aqbar. That's God is great in Arabic.

That's not that big a deal. But then they start saying, kill the dogs. There was confident. They were referring to the Israeli. these dogs the whole time. In the Arab world, that's, you know, that's something that is certainly not a positive. I wrote a massacre, you know, bodies piled everywhere. They're executing the injured.

Hamas members feel joy. They're screaming, yes, yes, kill, kill as they mow down civilians. They're shooting cars like it was a video game. Then I, one of the thoughts I wrote down, Hamas are cowards. They won't fight the IDF this way. They were shooting pets, just executing dogs. That kind of pissed me off. I don't know.

It was a little weird. Grones of victims. him slowly dying, beating to death on the head, civilians with a shovel, just beating them, bashing their head in. This one was particularly bad. Hamas terrorist comes in, throws a grenade, kills a father. There's two young boys who are in the house in the kibbutz. He's slumped over.

He's dead. One of the boys' eyes is blown out. He's screaming, and his brother is trying to comfort him. He's screaming, you know, where's mommy? The Hamas guy sits the kids dead. two kids down and goes, opens the fridge. And he takes out a bottle of Coke and he drinks it like a fucking Franco Harris commercial. Remember that all those commercials?

Yeah. It was just stunning. Yeah. No, I mean, nothing. And then just walks off. You know, Hamas communications that the Israelis kind of put out there, you know, internal comm saying that coat, we cut off their heads. My first kill.

Kill the Jew. Desecrating bodies. The blood-soaked bodies. The hostages were taken, some of them alive, into Gaza. And they were just beaten along the way. spit on by Palestinians on the street. I mean, this is video. We're watching this.

A Hamas member calls his family and he screams, he's talking to his father. He says, dad, I killed 10. I killed 10. His father screams back. Al-Aqbar. God is great. Braggs to his mom, I killed 10 Jews. The attack on the kibbutz was, I'm sorry, the attack on the rape, a mass casualty event.

It's horrible. Yeah. Bodies stacked up everywhere. And the joy in the celebrating. That's the thing. just, you know, absolutely joyous. And then I think one piece that's worth mentioning, and, you know, we've all, at the intelligence community,

we've seen this, there's a dead Israeli soldier and a Hamas operative comes there and just cuts his head off. He just saws it off in about 10 seconds and picks it up and just parades it around like a trophy. The Hamas member is taking selfies. And so kind of the takeaway on this was the joy of Hamas and doing this, but why this matters is because the Israelis know this. and in talking to Israeli officials afterwards,

and they say very clearly, you know, we cannot allow Hamas, not to be in exit, but to have any kind of role next door. In essence, you know, I live in Washington, D.C., that's right down the road here in Vienna, Northern Virginia. Right. That can't happen.

Right. And so, you know, when we say they want to eradicate Hamas, I mean, nobody really means that. You basically have to degrade Hamas, so it's not a threat anymore. But they said, that's non-negotiable. So when you hear someone say ceasefire, I mean, for fuck's sake, Bernie Sanders doesn't even support a ceasefire now.

Right. But when you hear a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities like the UN Secretary General, the Israelis, you know, look at that person. They say, are you crazy? Right. And so all these powerful kind of words that I just read that what I saw, you know, as an intelligence officer, you always have to put yourself in other people's shoes. So, you know, what do the Palestinians think?

Well, what do the Israelis think? And that's what they're thinking that. Right. And then there was a poll that came out two days ago by a, a very reputable pollster in Gaza. I'm sorry, in Gaza and the West Bank in the Palestinian territories, both of them. And 70% of Palestinians approve of October 7th.

Now, you can understand that perhaps because of kind of the humanitarian disaster that's unfolded in Gaza. But Israelis point to that poll and say, what the fuck? Right. Are you kidding me? Our neighbors are an existential threat.

Come on. Yeah. And let me just say one other point that I think is missed. there is a big peace camp in Israel. And so many of those Israelis who were killed along the border were actually members of kibbutz that were letting the Palestinians in, that they wanted them to work on their farms or in the kibbutz. They actually were very much pro-peace. And look what happened.

Yeah. And any discussion about, you know, the Hamas warriors, you know, they have the video of them beheading the Thai worker, right? like he's not he's not in the jewish military like why are you beheading a tie worker like there is so much out there that is just vile depravity if anybody can watch if anybody can watch that and say that hamas is nothing but a death cult it was unbelievable i mean i was shocked and i you know i was embarrassed um so i look over with the israeli press uh spokes lady and you know she's she has tears in her eyes i'm like you know she's seen this six times and i got you know i think What got me the most was the two kids screaming for their mom and the one kid his eyes gone.

But, you know, I had tears in my eyes too. I mean, it was, I've seen a lot of bad shit. This was really, really appalling. And, you know, again, you walk out of there and you say, okay, I get it. I understand why the Israelis have this sense of resolve now. They ain't stopping until Hamas is, again, you can't say eradicated. Nobody says that. We didn't say that about al-Qaeda.

You say degraded to the point. It's not a threat anymore. By the way, that's what we did. And so the Israelis are two months into this. It took us 10 years to find and kill the Laden. But, you know, and I'm proud of what we did at the agency. You know, so it's, you know, it's a combination of, you know, empowering our Afghan allies, our surrogate forces,

but also kind of relentless drone strikes where we did both, you know, signature strikes, which is killing the foot soldiers. But then, of course, a high-value target strike, you know, cutting the head off the snake. And the Israelis get that. You know, they're going to go after their, there are two high-value targets. It's Yaisenwar, is HVT1 and Mohamedi, is HVT2 and they're in and then they're going to try to kill as many Hamas members as possible.

And their estimate is about set. They've killed about 7,000 or the 30,000. And so, you know, when I talk to my friends in Israel, you know, they think that the IDF thinks they're doing well. Now they understand there's this time constraint and the U.S. is putting some pressure on them. And there's much more to do. But going back to that video, I mean, I understand the Israeli psyche now. I really do because it was the joy. I think that's what was shocking.

Right. I mean, by the way, this is 3,000 people. It's not one cell of Al Qaeda. I mean, fuck Al Qaeda. You know, when we went and we killed most of them. Right. And, but it wasn't a cell, you know, one or two cells, you know, of people who jumped on a plane and crashed it into the World Trade Center. That's horrible.

These are people who kind of up close and personal, you know, and the other thing is the, the amount of sexual abuse was staggering. Yeah. You know, the systematic use of rape and torture. You know, again, the video had, you know, you could see, you know, uh, uh, um, uh, the other female, you know, with kind of blood soaked in their private areas or naked with their privates exposed, bound and gagged, the beheadings, the kind of the defiling of victims. That's, I mean, I don't know. That, that to me, Al Qaeda was a, was a brutal terrorist organization.

This was, I think, much more like ISIS, was just a screw loose of depravity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it's fascinating, you know, how Me Too was such a, you know, such a cultural thing. at one point here. And now so many people are like, oh, well, there's no proof of this.

It's like, well, Israel is actually trying to, you know, they're not releasing a lot of this stuff out of sentiment for the families involved. Right, right. But somehow... Well, they're losing the information word, Dave. And so I told that to the Israeli embassy as well. I said, you guys are losing.

Yeah. And obviously sensitivities, they can't release this, but they can't tell this story because they're so worried, but but but and i don't i don't i mean if i was a family member and i saw you know some one of my loved ones you know getting their brains beaten in i don't know if i'd want that either but they're losing the information war and you're right and you know one of the amazing things is how did the united nations not for two months you know um against the israeli women and then the same thing and again we're not getting political but um and i've said it on this this show a million times

i'm right smack in the center so everyone's mad at me all the time about everything so that's good uh but But, you know, the idea of, you know, some of these progressive left, you know, groups up on the left in the United States, you know, marching in support of not the palace. I don't care if you march on the support of the Palestinians. That's fine. But with, basically, they're supporting Hamas. You know, go live there. Yeah. You know, how's it going to go for you?

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's the same thing with the notion of kind of the progressive left is going to abandon Biden because of his support for, for Israel. Well, you know, I mean, again, not getting political. but if Trump wins, do you think that you and the progressive left are going to have an easy time? I mean, there's no thought process here. And so I think that a lot of progressives, a lot of, I'm sorry, a lot of American Jews feel abandoned. Look, the Jewish community was integral in the civil rights movement. And I think a lot of American Jews feel abandoned by the left because all of a sudden they realize that they're not with them and that they're supporting their enemy.

I mean, one of my really good friends personally, like, you know, he was. very pro BLM. He was very pro. He marched and everything like that. And now he's like, now he feels betrayed. He feels completely. I mean, BLM in Chicago put a poster out the fucking Khamaska and a hang glider. Yeah. Yeah. Are you kidding me?

Yeah. And I guarantee you there was tons of, you know, progressive American Jews who were marching and support a BLM, which is fine. Right. But, but, you know, but ultimately I think there will be a feeling of, there is a feeling of betrayal. I mean, one of my, a couple of my friends who are definitely from the left, they've been watching Fox News all the time. I thought that was kind of funny. Yeah. That's, I mean, you know, I don't know. That's your experiences matter. Now, what's happening, you know,

that you get a sense or from what you've heard in the administration because we saw like a number of staffers, like White House staffers were calling for ceasefire today when they're actually going against their bosses. Is this creating problem? Do you think this could we do intelligence issues in the future? Well, look, I mean, you know, that kind of, I said it actually on air today this morning on MSNBC. I said I found it ridiculous that you have a White House junior White House staffers calling for a ceasefire when 30 plus Americans are dead. You know, what does a ceasefire mean? A ceasefire means, you know, again, nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about all the time.

A pause for humanitarian aid is different. A ceasefire usually is weeks or months. Right. Of a cessation of hostilities. Right. But calling for that means that we're letting Hamas get away with what they did to 30 plus Americans. So that, you know, that, but I think you bring up a really interesting point. So, you know, we worked in the executive branch.

If you don't like something that your boss is doing, you can fucking quit. You know, there's no democracy. I don't get a chance to set Afghan or Iraqi or Syrian policy. I was there, you know, with the U.S. government when we fucked up Syria six ways to Sunday. You know, when we didn't enforce a red line where all of our Syrian allies, in essence, were abandoned. But, you know, the policy decisions, good or bad, are made by your kind of political masters. And you're in the executive branch and you're, you know, in our case, you know, you're kind of the tip of the spear. You know, you're a sharp sword for the U.S. government.

But if you don't like it, you can quit. And you can. And you can speak out. And I have no problem with that. But the idea that people are protesting who work in the White House, White House policy, I find utterly ludicrous. Now, you know, I guess that that's, maybe I don't understand Generation C. You know, again, same thing that, you know, with a lot of people in the State Department, the AID are upset about this.

That's fine. You know, there's a dissent channel. You use that. But you see some people go on social media. Again, not the right thing to do. And, you know, you didn't join the military. You don't have a contract. Feel free to quit and to go to the Washington Post, the New York Times or anyone else.

And amazingly, you know, so one of the things that I, what I, what I, what I, angers me a little bit is you hear all this dissent. One person has quit in the entire U.S. government, an official from the State Department. I admire him. You did the right. And he spoke out. Okay, got it. That's what you should do. But the idea that, you know, you're protesting outside the White House. I found that unbelievable. And, you know, I will tell you that I've talked to so many of my friends, first of all, it's not happening in the intelligence community or in DOD, you know, for the most part. I think there was one senior agency analyst who put something on Facebook. you know, but for the most part, you don't see it interestingly enough in DOD or the IC.

We do our fucking job. Right. Dave, when you know, when you, I mean, in your career, I'm sure there's plenty of things where you're kind of scratching your head thinking, hey, this isn't really the right thing to do. Right. Right. Or I don't agree with it. Yeah. Right.

Right. Yeah. So what do you think is, you know, and the other thing you mentioned, I just want to go back to this real quick, you say ceasefire. but Hamas is constantly launching rockets into Israel. It's like you can call for a ceasefire. It doesn't matter what Israel does. Hamas is going to keep on, they're going to keep on attacking regardless. Well, I mean, I think that in some, I mean, I'm not giving Hamas a break on this.

But I think that, you know, that the ceasefire would definitely aid Hamas more. Yeah. Because they can regroup. They can move people throughout the tunnels. They can, you know, resupply and rest. They're getting their asses kicked. The IDF does not want a ceasefire, period. And so, so think.

back to the success that we had in the conflict zones. And I remember this clearly. You know, ordinarily, we think that intelligence drives operations. But in fact, operations can drive intelligence. What does that mean? And your listeners are going to understand. So, so instead of, instead of Shinback giving the IDF targets, IDF is going to, is going to, you know, move throughout the Gaza strip. They're going to find what? They're going to find a weapons cache. They're going to find a Hamas safe house. They'll do SSC, sensitive site exploitation. They'll capture Hamas operatives and do battlefield interrogations, that's driving the intelligence picture. So in fact, the more that the Israelis, you know, move into Gaza Strip, the more intel they gain and they can kind of roll in stopping

that, that all comes to a halt. And then they become, you know, more blind. And in fact, the last, you know, again, it was called a ceasefire, the last pause of a couple of days for the hostage release, one of the things I was surprised the Israelis agreed on is they stopped flying drones over Gaza. Hamas insisted on that. But again, that's, you know, maybe you can offset. I mean, I know we have an MQ9 there, assisting in hostage recovery. And with an MQ9, I knew you don't have to be over Gaza. You can offset a little bit. But I'm not sure that the Israelis capability.

But ultimately, you know, the cessation of fighting in any way does not aid the Israelis. That's why they want to keep going. I think let me just throw one thing out there. I know we're kind of moving fast and furious. But, you know, something happened today. And I'm interested in your take on this, too. And it's tragic. is that the IDF killed three Israeli hostages

who actually had escaped and just in the fog of war and at a time where Hamas was sending out suicide bombers, three civilians came out and the IDF killed them and there's a couple of things on that. One is there's no one who's going to feel worse than those soldiers on what happened. And there's all this bullshit on social media about this.

But ultimately what I think is going to happen and already the Mossad chief, David Barnia, has said that he's going to go back and actually meet the, cutteries again because the hostage issue is so emotional in Israel. And let me just kind of say one thing on that is that one thing that I find admirable is that the Israelis, you know, and we do to some extent, not as much, but we do have this is that in terms of hostages, but the Israelis, you know, they have a pact with their government that if you're taken,

the Israelis are going to get you back and they have traded, you know, Yaya Sinwar was, was released from Israeli jail in a hostage, and sorry, in a prisoner exchange where one Israeli soldier was released for a thousand Hamas operas, including Yaiasinwar, the head of the head of Hamas. So the Israelis will kind of push this and it becomes extremely emotional. And so there's going to be a lot of pressure from the families now that three hostages were killed. So I think that you might see these negotiations. Start again. The problem with this is, and the reason why the last round fell apart is it was abundantly clear. And I had kind of sources tell me this as well is that, you know, the sexual abuse of the hostages is something that hasn't been reported.

Now, it hasn't been reported, again, at the request of the families. Right. And also, I was told that Hamas members had threatened the hostages who were released that if you talk about this, other people are going to be at risk. But ultimately, if Hamas was to release more of these hostages, the stories of sexual abuse are going to be horrific. Yeah. And so in some sense, Hamas does not have an incentive.

either. That's why the negotiations broke down last time. And so it'll be interesting to see, you know, who's on, if there was to be any kind of exchange, because I think what, what is, what has happened to some of these people is, is going to be pretty barbaric. Yeah, 100%. I mean, just the reports from witnesses at from Nova, we're talking about some of that depravity. Right. And, you know, some of the discussions that Hamas members had on, on tape, talking about the women, like, take this one, take this one. You know, It was very clear what their intentions were. You know what you have, though?

I thought about this a lot. I just talked to a journalist who's really close to the situation, too. He's going back and forth to Israel, and he's studied this forever. You know, there's a difference between if you're living in the Gaza Strip under, you know, and you're a member of Hamas, which is an Islamic fundamentalist movement in which, you know, if you look at a woman, you know, before marriage, you know, or if the woman looks at another man, you know, they're condemned. And then all of a sudden you look right across the way. Literally, the lights over in, uh, in Israel where there's a rave where there's gorgeous women scantily clad. And so, you know, I, I think there, you know, this is, this is just my kind of my view of the, the, the, what happens in these kind of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist movements. I mean,

there's, you know, there's sexual repression there. I know we're getting deep here, but the sexual repression is, is an issue. And I think these, you know, the, the, while the Hamas, we know from the debriefs that, you know, the Hamas leadership or some kind of religious edict was came down that they were, they were permitted to kind of go rape and pillage and do all the things. But I think there's some, you know, I think they went crazy there because all of a sudden you're seeing these, you know, these beautiful Israeli women. They've been repressed their whole life. They've been told what they can't do yet. They've just been given the dispensation to, um, to kind of go down a road that, I mean, nobody does. Yeah. And so I don't know. There's, there's certainly some psychology behind this.

Well, but it's not, it's not out of, it's not out of pocket for, for that, for that demographic, because we saw it with ISIS too. We saw the sex slaves. Yeah, the sex slaves, right. Yeah. I think it was the Yazidis, it's mostly right, but, but, you know, that they would keep and, and, and trade and whatnot. So, um, so how does, you know, I mean, it's, it's crazy when you talk about how much money cutter gave Palestine, because there are two million people in Palestine, roughly, right? Two to five million. In Gaza.

In Gaza, right, correct. In Gaza. And if, if Cutter gave them, gave Gaza a hundred million, I mean, that divides up pretty well if that's what you were going to do and gets everybody a fairly decent quality of life. Or built substantial infrastructure. Hamas stole it all. Yeah. And built this tunnel system.

So talking about Hamas leadership. And, you know, just like Arafat didn't live in, you know, in Gaza, he didn't live in Palestine, right? Right. We have these other Hamas leaders who live in luxury in other parts of the world who are, you know, going on Mary or whatever in making these statements, you know, about how Israel should die and whatnot. What should happen to them and why isn't it? I guess that's a loaded. I guess that's a loaded question. Amos leadership, yeah.

Yeah. So, okay, there's two parts of this. So one is, you know, you wonder if the Palestinian public is going to seize the hypocrisy and kind of, it's protest to see how, you know, the leadership living in luxury hotels in Doha or somewhere in, you know, Beirut, somewhere in Algeria. You know, they certainly are not suffering with the rest of them. But, but it comes down to, I think, that, you know, we're going to see, you can call it, whatever you want to call it, a Munich too. And so, you know, the Shinbet chief, Ronan Bar already kind of announced this. It's kind of funny because Shinbbed, that I didn't think it would have a role, but he basically said that, hey, the Israeli cabinet met, and we've been given the task of tracking all the Hamas leadership down everywhere, you know, not only inside Gaza, but externally. You know, these guys are kind of are dead man walking. Clearly, that is, it's going to be in Mossad's, you know, number one in their, their tasking order. And they're good at this. And so I think it's, I think it's important for a couple of reasons.

One is they have to hold these individuals responsible. By the way, U.S. official yesterday, it was unnamed, too bad. I don't like that when people say this anonymously. But, you know, they said, you know, Yaya Sinwar is U.S. blood on his hands, and he's a dead man. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the U.S. advocating for, you know, Israel conducting this kind of extrajudicial killing and assassination. By the way, I totally support this. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, but I think the Israelis are going to go to the ends of the earth to track these people down. And it will last days, weeks, months, or years. There's no statute of limitations in the minds of Mossad. And perhaps Shinbet has a role too or Israeli military intelligence. But this is going to be what my old friends in Mossad certainly are going to do. And let me tell you, I'll tell you a funny story. I was in, you know, when I was serving in Damascus, I went to, this was just crazy.

It was 2006 or 2007. I can't remember. I was there 05-07. And it was Libyan National Day. And what does that mean if you're a U.S. official? you got to go to national days. But, hey, Libyan National Day, this is when we actually had kind of resumed diplomatic contacts with Libya.

We had opened up kind of a pseudo-em embassy. And I actually was on the ground there in 2005, helping open up our office there. A whole other story on that. But so I go to Libyan National Day because I thought it would be kind of amusing to talk to the Libyan ambassador about this. And nobody else from the U.S. Embassy wanted to go. So I was the schmuck who was going to go. And I go there.

and who was at Libyan National Day in Damascus, Syria. It was Ahmed Gibriel, who is the infamous head of the PFLPGC, a notorious terrorist group with a lot of American blood in his hands. And Khalid Mishal, one of the leaders of Hamas. And the rest of the diplomatic community was, you know, normally amused by the fact that I was there. But everyone there, including the Libyan ambassador, I never, of course, met either of these individuals because I couldn't have done that.

But they all said, well, Mark, I'm glad you're here because there won't be an Israeli air strike because they know that a U.S. official is here. And, you know, what Mossad lost on October 7th with the Israeli security establishment lost was that aura, that fear. And I don't give a shit who you, you know, how tough you think you are as a, you know, Palestinian terrorist or, you know, Hezbollah, Lebanese terrorists. They are scared of the reach of Israeli intelligence services, but that aura was shattered. And so what Israel needs to do for, you know, first of all, they want to avenge the deaths of 1,200 of their citizens, but they need to restore that. And so kind of that long arm of the Israeli intelligence going off and, you know, mythically, you know, killing folks overseas like they did it after Munich. Right. And they've done in other occasions too.

They've done it in Syria. They've done it in Iran. I think that's really important for them to do. I actually have no doubt they're going to do this. Yeah. Again, if, you know, there's nothing more satisfying. than being in a position right now of a Mossad officer who is who is the task is to find fix and help finish some of these individuals who are responsible for for the brutality of October 7th. And who knows, you know, what's happening kind of our joint efforts.

Obviously, it takes a presidential finding. I don't know if we have that when it comes to this. If the U.S. certainly is helping and targeting in Gaza, I don't know about targeting overseas. But there were also reports, by the way, that some of the Hamas leadership in Qatar has fled. I'm not sure if that's confirmed or not. Yeah. Because the Israelis told the Qatari's, and the same thing with Turks, we're coming at you. Yeah.

We don't give a shit. And a lot of protests from Qatar and Turkey, but I think that there were some reports that some of the leadership in Qatar. I think they might have fled to Algeria or not. I don't know if that's true, but not a surprise. And the Israelis will just keep tracking them. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you mentioned Hezbollah. And it seemed to me by the rhetoric coming from Hamas shortly after October 7th, that the, They thought that Hisbalah was going to join in this fight. And then all of a sudden, Hisbalah was like,

you're like, you guys got this. You're doing great. You got it. You got it. Go team. Do you think that there, do you think that there was like an agreement for participation at one point? And then Hisbalah just backed off. Or do you think that Hamas just kind of made that assumption?

Well, you know, they run these joint operation centers where Hamas and Hisbalah are co-located in Beirut. But none of this matters without their mama, their papa, which is Iran. Right. So the Iranian, so ultimately, you know, Hizbollah is the ultimate Iranian proxy in the region. You know, they, you know, have a stake in the Lebanese government. They're entrenched there. And for Hisbala to join the war, I think Iran does not want that because the Israelis have no appetite for this now. And so there's a, and this is a really great point, Dave, that you, that you raise now, because the risk of escalation.

is not in Gaza. The risk of isolation is is is is all eyes are north. All intelligence assets are pointing north whether it's human intelligence signals intelligence you know certainly imagery um because uh uh, uh, uh, hisbollah has what 150,000 missiles, not rockets missiles aimed at, you know, at Tel Aviv, at Israel. And, uh, and the Israelis, frankly are itching to kind of level Beirut. And they've said very publicly, if you want to have it happen, uh, uh, in Beirut, like what happened in Gaza, you know, go for it. And so I think there's, there's two, there's a couple of things going on in Israel. Well, first of all, you have, so the U.S. wants nothing of this. They do not want this to occur, which is why we park two carrier battle groups.

That's 16 aircraft squadrons. And then a U.S. nuclear sub with 150 tomahawks. And so, so ultimately, that's the, that's the show to Iran. Hey, don't, don't let his ball unleash on Israel because we're going to, you know, our targets are dialed in in Lebanon and Beirut. And that seems to held. The problem is that Israel and Hezbollah have this escalation ladder. And it's really interesting. And the Washington Institute has done a lot of good kind of research on this. And so it's where

you strike, you know, five miles, five miles or ten miles or fifteen miles across the borders. And so, and there's a gradual ladder. And that's going up now. And one of the things that, there's two things that can happen. That, that one is that, um, uh, the Israelis say, fuck it. We're not doing another 10, seven.

Um, we are going to preempt. And there is, And the IDF has been pushing for this. The Israeli defense minister is like, yes, we need to take care of this. We can't have another surprise. I don't necessarily blame them for that feeling. And the other part is miscalculation. So, you know, in these exchanges and Hezbollah and Israel are fighting every day and people are dying.

But I'm not as worried about, you know, the Israelis can kind of whack a whole bunch of Hezbollah folks because the Iranians really don't want this. If Hezbole gets a lucky shot and kills, you know, 30 Israelis, it's game on. Yeah. And so that is really the trigger point for what could be a really a wider regional war, which, you know, people ask me all the time, you know, where's the U.S. intervene? If it's, if it's full on, you know, Iron Dome is getting overwhelmed, you know, tens of thousands of missiles raining down. You know, our jets are taken off from those carriers. And we have communicated that directly to the Iranians and to the Lebanese. There's been National Security Council officials traveling back and forth to Beirut,

constantly. But again, you know, that's, this is the, this is kind of the, the point of events on the ground can kind of drive things. So, so, I mean, is, is the U.S. just trying to keep a pot on the kettle? Because we also have not taken, it's like for the Houthis and we can, I want, if you don't mind, I'd like you. Let's shift the Houthis. Yeah. For people who aren't familiar with that situation, it's almost like we sent them a strongly worded letter. This is killing me. And I don't get it. So, you know, one of the things about the administration is, you know, we do things, they do things fairly well. I mean, I think that the support for Israel has been the right policy. And then sometimes we're too cautious. And we'll get to Ukraine in a second. But in this

case, you know, the Houthis are conducting repeated attacks almost daily on kind of international shipping. I think that Central Command is itching to do something about it, but I think the White House is holding them back because of worry of escalation. Once again, it's that it's that fear of of things spiraling out of control. Now, I don't think it would take much for the United States Navy or U.S. Air Force assets located in the region to hit Houthi targets. You know, as you know, I'm going out of my kind of comfort zone here. You know, every kind of Houthi launch is a point of origin. There's a, there's a point of origin delineated where this attack was emanated from, very easily picked up by U.S. technical means we could put missiles, aircraft,

anything on that, probably within minutes. Right. Am I wrong? No. Fast, I mean, time of flight. Like it like, yeah, I mean, basically, I think the ship systems could lock on to the origin point almost immediately after the launch. So I don't know why we haven't done that.

Now I understand that Sencom, you know, is very frustrated that they're not able to respond. And, you know, And so what does this get to? This gets the notion of deterrence. Deference is not working. Wait, do we have deterrence? Because I haven't really seen much.

No. And same thing with the Iranian, you know, proxies in Iraq and Syria. Now, we have hit back a little bit stronger. I mean, there was kind of that, I'm sorry. This is just one of the things that I enjoy. That kind of joyous AC130 strike of about 10 days ago. Where, you know, local commanders, you know, or, you know, local, U.S. military were able to kind of see kind of point of origin of strikes.

I can't remember it was Iraq or Syria, but whatever. There's an AC130 in the area and they kind of blasted these guys. And that was, you know, that didn't need any kind of, you know, authorities from anywhere above, which is good. But ultimately, you know, we're not deterring the Iranian proxies, whether it's the Houthis or the proxies in Iraq and Syria. And that's a problem. And so why is it a problem?

You know, it's a problem because, you know, and you remember this from, you know, and you remember this from time in conflict zones, you get shot at, you got to shoot back. Right. I mean, it's pretty simple. And Leon Panetta, God bless him, at the Reagan Defense, the Reagan Institute two weeks ago, just as says as clear as anything that I believe. He said, hey, if someone shoots it an American, someone shoots an American, you know, with a missile, we got to kill that person. Right. Doesn't get any clearer than that. Right. And we're not doing that. And so, and so there is no, with the might of the U.S. military. which is extraordinary.

Right. It's the fucking Huthies. Are you kidding me? Right. And we're not doing anything. To me, that's exceedingly frustrating. And what does that mean? And so if you translate that, which gets me really upset, is, okay, so what, in essence,

the administration is saying is until an American dies, we're not going to do anything. Well, that's totally immoral, in my view. Right. And I remember when I was a base chief in Afghanistan, we were shot out every day, you know, from, you know, across the border in Pakistan, you know, I was authorized. to return fire always. And we had some wild cross-border engagements. And at one point, and this is, you know,

there's a little too much inside baseball. People were getting uncomfortable with this. And I remember, you know, a certain, I'm not going to say it was, a certain, you know, agency leader was like, hey, Mark, you know, you need to call back and ask us permission to return fire. And I said, send me home, close the base. Yeah. Can't do that.

You know, in fact, I'm going to tell you after the entire engagement's done. And I remember, you know, my, you know, the paramilitary officers from ground barons there, I was really fighting for them. And they really appreciated that because they said, you know, this is not sustainable. When you, when we're fired upon, we have to fire back. We have to kill the enemy who's trying to kill us. We'll tell everybody at higher later, you know, sure. Yeah.

No problem with that. But it's long done by the time, you know, we're calling up and writing a report. And I'm not getting on the horn screaming, oh, my God, we're under attack. You know, we'll take care of it on the ground. And so, in essence, you know, we're certainly not doing that in these places. And I fear it's going to take the loss of U.S. lives. and that's not fair to the American military. Right.

You know, I'll tell you, one, two stories. One is I just, you know, I've been giving college lectures all over the place. So I've been at the Naval Academy a lot. And I was, the last time I was the Naval Academy when I talked to the midshipmen. And I was like, hey, I just realized, like, you guys are all, you know, in your last year. Like, do you know, everybody? Do you know people out in the deployed right now in the Centcom A.O? And they're like, yeah, we talk to them all the time.

And I was, you know, so I'm thinking like these men and women, who I'm talking to, are going to be on a ship. You know, conceivably, it's, it's, you know, what is December now? They graduate in May. They could be on one of those ships. It's not fair to put them at risk. Right. And that pisses me off because we don't have to.

We can change that policy. Last piece is with the Houthis, I'll never forget I was, the last trip I made to Sana'a, before we closed up shop, God, when was that? It might have been, I might have been there in 2014, 13, 14, 14. but I remember the case officers coming back and they're like, there's a really fucked up group on the streets. You know, it's not, it's not AQAP. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is what we were battling.

And, you know, there was a major kind of, you know, under the table war between the U.S. I see and military and AQAP for years. They said, but this is a group, you know, they start chanting death to America. And here's, they brought me back a poster one time. I was just visiting from headquarters. And they said, but, you know, they're a little kind of fucked up. And there was the Houthis. Yeah.

But, you know, we're letting this kind of rag-tag group, you know, control the sea lanes. And it's ridiculous. And that's what I was going to, you know, say because it's not just that they have actually fired on U.S. ships. And because we have the, you know, because we have the ability to like to stop it, it's like, okay, no harm, no foul. Ha-ha, like a kid brother. But they've taken over major ships. They've shut down a shipping lane. Right.

Maris, an international shipper just came out and said. that incredible shocking but good for them good for merrish like they would said hey everyone fucking do something yeah i mean i mean you know this is i mean you know this is our special operations capability the navy seals are are you know this is their thing yeah this is old captain phillips shit yeah it's so you know come on yeah um but we're not we're not allow you know we're not employing any of these uh these resources i just i i don't get it uh i just want to i want to go over our notes from our talk real quick to make sure we haven't missed anything as we go um

One quick thing I wanted to to kind of raise was kind of the U.S. role in this in terms of U.S. intelligence community and you know this is saying I wrote something and I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal and I got a rash of shit for this.

But you know, so this was considered that October 7th was considered a U.S., sorry, an Israeli intelligence failure. But I think you have to kind of unpack it a little bit too. And so the U.S. has a little bit of, you know, responsibility is the wrong word, but let me just kind of walk you through my thinking on this. And I said we have a little bit,

there's a little bit of blame on us. And, you know, Warren Strobel, who's the great journalist for the Wall Street Journal said that he got, you know, that agency folks really pushed back on what I said. But ultimately it's that, you know, decisions are made in terms of resource allocation. And so, you know, I sat in 1996 and the Hamas branch. That branch doesn't exist anymore.

Well, why is that? Well, you know, Hamas, we didn't think had an excellent. external operations capability. Interesting, a whole bunch of arrests recently in Europe. In Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, I think it was. But because we had bigger fish to fry, which was what, obviously Al-Qaeda. And so we shift the resources, but we did that. There's something called the Nipf, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework. This is the weird geeky shit that you know if you did my job in the past. And that means where are we going to put our money in our resources? And we said, okay, we're going to shift it all to

Al-Qaeda, but ultimately, you know, we still have to have coverage of Hamas, but we're going to give it to the Israelis. We're going to cede all collection to the Israelis. You know where this is going now, because we did. So there's no more American human capability. There's no more SIGA. We're really going to say, Israel, you got this. Right. And once again, 30 plus Americans were killed on October 7th. Eight Americans still held hostage. And so you kind of look back and you say, we understand why the U.S. made those decisions. I get it. There's no, there's no, no one's going to get disciplined for this, but we made decisions that were actually turned out to be maybe the wrong one. And maybe in the future, when we say, you know, we can't cover this target, maybe don't go,

you know, 100% give it to a liaison service, maybe keep a little bit of residual what we call unilateral collection. And I'm not sure we did that. This is just, I'm just surmising this. I, you know, I wasn't there for these decisions. But, but then what happens? So then, you know, And I would also say that, you know, what's the role of the American intelligence community? Well, we want to prevent strategic surprise. I can't imagine, you know, Bill Burns, the CIA director of Real Haynes, the head of the DNI, going into see the President Biden when he says, what the fuck happened on October 7? Well, a 3,000 man army invaded Israel.

Did we not know? Yeah. And the answer is no. Like, that's not good. Right. If I was ahead of the U.S. I see, I'm like, that's not a good day. Right.

And so, okay. So I just kind of throw that out there, but no one ever wants to criticize anything. And so I got a lot of pushback. But I think the CIA, NSA, the USIC, certainly U.S. military, has rebound. And so what do you have? You have an MQ9 flying hostage recovery. You have, you know, obviously an intelligence fusion cell at the embassy. You have, and this has kind of been reported.

I think you guys have talked about it, you know, different soft units involved in Haashton recovery, whether they're, you know, in Israel or hanging out in Cyprus, wherever the hell. I'm going to cut in here. Jack wrote a article about what's going on, like Jay Sox spun up in Cyprus and is ready to go for any kind of hostage rescue and stuff like that. So we have responded really well. And of course, the intelligence support. We're kind of pumping intel in there.

And so I think the U.S. has certainly recovered. And again, and there was an article, I think the Wall Street Journal is saying U.S. SIGINT, we're actually now conducting unilateral SIGAN missions back there. So, you know, we can turn on a dime. It's an area we know very well. And I think that, you know, the relationship between the U.S. and the Israeli intelligence communities has always been very good. Some strains here and there sometimes.

But it's probably going full bore now. But look, we weren't covering this on October 6th. And you just got to admit that. Yeah. Out of curiosity, you know, we're in Gaza is this kind of weird area, especially the relationship to, you know, Israel and what's going on right now. because if it were Somalia or Yemen or, you know, the Philippines and 10 Americans were killed and eight were hostage, what, in your experience, what would be our intelligence and military response to that at this point in time? Right. I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, that's a mass casualty terrorist event. A task force is set up. You know, there's, you know, embassies are mobilized. You know, CTC goes on war footing.

you know, the beach and brag, you know, are 24-7. People start moving right away. And, you know, and so, I mean, there's an enormous industry in response to this. And so, you know, again, you know, when Americans are, you know, in harm or killed or captured, you know, that's our thing. There's nothing that kind of gets you going every day. like you'll work 24 hours a day weeks on end. And so, you know, I imagine that's what's happening now. And I think that I would hope that there would be some questions asked, though, about, about, you know, events before this.

Because, you know, okay, so let's, you know, again, it's the idea of, you know, can we have global coverage as the intelligence community? Well, I think that we should we certainly, we can certainly try. But to have kind of ceded all this to the Israelis in Gaza was ultimately was a mistake. I'm going to ask you to put on your sort of imagination camp because anything can happen. But how do you think this winds down or ends? Because obviously Israel can't stay at it forever. They cannot get every member of Hamas. you know, no matter how hard they try.

But Hamas is still going to live right next door and they're going to build up again and they're going to plan the next operation to do this. Because Hamas's goal is to bring hate and pain onto the Palestinians. Right. Right. Like that's to eradicate Israel and, you know, and create martyrs. Like what Israel, what is going on is. or in Gaza right now,

Hamas planned for. Oh, so there's, what a great point you made, Dave. So in there, I mean, it's, you can make the same argument by Osama bin Laden in September 11th. You know, they plan for a massive response. And so, you know, so right now Hamas thinks they've won. So that's why a ceasefire, I think, is so damaging. If Hamas, they've gotten their asses kicked after this,

but Israel is now in, you know, in many circles in international pariah because of the collateral damage, the civilian casualties. So Hamas thinks they've won. And so they're happy to kind of call it a day. I mean, they're actually, their spokesmen are saying this right now. Yeah, we want to ceasefire. Yeah.

And the Israelis are saying hell no. But your question is really important because I'm really good at doing what we've done in the last hour and 22 minutes. talking about the kind of the tactics and counterterrorism. But when you say, you know, how does this end? I think the smartest thing for an intelligence officer or a former intelligence officer to say, like, I don't really know because there's so many different variables. And ironically, I think the biggest variable in this is Israeli politics.

And let me tell you why. Because ultimately, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is enormously unpopular, probably has about a 5% you know, popularity rating there, would lose in the next election. there is no incentive for him to have this war wind down because the second it does, there's going to be elections and he will be out of power. And any politician, particularly someone who's kind of cynical as Netanyahu, wants to remain in power. The other part, too, is that he very much, you know, the notion of how this could conceivably end, which is some type of two-state entity where there's some kind of good governance, Palestinian something,

you know, Palestinian Authority 2.0. All this is he is fundamentally against. He does not want a Palestinian state ever. And so, you know, I think this goes where the Israeli electorate sends it. So, you know, a new Israeli government is absolutely critical. Right. The Arab states have said, you know, the Emirates, the Saudis who have, you know, gazillion dollars have said, hey, we're going to come in and rebuild. But only if there's a two-state solution and it kind of a viable Palestinian entity, not Hamas. Right. Let me, so I think that, you know, but so much it depends on the Israeli electric.

Excuse me. This is a, D's making me drink all this Uzo, so I'm talking. It's your fault. Let me throw one other thing out there to discuss. And this is in relation to this, because I think it's really important. There's the notion of the Arab street, you know, what does that mean? So, you know, American embassy officials are sending in cable saying the U.S. has lost the Arab street for generations. And my response to that is that doesn't fucking matter.

Because so much of this is kind of generated by Arab governments who want to give their miserable populations at some kind of, you know, valve to vent. Right. I'm sorry. You know, there's, you know, and when I say miserable populations, that's not being, that's not being fair. But so what really matters in terms of, you know, the Arab world? And that has to do with the Arab intelligence services. And so what I've been, I've been asking people, if someone write this story, I can't, I don't have the sources. the whole thing goes to shit if security cooperation breaks down between Israel and Jordan,

or Israel and Egypt, or Israel and Qatar, or Israel in Saudi Arabia. Israel actually is the security blanket for Jordan. So you see the Jordanian foreign minister, the Jordanian king, howling, protests all over the place. The last I heard from kind of sources I had in GID, they were telling Israel keep going. I'm being dead serious, Dave. Yeah. And so, you know, so, and why does that matter even in the context of what we're talking about is so, okay, so everyone's saying that Israel has to kind of do the best they can and remove Hamas as a threat. But then when it comes to rebuilding, you know, the Arab states will come in, but you got to have a different Israeli government in power.

But the thing is, though, also, I think, I mean, in addition to that, because I agree with you. And in addition to that, anytime a two-state solution has been brought to the table or anything else like that, whoever was running, whoever was making money off Palestine, whether it was Arafat or, you know, or, I mean, not not Arafat, but, you know, whoever was making money. Because Gaza and Palestine is basically, it's a money-making scheme for, you know, whomever runs, you know, like runs Gaza. So actually getting them to the table and agreeing to it. Well, then, you know, who, Gaza is a problem because, you know, who's going to come in after that. I mean, you know, you know, the Hamas has kind of run the entire infrastructure there. But, but I think you bring up an interesting point that at the times where we thought that a settlement was closest, you know, Arafat ended up rejecting it. And that is kind of the tragedy behind this as well, you know, for sure.

But, you know, so, but, you know, it's okay as a former intelligence officer. intelligence officers, they say, how does it send? You say, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, because there's so many variables, but I really do look to the Israeli elections. Like, that's going to be getting Netanyu out of, Netanyahu out of power. Yeah. Yeah.

And that is the only path forward to this kind of having any kind of resolution that means something. Yeah. It's tough for me because, you know, having, you know, studied Arabic and had a lot Arabic teachers and talking to them about, you know, the region and their impressions, you know, And as citizens, like, they were, none of them were government officials. But from my Egyptian instructor, Jordanian, Lebanese, they were all the opinion that Palestine is not going anywhere because Palestine is a great foil to Israel. So nobody's ordering or nobody's opening their borders to Palestinians. Nobody's letting the Egyptians are not.

I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, Jordan killed. They're terrified of this. They don't want refugee. Yeah. So nobody's going to open their borders. And the thing is, is that as long as, you know, there's the Israel-Palestinian conflict, there's always a foil against Israel to claim about, you know, to claim that Israel is abusing Arabs.

And, you know, so it's that, it's that Palestine, operate or Palestine creates an opportunity for them to complain about Israel. Let me let me throw. I just thought of one other great story. You know, one of the fun things about coming on the show here is that I can say things that I can't say

in a 30 second, you know, TV soundbite. I think I put that out on social media today when I said I was excited coming on. But, you know, and this goes to my, you know, so obviously, you know, people are going to walk away saying, holy shit, Mark, is this like crazy pro-Israel kill them all nutback but actually no and let me tell you a story because i really do sympathize with the plate of the Palestinians and in the israel and so this is going to be kind of on the opposite

end is that you know anyone who wants to have an idea about the complex got to visit and i was going into uh into romola back in 2016 and i hadn't been to israel for since 2010 or 11 is when i left jordan so when i was at the uh uh sign there and so 2016 we're going in i'm with our you know are kind of head of our liaison to the Palestinian intelligence service, we're going to see the head of the Palestinian service in Ramallah. And as we're going in, I'm like, holy shit,

they've built a whole lot of walls here. Like, you know, it was very imposing. And we're going in. And of course, what people don't understand is often as a U.S. official, you're not treated all that well by even the Israeli border guards. You know, they can be total obnoxious assholes, frankly.

They don't give a shit if I have a black pass. passport because I'm going into the Palestinian Authority area. So clearly I'm doing something that's not going to be in their mind, something positive. But I'm going in there and my colleague, again, who's listening right now, and he's texting me wildly because I'm being a pro-Israel nutbag. He said, tell the story. And so we're going in there and he looked at him and he said, welcome to the zoo. And it was shocking to me.

And that was the notion that the Palestinians are caged in there. And so, you know, it goes kind of the fundamental notion is that, you know, this is not sustainable. You know, the way the Palestinians are treated is not sustainable. And you got to go see it. If you're, I remember, you know, this is going to sound horrible. Like, we're having a drink at somewhere, you know, in a bar in Jerusalem, overlooking, watching the, you know, the Palestinians in the old city battling with the Israeli, with the IDF. You know, it's just, you know, it's not sustainable because the Palestinians certainly are not treated well.

um both in you know certainly in the west bank and gaza is not ruled by israel uh but there's got to be a better way and you know you can't help and that's why that you know there was there was a uh you know so i go and i go to the israeli embassy i watch this footage for 46 minutes i'm outraged but then yesterday you know a really good reporter clurice award of cnn i mean she's a great war reporter and she went in um with uh kind of snuck into gaza and went to visit the emirati hospital there a field hospital And the report was kind of heartbreaking at the civilian casualties, at the kind of humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. And I sit back after that.

I'm like, all right, like, what am I feeling? What am I doing? And it reminds me of conflict zones where there is, you know, there's so many kind of different moral challenges all the time. I mean, I remember, this is a terrible story. I get in trouble for this. I remember when we're in Iraq. And we had some assets who were giving us, you know, targeting data.

And I sent some coordinates and it was relayed up to a, a Marine F-18. And he came around and he was trying to hit a target and he missed and he hit a building. A fucking apartment building. And I was like, what the fuck just happened? That's my fault. And that happens constantly. And, you know, some innocent people probably died that day.

Maybe not. Maybe they were evacuated. I have no idea. A hundred percent possible that no one was there. But, you know, bad stuff happens like that. And innocent people get hurt. And so, you know, there's all these kind of moral ambiguities and war. And I go back to again, one of the great victories of the war against ISIS was Mosul,

2017, 10,000 civilians died. And that's considered a great U.S. success. I don't know. No, it is challenging. You know, you and I have talked about this. The footage is like it goes outside of war. The footage goes outside of what the normal humanitarian crisis that happens in a war. the footage, even one of those guys, if he had done that in the United States,

it would be on all the news channels as this barbaric act. Yeah. Well, Dave, let me say something. So if the equivalent, 200, if 40,000 Americans had died and a third of them had been beheaded, beaten, the death, and raped, whatever country did that wouldn't have a capital. I'm sorry. like so americans don't understand this and you know we would have leveled you know we're talking about that you know i mean joe scarborough on morning joe said this you know and former you know kind of conservative congressman um he said you know if mexico had done this to us he just kind of threw this out there goes mexico city would be and someone said would we have tanks outside mexico city he said no it wouldn't exist 40 000 americans you know raped and dismembered and and defiled and so i don't know you kind of understand the israeli thinking. We went to war for, we went to war for 3,000 World Trade Center. We went to war for, what,

three, four thousand, Pearl Harbor. Like, like, Pearl Harbor was 2000, I think. It was even small. I mean, the numbers, actually, there's a great Netflix documentary out on World War II. Have you seen that? No, not yet. It's really good. Oh, the one that's colorized. I think Jack was on it. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. But I think the casualty numbers in Pearl Harbor, tragic, terrible, were not as high as I, as I, for whatever reason I thought. Yeah. Yeah. And we, yes, we went to war. We went, we went to war.

Like, we went to war. So. Equivalvement of 40,000. So I think, like, I tend to agree with you that I think that America should be very embarrassed because our anti-Semitism is really showing right now in the sense that on the right, you know, when you talk about racist and anti-Semites on the right, like, you always knew they were there. They weren't shy about it. You know, they've done little, dumb little costumes and do rallies and stuff like that.

On the left, it was hidden until now. It's there. Yeah. I mean, it's not hidden anymore. Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. Look at, I mean, you know, university presidents getting fired.

Yeah, they could be marching alongside clan members. And it'd be like, you know what I mean? It'd be like. Which, which I think is, you know, actually I'm surprised at that. You know, I love this country, you know, dearly. I'm disappointed with a lot of what I've seen, you know, especially on college campuses. Now, you know, it's funny because I go around, I talk to colleges. I probably do one lecture every week around the country.

I love doing this. And I haven't seen this. But I'm trying to think like, okay, why am I not seeing this anywhere? And because I'm going to talk to the class that's, you know, of national security studies or intelligence studies that, you know, whoever's taking that class is not going to have the propensity to kind of, you know, have those have those feelings and so um but you know i was but uh i uh i was at uh i i was at uh i think i addressed i did a keynote at gw university's um naval rotc kind of their annual conference and and gw has had some problems and so you know some of the students were telling me about

that too but it's it's it's it's it's really unfortunate because um you know a lot of these a lot of kind of jewish students are feeling incredibly unsafe and it's uh it's uh i just i just i i I thought better of America. And you know, you can be upset what's happening. You know, if you sympathize with the Palestinians, that's fine. But the idea of, you know, glorifying Hamas. And let's not forget, you know, that insanity of last week or the week before where this kind of this went viral on TikTok about the bin Laden letter.

Right. You remember that day? Yes, yes, I do. And all of a sudden, bin Laden is the new Che Guevara. Right, right. I mean, are you, what the F happened? I went crazy with that. Both of them hated homosexuals, so why not, right?

Like, like, both of them executed. Yeah, so it's like... But this is the new, the new darling of the left. Like, oh. And to me, that was something that was really unfortunate. I just again, it's... But, you know, as I do a lot of media stuff, I've met, you know, or, you know, I certainly run across a lot of kind of senior, you know, Jewish leaders,

you know, and... and, you know, they will tell you that anti-Semitism was, this anti-Semitism was always there. Yeah. But to me, it's, I'm certainly disappointed. I mean, you know, when I went to college, you know, you study everything. And there's, you know, you have to, you have to be able to talk about everything. And it certainly is that there's a notion of free speech. But you never let any kind of group feel unsafe.

Right. And that's what we've seen. And that, to me, was really awful. I want to move on if unless there's anything else you want to cover. I think we're good. I got all my notes. We've covered everything. So, you know, the Russia-Ukraine war was hot in the news for a minute.

And then, you know, obviously the situation in Israel is taken over and there aren't too many reports. Have you been following that closely? Big time. And so, you know, to me, this is something that's near and dear to. my heart and I will tell you why. The last job I had, again, from 16 to 19 when I retired, or maybe early 7th, late 16, early 17, being the deputy ops chief and then the acting ops chief for all of Europe and Eurasia. So that's 50 countries, 2,000, you know, agency officers. But ultimately, a lot of it had to do with what I call putting in the plumbing in a kind of

of our counter kind of Russia program. And that had to do with supporting the Ukrainians. This was the most non-sexy deployment of all time, where we had folks going out there, kind of working, building those personal relationships, training, assistance. You know, the Ukrainians were fighting the good fight in the East, but it wasn't Iraq, it wasn't al-Qaeda, it wasn't Afghanistan, it wasn't kind of the stuff that's on the news all the time. And then it was. And one of the things that is so great about, you know, the intelligence community being a CIA officer is that's, you know, we build these relationships. And we do them at a time where you don't know if it's going to be an advantage later on,

but in this case, it 100% was. And so, you know, the day of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, it's not like Zelensky called up Langley and said, who are you? It's more of, hey, you know, the guys and gals down the street who've been here for years helping us build capacity training. And, you know, one of the things that happens in our old world is that, you know, you have this kind of cycle. There's a rotation cycle where people go back to the same area time and again and again and again.

So our people knew, you know, the members of, you know, Ukrainian military intelligence, for example, because they've been going there for years. And so you build on those relationships and then what happens. And so you look right now, there was, this is incredible. Two days ago, the U.S. I see declassified an assessment of Russian losses. Dave, I don't know if you saw this, but it blew my mind because I, knew it was bad. 87% of the Russian standing army anywhere on the day of the Russian invasion has been killed or wounded.

315,000. That's a staggering number. If you think about our assistance programs globally, anywhere in history, never anything like this. But what does that mean? Also, not a single U.S. Putin on the ground. There's no U.S. military on the ground. There is no U.S. loss of life. And so, and it's about 5% of our, of our defense budget.

And even the assistance program that, that we're trying to push through Congress now, $60 billion. That's an accounting error, you know, rounding error in DOD. And so, so the U.S. has done incredible things for the Ukrainians. And I'm really proud of that because it goes back to kind of the, that notion of building relationships that we do over time. You know, I've written articles on this before. I firmly believe in kind of the concept of defending forward. Now, does that mean U.S. military deployed all over the world? No, but it does mean U.S. intelligence deployed all over the world. It means our case officers, our paramilitary officers, selectively, our analysts, certainly CIA stations, where we're kind of, you know, building that capacity, building those relationships that if they need to be called on, can be. And that certainly is what happened in Ukraine. And so I think that ultimately this is going to be one of the great success stories. Now, I wish we had done more. And what drives me crazy about this administration is you can make the argument that the administration saved Ukraine and they did.

But they didn't allow Ukraine to win. Right. And that means giving them kind of advanced weapons. You know, there's always this, again, what does this go back to, Dave? It's the fear of escalation. Like this is like kind of, you know, traumatized this administration on every count. Some would say that's being smart and wise. I would say we're being too risk averse.

But ultimately, you want to give the other side. the ability to win. And so, you know, we're at, we're at a point right now in which, you know, the European governments, actually, this is a really good thing. This is a good, the messaging is all wrong, you know, in terms of how this fight in Congress. This is not a never-ending war. You know, we actually have a never-ending ally in Ukraine, but the never-ending wars, we need to get Ukraine through the next year. But Germany just pledged $8 billion. And the European nations actually are pledged even more in military assistance. So this $60 billion will get the Ukrainian through 24.

And we've really gotten Europe on board. I think the Estonian said that 0.25% of their entire budget is going to be dedicated to Ukraine. That's pretty impressive. And so I think it's a success story. Certainly it's a massive intelligence success story. I mean, something that we, you know, that myself as a former agency officer is incredibly proud of.

And we just have to kind of keep resolute. that ultimately, maybe I'm being an optimist, I think that they're going to come to some agreement. The Democrats will give on some border stuff. We'll get this $60 billion package forward. And again, but it's, but it's not a never-ending war. Right. It's a never-ending ally, but the Europeans are stepping up and that's a good thing. Right. Is there, has there been any major shifts in the battle lines there, or has it been mostly static? I mean, it has been, you know, this, this vaunted offensive didn't work. Now, why didn't it work?

I think that we didn't give them the means to do it. There's a lot of arguments between the Pentagon and the Ukrainians on strategy. I'm not a military strategist, so I don't know. But ultimately, I think that if you don't have air power, how are you going to make any kind of gains? And F-16s are coming online, but they're coming online late. Right. The attack of missiles, these long-range missiles,

these attack of missiles drove the Russian Black Sea fleet out of Sevastopol. Right. But there's no many, you know, we gave them like 20. There's no more left. I mean, it's maddening to me. Right. And again, it's because of this indecision and this trepidation and fear of escalation in the NSC that drives me nuts.

It's the same thing we talked about before, about, you know, the worries of escalation in the Middle East. I think that, you know, the U.S. could have a much more aggressive foreign policy. By the way, this is also not a Democrat versus Republican thing. I don't know if a president, you know, Haley or, you know, or, or, or, or, or, Santos or Trump would have a different view of this. But I certainly think that we should, we can be much more aggressive. And we have this tremendous military power.

We should use it and be smart about it. But again, not all is lost in Ukraine. I think that the key thing over, you know, it's 2024 now. Ukraine is running out of ammunition and they're running out of air defense. And Europeans is not going to come online. So we've got to get them what they need over the next year. I wish that the administration would make. that argument. I think the GOP would respond to that because they're concerned about a never-ending

conflict. My point is it won't be. Europeans are going to step up. They have. They pledge this. But just you know this as a, as, you know, as former military, like the whole kind of capacity in production. It just takes a while to ramp up. We'll get there, but we got to get them through this next. And, you know, if you say, hey, we're going to give the 60 billion and then Europe's got to take over, that's fine. And I think the Ukrainians would accept. that. But I think the messaging has been all screwed up on this. I don't blame like the GOP's view for like, you know, or whoever in the GOP, because, you know, I think that there are these war, these hawks basically, or these Russia hawks that

it doesn't matter if they're left or right. They're just Russia hawks, you know, who through last through these administrations. And their goal has been to bleed Russia. Like, they didn't want Ukraine to win a decisive victory in no. no time flat because that doesn't serve the goal of economically and militarily harming Russia to that, you know, to a massive degree. So, you know, when you talk about, when we talk about just money, because you mentioned the attack comes and talk about F-16s, when we talk about money, it's like, well, if you give me $10 worth of aid in BBs or $10 worth of aid in shotgun shells, it makes a significant difference in my ability to, you know, to defend my, my home. And I think that some people

see as us have, as U.S. as have been giving Ukraine BBs. And we're just going to keep giving BBs, even though it's a meat grinder for them. It's also a meat grinder for Russia. And that's the long-term goal of some of these people deep in the administration. I think that, you know, there's a, you have a different view of this if you've been on the ground working with local forces, with indigenous forces. And so I, you know, I always think about things I did in the past with the Kurds, for example, other Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, for sure. And, you know, the U.S. makes a lot of promises.

And, you know, and very often we don't kind of uphold those. And so if I wasn't retired, I would hope I certainly would have volunteered. Maybe I was too senior. I'd take a demotion. Like, I'd want to be in the Ukraine A-O. You know, I can't say anything more, but I'd want to be around that area. So if you're looking at someone, you know, and it would probably be someone from Ukrainian military intelligence who we're working with.

And you say, you know, we're going to help you win. By the way, I also know that, you know, your sister and your brother were killed. Your home is no longer. And so, you know, you are under. absolute threat from the Russians, but we're going to do everything possible. But then then your government, in this case, the U.S. government doesn't do enough. These are really hard. That was the hardest part of my job before is dealing with that.

And I remember in the Syria program where literally senior U.S. officials would say, we're just going to give the Syrian opposition enough to get to the negotiating table. And I said, that's fine if you're an armchair quarterback in D.C. at the NSC. But if you're on the front lines, everyday living with the Syrian opposition, how the fuck do you say that? And so the same thing with Ukrainians where they say, we know you have attack them's. The same thing with the Abrams, the tanks were late, F-16s were way late.

Why can't you give them to us? Like, my family's dying. Right. And so maybe that's the age old kind of, I had this conversation with a lot of people here in D.C. Because this is the way I think of things. And they're always like, well, you know, Mark, you don't understand the greater strategic good and blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm like, well, I look at it from being on the tip of the spear. And my job was to look at my, my indigenous kind of, you know, compadre, who by the way, it's impossible for me not to fall in love with. I'm sorry. You know, I'm living with them. It's the same thing with the CTPs in Afghanistan. Right. In my base in Afghanistan, like, you know, we lived with them.

We ate with them. Such different experiences when the regular U.S. military, everyone was armed together. There was never a green on blue ever. And in fact, they saved our lives constantly. I'm not here today. Right. There's 10 Americans or 20 Americans is a thousand indage. Right.

And so, you know, you have an affinity for them. And, you know, these are your brothers and arms or sisters in arms. And so ultimately, I think that where I get upset about the Ukraine issues that we just didn't do enough. Yeah. And I would have hated to be on the front lines or not the front lines, but, but, you know, in the trenches somewhere with Ukrainian, you know, partners and trying to explain why we didn't give attack them's, where F-16s are late. and for God's sake political dysfunction in the U.S. I mean, again, look at that

declassified Intel report. I mean, we have attritted 87% of the Russian military, that's an adversary of ours. Like, this is a wild success. Like, okay, why are we not doing more of this? I just, you know, it's a, and one other last piece, too, I know I talked

about it last time I came on about Ukraine, and this is being very simplistic. But it is a, I think one of the reasons why Ukraine has been appealing to members of the intelligence and special operations, the military communities, is that it is much more of a good versus evil story. You know, Iraq was very fuzzy. Yeah.

I mean, for fucksave, we have, we have put in place a sort of an Iranian surrogate. Right. Iraq. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I could you say that Iraq was a win for the U.S.? No. No.

No. Right? No. Ukraine is a little more clear cut. Yeah. In my view. And I think there's that, I'm sorry, I'm just a middle class kid from New Jersey, but that's the appeal that I have.

That stuff tugs at me. Yeah. Yeah. Russia invaded and we're helping a country free from invasion. That's it. It's kind of good. I mean, I like that. We knew by all the protests against Russia that they invaded.

Right. Everywhere. Amazing. Yeah. All over campuses. I don't know. I mean, I'm going to go down to D.C. Yeah.

Or in London or everywhere else. I mean, yeah, no. Didn't see that. Was there anything else? Is there anything else that you want to talk about, even if it's not about these two topics? Anything else going on for you? One of the coolest things that I will,

this is a positive note. Because I mentioned before that I go around kind of talking to to college students all over the country. I mean, I spend, I don't get paid anything for this. They'll pay my expenses. So it's not, I'm not making any money. But I love going and talking to college students who are interested in national security.

So these are either ROTC programs or, you know, intelligence study programs, national security programs, anything like that. And it's the idea of passing the torch to the next generation. And to me, that's so important. And aside from my kind of being horrified at some of Generation Z who are protesting out in the streets, but in general, I think we're okay. And, you know, and the individuals who are, you know, who are interested in national security, you know, are,

are patriotic. They want to serve. And as I go and talk to schools all over the country, and it's across the board everywhere, it's really exciting because I think that, you know, the most important thing is that, you know, as we all kind of get gray in the tooth or lose our hair, sorry, you and I are in the same spot.

We got to go back to the first episode I came on. I definitely had more fucking hair. There's no doubt about that. But ultimately, we're passing the torch to the next generation, and that's a good thing. And, you know, when you, I don't believe everything the agency tells me when I ask them about kind of, you know, recruitment and retention. I think there's an issue on retention. But I think on recruitment, I mean, I think they're doing pretty well. And so there are people who want to come into the national security community. They want to serve. And it's not, it's not the post-9-11 surge where everyone wanted to go kind of kick ass. But it's the idea of, you know, what is an intelligence officer mean? Well, it's, you know, it's an intellectual exercise, too. You know, I always, I would say, you know, you got to go and be interested. And, you know, Dave, you talked about, you know, in your military, you know, your career, learning Arabic. And so you got to learn different languages. And what does that mean?

Well, you've got to learn about different cultures. You got to learn about religion. You know, you got to learn about Islam if you want to go in the Arabic world. It's funny people and funny food and immersing yourself in a culture and becoming that expert. And, you know, I tell these students a story, which really, I've done a lot of things in my career. And you and I have talked so much about this. I've had some great moments. I've had some awful moments.

My record is mixed and I'm very humble. But one of the cool things that happened. And I'm going to name a U.S. politician and half the audience, maybe more of it here, will go crazy. But it doesn't matter because she was Speaker of the House. So Nancy Pelosi came out to Damascus when I was there. And she went to the Charger de Fair. There was no ambassadors.

The number two. But she said, I want to talk to the smartest person on Syria in the embassy. And he said, go talk to Mark. And I was flattered, first of all, that a senior State Department person, person said this, but that's because I spoke Arabic. I knew the town cold. I knew everything. I knew everybody in the town. There's nothing in that place that. And so, and I spent four hours talking to her just about internal Syrian dynamics and politics. That is what you want to do as an intelligence officer. This goes back to the old days of Lawrence of Arabia. Right. Or the book I read by,

I love, you know, James Michener books. You know, there's a book he wrote caravans about a young foreign service officer in Afghanistan. That to me is so inspiring. I want to be that. I want to be that substantive expert. I remember there was an ABC news journalist, also Anthony Cordesman. I don't know if you remember that name. He worked for ABC for a long time. He came to Damascus and he went to the Syrian. He told me he went to the Syrian palace.

And he said, who's the smartest person at the embassy? And they said the CIA guy, Mark. Now, that's not good. I was like, well, fuck. My cover's fucked up right now. But that's what you want. To be that area, to be that expert. Yes.

Yeah. And so that's what I tell these college students is that you immerse yourself. like hey if you don't want to do kind of funny food religion people ethnic stuff go join the fbi god bless love my bureau colleagues work in america go to you know de moyn which i actually might be going to so i got to go go do a speech in demoyne i've never been to demoyne i'm actually excited about it um uh i love you know we've been all over the fucking world and i haven't seen half of america so i'm excited to see mid-america but but ultimately you know that's what you want to be you want you want to be that person who has that incredible kind of, you know, cultural and linguistic

and historical knowledge. And, and when I tell us to college students, they really respond to that. And so I do have faith that we're going to be okay. Yeah. Not always, but, but, but, but just kind of inherently when I go and talk to these folks and, and then, you know, particularly when I go to talk to ROTC programs, I was not in the military, just like going to kind of throw that out. But, you know, I go talk to the service academies. I've been going to the Citadel quite a bit to talk to them. I'm going to go to VMI for their kind of leadership programs. program and so I think we're going to be all right. And that to me is is something that that matters. If we if we can pass the torch the next generation,

you know, no one gives a shit, Dave, what you and I did in our past. I mean, I don't know, you might have this, you know, we got to have you guys come to Northern Virginia. Team House trip. Not true. I'll come to the, you can come to my basement. Everyone has their I love me wall. Everyone fucking has it. I'm sorry. You know you have it. Yeah. And it's all the, the hero shit that I've done. But none of that matters. No one gives a shit except me. my kids. Yeah. What matters is passing the torch.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. What were you saying? I say, no, people will remember what you got,

are interested in what you guys do. Oh, I don't think so. Like, even my girlfriend gets like, sleepy-eyed when I, like, start telling her stuff.

That's what I don't know. We should do a lot of stories. We should do a team house at the Vienna Inn. That's what you have to do a team house. That's what you got to come to the greatest dive bar on the planet where actually I spend way too much time. We're down. A special show.

Chili cheese dogs. You know, the Vienna is cool. Actually, so here's, oh, there's what, I'll tell you three stories from the Ghana. One is there's a hat I wore in Afghanistan for a year in skin that's in a glass case right by the men's room there. I think that's pretty cool. I came back and it was a Vienna and had it's dirty and nasty and smells, but we put in the glass case and Marty, the owner, put it up there. Number two is they sell my book there. I wrote a book on leadership

And so I signed copies And people come in and buy it Which I still find shocking The last point And I haven't told you guys this So I was the technical consultant On Equalizer 3 The Denzel movie

Oh how was that for you man It was it was fun And but here's the great Vienna in story So you know As I'm going through And I'm kind of reviewing the script And if you go back and you see the movie There's so much kind of CIA nomenclature in there

So it's Denzel script and Dakota Fanning and all the things they say. It really is kind of this story is not a CIA story, but everything to say about the agency kind of rings true, whether it's, you know, I think Dakota Fanning works at CTC Fino, Financial Operations Group. That's a real group. There was a, you know, there's a, there's a team that's coming in and doing something, and it was PAG, the physical access group. I mean, none of this is classified.

So I, or if it is, I'm in trouble. But, but, but the best part about it is there's a, there's a character. in there who plays the chiefest station in Rome in the movie. And they made it exactly looking like kind of me, like the little goate, all the time wearing jeans and kind of an untuck button down shirt, which is all I wore ever anywhere, including at headquarters. And then, but I remember, so I went to the Vienna one day and I'm like, hey, I got to get a hat out to the set out in Italy.

And so we FedExed a Vienna in baseball hat. And in the movie, the chief of station of Rome is wearing. this Vienna Inn baseball hat for, you know, five different scenes. That's awesome. And so it was awesome. And so there's a picture. There's kind of a picture up. There's a spread at the Vienna in about it.

They're really excited about it. But what happened is, so I went in there the other day and they're like, we've had to, like we're getting calls from all over the world for these baseball hats, the VN hat. And so they've had to make multiple orders over and over and over again because it's now this kind of cult following because like the Vienna Inn. So it's, it's an old CIA hangout too. so um but you know but you know i go in there every once in a while i'm always saying like shouldn't you guys give me like free chicken wings right you know right chili cheese dog

occasionally they do but not enough well i mean either that or some of those sweet sweet hat profits totally but it's a great place and so you know i mean the vienna is like this we sit around and just fuck around and bullshit and yeah and that's why that place is is i mean it is i think if if that place closes i'm moving yeah yeah that's it So Mark's book is Clarity and Crisis. You can get it on, for many of your booksellers. It's down in the description. And we've talked about the book on a previous show.

And Mark's been on like, I think five times now, maybe six. I'm not sure. But go back and check out everything from talking about the Vanisend Room to, yeah, to, I mean, every show has been, every show has been great. It's been fun. But people always come up to me and tell me, talk to me, they love, they remember, these shows. That's great. Yeah, so you guys have a cult following.

It's good. I guess we get around in the Intel community every now and again. You do? Yeah. 100%. Oh, yeah. This is fun. Maybe I shouldn't have showed my ass earlier.

By the way, you started off the show. Yeah. I don't know if people turned on, I don't know if people turned on and like, you know, all of a sudden it went viral or people like, oh, they got to turn it off. You know. You can see. You guys have your metrics on this. You'll see how many people end up doing this thing.

I got some jelly in my role. What can I say? I think it's a net positive. It's a net positive. Okay. Yeah. I'll think so. Where else can be?

Because, let's go. By the way, I just want to say to all the listeners, you know, this is, you know, obviously there's a, there's a great following for the show. But you all are quality humans. And I will say that when I, last time I was in New York, we all went out at the lunch at a Greek restaurant. I think chosen by D, right? downtown and it was awesome. It was just great seeing you guys.

It's so much fun kind of hanging out. And basically, I think when we sat around for lunch for two hours, we did this. Yeah. It just wasn't taped. Yeah. Just sat around a shot to shit. Yeah. Where else can people find you, Mark?

So, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, I'm on Twitter at M Polymer. It is unfiltered. And, you know, one of my friends from the Intel community is also in the media, I won't say his name. But he said, he goes, you know, you are like the dart with no feathers. You don't just, you don't give a shit what you say, which is probably hurts me sometimes. But yeah, so I'm on Twitter and certainly I'm on MSNBC as the national security contributor. I'm on probably a couple times a week.

And I, you know, you know, I have a kind of unique place there. And that, you know, look, my job is to comment on the intelligence world and the national security world. And so I've had some fun doing it. that. But it's, it's a, and then the last piece too is that, you know, one of the things I do, if anyone here is in the corporate world or the sports world, I do a lot of leadership talks around the country. I've done tons of it for sports teams. I mean, I was pretty good, Vanderbilt University baseball. Any baseball fans are college baseball, they reached out to talk to me and I was thrilled. But I've gone around the country talking a lot about leadership in the athletics world.

And then obviously corporate stuff, which makes me some money, which is, which can be fun too. One of the cool things about the book is, you know, the principles, and we've already done our book episode. But I've had some wild groups kind of come to me to do leadership talks that you would not even imagine. And so it's been a lot of fun, too. Dee, I got to tell you a story. One last thing for Dee. Yeah, yeah. There's no rush.

I went out to Chicago about in October. And I did the leadership convention for the Greek Orthodox Church of America. Oh, God. Jesus Christ. 80 Greek priests, 350 members, and they wanted to hear about leadership. And it was incredibly fun. It was wild. Was the FBI surveilling?

No, no. But it was pretty close to the Greek. And so my father calls me and said, when's the last time you were at church? I was like, never. He's like, you're a fraud. So I could call them up and say, look, hey, like, you know, I'm not very religious on this. They didn't care. And it was actually really fun.

And the Greek church has the same. problems as any company or corporation as anywhere else in terms of, you know, you know, micromanagement or not being on the same page. Embezzlement. I'm not going to say that. But ultimately, I've done some some really fun stuff with this. And so that was a wild one out in Chicago, Illinois. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of North America came to see me.

What the hell? It was great. I think he could, he probably condemned me. You know, but one of it. So here's a really. interesting point on that. Sorry, this is great because we can kind of do free form stuff is I told a story about having some of the things I've done in war zones. They were really upset about that. I guess, you know, religiously, they said, you know, you can't feel like you have to forget.

I had to do with forgiveness. I said, I haven't forgiven myself for some of the things that I've done. Yeah. And they said, you have to get, they were really serious about that. And they took me aside and they're like, we need to talk to you about this. And I said, and, you know, forgiveness is something that's really, you know, it's got to be kind of your personal journey. And I said, well, I don't. I really screwed up and some people got hurt. And they said, well, this is something for you to work on. So I thought that was fascinating.

Yeah. And it's also interesting, I think, you know, it's always easier to look at somebody else and forgive them, especially if you understand than it is to forgive yourself. Like you were talking about the three hostages, Israeli hostages killed, you know, in that thing. And it's like anybody who's been sort of in that situation and fog of war, and especially if you have maneuver elements

or you have people with suicide bombs that you can't really identify that can clack off when they get within five feet of you or whatever. It's a terribly tragic thing. And the people who did that, I don't know what unit it was, but they probably were not a premier counterterrorist.

Oh, it definitely was not. It was not a tool. You know what I mean? There are probably regular soldiers who are not trained. I would say, actually, they were probably reservists. Yeah, who were not trained to that level. And they were put in a stressful situation and made a bad shoot. They're like, they're, though the hostages families, I would, I would imagine will probably forgive them long before they forgive themselves.

I will say that this is going to get a little too personal that some of the things that I've done that gone wrong that there are people who have said to me, I forgive you for that. Yeah. But I don't forgive myself. Yeah. So that's a really good point. Yeah. On that.

And I don't know. My wife, you know, so I'm Greek, but, you know, my wife's Catholic and our kids were raised Catholic. She's always trying to get me to get a little more deep and religious. I'm not there yet, but I don't know. We'll see. But, you know, on a serious note, I've told you before about kind of my, some of my health struggles and stuff like that in the past. but the one individual who's the most helpful for me in terms of kind of mental health care at Walter Reed was a Marine Corps chaplain, you know, Chappie. And he told me about forgiveness.

And so it was it was definitely like, you know, because I was really pissed at the agency for screwing me on health care. Yeah. And certain individuals. And he's like, you've got to forgive them. And I said, I can't. He goes, you just got to, you got to just, you got to drop it. Like the anger and the hate, it's not good for you. And so in that sense, that, that idea of forgiveness for me, you know, me,

looking outward at someone else, I can do that. Me looking at myself for some of the mistakes I made, you know, that's a different story. And I will say that Walter Reed also said that as I was there with, you know, myself and a couple members of, you know, naval special warfare and then Air Force Special Operations Command, they basically said, you know, we could probably spend a year with you all. So I'm on mental health counseling. That's true.

Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Anyhow. No shame in that at all. That's something that I certainly needed and still do. Yeah.

No, it's important. And it's, you know, it's an important facet that, you know, we've talked with you about it. We try to talk with other veterans and intelligence professionals about it. If they've gone through that journey, because it's something that needs to be normalized. I mean, it doesn't help when medical records are getting turned over to cops. Like it makes people like, you know, like this big thing that's like it it definitely like it makes it harder for veterans to trust that

that they can speak in confidence with anybody without all all of a sudden getting red flagged or whatever else right right but that's this you know so it can't be a stigma it cannot yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah all right last last thing i want to i want to say i'm going to ask you guys what's your favorite show on tv right now i'm watching fargo right now you said fargo yeah that's pretty good that's what I'm watching. Dave? I mean, I don't know.

I mean, Severn's was fantastic waiting for the next season of that. And then Mythic Quest. I don't know. There's a lot of good stuff. And war was phenomenal. I'm going to throw up Bosch Legacy. Box Legacy. Bosch, Bosch.

Oh, Bosch is a. Oh, from the old Bosch. Yeah, Bosch, the police series. Yeah. So Bosch Legacy is when his daughter becomes a cop too. And he becomes a private investigator. It's awesome. Where can people find that?

Amazon. Yeah, I think Bosch was on Amazon. I'm pretty sure the second one. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I do a lot of leadership. One last piece, a lot of leadership consulting with the Philadelphia Police Department. So I'm shuttling back and forth to Philly a lot because, you know, the cops, especially cops on the street, certainly need that. And so I've kind of become fascinated with the policing profession.

And so Bosch legacy was pretty cool. But I, you know, my wife thinks I'm crazy because I come back and I was like, yeah, I'm going on these ride-alongs at night with the Philly cops and having a blast. And it's an adrenaline rush. And she's like, come on, man. You're 55 years old. What are you doing? Yeah. And actually, I took my son there.

My son's in college. So I took a picture of him. He's wearing his vest. He's going out in the streets with the Philly cops. And she's like, you're crazy. And of course, now he's totally into this. Mark, I got a question. I've got it.

We got a question. Did you check patron? or do you want me to? Can you do it? Yeah. I'm going to ask Mark a question right now, too. Okay. Okay. So let's say, you know, you were the deputy chief of ops, right, in Eurasia and Europe when you retired.

Cut, you know, and you were what? You were young, relatively young. You were like in your 50. 50. I mean, if you didn't retire and let's say like the, you know, you didn't get hit with the microwave weapon and all that went down, you're probably in line for like deputy. director, no? You got to be on a short list, no? That's all based on luck. I have no idea.

I mean, I think that, you know, ultimately, well, there's a couple things on that. That's total luck. I have no idea. I would never be so presumptuous to think I'd be chosen for that. But let me also say, like, you know, the second you get promoted up to those ranks, your life is miserable. You don't run operations anymore. It's all about people and resources and problems. I hated the job. I really did. And, you know, my time is a street case. officer was so far in my past. So I don't know. I don't think I was terribly ambitious to do those things. But what was interesting is, you know, you get promoted to the senior intelligence service. It's a big deal. That's similar to be a one star. And then I retired as an SIS four. So that's the

equivalent of a three or four star. But it doesn't mean anything. And ultimately it was just kind of a lot of headaches. And I remember when I got promoted to SIS, one of my friends said, well, you know, we're in the same class. And they said, you know, now we're going to get the secrets to kingdom the keys of the kingdom and there was nothing there um it's you know it's it's it's a thousand personnel problems resource problems and you know if if someone comes to me with an operational decision something's gone really wrong because there's a got a billion people under me who should make those decisions now sometimes that happened but you want to you know the leadership kind of uh model you should follow is like you know uh no one i should not be making these

decisions it all brief me on what happened after the fact for god's sakes but uh but not coming up there. So I don't know. There's no glory in senior leadership. Sorry. Nice fancy title. That's about it. I mean, obviously, I'm being hypocritical because I certainly would use this since, you know, in my public persona now. But my favorite times was as a street case officer, as a GS-11 or 12, you know, on the streets of the third world somewhere. That was really fun. I had, you know, I had nothing else except me and the agent I'm handling in a hostile counterintelligence service and you know foreign intelligence information to gather um that stuff was was really fun no other responsibilities i want to be a kid again that's what i'm saying yeah yeah well i mean may in about

30 years we will be so um from patreon uh from ian please let mark that we're concerned for his health and hope he is well that's very nice that's very good people have been been so nice about kind of my health journey um and so you know i talk about i talked to of Walter Reed the other day. And, you know, I was, I was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. Obviously, you know, and it was based on some events that happened in Moscow in 2017. But when I talked to the docs at Walter Reed, and, you know, this is the leading TBI center on the planet. And I said, you know, it's six years later. I'm finally feeling better. And they said, yeah, TBI takes about five or six years. And I was like, you didn't fucking tell me that.

And, you know, and they said, we can't. Yeah. So if we tell you that, you know, and, you know, And this is really serious. Like people might, you know, if you say you have a five-year recovery, there's going to be some bad stuff that happens with people who are really suffering. And so I'm like, I'm really feeling better. Thank you for all you did. And they said, well, you know, that's, that's, you know, this is, this is the, kind of the timeline, the trajectory.

And so I was, I was both happy that I'm on the right path, but also I was like, holy crap. I mean, if you had told me, you know, in 2018 or 19, 2019, in 2019, especially, or 18, when I was really struggling, you know, that's when you have some, some serious kind of, that's a danger zone right there. If you say, hey, don't worry about it. Three years, you'll feel better. Right, right.

My head's going to fucking explode every day. Right. And, you know, and whatever happened to me, um, uh, doesn't matter as much as the notion that it, it was a TBI. And so like all, everything I experienced, all the symptoms, you know, and when, when I ultimately got a settlement from the, from the agency, um, it was because, uh, uh, Walter Reed, you know, did the following. They said, yes, Mark had a traumatic brain injury.

line of duty, imaging shows it, not a pre-existing condition. This is what happened. I mean, they were so meticulous in documenting this. And so I got a lot of love for that place, I must say. Those people save my life, no doubt. Isaac, I've seen some of the footage from the festival massacre, and I'm aware of the terrible things that Hamas has done, but how is it even possible for all of that awfulness to be getting lost

and all the noise. Right. And so, you know, that's the problem. That's the age that we're in where, you know, footage like that is talked about comes out a little bit, but then people refute it, say it didn't happen. Right. You know, social media has been, you know,

social media is a great avenue to kind of disseminate, you know, things to the masses in the world, but it's also so rife with this information. And you have, you know, you know, you know, hundreds, thousands of people who actually don't believe that 10-7 happened or, or actually say, you know, Hamas did not perpetrate those atrocities. And, and, you know, you can have this, you know, notion, you know,

and I'm not saying positive or negative, kind of the Elon Musk view of this is the kind of the, what does he call it, the, like the public square. Yeah, the public square. Yeah, the public square. But the problem is there's no filter. Right. And of course, what can be a filter? Who says what's right or what's wrong?

But ultimately, you know, it is, I think, you. you know, the, the idea of pushing this out, that kind of information out is, is a good thing. Obviously, the families made object to this. But yeah, so the disinformation. So, I mean, this is a whole, you do a whole other show on this. And, you know, how does disinformation kind of play into everything we do? But, you know, some people is, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to, if you'd ever show that, that, that footage of 107 to someone who's a Hamas sympathizer. They won't believe it.

Right. I don't know. I mean, just you'll lost. They'll say it's all like deep fake or AI genera. I mean, I don't know. And the thing is, is that, you know, what the counter agents do is they do create the deep fakes. They put them out there and then they then they debunk them and then they say, see, the whole thing was fake. Right.

So that people discard everything that goes along with it. Yeah, it's, it's crazy. So one of the things that was really interesting in my last job. We talked about Russian disinformation and information operations. And so how the Russians would put. And so the way to battle this, just, and this is not, I'm not picking on Russia now, but, you know, the truth is always the right thing to do. And so if you can, you know, it's not, you can't battle propaganda with propaganda.

What you have to do is, is if you see something is, you know, is a deep fake, or it's kind of a Russian disinformation operation, or if it's the China, The Chinese are endemic in this. The Chinese are kicking our butt at stuff like this. You know, if we can kind of catch that in time and counter it with the truth, you know, I remember when we would kind of brief members of Congress on our efforts on this. And they would say, well, we can't make up stuff about our adversary. Well, like, we're not.

We're just, if we tell the truth, if we expose what the other side is doing, that's going to be really effective. And so, but, you know, when it comes to that kind of the Hamas, Israel Hamas stuff, I mean, Israel is losing the information war, which is, which is unfortunate. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. I wonder if the response we saw from the U.S. public was partly from the algorithmic content grooming. An example of this is a present presenting content that is likely to be negative to keep the user engagement gone. I don't even know what that means. You know, just like creating negative comment or content, because the algorithm promotes posts and content that has a lot of engagement. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

So if you create negative posts or even false. Sorry. I apologize. No, that actually makes a lot of sense. I think I'm not smart enough on this, you know, in terms of the algorithms of some of these, whether it's, whether it's, you know, Twitter or Facebook or things like. like that, but it's clear. And so I apologize to the person who wrote that in. It actually makes a lot of sense. So one of the things you look at is the algorithms that I've heard people talking about the algorithms for for TikTok. And so, you know, it's so kind of wildly biased,

you know, kind of in a certain way. I mean, it was, God, I don't know what entity put out that, you know, that it was kind of this kind of pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian content was like 87% of the algorithm, you know, it was something like that. So I, but again, this is, this is, you know, how do you regulate social media platforms? I don't know. This is getting into areas where there's issues of free speech and it's, it's super complicated. And, you know, the weird thing is that, you know, there's all sorts of different political kind of, this is across the political divide, or, or you have weird bedfellows on this with kind of the hard left and the hard right sometimes agreeing on this. I don't know. Tough one. Do you, for the people that you know in Israel,

is Israel right now looking at these, because we're seeing this a lot out of Ivy Leagues, right? We're seeing a lot of these protests out of Ivy Leagues. And Ivy Leagues lead to a lot, a lot of times to government positions to, you know, they had that pipeline. Does Israel see sort of this current trend in America colleges as a threat to their future in 50 years or 20 years? You know, I mean, I think that it's just been a lot of surprise at some of these elite universities. I mean, you know, one of the things, you know,

the everyone wants their kids to go to kind of the best schools. All of a sudden, some of these best schools are not a place where kind of, you know, American Jews can feel comfortable. I think that's, you know, my friends, you know, kind of in the Jewish community you were sending their kids, the Ivy Leagues are horrified. That's what I, but that's where you want to send your kids in terms of kind of making it in America.

But I think that, you know, again, when I talked to the Israeli embassy officials the other day, I said to them, I said, take this video to the Ivy League campuses and they said, we're thinking about it. And I said, that's the right thing to do. Again, understanding the sensitivities of the families. But, you know, you got to kind,

and I wouldn't blame it only on the Ivy League. I think it's endemic all over. college games. Maybe not the SEC. I don't know. Maybe not down south. But again, a buddy of mine was at the Alabama game and there was, you know, students running around with kind of free Palestine flags down and so, but I think that it's just a matter of kind of pushing this message out. And look, what's the old, I'm going to get this totally wrong. It's the oozo talking and the old statement by Churchill. If you're not, you know, if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart. And if you're not a conservative, when you're old, you have no brain.

You're like, you know, college kids, like young people can be stupid. That's okay. Like, you know, youngsters are going to be dumb. I was. But ultimately, I think that, you know, we do have to kind of put the truth out as best as possible. And there is, there is a lot to be said for that testimony of the university presidents the other day. Yeah. From MIT, from Penn and from Harvard. Because I think that is indicative of kind of some of the things that have gone wrong in American academia. When I went to college, you know, I, you know, so truth be told, I got to admit it here. I get vilified by ever. I went to Cornell. It says an Ivy League school. But, you know, there were, there were professors who were very conservative and have professors

who were liberal. And there really was more of a notion of free speech. And my friends there from Cornell, some of them who are listening here, you know, my Jewish friends, and who some of their kids actually go to Cornell are horrified at what's happened. And they can't believe it. And, you know, I think, you know, there's certainly people who want to pull their, you know, donations or, you know, fundraising for the schools. But that's not the right answer. It's more of, you know, what is how?

So I actually blame this, Dave, on the professors. I don't know what's happened. You know, so, you know, when colleges hire professors, they got to hire both from the left of the right. Yeah. They really do. Yeah. I love that.

I had an extremely conservative professor at Cornell. Jeremy Rapkin, famous kind of strict constitutionalist. I loved his class. I didn't agree with a lot of the stuff. Yeah. But you got to learn both sides. I want to read Carl Marx and I want to read Anne Rand. And let's talk about it.

But I think that American academia somehow has drifted so far to the left. And, you know, I'm a centrist. So, you know, I'm not, I come at this from a kind of a very moderate angle. But I think that when it comes down to it, it's that it's, you know, professors are going to influence the students. Simple as that. Sorry, we, uh, our church upstairs seems to be going out a pattern and starting up on a Friday night. So if you hear that, I apologize. Yeah, I've already sent them a text. I just want to say, yeah. Oh, what are they doing? Bro, they fucking rock, dude. It's like they play

on their drums. They have their speakers on the floor and they like do chance. It's like, it's like, it's like shaking. It's like being in a club. It's a church. Yeah. It's an ether. Ethiopian evangelical church. I love it. We've been doing weird shit up there. No, I hate it. I hate it. They let you go do it somewhere else. They should go worship whatever they want.

They're not supposed to do this on Friday nights. But not right above us. These fulms, thank you very much for the donation. We appreciate it. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. You're good. And Mark, that's it, man. Thanks so much for joining us tonight.

That was great. I love coming on. You guys are awesome. I hope the listeners enjoyed kind of a grand tour of the Middle East and Russia and our usual kind of banter. but love coming on here and give Jack shit.

I will. He's avoiding me. He is avoiding me. I am now officially suspicious. Again, like I said, he's playing hard to get to get you to our Christmas party. Right. I'll be in the Bahamas. I'm out of here.

Perfect. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Mark.