The Team House - Syria Deep Dive w/ CIA Analyst Turned Author | David McCloskey | Ep. 234

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

David McCloskey is the author of Damascus Station. He is a former CIA analyst and former consultant at McKinsey & Company.  While at the CIA, he wrote regularly for the President’s Daily Brief, delivered classified testimony to Congressional oversight committees, and briefed senior White House officials, Ambassadors, military officials, and Arab royalty.  He worked in CIA field stations across the Middle East throughout the Arab Spring and conducted a rotation in the Counterterrorism Center focused on the jihad in Syria and Iraq. During his time at McKinsey, David advised national security, aerospace, and transportation clients on a range of strategic and operational issues. David holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, where he specialized in energy policy and the Middle East.  He lives in Texas with his wife and three children. Grab David's books here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/stores/David%20McCloskey/author/B094RGDC82 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today's sponsors: Augusta Precious Metals⬇️ https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/ Learn why thousands of Americans are getting gold IRAs as part of their retirement portfolios. You need to contact Augusta Precious Metals and get their free guide!  Text "TEAM" to 68592 or go to https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/ Vitamin 1 Water ⬇️ (VETERAN OWNED & OPERATED) Hydrate Your Health! https://www.amazon.com/stores/Vitamin1/page/EE9B1311-273B-4D86-B4D7-D8BD1CFE62F8?ref_=ast_bln ELECTROLYTE AND B-VITAMIN ENHANCED / SUGAR-FREE / CAFFEINE-FREE / DYE-FREE / GLUTEN-FREE / NUT-FREE / KOSHER / 4 DELICIOUS FLAVORS / JUST 5 CALORIES PER 8OZ. SERVING Buy Vitamin 1 here⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/stores/Vitamin1/page/EE9B1311-273B-4D86-B4D7-D8BD1CFE62F8?ref_=ast_bln --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #cia #espionage #spyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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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 hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 234 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. And our guest on tonight's show is David McCloskey.

He is a reformer CIA analyst. He is the author of Damascus Station. This one was very well reviewed. Came out like two years ago. Two years ago. This is the new one that's coming out in October, Moscow X. So next month, this one will be out. I read an advanced copy that your publisher was nice enough to send me.

Really good book. So we're excited to talk to you about your work and your career in the intelligence community as well. So thank you for joining us, David. And I got to let people know about our sponsor up front, Augusta Precious Metals. If you guys text team to 6852 or go to Augusta Preciousmetals.com. They are one of our sponsors. I hope you guys will check them out. So thank you for doing that.

So, David, I want to jump right into it with you. Tell us a little bit about sort of like what your upbringing was like and what your career track was, like, what took you towards the intelligence community. Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me, guys. It's fun to be here. Yeah, thanks a comment.

So I grew up in the Midwest, mostly in Minneapolis. I as a kid just read tons of thrillers and spy fiction and, you know, devoured all kinds of nonfiction books about the world. And, you know, I kind of had it from an early age, I think, a sense of like, and there's no sense that I wanted to join CIA, but the sense of like, I'm interested in the world. I want to travel. I want to understand how things work, right? I went to college at a small place outside of Chicago, and we had a guy come through who ran at the time, the Middle East Analytic Shop. So he was like coming through the University of Chicago doing recruiting stuff, and he was an alum of my school. It was called Wheaton College.

And he came through kind of just to like talk to an IR 101 class, which I was in. And I ended up kind of getting in in a way that I'm sure would make a lot of our, you know, OSS-4bears turn over in their graves. But it was basically a guy showing up at a small liberal arts, you know, Midwestern school and saying, hey, you know, here's what the CIA is. Here's what a CIA analyst does. And talking to class and I thought it sounded awesome. I mean, it felt at the time, like literally my work experience was I'd been, I'd been, I'd been, digging holes for a sprinkler system company, and I had been a cashier at Wendy's.

Like, that was literally the resume. Like, no joke. That was the resume that got turned in. And so when the CIA comes to campus, it's like, all right, this seems pretty interesting. I'm sure I won't get in, but let me just apply. And I ended up going through the process, and I think, you know, it turns out one of the things that,

if you go into a small liberal arts, Midwestern Protestant school, you know, you're pretty good at passing polygraphs because you got like, you haven't done anything really. really wrong and you've got this kind of base load level of guilt going that's really helpful for the polygrapers so they know you're not a sociopath. And I got in. So I actually joined as an undergrad intern. So I took the poly and the full lifestyle, poly and all the medical and all that kind of stuff, psych exams, interviews, all that at 19. And I showed up the summer when I I was 20 as an intern.

And they threw me, you know, I kind of describe it this way. Like the CIA, at least from an analytic standpoint, basically hires for kind of two major profiles, again, oversimplification, but helpful. One is like somebody who was extremely knowledgeable on a particular topic. Like they lived in Russia for 15 years and they did their dissertation on blah, blah, blah,

and like that's, they speak the language and they bring that person on, put them on Russia. And then the agency goes after really, you know, pretty young people who they think they can, you know, make into good analysts and get them pretty early, right? So I fell into that group, got in and, you know, quickly realized that it, you know, was a pretty big step up from Wendy's. And I was, I loved it. I worked the first summer. They put me on Syria. Still to this day, I don't really know why. It's pretty random, I think. And mostly just because the guy who came to recruit was running the Middle East shop at the time. And the first summer I was there was the 34-day war between

Israel and Hezbollah, which, you know, this was 2006. 2006, that's right. So the account, you know, at that time, it was pretty small. There just weren't that many people working on Syria or on Lebanon. And so I had the opportunity to, you know, participate in a lot of briefings and to write stuff that, like, you know, I probably had no business doing. But it was one of those things where you've got a team of like five or six and you're short on people and there's a war on. So, you know, the intern is a member of the team, right? And I was fully cleared and working. So got hooked on it dead. And then the next summer I came back. So I go to school, you know, come back for my second summer. And that was the run up to when the Israelis bombed Al-Qi Bar.

And so I was thoroughly hooked after those two summers. It felt like, man, this is exciting. I kind of am getting a sense of like, how does the world actually function? How do governments work? How does this region work? Right? And that was really addictive to me. So did that for two summers, got the full-time offer and jumped in. And I pretty much worked on Syria the whole time I was there. That is like pretty wild.

I don't think I've heard on this show. I don't think we've heard of somebody who like walked through the door quite that young. Yeah, I was very young. Yeah, a lot of people who were like they had graduate degrees or they had a military career or they had a law career. a law career or there are lawyers or something. I mean, coming in as an intern at, what did you say 19 when you first started? Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. But great. Yeah, it felt it felt like, you know, it was one of those things that even at that age. I was kind of thinking this seems like a mistake. I'm too, you know, I'm too young to be doing this. But, you know, I think,

I think there's a logic to getting people in the pipeline young. And frankly, they're now looking back on it. You know, there's an element here of like the further you get into a four-year degree, the less likely it is that you're going to pass a lifestyle, Polly. And so if the agency can kind of give you, you know, a pathway early, it creates incentives to not do things that make you flunk out, you know. So for folks out there watching, and I know that there, you often are a lot of young people watching these shows that are interested in pursuing a career in the intelligence community. Can you could lay out what your job as an analyst was for people who just have like no

knowledge and just, you know, they, maybe they understand we have spies out there meeting in cafes with people and trying to get information. But what's the analyst side of it? Yeah. So I think, you know, there's some flaws in this analogy, but I think it's helpful to explain it to people who don't understand the inner workings of the agency. Like I think about it in a way as clandestine in journalism, right? there's a story that you're writing for, and the job is primarily, you know, writing and briefing, right?

You're answering a question, a story for a consumer of that information, and that could be the president, that could be the director of the CIA, that could be, you know, the Secretary of Defense, that could be people on the National Security Council, you know, people who are making policy, right, or informing policy, we're sort of, we're not doing that, right? We're providing an input to the policymaking process that is trying to answer a particular question about what's going on in the world and why does it matter for us and what might we be able to do to shape that thing to be more amenable to our interests. So you're taking in, as part of that process, you're taking in all different kinds of information, right? So you might have, let's take Syria as an example, we might have human sources that have access to people inside the government who are providing us information. secrets, right? They're providing us with secrets from Syria that help us understand better and, you know, what the Syrians are thinking are doing about a particular topic. There's satellite imagery. There's, you know, open source press stuff. There's academic field work. There's signals intercepts, phone calls, faxes, emails, things like that. You're taking all that information in

and trying to make sense of it to answer that question for the policymaker. So, you know, the parallels to journalism are, okay, you've got sources, right? You have people, let's take the case of, you know, human sources as an example. Like, you've got people who are providing us information that maybe they shouldn't be. So if you're writing a story about, you know, corporate misdeeds in the United States, you might have sources inside that company who are providing you with, you know, with email records or things like that from inside the corporation. They shouldn't be. You have to think about asset protection and how you actually communicate with that person, all that kind of stuff. But in this context, it's information that's, you know, highly classified and obtained in ways that were the sources and methods known, people would get killed or valuable collection programs would be compromised.

So you're putting all this stuff together and, you know, frankly, the output of it, you know, is a little bit underwhelming in some cases because it's like you might take a very serious, complicated topic like what's going to happen next in Syria, right? which is the thing we were constantly trying to answer in 2011 and 2012 and 2013, and you boil it down to like a page or two. And that goes to, you know, whatever that, you know, whoever that senior policymaker is, and it's one piece of the information that they receive on that topic, but you're sort of feeding, you're feeding that consumer base with information about these questions that are important to the policy making process.

And that's pretty much what you're doing as an analyst, you know. And it's distinct from other aspects of, you know, the primary other job inside CIA, although there are many, is, you know, the folks who actually trying to recruit, develop, you know, and spot human assets and actually collect that information. So I'm distinct from a collector of information and that I'm analyzing the information that the collectors provide. But you guys could assist them in finding like, hey, this guy in this ministry, would be a prime target for you to try to pitch. Yeah, exactly. Like we would help in the process of, now, you know, oftentimes,

there's a lot of stovepiping in this business, right? These are big bureaucracies that don't always function particularly well. But in an ideal world, yes, you know, we were providing input to the collectors on where there might be gaps. There are, you know, our particular analysts with like targeting specialties who do a lot of the work that you're describing there, which is like, here's the 15 people, you know, that we'd be interested in, you know, in knowing more about inside the Syrian MOD, right? And here are the gaps that we have about, you know, the Syrian militaries, plans and intentions

and capabilities and kind of feed that stuff to the collectors and the hopes that they can go and find people who actually have that information. What was that, that communication pipeline like for you as a junior analyst and then as you know, as you grew and became known or became sort of got your bone of fetes in the sense of first you're receiving information and you're always receiving information, right? Whether there's the message traffic that's coming through, but you're putting your analysis, you know, on it. But were there, I know that there are specific people for taskings, but how much input would you have in those tasks? Could you reach out to a case officer and say,

hey, these are some other pieces of the puzzle. Not necessarily this is a person you should target, but in these sources or these assets that you have, you know, these are the pieces that were sort of missing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that was very hit or miss depending on the personalities involved. I think I can think of a number of examples where, you know, it felt like we just couldn't really get close to the collectors

on things, and then others where, you know, we would actually be in the meetings with the assets because we, you know, knew a ton about the particular topic that that asset was feeding and, you know, sort of the assets reporting on and were a helpful partner for the case officer in conducting that meeting, right, to get the information. Because ideally, you'd say, we're in lockstep with the collectors because we're, you know, really the most down stream part of the process before we get to the consumer, right? So there's a lot of value in the analysts and the collectors being really linked up. But I found it was pretty spotty, how solid that connective tissue was.

And, you know, I think that's, you know, we talked a little bit before the show about modernization. I think that was, you know, one of the primary, you know, sort of problem statements in that, in that bit of a reorg was like, can we create better connection between, you know, analysts and operations and the tech folks to make sure that this place actually, you know, does espionage better. But it was, it was all over the place, truly. Well, I mean, as, you know, as sort of the shop, you know, whatever shop you're in,

as sort of the shop as the subject matter experts. I mean, were there ever instances where you could turn around to like a case officer and go, hey, none of this fits. Like your source is absolutely full of shit. You know, I would say there was a slightly different tinge to that conversation when we felt like the source was producing stuff that was bizarre. It was less direct than that. I think that when you go to the operational side, they're doing the vetting, that conversation can be that blunt, you know, not in cable traffic,

but in person. Right. But on the analytic side, it's a little bit more anodyne. It'd be like, hey, these five reports, like, they don't track with the second. Right. Like, what's going on, you know? Or just frankly, it's maybe some, a stream of reporting from an asset that's like, this isn't particularly valuable.

Yeah. You know, so we would, we would not do it that that bluntly. Right. Because we're frankly, you know, especially on, on the analytics, on the analytic side when you're not talking about like CT, like we're sort of removed enough from it where we're like not capable of making as, you know, sort of direct and harsh of a claim as that. But you never sent a cable back saying, hey, the Taliban do not have that 16s, get your shit together and fire this source.

No, I mean, but we would, we would, you know, be like, hey, this piece of like thirdhand human that you collected here is like, this is crazy. Like, what is this? You know, and that then kind of filters back into the Dio side of things where they try to piece together like, okay, the data said this is this is garbage? Here's 10 pieces of contradictory information. Did this person make it up because they wanted us to pay them? Or did they, is this a game of telephone or is this an effort to sort of, you know, is this a, a more systematic effort to sort of mislead us on a particular topic and we need to cut this person loose. So that would get kicked back to the to the DO side to sort of work through that.

Yeah. So can you tell us about the, you know, we've talked about the farm, you know, people talk about, you know, sort of their case officer training. Can you tell us about what the the analyst pipeline, how do they train somebody to be an analyst? So they, I think they took us, it's probably changed. But at the time, you know, more than 10 years ago, they basically took you off your account for somewhere between four and six months and put you at a, you know, you're still like, you weren't living away from your family, but you were going to, you know, one of these sort of outbuildings in like Hernden or Reston or one of these other places in, you know, the D.C.

Burbs. And you had a class of people who were with you, all other analysts from all over the D.I. you know, maybe 20, 25 of us. And they basically walk you through, you know, a very excruciating deep dive and how you actually think critically, which, you know, low and behold, a lot of people coming out of before your university are really smart, but don't actually know how to think critically. How do you write clearly and, you know, without value judgments or colorful language or of this kind of stuff that, you know, if you've been, again, you know, writing papers and

in our program, you know, you have, there's, you know, a voice that you might have that they try to stamp out and turn into something that's like, hey, you're writing stuff as, you're not writing as David McLaughie, right? You're the CIA. So like, what, how do you strip everything down? Yeah, this isn't an article in the New Yorker. Correct. Correct. So it's really this kind of like down, you know, take the thing down to the studs, like, how do you think? How do you write? How do you take in? We're going to give you a lot of the exercises where like, here's a packet with like 600 pieces of information. You have to write an article on this. And it's like a page. And, you know, and like how do you put together the what, the why and the so what? Substantiate it, write it clearly, you know, and do it in like, you know, a page and hand that off.

It's really hard. You know, that's, that is not something, you know, it's not a skill that's really taught in most, most undergrad programs. And frankly, if someone's coming, a lot of analysts, you know, particularly the kind of analysts who might come in more like mid-career are coming out of academic backgrounds. They're not doing that for the most part. You know, you can learn it, but a lot of people haven't been practicing that. So it's a lot of that.

A lot of briefing practice. So, like, you sit down, I mean, a lot of the customers, you know, down at, the White House or DoD or certainly in Congress are like really unpleasant to deal with. Surprise, surprise. And so, you know, how do you actually engage with somebody who, you know, you need to brief them, but they're also, you might hate the CIA. It might be a dick. You know, how do you interact with people like that? And it's a lot of role playing and a lot of writing. So you kind of, you do that for almost half a year. You end up doing also as part of that, at least you're used to a rotation where like they take you and actually put you in a different

part of the agency so that you kind of you get a different perspective on how the place works that's not on your team which I think is pretty valuable and then they put you back in and you're you're kind of on the line but that's more or less the arc of it is there for people who might be interested in this and know if they have what it takes to be an analyst is there like an industry standard textbook out there that you can get on your favorite bookseller or whatever? Is there, you know, are there any sources you would recommend? I, there's a book that's escaping me. There was a book we used, it's going to bug me. There's a book we used about intelligence analysis and sort of how you think about

or how you manage different kinds of cognitive biases when you're writing and thinking. That is kind of the, it was the foundational text in the program because so much of it is like stripping out those biases so that you actually provide objective and clear information. It's going to drive me nuts. I don't know. I'll have to double back with you on that,

but there is a good book that's publicly available that would give people a sense of like, here's, here's, if you're going through that, you know, that analyst program at CIA, like everyone's going to read this and go through it. Take two minutes to think about it if you want. I have to do this ad read here real quick. Sorry to interrupt you, but if you think of it, I'd love to take a look at it myself. So our first sponsor for tonight's show, Augusta, precious metals, if you're like me, you've wanted to buy gold for years, lots of commercials out there, but who can you really trust?

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So back to you, David. Yeah, it's... Now, with the analysis and when they're training you in this craft, is it just a matter of like eliminating your cognitive bias and how to write? Is there? Because obviously you guys are using, you know, things, you know, these, I don't know if it's, if it's declassified, but I'll, but these programs, you know, to create link chains and things like that. are they also teaching you sort of how to put these puzzles together and stuff?

Well, I am sure that the trading has become much more rigorous, like in the types of probably software programs that are used. And frankly, like now in a world where you're talking about, you know, AI-assisted search and things like I couldn't speculate exactly as to what they've, you know, how they've updated it. But you're hitting on something, which you're right that I missed, which is like, there's a weighing of, which I think is still true even in the world that we're living in now, a skill in learning how to weigh the information that you have in front of you. And frankly, so much of it is contradictory. It's like, what do you do with?

You know, you take my example of like, here's a packet of 600 sources of information. Well, you know, 150 of them are crap, but they're not going to say that. they're crap. You're going to have to figure out that they're crap. And, you know, another hundred are going to contradict the ones that you actually need to use to write. So how do you sort through that? Because it's not all just going to point in one direction, right? There's going to be stuff that points you or sends you down different rabbit trails. And so I think, yeah, you're right. It's not just the sort of elimination of bias, but it's also like, how do you figure out what's good information and what's bad information, right? That is easier said than done.

and it's often very unclear, you know, which is another reason why, like, we use a lot of, and it drives policymakers freaking nuts. They hate it because it's, we use this sort of probabilistic language, you know, or like, hey, we have, you know, medium confidence in something. Right. Well, what the hell does that? You know, what does that mean? I mean, we, we wrote stuff where it's like, we have low confidence in this assessment.

And, you know, sometimes these, like, you know, briefing where you're forced to. to go in with that kind of line. I mean, you just get this like eye roll from the, from the person across the table where they're like, geez. I mean, that's like, this is the most useless piece of garbage you could bring me. I think Obama said about the bin Laden raid when they were briefing him. And at some point, he was like, just stop making up numbers, guys. Like, it's a flip of the coin, right?

Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's, you know, that's true. And I mean, I think if I were across the table, I would have wanted to maybe reach across and strangle a younger version of me multiple times while delivering those kind of mealy-mouthed assessments. But there is a logic to it, which is like we are providing the CIA's assessment. It's not my own personal opinion. You know, if I'm a think tanker and I go down and I talk to a bunch of people on the hill, like I'm not speaking for Brookings or the American Enterprise Institute or whatever, you know,

the international crisis group. Like I'm speaking for myself. Right. agency analysts aren't doing that. And so it's a lot more, there's a pretty big rigamarole to go through to, like, actually get a piece of paper that has the CIA's judgment on it. And if you stray from that, you know, it doesn't go so well for your career. And the thing is, is that even though it's probably frustrating to the people hearing it,

even if something's low probability, if it's, you know, it's like, you know, it's sort of the carbon methodology of, you know, target assessment. even if it's low probability but it's high like high consequence you have to tell somebody right you can't that's right you can't you can't go well

we know they're going to be you know asked up at us if we go and say this is a low probability you know or low confidence sort of intelligence because the flip side to that is like if you have intelligence of a pending terror attack

right you think this is all this sort of versus BS, it's almost certainly not going to happen. But if it does happen and you were sitting on that intelligence. Right. Oh, boy. Right. That's right. Yeah. And I think, yeah, the most direct, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the CT example would be the best one where there's a, I think, you know, it's like a duty to warn, right? It's what it was called. Like, inside CTC, you would sometimes get, you know, pieces that were written or, you know, briefings that were done or it's like, I mean, the CT analysts would say, like, yeah, probably not.

But what am I, you know, I can't, what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to just kind of log off and go home without telling you about this. I mean, yeah, you can't do that. And there were a number of instances on, you know, on Syria, and even more sort of strategic topics where, you know, I felt like, okay, the impact of this is such that we need to share the sort of low confidence assessment with you, you know. But less so when you're not talking about like, you know, the impact of this being, people might die, you know.

So let's, let's jump into that because I'm continually fascinated with, with Syria and our involvement in it. It sounds like you were there from the very beginning. Yeah, you were Syria before Syria was cool. Right, right. Yeah, it was not cool at the time. Yes, that's right. It was, it was a solid one PDB a year account prior to the war.

And no more. There wasn't a whole lot of attention on it. I mean, there wasn't a few things, but it was, yeah, it, it, just spiked, obviously, once the uprising started. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, maybe we want to talk a little bit about the prologue to it. I mean, the Arab Spring, Gaddafi goes down in 2011, and then this thing migrates over

to Dara and Syria. As an analyst, sort of, what are you seeing? What's the vibe in the office around this time frame? Yeah, you know, I would say basically every analyst, once Tunisia started, which would have been December, I think, of 2010. It was before the new year. And Ben Ali goes, I think, in like January or something like that. And every analyst I know who was working on any sort of Middle Eastern autocracy

had like a piece in drafts about why it wasn't going to happen in their country. And it was said in like slightly, it wasn't said that directly, but everybody had good reasons. Low probability. Low probability. Or, you know, I think the way we ended up framing it was like, here's all the different obstacles to a protest movement, right? And let's tick through those, which was an intellectually honest way of saying.

Like, yeah, there's a lot of obstacles to it. But, you know, it was a fascinating time to be on the account. I mean, I was actually in the region in January and February. And I watched like that night of the camels and top. rear when you know when barak brought in those those goons like literally riding camels through the protesters and like swacking them with clubs and like polo stick it was crazy I remember watching that in Damascus and like you can just kind of see people in Syria watching this stuff and realizing that there was a very profound shift occurring that wasn't predictable right

But you don't know when these kind of things are going to happen, but it was akin to, I think, what happened in, you know, eastern and central Europe in 89, or all of a sudden it's just like, things are changed. And there's this mass psychological shift that occurs. In Syria, they, you know, Syrians called it like the wall of fear, right? That there was this barrier to any kind of political activity or action. or resistance to the security services and the regime apparatus. And very quickly people realized, oh, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be this way. And there was a lot of dry, you know, there was a lot of kindling. Obviously, in the country, you had pretty significant socioeconomic deprivation.

You had the lingering effects of a drought that had been going on in the east for four or five years at that point. It had led to these crazy migrations. of people around these shanty towns, you know, around Damascus and Aleppo. You had, you know, really predatory regime patronage networks that extracted from the country and from ordinary people and didn't disperse, you know, it in any way equally. You had security services that were really the only effective arm of the state at that point. You know, I mean, most of the rest of the regimes, institutions had been pretty hollowed out and were ineffective. Like the only ones that worked really were like the four major security services in Syria.

And so the population, like the surface area with the population was happening through the security services, which are, um, alibi dominated. And, um, you know, you have these kind of guys who don't make a lot of money and have to extract it through graft and corruption from the population. And it was, you know, you have a youth ball, you have, you have all the things, right? Like, so this is a place that's pretty primed for, and I mean, at that point, the Assad family had been in power for 40 years. You know, so you're dealing with a pretty ossified structure that's lost a lot of its legitimacy, right? And then all of a sudden, people thought it could be different.

And there was, in Dara, down south, there was a group of teenagers who put up some graffiti. They got arrested, and there's a whole bunch of different varying accounts on this, but were probably tortured and certainly significantly mistreated, and there was sort of a back and forth between some of the elders in the city and the security services, and the kids probably got killed, a few of them, I believe. And there were protests, and then you sort of had this cycle start of like protests, people get killed by the security services, there's funerals, more protests break out, and just

sort of spiraled from there. One of the interesting things is that those kind of incidents, like between the population and the security services had been going on for a number of years prior. You know, we tend to think of it as like, oh, nothing happened, and then all of a sudden this happened. Well, not really. Like, these kind of things had been happening. It was just that this was the first time it happened in this new context of, you know, we can, we can push for something to be different. And maybe the regime won't kill us. You know, maybe we can get away with it. And that's how it started, you know, and it started really and truly as a pretty peaceful protest movement for a while. And in the dynamics change, we can talk about if you guys like to.

But, you know, that first bit of the, of the one other thing I was. say, which I think is important, is that that first year or so of the uprising, a lot of the press, like if you go back and read the regional press, or if you read a lot of the American press, you would think that the regime had started a kind of scorched earth military campaign, like right off the bat. And it's just not true. The regime's response initially was more waffling than anything. It was this sort of haphazard use of force so that it wasn't effective and then giving concessions too little and too late so that they wouldn't actually appease people.

And they really failed in that first year, I think, from a lack of decisiveness more than anything. And then, you know, as things became more militarized, they started, you know, in early 2012 to do a much more kind of score short military campaign, which was like, we're just going to destroy. places in order to suppress the opposition. And then you had, you know, you mentioned that you were living in Damascus around this time frame. I could you talk a little bit about like your personal experience as well as like some of your observations, either workwise, but also just sort of that experience of living there and interacting with the people?

Yeah. So look, I was there before the uprising started. Okay. I love, I mean, it was a. absolutely beautiful city filled with people who, you know, were incredibly generous to most Americans that they met. It is a, you know, wonderfully, especially in the center, I mean, wonderfully cosmopolitan place, exceptional food, exceptional cult. Like, it's just, I loved it. And it had a very kind of undefiled feel to it because it, you know, it hadn't been, you know, it hadn't really been open to a lot of sort of Western consumerism

because of the sanctions. It's a very like Arab city. Yeah, that's right. And it just was pretty a magical place. You know, and it was filled like at the time, any Syrian, even though you could kind of see that people were watching what was going on in the region and starting, you could kind of almost see the gears turning when you would talk to them. But if you asked them the question of like, hey, could this happen here? They'd be like, no. You know, there's no way. Like, it won't happen here.

But you could, you could also tell that like something is shifting in it profoundly in the way that that people. Pause it with a cigarette held between two fingers. Looking off into the distance for a moment. Just kind of looking off into the distance. Yeah, there's a certain like a certain wonder, I think, to seeing something like that happen. Right. But I love, I love the city.

and you know it was interesting though like being in damascus and then like i went down i mean i drove down to darah a month before things started because there's this really beautiful uh roman amphitheater down there and that city you can just like the vibes are so different a city you get out of the car and was that palmyra you know no no uh darah oh outside okay yeah yeah uh And I just did like a day trip down there. And as soon as you get out of the car, it's like this feeling of, hey, people are looking at you like, they don't want you here. And it had a very different feel to it that when I look back and kind of think about the way the protest movement started, you could just kind of, it's one of those places where you can kind of feel the suffering, you know, and the fact that this is a people who are being excluded from the cultural life. the economics and the politics of the state, right? And we're pretty, we're pretty primed for

something. It felt very different from Damascus. And I mean, we can, we move the timeline forward if you want to talk about how it developed from there. What of course stands out in my mind that I'd like to hear your, your thoughts on is how the, a protest movement led to an armed insurrection. and then how that became specifically Islamized, I think is probably the topic to hit. Well, so, you know, the regime had an interest from early days in militarizing the conflict because it could not figure out how to deal with, you know, a large, pretty peaceful protest movement, which was like, hey, people are just out in the streets on Friday in large numbers, demanding significant political change.

Like it's very, this was not a government that could deal with that. And so they did have an interest in creating and helping to create an armed opposition to itself so that it could fight it and it could create fault lines that already existed in the society around largely ethnic and sectarian lines, but it could sort of firm those up and use them as a way to divide and kind of conquer the political system. And one of the things that the regime did was they released jihadis from Sednaia in April, I think of 2011. They released a number of guys who had fought in Iraq and who had come back and who had been

arrested probably by SMI, Syrian military intelligence, you know, for activities in Syria. And a lot of those guys, you know, from Idlib up in the Northwest, and they became the founders of a number of very successful Salafi Jihadist groups that fought against the regime. And they were let go in April of 2011. So I think the regime fed some of this. At the same time, you also had people. and many of them were Iraq war veterans who had fought against us in Iraq and then had gone back to Syria. You know, you had people who very reasonably saw that the regime wasn't going to ansell itself

and who hated the security services with a passion for good reason in many cases and who were very excited about the prospect after a few months of protests and the realization of like, hey, regime's not going to do anything to go out and kill security services officers, right? Many of whom are Alawi, and most of the Sunni insurgents were Sunni era.

So there was a dynamic that started really, I mean, I think it was by spring of 2011, we were starting to see like, hey, there are some low levels of violence here that could get out of control pretty quickly. And from there, it just kind of, you know, you had the dynamic of just that sort of spiral internally, but then you started to have, you know, external actors getting involved to sort of equip and, you know, fun and train it. First of all, in a very haphazard way, but, you know, they sort of fuel those dynamics internally.

and that became violent. And are you talking about like the 2011 to like 2012-13 timeframe? Yeah, that's right. How was, what was American policy like at that time? Because initially, like we were saying that Assad was a reformer. You know, we were all on, you know, his side. and then then our policy is saying he's got to go and right and how one how did that influence if it did you guys and two do you you like if if if the u.s says Assad has to go do people in the country who are against his regime

do they feel like that's the wink wink we got you boo type of attitude. Yeah, I think that's spot on. I mean, you know, I would say, and there were different sort of phases to the way we engage with this, but one thing that was consistent throughout was the chasm between our rhetoric and what we actually did. You know, there was just a tremendous gap the entire time between what we would say and what happened actually on the ground and what we did. that made everybody confused, not in a good way. You know, it wasn't... You mean people in Syria?

Say that again? When you say it made everybody confused, do you mean people in Syria? Do you mean people at the agency? People in Syria, allies in the region, you know, I think we had, you know, Syrians who thought, okay, if you say, which I think, I believe President Obama in like the late summer of 2011, said Assad needs to step aside. Yeah. I know Hillary said it.

I don't know if Obama said. I know Hillary did. And, you know, Syrians took that to mean, okay, they're good. The Americans are going to help us make him step aside for the most part. And, you know, Arab partners, Saudis, George, you know, sort of said, okay, that means you're going to help to, you know, fund and back. maybe equip and train and opposition, right? And I think that we, we just sort of got half pregnant on that. You know, it was like, we're going to do some things, kind of, in a very tepid way, we're not really going to get involved. And we never provided any kind of clarity.

And I think the regime pretty quickly figured this out and sort of used it to its advantage. but we just never were able to muster. And there's a good conversation we could have about whether it would have been in the cards for us to really be involved in a much more robust way to effectively create an alternative to Assad. I'm not sure if that would have ever been possible. But we didn't do ourselves any favors by getting totally over our skis with what we said. Right. what was going on on the ground. And I think, you know, honestly, what was going on with a lot of the stuff, we were writing

and with our engagement with the NSC was like they had watched, they meeting the White House had watched, Ketunisia goes, Mubarak goes. Now, his regime doesn't go, but like he's gone. Gaddafi's gone. Never mind that we acted as the Air Force for that. But let's put that aside for a second. And so there was this sort of narrative of like, this is predetermined. He's gone.

It's just a matter of the circumstances. And so I think that the Obama administration thought that they could kind of step to the side, say whatever they wanted. And in like six to eight months, he would be gone. And that would be a win for U.S. policy. And so it was really a policy of sort of strategic communications above all. else and then you step to the side and sort of let history do its work. And the Syrian regime is a lot more resilient and determined than any of these other sort of, you know, political systems that had gone down.

So they didn't. But that was the dynamic at the time. So anything we put out as analysts, they would talk about Assad staying power or some of these sort of violent dynamics and the conflict. Like there wasn't there wasn't a receptive audience, you know, down to. town for that kind of stuff. And it's weird that, you know, after like Tito and Yugoslavia, after Saddam, you know, after Gaddafi and the violence and, you know, reactivation of the slave trade and all this other stuff, that like America still hasn't learned that lesson is, yes, there are some really shitty people running these countries. But then when you eliminate this shitty person who's just shitty for the for the fact of being shitty. that, you know, these randomly drawn countries

break down into sectarian, tribal, like, warfare, and we have no solution for it. Right. We're like, we don't like you, so you're gone, and everybody left over. Sorry about that, but, hey, you don't have a dictator anymore. Right. Yeah, I've struggled with this, too,

because I think it's probably pretty challenging to, like, look back, the past generation of U.S. foreign policy decision making and think that we've done a good job. You know, it's been not great. And significantly worse than the generation of foreign policy making decisions that sort of came before it. And I don't quite know why that is. And I think, I mean, Syria is symptomatic of that where you look at it.

You say, okay, well, guys, you know, you don't have to be a genius to look at the ethnic and sectarian makeup of this country. and to do a quick breeze through how the security services are organized, to kind of understand that, like, this thing isn't going to break well, you know? So maybe we should be more thoughtful about, you know, or at least more cognizant that it's been designed that if you break it, it's going to explode and destroy the country. You know, that was a thing that was known inside,

the intelligence community at the time was like you can't rip this thing apart without a significant amount of bloodshed. Now we could debate whether that's worthwhile to, you know, achieve some political outcome. But like, it's not going to go well. I mean, all you had to do was look at the way that Iraq broke and say like, well, okay, this is going to be a huge mess. And there is some sort of willful blindness to that that I'm still not quite sure where it comes from or why it's persisted for so long. Right. As you talk about this, I have to wonder if there isn't an aspect, as cynical as I am about, about the real politic of things, but that there's maybe an ideological bent at the White House. I mean, you remember Obama would give that

quote about, you know, the arc of history moves towards truth or something like this. And it sounds like that's what you're saying, that there's this idea that we could step aside and history would move in the right direction towards democracy. Yeah. I think that. I think that. That was a significant part of it. I also think, you know, you look at the, I think, you know, that administration in particular came in and said, like, we don't want any more problems in the Middle East, please no. And I think there was this sort of this, like, knee-jerk, like, you know, like, let's just do nothing. We had just pulled out of Iraq, too, to.

Right, right, yeah. And there is probably, you know, again, it's like, yes, we should not be spending, you know, we should not be spending 80% of our national security decision making time on this region. That's a mistake. We're over rotated. Excuse me. But you also, but that doesn't mean that we can just sort of, and I think, I mean, ultimately where I, where I fault them, because I wouldn't. I don't envy the decisions they had to make. And I don't think that Syria, like, there was no clean answer here from the get-go period. But, you know, it's sort of willful ignorance to just basically run the policy as a communications policy and kind of let everything else drag behind it in a really sort of, you know, incoherent and flaccid manner. You just can't drag all the other elements of policy behind comms. That's, I think, what the mistake was.

So as that incoherent, flaccid policy played itself out, you have the rise of ISIS. They bust across an international border into Iraq, wage a genocide against the Yazidis and Xinjar, start moving towards Baghdad. Now we have what we would probably call in the military a cluster fuck. A full-blown. A technical term. A cluster-fifle. sandwich. A shit sandwich once again in that region.

And as we discussed this, I think one of the other important things to talk about is, I don't know what your view is. I'd like to ask you. But I get the sense that there were some conflicting missions because there was on one hand the removal of the Assad regime. There's a regime change program, but there was also a counter ISIS program. and so now we are trying to remove the government but also the group that is also trying to remove the government like whoa what the hell are we doing here and and i mean i want to caveat that by even saying you know and to some degree we could because you mentioned the salafas right that that the regime had released and suddenly these people who ostensibly orchestrated nine

11, right? This group of Islamic fundamentalists are now our allies in the region and we're, and this is pre-ISIS, and we're arming them and giving them the weaponry that, you know, to overthrow Assad or Bashir, and they're like, oh, maybe we'll go this direction instead, right? I mean, is that, is that accurate that? I think we were, I mean, look, you know, it's, it's a war zone. It's a civil war. So there's going to be mess around where things end up and all of that, right? That said, I think we were careful about ensuring that we were not linked up with, you know,

Salafi jihadists of the global bent, let's say, which I think in this context in Syria is an important distinction and is one that is often kind of lost in the conversation. It was like, there was a distinction between groups that were of that, you know, a very sort of conservative Sunni Islamist bent, but were, you know, not at all thinking about attacking Europe or allies us, you know, outside of Syria, like they were prosecuting. Yeah, there was a hope that there would be Islamic nationalists like the Muslim Brotherhood or even the Taliban as opposed to waging external ops. And those groups existed in Syria, right?

That was a real dynamic in the war from, you know, pretty early on. But I do think that and this is, you know, just the reality of this conflict was like, I mean, was there ever an opportunity to really create an alternative to Assad that would have been palatable to us, you know, that could have taken power in Damascus, controlled most of the country? Right. And administered the place in a way that was like friendlier to our interests. You know, I mean, man, that is, it's hard for me to imagine. It really is. And, you know, I think, Jack, to your point, like the CT, I actually give us higher marks on the CT mission, right?

Because we were much more coherent, like the Syria policy when ISIS started to become a much more significant issue, sort of broke into two pieces was like, you know, sort of the anti-regime policy, which was an individual. coherent mess and the anti-ISIS campaign, which, you know, we, you know, you talk about all kinds of problems there, but like was much more coherent in its objectives and in its resourcing. We had, you know, a tremendous gap between rhetoric and resourcing on the regime side, the anti-regime side, I think on the counter ISIS side, that gap was much narrower, right? we were resourcing a fight to achieve an objective of diminishing the territory and influence of the Islamic State. But the Syria policy effectively kind of became a counter-Isis policy and the regime

stuff just kind of pilled away, in my opinion, over that period of time. Because it was also getting to the point where it's like, you know, Assad, you know, that sort of corresponded with the Russian intervention in the fall of 2015. Assad starts to retake ground on the backs of Russian air power, and it becomes pretty clear by, you know, 16 or 17 that he's not going anywhere, in my opinion. And that's why the counter regime programs kind of, you're saying they just sort of faded away naturally over time as this became sort of an unrealistic option. I think so. I don't, again, I don't think we ever really said that, right? I mean, you know, it just sort of became more or less a fact of our. our policy that like, okay, we're just going to, I honestly think something collectively happened inside the national security bureaucracy where everyone just kind of threw their hands up

and said, you know what, like, it's too hard. We're just not going to do anything with it. The big inflection point, I mean, didn't it come after Gouda and some of the chemical weapons attacks and Obama was talking? There's this talk about the red line. And there were things that got, there were the machinery. of the U.S. government and the Department of Defense, I was ready to go in and drop the hammer.

Yeah. And, I mean, Obama took that kind of like famous walk in the Rose Garden with his national security advisor and came back and said, no, we're not going to do it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I do think that that was an inflection point for sure. I mean, I think it was that August or September of 13

after the attack in Duma. And, you know, know, that is another great example of just the sort of, hey, here's, that is the primary example of we said this thing. Yeah. And we did just, it's like, we just didn't, we just didn't do anything. And, you know, that one is, I think particularly agreed just to me because we didn't have to remove the regime. We, we could have just punished it. Which is what militarily. Trump ended up doing early in his presidency. Yeah, like we could have done that, you know, multiplied by 10 and said, this is what happens. Don't do it again. You know, um, you

it again, it's going to be five times worse than this. And we chose not to for reasons I still, I still struggle with. And so I, let's see, pushing the conflict forward. We get to that 2016, 2017 time frame. Now the U.S. military is in northeastern Syria, linked up with the, the SDF, you know, the Kurds that we've cobbled together into this Arab alliance. How did things start to, you know, move? How did this conflict evolve from an American foreign policy and even, you know, defensive strategy standpoint? Well, I mean, so at that point, things were pretty cantonized, right?

I mean, you effectively had, like, the idea that Syria would sort of be reconstituted in the near term as like a functioning political entity was basically gone. The regime was still very weak relative to, you know, pre-uprising, but had kind of coalesced into, you know, the most powerful militia in the country. And you had, what, I mean, five external powers that were, you know, intervening in some former fashion on the regular, you know, us, the Israelis, the Iranians, the Turks, the Russians. So, you know, you ended up, I mean, my frame for the conflict at some point sort of became like, this is just a bunch of warlord fiefdoms.

Yes. And it's not useful. It's like the concept of Syria, like is ceasing to be a useful analytic construct. Like, it's just a bunch of, you know, mafioso groups that are fighting over populations and resources with the help of different foreign backers. And, you know, we, you know, I think our presence there in that time period still made some sense in the counter ISIS mission. And, you know, this is maybe not a help, like, there's probably some problems with this analytical. frame, but like I kind of look at the very small number of Americans that we had in Afghanistan that sort of supported this broad. There was this broader architecture of like elite

cohesion and political will to do things that was bucked up by having us there. And I think having a small number of Americans up in the Northeast like sort of does the same thing for many of our partners. So there, you know, I sort of see there being continued value in that. But, you know, we effectively came to a point where the Syria policy as articulated by really both the, you know, sort of the Trump and the Biden White House's kind of became, you know, at some point I saw something, it was like five or six different kind of policy objectives. And it's like this, there's almost so much here that there's nothing. And it's just on this kind of autopilot of, right.

Let's make sure there isn't some kind of like catastrophic terror attack. in Europe or in the United States that emanates from this place, be it ISIS or be at some of the sort of, you know, OG al-Qaeda guys who took up ruse there in the Northwest. And, you know, it really just kind of sputtered out of the headlines. I'm sure it has sputtered out of like significant, you know, the number of like deputies committee and principals committee meetings in the White House on Syria in the past, you know, a few years,

I'm sure has just gone down to nothing. It's really, I don't know, it's on one sense. It's just, it's sort of like analytically very difficult to come up with anything useful to say on like what we should do. And, you know, it's just like everything that's just kind of sputtered out in a very sort of profoundly unsatisfying way. Into a status quo. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Where I, you know, I think at some point, you know, the regime will probably continue to claw back some. parts in like the Northwest and whatnot, and maybe eventually in the Northeast, you know, if we decide

to leave and if they can reach some kind of deal with, you know, with the Kurds up there, which both of those things would would feel pretty reasonable to me. But I think that, you know, the Syrian regime is a very patient entity or the militia that used to be known as the Syrian regime. It's a very patient entity. And they'll just kind of wait. I mean, I think it's a generation of waiting for them. And I mean, I think you touched upon it, but before moving on, I mean, is that how you see our presence, our continued American military presence in northeast Syria? To your mind, it's about maintaining that status quo, about assuring some of our allies and about ensuring that there aren't external ops directed out of Syria. Yeah, that's how I see it at this point.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and I think relative to the amount of, you know, blood and treasure that's been expended, it feels to me like it's a pretty reasonable investment at this point. And it's kind of, I don't know, it's one of those things where you look at it and you say, well, it could be a lot worse, right? There could be a lot, you know, there could be extra total attacks plan from Syria regularly, right? You could have a situation where, you know, the Islamic State or rump elements of it begin to take more tears. So there's all kinds of sort of bad outcomes that I could imagine if we did not have a small presence there. That to my mind, sort of if I'm putting my, you know, my policymaker shoes on, it probably continues to justify us having that presence there.

I also think that I bet if you took a poll amongst Americans and asked them, you know, do we have troops in Syria? right now. I do wonder if people, my sense is most people, I mean, A, wouldn't know where Syria was on the map. And then B would probably say, say, no, they're all, they're all in Ukraine now or something crazy like that, you know. So. And as for you personally, as your career went on in the, in the agency, how did you feel about all these developments? One thing after the next, as we slide into this sort of, from this sort of, a fantastical thinking about regime change and democracy. to the sort of like status quo. I don't want to use the term frozen conflict.

It's not that. But it is a sort of a status quo conflict from an American point of view. Yeah. You know, it made me really sad, actually, mostly. And it honestly was one of the reasons why I started writing the thing that became Damascus Station, the first book, was because, you know, I had lived there at that point.

I'd spent most of my young adult life at that stage working on this country and thinking about it and a lot of friends who were Syrian and like it just made me really sad because the human element of it, you know, we talked about that analytic training up front in our conversation. Like, you're sort of conditioned when you're writing at the agency to like strip a lot of the humanity out of things and to just report, report things from a higher level, right? Like that human element, the emotions that come with it are not, you know, They're not encouraged in the writing. And when the war became,

this kind of, when it became clear, it was going to be this long, bloody kind of grind. And that, you know, we were more interested in prolonging the suffering of the Assad regime than we were in resolving the conflict. I mean, I don't think we were in a position to resolve the conflict, but I think we got to a point where effectively we said, look, there needs to be more violence so the regime comes to the table to stop. You know, just as a person, as a human, I kind of, you know, with some skin in the game in the country

and obviously a lot less skin than any Syrian had, but with more than most Americans, man, I was just like pretty frustrated and really kind of wrecked by it. And so when I left, you know, I just, kind of started to, I started to write as a way to kind of deal with that. Because at the, at the kind of heart level, it just didn't really, it stopped kind of sitting well with me. And there was a point where it became a little hard to kind of just maintain that, that, you know, 30,000 foot view, like just the facts kind of perspective, because it just felt like, oh, well, you know, we're going to have just millions and millions of people who are going to get displaced and this whole country

is going to get wreck. All the infrastructure is going to be destroyed. It's going to get taken over in pieced out by the worst warlords and psychopaths in the game here. And, you know, the people who suffer are going to be all the normal people who are like, hey, I just want to go and work at the bakery and, you know, sell cars and like, you know, just do all the normal stuff and go to school. And like, it's just all those people who are the ones who end up being, you know, the sort of, um, the collateral damage and these kind of conflicts. And it just kind of made me sick. And what year was that that you left?

I left in 14. Okay. Yeah. Now, out of curiosity, like, um, not defending Assad because Assad like Saddam, like Tito, like they're, they're shitty human beings, right? Like, they're not good people.

But were those people in those, you know, villages and those outlying areas outside of the regime terror? Were they still able to, like, live their lives prior to the warlords? Like, before the uprising started? Yes. Or, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, it kind of, like, it wasn't, I mean, for a lot of people, it was pretty desperate, right?

Right. But it wasn't this. Right. It wasn't. And that's not. Heads being set off in the town square. Right, right. And, well, yeah, you didn't have half the population displaced and, you know, you didn't have a 90% poverty rate and you didn't have, you know, $250 billion of infrastructure damage or any of these kind of things. But, you know, the thing that I, I think one of the most sad things about this is that you look at the way the society was sort of divided and you look at the way the regime was constructed.

And there is a certain inevitability to the violence and chaos and the destruction of like you can't, you know, Hafez al-Assad designed his government so that you couldn't just like excise him and the family. Right. And the country continues to function and you put better people in and then you're rolling. Like he designed it so that you couldn't do that without an extreme level of violence and that most people understood. that so that they didn't do it. Right. So, you know, but I struggle with this idea of like there was a certain inevitability to the way this went down, or at least you would have said it's probably the most likely outcome, right?

And on the one hand, and on the other hand, you look at the people who came out to protest early on, who were essentially asking for dignity in a system that deprived them of that. Right. And that kind of contrast is just, I think, really a devastating one because you look at the reasonableness and the humanity of a lot of those people, right, who are like, hey, I just don't want to have to get approval to get married from the local head. of the political security directorate or I don't want to pay bribes to add a second floor to my home that will impoverish my family and I need that space in order to sort of house my kids like

they're like what do you think this is New York you could not legally work you can not get a passport yeah I mean yeah it's so you know and we see this and again I mean I think Iraq is a great example in the sense of Saddam was horrible, his sons were horrible, the things that they've done to the Kurds, to their own citizens. It's well documented.

We know about it. And then, you know, when we look at a regime like Assad, when we look at these regimes, like what, particularly in the Arab world, I think, because we do have the Salafi kind of

hanging out in the wings, right? Like ready, the swaffis. What, like, for you, with your experience and your knowledge, if we were to rewind time and you were the king of America and could make the decisions, do you think there were right or wrong decisions to make in that area? Yeah, I, um, I think that we, Boy, you know, it is, it's the absolute hardest question to answer. I think there was probably a period of time that was like the first six months where, and again, you know, I think from a, I struggle with, I struggle with answering the question because on a geostrategic level, when you look at Syria, like, not from a human level, but from the strategic, like, is it worth it, right?

Like, is it worth the amount of attention that we pay on a country that at the time, you know, it's 22 million people. They don't have nuclear weapons. They don't have oil. They have geography that matters, right? But that's kind of it. So I struggle with whether we would ever be able to really effectively resource something that's like, hey, let's help create a political alternative to the regime that exists. But I think there was a period in those first six months where, where we may have had an opportunity to, you know, more effectively support the protest movement

and to create, try to create, you know, some kind of coalition inside the region and in Europe that could have done more to support peaceful protest in the country and to try to try to to create, you know, some kind of, you know, concession, some kind of structure where there might have been concessions from the regime or, you know, at least cultivating that protest movement. I think we could have done more, but as soon as it went violent and started to get really violent kind of that fall into the, you know, early 2012, so like eight to 12 months down the road from when the protests first started, you know, There just weren't there weren't institutions in the country, groups in the country that we could have really probably affected, like supported to affect change that would have been amenable with our interest.

That would have been really hard and it's hard for me to imagine what that could have looked like for sure. But I think more could have been done early on. But would it have led to a different outcome? I don't know. I just think that we could have done more. well and you know like sometimes when I look at these situations I wonder why Assad and not Mugabe like

why aren't we going like you know why why do we pick one but if they had a substantial protest movement against Mugabe maybe we would have you know maybe but the thing is it it's it's just a question why do we pick yeah right why not why not me and Mara Right. One dictator over another, you know, to say, oh, this person's a shitty person. You know, I mean, look at Gaddafi, right?

Gaddafi was playing ball with us, essentially. Well, you know, I think that if Gaddafi, if the dominoes had gone down in a different order, I think we might have done to Assad what we did to Gaddafi or something closer. That was Assad's fear, wasn't it? Well, it was. And the fact that Libya wasn't, the fact that Libya wasn't going so well, that, you know, pretty early that spring was kind of like, hey, we're already over rotated here, guys. We can't go and do something in Syria. You know, if Syria had gone, if the order had been Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and not Libya in there, you know, we might be looking at a very different region right now.

but yeah i mean you know your your point's a good one of like why why assad and you know why not others and you know i think i do think there was an element here of um he was vulnerable he he's vulnerable and you know there's there are always these kind of um fever dreams of you know we're going to roll back iranian influence right um You know, with him, with Assad being such a critical Iranian ally, I think there was a sense of like, well, we can deal the Iranians at below here. Yes. Which that, that mattered to, I think, a lot of the people making policy. Yeah.

In that season, for sure. But we can go back to the Bush administration and say sort of the same thing. Is it like Iran has never been a friend of ours. And Saddam, for all of his evils and faults, was all. always an opponent of Iran. And yet we're like, oh, screw you. And somehow are policymakers, because I don't want to say the analysts, because analysts, I think are brilliant.

Like analysts, I think, see this stuff. And whether people pay attention to them or not is, you know, is another issue. Yeah. But the whole idea, you know, you talk about our recent history, right? our recent administrations, you know, in World War II, it's like, if you break it, you buy it. Like, we're not leaving Germany until Germany's self-sufficient. We don't just hand it over. Like in Iraq, we go, you go in, you break it and you go, here are you guys.

We're not occupiers. We don't want to be occupiers. Yeah, this gift of democracy. It's the gift of democracy. We're just going to hang out and help you, but we're not going to rebuild all the infrastructure. That's right. Well, and I think, you know, I think if you dug like Metternick out of his grave or you took some of the guys who helped build the system after World War II, you know, and you sat them down and you're like, hey, I'm going to give you like a two-hour briefing on U.S. policy in the Middle East over the past 25 years. I mean, they would probably leave that and be like, you guys are morons.

Yeah. Like what I don't understand fundamentally what you've done. Right. And like it is, it's hard. I'm drastically oversimplifying, but you know, as you kind of look back at the arc of all this and think about the way that Syria fits into it, you're just like, I don't understand. Like, I do not, I don't get. It has to be the case that there is some combination here of like this region doesn't matter all that much to us. Right.

really we can't be you know i would say low marks for the sort of uh humans who have been making most of the policy over the past two generations on this you know so like or the past generation on this like they haven't done a good job and you know we're also sort of profoundly enamored with this region so there's sort of these fantasies about it that make us behave in very or rational ways. Stop and go. Irrational ways of like we're disengaged or, you know, we've got, we're fighting, you know, two land wars at the same time. Yeah, we can't make up our mind. Right. Yeah. So, David, you left in 2014 and what, I mean, did you have this idea that you wanted to go and be a spy novelist right off the bat? Or was there another, another job? I mean, presumably you didn't go back to being a cashier at Wendy's. I mean,

What was the next step off for you? Dust off the old red apron and go back into the business. No, I left and took a consulting job. And the thing that became Damascus Station, I started writing like, I basically had three months after I left the agency, four months after I left the agency to when I started that job. And that's when I was just kind of processing stuff and writing. and it was all very unstructured. It was very poorly written. It wasn't, I wasn't writing it to be a book.

You know, I was just kind of writing for me. And, you know, I took, the consultant job started. I kind of just put that away. And, but in that time period, I had found, like, I really love this. Like, I actually love writing. And I found it, you know, again, we kind of, we talked about that kind of, Anodyne, analytical writing that you do with the agency, I felt really like freed from that, you know, for the first time and a long time of like I can, I can actually write with emotion and color and like I can play around with language and I can play around. I can find my voice and figure out what works. And that to me was this wonderfully freeing fun process where I felt like I was really kind of, you know, in, in tune with the universe. And I, uh, I loved it. And so I ended up having an opportunity after about five years of consulting to take some time off.

And that was just burned out. And I went back to the manuscript and I reread it and I'm like, okay, this sucks. But, you know, I want to rediscover that magic. And I think I would like to write a spy novel. Like I'd like to actually try. Like I'll just see if I can do it. Right. Like write something that I want to write and write something that somebody else. else might want to read. And so I kind of came back to it, I think, with space, with maybe more maturity on the writing side to think about how do I actually craft a story that someone wants to consume. And then frankly, some distance from Syria where I wasn't just like dealing with it. I could, I could kind of harness that emotion that was still there, but I could use it in service of the characters in the story. And so I, you know, in those six months, I just started to,

go back to the writing and Damascus Station, you know, kind of by hook and by crook came out of it. So, I mean, and the book really is beautifully written and has this sort of like authenticity that really I think could only come from somebody who, you know, lived in Syria and also has an intimate familiarity with the Central Intelligence Agency that really comes through in this book. Do you want to tell the folks out there, you know, what you're going to. your book, what Damascus Station is about? Yeah, sure. So it's a story about a CIA case officer named Sam and his Syrian recruit, Mariam, who they break a kind of fundamental rule of espionage and fall into this forbidden relationship. They go into Damascus to hunt down the killer of another CIA case officer. And so doing really kind of come face to face with the tension and the conflict and the passion and their own relationship,

but also into conflict with a really pretty brutal pair of Syrian brothers, one of whom is also much more than meets the eye. And these guys are kind of guarding this very dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime. So, you know, it became, I think as I wrote, obviously it's a spy novel, so it's about espionage and I'm trying to deal pretty realistically and authentically where possible with, you know, the kind of not just the tradecraft of the agency,

but it's ethos, its culture, what it's actually like to be a CIA, you know, officer. But I hope it's also about kind of love and loyalty

and also like what it means to be a human in the middle of a really awful conflict. You know, I told the story through the lens of multiple Syrian, I took multiple Syrian perspectives on this because I really wanted to try to get down

to the humanity of like, what are actual people doing and experiencing in the war and kind of get away from, you know, for me, one of the cleansing things was kind of getting away from like, I don't have to come up with the answer on Syria policy or say what we should have done. I can just tell a story from the standpoint of different Syrians in the conflict. So, you know, I hope in some sense it's that too. And yeah, no, I mean, now that you say that, it does jump out. There, you know, the sort of Syrian protagonist of the book is a member of the elite class, maybe not.

doesn't even understand how much privilege she has. There's that interesting scene where her and her friend break down on the side of the road and her help out by people who are literally dirt poor. And you kind of played that, that culture clash out very well. Yeah. No, it's, it's funny. That is one of my favorite scenes in the novel because I think that there's this kind of class, you know, in Central Damascus who they're in a bubble. They're all connected to the regime in some way, shape, or form. And you know, you're sort of, some of them are, you know, presumably coming face to face with this reality that like there are elements of

this being sort of a slave society that they're running here, you know? And how do you in the character in the book, you know, like, how do you deal with that as this very privileged daughter of the elite who's like, not necessarily doing anything wrong, you know, but who is elevated above these people and in control of them in some way. What do you do when you're just sort of dumped into direct, you know, direct, a direct face-to-face kind of confrontation with them where you're forced to see them as people, you know, and not just as the other or these, you know, we can sort of put them out of shanty downs and not think about them.

So, you know, a lot of the book, I mean, there's, you know, another Syrian protagonist who's a security officer who kind of is always having to wrestle with some of the same questions, but who I think comes to a very different set of answers, you know. And something that I think our listeners will be interested in, and what caught my interest in your book is that part of the plot, without giving too much away. Part of the plot is that their president gives a lethal finding on somebody in Syria. Word that David's not allowed to use assassination.

It's not an assassination. It's just a lethal finding. And I thought it was fascinating reading the novel about that. Like, you kind of like detail that entire process. And it's a work of fiction, folks. But it was very fascinating, I thought, to read as you kind of like walk through step by step, how that takes place from the legal side, from the policy side, and how a finding like that gets pushed through to how out in, you know, the premier intelligence services secret facility that we're not allowed to name, where the rehearsals for that plot are acted out and how this conspiracy takes shame. and ultimately is enacted in Syria. I thought that whole sequence of events

was a very interesting part of this novel. I had a lot of fun doing that. And I think, you know, one of the things that... One of the things I wanted the book to be, again, without it becoming boring or pedantic, was a bit of an intelligence procedural. You know, I think we don't... There isn't...

And this isn't a knock on the genre in the least, but just there's just not a lot of spy fiction that does that. Yes. You know, and I, when I come across it, you know, I enjoy that a lot. So I was kind of writing this for my own, you know, nightstand at a lot of ways of like, I like, I like books that get under the hood a little bit and give us the inside baseball and kind of make us wait for the payoff and the action because they kind of build to it. And so I wanted to go.

through those steps because I thought, I think it's really interesting how this thing of like, okay, okay, we're going to, we're going to kill somebody. There's a whole system and there's a whole system of legality and bureaucracy and then just sort of like machining, like in production that goes into this kind of stuff. Like technicians that have this hyper-specific job that were focused on this one thing. That's right. I thought it was, I just think it's fascinating. So I, I kind of wanted to do that, do that end to end. And I was, I was glad they didn't edit too much out. Yeah, I mean, you did, you know, people like you that served in the agency and even, you know, some people might not realize we read a novel that has to go through the PRB, the public

review board. Yeah, that's right. What was that process like for you? Was it difficult? It was actually pretty straightforward. Yeah. You know, I have heard from colleagues who have to go through the DOD process that it's much harder and just like much more disorganized and chaotic and slow. The agency is actually pretty streamlined at this. Like I think, you know, I like to think it's because the person reading the books maybe just really loves them, but they read them pretty quickly and get them back to me, you know, in, I don't know, under two weeks with pretty reasonable edits both times. Like, and I source them because I'm a little bit of OCDs. Like, Damascus station went to them with like 300 footnotes or something like that of like, hey, here's, you know, I, because I worked on Syria. And so with that one in particular, I wanted to be buttoned up. So I just said, okay, here's, you know, in this book, this page, here's where I got this. So you don't have to, this is a specific thing. You mean like, you don't have to think it came out of my, you know, the classified regions in my brain. Right. And so, and I'm sorry, I interrupt you. But when you say source, you mean you show them like open source.

Yeah. You know, the open source like references so that it's like, look, this is already out there in like the public, you know, in the public knowledge. So I'm not saying something that hasn't been reported on or. That's right. And like one one fun example that I think I actually have the book back here. Like there's a there's a thing in the, yeah, it is. So there's a book by Sam Dagger called Assad or we burn the country. which is a good history of the war

and he's got some great sources inside the Syrian regime. And there's a thing in there about how Assad, because Assad's a philanderer and he sleeps with the wives of other members of the Syrian elite to kind of demonstrate his control over the system. And that's sort of been a pattern.

And that's a specific fact. It's referenced in the book. And I wanted to make sure, that like the PRB isn't like, oh my gosh, where did this, you know, where did this come from? And so it's like, okay, well, it's on, you know, page 145 of Sam Dagger's book. Right. Footnote, you know, you can find the book. Here's, here's the page number.

Here's the title, all that. And that tends to, that, that's an effective way to kind of make sure that, like, I'm separating the classified regions of my brain from what's available in the dinosaur. That was actually like a major plot point in one of Mark Graney's books about, about Syria. Was it really? Yeah, yeah.

As Mel Brooks. Yeah, it was true. As Mel Brooks says, it's good to be the king. And the other thing, you know, so I read your your forthcoming novel as well. We'll talk about in a moment. But I wanted to talk for a moment about the commonalities between these two books. Because when I think of your work, at least that I'm familiar with so far, the one thing that really jumped out at me that where you're really strong is in describing the, you're

the life of a person, like an actual human being living and existing in a authoritarian regime. And it's a view that I think is so alien to Americans. You know, the views are going to be very black and white, not a lot of nuance in there. You really describe these people who are part of the regime. They're part of the predominant system. they're not necessarily bad human beings but they are part of the system for all the good or all the bad whatever you think about that they're a part of it and they're trying to find a way to exist in it just a scale live without having their heads chopped off right yeah no it's

I think that that is true thematically across both books and I'll say that neither of them started with any intent around doing that it was just sort of discovered the process of discovering these characters and writing them, like, that that reality started to become very clear to me. So like in the Syrian example, you know, there's two primary characters, Merriam and Ali, who are having to deal with this idea of like, hey, I don't, I might actually be very privileged. There might be a lot of things that I have in this system, but my level of sort of agency is pretty limited. and my ability to sort of exist as a human, like morally, is compromised before I've done anything, you know, before I've actually made a choice. There's that line in the book that like were chained to Assad's throne or something like that

that you write. Yeah, yeah. And I think I think that is true in the Syrian system. And, you know, it was when I came to Russia for Moscow, X, like, again, I didn't start with this idea of, like, I'm going to tell a story about living in an authoritarian system. But my major Russian character named Anna is a Russian intelligence officer. She works for the SVR, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. And she works effectively as a knock for the SVR, what they would call their, I'll butcher the Russian if I say it. But they call it the apparatus of attached employees.

So it's basically she's an SVR officer who's a banker. And I was really struck as I just started to kind of do research on, not on like high level questions of Russian policy and history and whatnot, but like what is it like what's it like to be a Russian? You know? And I was really struck by this concept of like the Wiley Man. I don't know if you've heard about this way of. characterizing kind of Russian interactions with the state of, as it says, the parallels to Syria

were very profound because, again, it's, it's an authoritarian system, same as Syria. It's obviously a different cultural context and a different system in a lot of ways. But you have this feeling of like how the state sort of just is. It's both extremely predatory, but also worthy. And, eternal. And, you know, I sort of, especially in Russia, you have this idea of like, okay, well, I'm not really going to protest. I'm going to be very patient. I'm not going to resist. I'm just going to kind of adapt to the system. And I have kind of a passive displeasure or even like a mockery of the system, but I'm not going to demand kind of like full rights and freedom. in the way that we would define it.

And I think there was like, there's like just this idea of I'm trying to eke out for myself inside this very messed up kind of double speak, double think world. I'm going to try to get what I can. Right. And that's kind of it. So you have these little moments where people are. asserting their own dignity and their own humanity, but it's far short of how we, you know, as Americans would define kind of a full measure of freedom and agency. And so the character,

you know, especially this Anna character in Moscow X is like she's coming at the world with that as her starting point. Like she's not trying to be free in the way that we are. She's actually, there's a line in the novel about how when she finally sort of, I don't want to spoil anything, but she basically says like, you know, I've stolen from a thief and I'm going to get away with it. And like, that's the win. Like I, you know, like, you're a thief.

I'm taking from you. Right. That's my victory. Right. Everybody's getting their own, so I'm going to get mine too. That's right. That's right. And fundamentally in a system that's unjust and amoral,

is there any such thing as, Right. Breaking the law. Like, like breaking the law. Right. Like is that, like is that, is that, is it a moral to break the law in an amoral system? You know, right. Tough questions. I mean, you know, the one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, they're asking those questions, you know, in the gulog.

But I, but I feel like that's an ethical question for every citizen of every country. Like when. Yeah. Right. When you believe that laws or certain laws are immoral or whatever else. The other commonality between the two books is the character Artemis. Yes. Who is in, so these books exist in the same world very much.

So Artemis and Damascus Station is like, in my opinion, a bat-shit C-O-S. You would not want to work for. Which is a real thing. Yes. Yes, that's fair. And then in Moscow X, she's leading this, you know, this special access. program called Moscow X that you guys will read about when the book comes out. Who is Artemis based on?

I mean, I'm not looking for a name, but... Sure you are. Spill the tea. We got it. We can handle it. So, initially, like, all my characters have started, like, when I start to write them, I write, I write scenes and I write backstory and dialogue and stuff that I know. is probably not going to be in the finished product to like just kind of get to know the character. And most of them start as composites of actual people. And I will not give the names

because if I gave the names for Artemis Proctor, I do think I would be hunted down and murdered. And I want to stay alive. But there are a couple case officers that informed her character and kind of started like as I was initially crafting her. and initially writing her like, I was thinking about them. And so I just kind of started riffing with that, a composite of a couple female case officers that I knew. And like any good character that's going to work in fiction pretty quickly, that composite got left behind.

She became her own entity with her own voice. And we were just kind of off to the races. She was a character you couldn't deny. That's right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, most of the good ones are because they just start to like, okay, I can kind of hear. I know what she sounds like. I know what she says.

You know, like I'm in communion with wherever she exists in the universe. So like I'm moving her onto the page. But she is a good vessel for. a lot of great stories that I have gotten from Dio colleagues over the years. Like the most unchained crazy stuff that you get, you know, from listening to stories from these guys. And there's a lot of crazy stuff. She is because she is so, she's some combination of like competent and also deranged. She's a great sort of, you know, mouthpiece for a lot of that stuff.

So talk to us about Damascus X. The book is coming out next month. What is this novel about? Because it's a totally different subject than Damascus Station. Moscow. Did I say Damascus. So yeah, that Freudian stuff. Damascus X was a real thing in real life when you guys got booted out of Syria and you were living in another place for a little while.

Moscow X, the book that's coming out in October. What's this novel about? Yeah, so I started with a concept and we can talk about how real events have sort of made writing this thing very hard because I started and I said, okay, what would it look like if from a covert action standpoint the CIA really took off the gloves against Putin? That's kind of where it started. It's like what's from a CIA standpoint, what can we do? So the book, you know, Moscow X is a fictional component inside the real Russia house that's kind of charged with this outside the box, pretty aggressive approach to dealing with the Russians. And the idea that comes out from some measure of sort of, you know, geopolitics but also Proctor, Artemis Proctor's personal grievance is to convince Vladimir Putin that a coup is afoot when one is not. and to destabilize or sort of weaken, you know, his regime accordingly.

So the agency taps two officers under non-official cover, commercial cover. One is a lawyer in Europe. The other one runs a family thoroughbred horse sort of breeding and dealing operation in Mexico to go and actually target and recruit one of Putin's money men to get access to some of his personal funds. The money man is married to a woman named Anna, who we talked about her earlier, who is an intelligence officer. The CIA doesn't know that. And she's also just sort of playing her own game entirely. And the book is really the cat and mouse between the agency and between Anna and Vadim, her husband.

And, you know, as I wrote it, it kind of came the story of, like, you know, vengeance and what does it mean to tell the truth? what does identity look like in a world where you're most of the intelligence officers in the book are under pretty exotic forms of cover that are very demanding on humans. And so like what does identity look like in that world? And then, you know, what does all of that look like in kind of the real context of the sort of covert war between Washington and Moscow? So that's what the book's out. And again, our listeners out there will be very interested in this book that it's about Knox, people who are working under unofficial cover. And again, it's fictionalized, but the procedural aspects of that. And like maybe how something like that kind of sort of works, including like

the national resources side of it, how you bring American citizens into maybe a covert action program. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this book that I think people will be interested read. Yeah, I agree. I hope so. And, you know, it was, it was fun to deal with the commercial side of the house, the commercial cover side of the house here, you know, for a couple of reasons. One was just the reality of trying to write, you know, the demands of a story and fiction are such that like if you have, if a big point of the novelist relationship between the intelligence, the case officers and assets, like they need to spend time with each other. And if you're writing a story about agency operations in Russia and you're using officers who are

under like embassy cover, you know, you're not spending a lot of face time with Russian assets inside Russia in that context, right? When you strip away the sort of, you know, diplomatic cover side of it and talk about Knox, like, you know, from the standpoint of fiction, you're in a much more flexible world where things that wouldn't be possible in kind of the world of Damascus station, fast forwarded to Russia, are all of a sudden possible. And then, you know, kind of more, I guess, technically, as you kind of look at the way that human intelligence is being collected and will be collected in the future, because of, you know, ubiquitous technical surveillance, all that kind of stuff, like it's increasingly challenging

for people who are under sort of official forms of cover to even do this stuff anywhere. So you're starting to, you know, see this kind of flexibility. or a need for this kind of flexibility in the way the CIA runs human intelligence gathering operations. And I think playing around with that in this book was a lot of fun. So the book comes out next month. I assume it's got to be up for pre-orders now if people want to go out and grab it. I think it's going to be a big hit. I enjoyed Moscow X more than I enjoyed Damascus Station.

That's good. I think. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. I am. It, uh, it was harder to write. Uh, it, it nearly killed me. But I'm, I'm really happy with how it, with how it turned out. And, uh, I think, I don't know, I don't know if we talked about Jack. I think there was some like gunplay, I think in Damascus station that, that sort of broke you

toward the end. Because I just, I, you know, there was some Hollywood moments. I was wondering because this has come up on our show before. And I was wondering if, if Jack, sent you any hate mail about about weapons handling he didn't send me any hate mail no he just he gave an honest he gave an honest review of damasca station if i recall yeah i mean i thought it was a really good book there are there's a couple scenes of uh the female protagonist going rambo that were a little bit i was like oh my gosh this those were fun to write though yeah no that's yeah that's fair and i think um there's probably marginally less of that in this novel i think my my sort of sensibility when it comes to these stories is I like, I like to push that a bit.

Like I'm not trying to do the full shoot-em-up thing, which is wonderfully entertaining, but totally divorced from reality. And I'm also not trying to do the full kind of, you know, well, I mean, rainy procedure. I will also say, you know, David, because I mean, you are a really talented author. And if you were to do a book that was more looking at either the agency paramilitary arm and that side of things, I would be very, very interested to read that as well. Like if you were to write a book more in that direction or the or the J-Soc agency collaboration, like I would be all in for that. Just make sure Jack gets a chance to look at it because you will get the hate mail about

the wrong caliber of weapon. Like I hit up Mark Rainey. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. But again, that was that was an advanced copy. I was like hoping he could fix it before it was published. Yeah. Oh, wow. Do you have a writing process?

Did you develop one? Do you know the end of your book when you start? So it's been, you know, I feel like my process is a total mess. And I just don't, I don't think there's a better way for me to do it. because I've experimented with like outlining, and I found that doesn't work for me at all. So what I've done or where I've sort of landed is I usually start with an image in my head of the climactic scene in the novel,

like where all of the tension is going to build to and sort of where it's going to explode. With Damascus Station, it started with an image of people, It literally started with an image of a couple sort of face-to-face in a Syrian interrogation center, which is what happens in the book. And then in Moscow X, it started with an image of a woman riding away from a burning house on horseback. And that was it. And so I was like, how do I get there? And the whole process of writing the book was like trying to get to that scene. And I didn't know, like, the woman on horseback, I didn't know what her name was.

I didn't know she was Russian. I didn't know whose house it was. But I was like, I felt that that was where the book should get to. And I started to write with that in mind. The story actually started, this is why it's such a mess. The story started in Texas, and the whole novel was going to take place in Texas. And I wrote about 7,500 pages of that. And it didn't work and I just threw it away and it started over because it wasn't right.

So I usually start with that image. I start to play around with the characters, you know, and try to understand voice and kind of who they are and all of that. But then I'll just kind of usually what I do is I try to get about 2,000 to 3,000 words in a day. And I'll show up at the coffee shop. I always write from a coffee shop. same coffee shop, usually the same table, same cup of coffee.

And I'll sit down after I drop the kids off at school. I'll write until lunch. I'll eat lunch. I'll get another cup of coffee. I'll write in the afternoon. Get those 3,000 words in. It's a good day.

And, you know, I just, you just knock it out that way. I usually end up writing, I would say, if the novels are somewhere around 125,000 words, I'd probably write about 500,000 words to get the novel. Holy shit. And, you know, I don't know how to do it another way.

The comparison I like, or the sort of analogy I like to use is, like, if you're going to put together a 13 or 14 track album, you know, you didn't write 13 songs, probably you wrote 30. Right. And those were the tracks that made it, you know. Right. And so it's hard to know what the final thing is going to be unless you write a lot more. And like, you know, I sort of play around with it that way and figure out where I'm going to get the most punch.

And it's, you know, I've sort of, I've finished the third one now. And I'm kind of putting the final touches on that. And, you know, like, I have started each of them thinking it will be easy. this time because I've already written books and it hasn't gotten easier yet. Let's just put it that way. What's a QT's book three at all? Yeah, it's a sort of modern homage to Tinker Taylor. So it's a legit mole hunt in the CIA.

It's Proctor in the sort of George Smiley role. And that was it was it was very fun. very fun to write because it's really it's really more her like it's kind of her story um and uh the working title right now is the seventh floor so the you know CIA executive floor um but that one is is pretty much done and uh that's great have some news on when that'll come out you know hopefully pretty soon that's awesome man um we'll have you on when when that book is out or coming out. Great.

Anything else that you want to tell people about? Anything that we failed to cover here tonight? I don't think so. I mean, we hit a lot. This was fun, guys. This was really fun. Thanks for having me on. It's fun to go back and relive Syria and talk about the books.

This is great. Where can people find you? Where should they go and look for your books? Yeah, so you can find me at David McCloskeybooks.com. That's my site. you can find the books pretty much anywhere. I mean, you know, you can put them on Amazon, you can get them on Target, Walmart. If you want to support your local indie bookstore, which is always something I recommend,

you can go to Indy Bound and find a local indie near you, and they'll hook you up with the book. You can get it on, you know, Apple Books and you can get it anywhere. The audio book is not up for pre-order yet, which is kind of frustrating, but it'll be up very soon. And it'll be out, you know, shortly after the release. So for those of, you know, those listeners who just do audio books, that's, that's coming and you'll be able to pre-order that really soon. And for our viewers and listeners, there'll be a link down in the description for people want to go and check out his books. I also want to give a quick shout out to our friends at Casa Caraba Beo, who gave us some really awesome cigars. Donnello Torpedoes are really good.

If you go to Casa Carabio.com, you'll be able to check them out. really enjoying their stuff. We have a few questions. Actually, first off, Dee sent me an email that he picked up in chat. Someone in chat asked the book you were referring to is called Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard J. Howard. There you go. There you go.

That's it. Somebody nailed it. Somebody nailed it. There's got to be another analyst out there watching or something like that. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Paul, thank you very much for the donation. I don't see a question.

If there was a question to ask that, please just type in the chat right now and we'll pick it up. Oms, thank you very much. Cheers. And a couple from our Patreon subscribers. How would you explain TikTok to the everyday person and why they should be worried? Oh, man. I don't know if I feel qualified. to answer that question.

Do you have TikTok? So I don't. I mean, I guess everyone should probably be worried in large part because it's highly addictive and is like wrecking people's brains and capacity to focus on information. So that's one element of it. I mean, on the other side of it, and again, I don't, you know, there are far more authoritative sources than I on this. But, you know, I don't have a great sense.

of like how much of this information. I mean, maybe you guys know the answer better than I do. It was like actually harvestable by the Chinese. And, you know, you got to think about who you're given that information to. But I don't have a highly educated answer on this other than I don't, my reasons for not using it are purely because I already find my attention fragmented. And I feel like I would prefer to not give it to cat videos and other such nonsense.

I mean, friends don't let friends do communism. folks. Animal videos are great. But yeah, I think that, like, one of the discoveries about TikTok, obviously, Facebook and Google, they're all horrible in terms of

what they collect personally. But I think TikTok was actually you were getting it wide, wide permissions to access a lot of shit on your phone that it wasn't even connected to. Yeah. And look, I mean,

it's like, it's like 23, well, I won't say any genetic information but you know it's like you know a lot of these you know my heritage tests you know where you can get your genetics it's like the chinese own most of those and you can say i'm a nobody it doesn't matter but at the end of the day maybe it matters to your grandkids you know that right that yeah that's that's right that's right um i mean Yeah. I'm just, I'm glad I don't have, I have, I have not, I know a number of authors who use them for like book promo and stuff like that. And I've so far, I mean, maybe it's more out of sheer laziness, but I have so far stayed off the, stayed off the talk. Yeah, do it. Call me Ishmael. Do you think that the intelligence community correctly managed to start of the Russo-Ukrainian war? Or do you think there was a credibility problem that led to missed opportunities?

I mean, with the caveat that I, you know, haven't been reading any of the actual intel on that, right? I'm just sort of reading what gets leaked out and what's available publicly. I don't know. I mean, it felt to me like I would give the administration and the IC pretty high marks from the standpoint of we knew it was coming. and we effectively, you know, I think largely effectively sort of leaked information or provided information into public sphere into allies to like demonstrate that that was going to occur. So relatively high marks there from sort of a plans and intentions standpoint, like it seems like the assessments were pretty good. Again, I'm not reading them.

what I have seen, again, from leaks about our assessment of the Russian military's capabilities and the Ukrainian military's capabilities doesn't seem like the analysis there has held up so well. That's an inherently harder question to answer, right, because you're talking about the dynamics of a war. But that feels like it was sort of missed. But again, you know, I'm looking at this from way on the outside. coming at a lot of this from the standpoint of, you know, researching a novel, right? Not writing policy papers for a think tank. But so I don't know, I think I'd say relatively high marks on kind of what's Putin up to

and then not as great on what will the dynamics of the conflict actually end up being. I mean, it seems like we dramatically underestimated the Ukrainians' capacity to resist and organize and fights, and we overestimated the Russians. You know, I think there's sort of this kind of tendency to either view the Russians is like completely incompetent or all knowing and all capable. And, you know, the answer is, you know, somewhere in between. And it seems like we didn't, we didn't get that right. Out of curiosity, as an analyst, you know, were you, did you ever feel as though you were ever, that you were ever under political pressure? whether it was from an administration or from internally in the agency to provide answers that somebody else wanted.

You know, the first thing I'd say on this one is like the agency, at least on the analytic side, I think more generally, really does take politicization seriously, or at least it did. I don't know now. But like they beat that into you right off the bat of like you're speaking truth of power. You're going to speak up if, you know, someone, you know, says something that's wrong. And I was in meetings with, you know, director Petraeus where like very junior people would like contradict him, you know, and say things that that he didn't agree with. And you're like, that's positive, right? There's something in the sort of bloodstream of the organization. that's pushing people to do that.

So, you know, that was always very serious. And like, if someone raised issues around politicization, like, that got noticed. Like, you didn't want to be involved as a manager in, like, a complaint about that. Right. I do think that there were sort of subtle forms of it. Like, it was because of that overarching structure, the way that policy, the way that the White House would sort of influence things was a little bit more of like, okay, let's take this. Let's take Assad's staying power as an example.

Like it wasn't that a piece would be rewritten to say that he will fall. It was that things would get watered down through the writing of the PDB. And oftentimes when things got to like the DNI kind of level, they would be mushified to, to either say nothing or to sort of soften the analysis so that you could kind of ignore it or interpret it in different ways, or things would just be kind of maybe more omitted, like pieces that were very clear and hard hitting

and I think substantiated would sort of be like, oh well, maybe that's just not gonna go into the PDB. Yeah. Because there's only like 10 articles that'll get in anyway, and there's always something else that could rise to the time. So maybe that's just not going to be there. Maybe that's going to go to the senior director for the Middle East and North Africa.

But, you know, it's not going to go to the president, you know, that kind of thing. So it's, and trying to understand why that was being done was impossible. You know, like, is it, is it really because we got bumped because there was a more important China piece that needed to get into the book? Right. Or are you looking at this and saying, oh, this is a stinker? Like, I don't want to go into the Oval with this thing. because then someone's going to yell at me or we're going to have an argument and I don't want to do that because I want to continue to get invited into the Oval.

It was always hard to tell, you know, as an analyst. So you had to tread very carefully before you started to say, okay, that's politicization. But I think there were, I think in total, you saw that on the serious side of things. Yeah. We knew that there were analytic lines that the administration just didn't want to hear. Well, and maybe not just the administration, you know, not pointing at, you know, any president or their administration. But even and even inside the agency, because the agency isn't this monolithic thing. It's made up people who want to get promoted.

Yeah. And have different motivations for why they're doing what they're doing. so totally yeah i'm not necessarily like calling out the administration for anything just that i was just curious as to was there like you said you know there was there things might be get watered down somebody didn't want to be the very bad news i mean even with chenna now we hear that a they're on the bank of they're on the brink of bankruptcy and be they are ready to take over Taiwan and right and create it's sort of schizophrenia But it's also two things can be true.

Yes. Yeah. That's right. That's absolutely right. Two things can be true. And, you know, like, you have, you can have people who just for very, like, it's, it's not like a nefarious. Right. I'm trying to silence the analysts.

Like, that wasn't going on. Right. It was more like, hey, you know, if I'm the, you know, DDI and I. and I'm the one who's kind of in charge of the PDB, and I'm the one going in and I'm the one giving the briefing, man, you know, and there's some real human tension there between bringing bad news and having access, you know? Right.

Like, you sort of have, you have to be really thoughtful about how you kind of meter that out because you can't be bringing pieces every day that are like slapping the administration Syria policy in the face. You know, like, there's just going to be a limited tolerance for that. And eventually they're going to be like, we don't want this guy to come here anymore. like send us somebody else you know um so i you know i think you get down to that human level it

starts to become less nefarious and much more just like someone someone's trying to do their job and kind of get by you know right um what is your perspective on sport washing by saudi arabia should u.s sports fans attempt to push back and saudi or saudi influence uh or control over domestic leagues teams or just accept that it's that it's inevitable. I mean, I can I don't know what we do about it. I can tell you that I just I find it sort of kind of gut wrenching and sickening in general just to have them buy all this stuff off. I don't really have like much of an analytic basis behind any of that other than just,

you know, I'd prefer to not have all these like wonderful athletes purchased by Saudi Arabia. Yeah. But I don't know what do you do about it? I don't know. I haven't thought about it much. It just kind of gives me a knee-jerk, sick reaction to see it happening. Yeah. I don't fault any of the athletes for doing it.

It's like this crazy amounts of money and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, it's just, it's frustrating. It kind of actually gives me the same sickening feeling like, and there's a minor analogy, but it sort of speaks to the same thing of like, When I look at, I'm a big baseball fan, right? And when you look at what's happened to the game with just things like the name, the way the stadiums and ball parks are named now and all have corporate names attached, or the way that sort of gambling has now totally infused the life of the sport,

like you're watching LLB TV and they've got all these like parlays up on the screen and stuff like that. It's like, I don't like this stuff intruding into the game, and I understand why it's doing this, and I understand that it's important to the economics of the game, but you kind of wish at some point that, like, some corporation would be like, it's our civic duty to help sponsor this stadium, but it doesn't mean that we have to call it, like, you know, progressive field. Like, we can continue to, it can continue to be called Jacobs Field, but we're going to support it because, like, we're a citizen. of this city. Right.

And I think I feel a similar sort of like nature, like, when I see the Saudi stuff of like, I understand why this is the case. And I really wish that these like beautiful games weren't just bastardized by, you know, corrupt corporate and political entities. Yeah. And then why do you think Arab Spring fell short

and judging by events in the U.S. Could the same spring happen here? but for the wrong reasons. I don't know if I want to touch that, the latter part of that one. I think, I mean, the Arab Spring didn't, I mean, yeah, I think failure is probably right, although I would say that it was very, like, the way it came out was very uneven and it depended a lot on the sort of political context in the system and the structure. of the society in which those sort of mass kind of uprisings occurred, right?

Things shook out very differently in sort of, you know, one man or one family sort of presidential republics, quote unquote, than they did in like constitutional monarchies, right? So things came out very differently in like Jordan, you know, and in Bahrain even than they did in like Syria, right, and in Libya. But what I would say is like in terms of just not getting to really any kind of solid kind of democratic outcomes in any major Arab state. I mean, I would say, look, you're talking about a couple generations now of a region that is extremely uninstitutionalized dealing with massive socioeconomic issues, youth bald, you know, issues with educating and just kind of getting people into jobs, like all these kind of major systemic problems. You have a tremendous amount of sort of, you know, geopolitical rivalry inside this region between different, you know,

between largely like a sort of Saudi-led camp and an Iranian camp. So you have all these like structural problems. It's like those things like trying to get to some kind of stable democratic order in a system. like that is like almost impossible. So, you know, that'd be what I'd say. Like he's just, the deck was completely stacked against any country getting to a much better outcome. And not, not by like millennia of history, but just by like the last couple generations

of the way this region has developed. Yeah. I mean, basically since, since Westerners redrew the, or drew up the country, lines a lot of times. Yeah, I mean, drip the country lines, like, I mean, the way that it's an extremely militarized region that also lacks a lot of like institutional structures and processes that kind of limit conflict and things like that. So it's like, you know, you're not, you're not in a, and it's a region that has,

that has dealt with a huge amount of external intervention by great powers too. So you're like, you're not, you're not dealing with like a great petri dish here for a, for a democratic experiment, you know? A couple more questions came in. Jackson, thank you very much. Ever interact with Ground Branch guys? Any plans for Ground Brands specific novel? Do it.

I mean, look, I'd be interested in doing it. I didn't have much interaction with them when I was on the inside, to be honest. So it would be, I would have to lay some real groundwork in source networks and things like that to actually understand how it all functions. But I would, I mean, I would be very open to doing a book that focused there. I imagine there'd be a tremendous amount of material and it'd be a lot of fun to do. So very open to it. But no plans as of now. And M. Corbyn, thank you very much. Thoughts on CZP's means of waging war by ever means up to actual confrontation with U.S. military apparatus. Oh, the idea that the way the CCP is waging war on the U.S., do you think it'll ever mean

or lead up to an actual confrontation with the U.S. military? And just whatever your answer is, if we ever do or don't go to war with the CCP, people will quote this saying you will go back. Yeah, this is going to be a very important piece of the historical record. Yeah. No pressure. Yeah. No pressure. I need to think I need to think of Longhart. I was like, your great grandchildren will live in shame or honor based on your answer right now. Man,

I feel like this has been a very casual and fun interview up to this point. And now I'm, it's not anymore. It always gets here, though. Like we are gotcha journalists at the best. Three drinks later. Here we are. Oh, man.

I mean, like, uh, I mean, I guess the answer is I don't know. But then beyond that very useful answer, I would say it would seem to me like there will be some, like if I were, if I had to put money on it, right? It seemed like we're headed that direction. Right. And you're not talking about the next five years or 20 years or 100 years, but it's, it seems inevitable.

It's going there. It's going there. Yeah. Like, it just think structurally, you have a country that's. like, hey, we would prefer to write more of the rules in East Asia. You're doing that right now, and how is that conflict going to be resolved? So it seems like it's probably coming. And I don't know, I don't have no concept of what form it will take or anything like that. But, you know, if I had to, if I had to wager, I would think that would happen in the next, you know,

generation or so for sure and that is the end of the questions uh somebody asked about a chicken no i'm just kidding uh no uh that's it all right so yeah thank you david for coming on the show man appreciate it yeah thanks for having me guys this was fun uh i really appreciate you having me on and next friday we're going to have brent tucker on the show uh former delta operas operator. So we hope to see you guys then. Monday. Don't we have some Monday, Dee? We have a Patreon day. Okay. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to come in Monday.

And Moscow Station and Damascus X. Damascus Station. Or Damascus Station of Moscow X. Sorry about it. Damascus Station and Moscow X. Yeah. Yeah. But but read them. You'll get the nitty gritty. Like real stuff from real people. I mean, that's what more can you ask for all right guys amen so we will see all of you next Friday take care everyone