The Team House - UN Weapons Inspector to Iraq Scott Ritter details secret CIA/JSOC ops, Ep. 29

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Probably the most insane episode we've recorded thus far involving CIA double crosses, false pretenses for war in Iraq, ISA and Delta Force operations, black ops nestled within black ops. Strap in for this one. Scott Ritter was a leader in the United Nations weapons inspections teams to Iraq, which involved an incredibly dangerous game of cat and mouse as he found himself trapped between the governments of the United States and Iraq. UNSCOM ended up involving everyone from the CIA to JSOC to Israeli military intelligence, all of it secret and hidden from view at the time. Ritter thought he was doing the right thing, but found himself being retaliated against by his own government for the sin of doing the job to which he was assigned. His latest book can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Dealbreaker-Donald-Trump-Unmaking-Nuclear/dp/0999874756 Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents,

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode 29. I'm Jack Murphy. This is my co-host, Dave Park. We are here today with our guests, Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter is a former lead UN weapons and weapons.

inspector led weapons inspection teams into Iraq during the 1990s. I think there was a total of 14 inspections that you led overall, Scott. He's also a former Marine officer. And he wrote a book that I read this week called Iraq Confidential that details all these weapons inspections that he was involved in, seven years of his life. And frankly, all the shenanigans that went on with the UN weapons inspection teams. There were all sorts of covert operations that were blended into these inspections, all sorts of enough chicanery and subterfuge and politics and intrigue to just make your mind spin. And as I was telling Scott a little bit earlier, it was from a personal perspective.

It was kind of traumatic to read because it was something that I experienced the aftermath of. And so did Dave. We both deployed to Iraq in the 2000s. We both saw the horrific consequences of the invasion in 2003 and watched that country fall apart in so many ways. So reading Scott's book is really reading like the prequel, the prelude to everything that we experienced in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And to say it was upsetting is an understatement to put it mildly. I mean, you really have to read the book to really get it. but we're going to cover as much of it as we can here on this live stream today.

You know, Scott is also a controversial figure in more ways than one. There were people who didn't think we should do this interview tonight. And we are going to talk a little bit about why later on. But I think that Scott has enough first-hand experience. He is a primary source who had boots on the ground, so to speak, and really speaks from a position of authority and credibility in the things that he experienced firsthand. And the invasion of Iraq, the WMD's issue in Iraq, is something that continues to haunt us, and quite clearly haunt Iraq until this day.

And it is something that has bled off, I mean, going off in both directions, east and west, now in Syria and Iran as well. So these issues could be looked at as contemporary history, but it's also very much something that continues to unfold in real time. It's a part of Iraq's history and it's a part of American history. And from our perspective, it's a part of American military history. So Scott Ritter, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely.

I was wondering if you could, to contextualize this and sort of start at the beginning, how did Unström come about? How did these weapons inspection teams come about after the Gulf War? I'm sure there must have been some sort of political resolutions at the UN or at the conclusion of the Gulf, the cessation of hostilities that led to a conditional ceasefire or a conditional surrender. I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how all that started. Sure.

Well, I mean, you know, you got to go back to the beginning in August of 1990. when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. That invasion prompted the international community through the vehicle of the United Nations Security Council to impose economic sanctions. These sanctions were intended to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait to avoid using military force. The idea was not to go to war,

but rather to impose sanctions and get Iraq to withdraw. So that's a very important element of what we're going to be talking about is economic sanctions. As we move on through the fall of 1990, it becomes more apparent that Iraq just isn't going to withdraw. And the United States is going to have to create this coalition and use military force to liberate Kuwait. And to do this, you know, President George Herbert Walker Bush had to get a recalcitrant Congress to agree to the use of military force. And that also involved getting the American people motivated. So he gave a series of speeches. And one of his speeches, a very important one that was delivered in Cincinnati, Ohio, I believe in October of 1990, he likened Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler.

and he said that we're going to have to subject Saddam Hussein to Nuremberg-like retribution once we liberate Kuwait. Now that's critical because you don't liken someone to Adolf Hitler and say that they

have to be subjected to Nuremberg-like retribution if you're not serious about it. I mean, that's a serious You can't switch around and say, well, okay, now we're going to work with this guy or we're going to accept him, you know, as a political leader in this country. So when we entered the Gulf War, we did so not just to liberate Kuwait, but the way we prosecuted the war was to destroy the legitimacy of Saddam Hussein.

What we were looking for in Iraq was someone to apply the 75 cents solution. That's the price of a single 9mm bullet, which would be put in Saddam Hussein's skull. He would be removed. someone who looked like Saddam, talked like Saddam, acted like Saddam, would replace him, and we would be very happy. You know, that was the objective. When the war ended and Kuwait was liberated, let me back up a little bit. You know, when I first saw the war plan, the Desert Storm War Plan,

one of the things that struck me was the mission. And the mission wasn't to liberate Kuwait. The primary focus of effort was the destruction of the Republican Guard. That was the center, identified center of gravity of Iraq. Because they thought the country would collapse after you destroyed the Republican Guard? If you destroyed the Republican Guard, you destroyed Saddam Hussein. And one of the things that was frustrated about the war is that, you know, the way the war unfolded, we were in a position to do what we wanted to do, to destroy the Republican Guard.

Unfortunately, war is a deadly business. And, you know, people don't like it when a convoy. is leaving Kuwait City and you pop the lead vehicle, you pop the rear vehicle, and then you destroy everything in between. They called it the highway of death. Yeah, no kidding. That's what war is about. We kill people.

You know, we close with and destroy the enemy through firepower maneuver. Tough luck. You know, you shouldn't have invaded Kuwait if you didn't want this retribution to be brought down on you. But for political reasons, the war was halted after 100 hours. And the Republican Guard survived, emerged intact. So we didn't get the end result we wanted. We didn't get Saddam Hussein killed and removed from power.

He was still in power and he still had the forces necessary to sustain his regime in place. And I remember when the war ended, there's a lot of debate about, you know, what the next step will be. And the CIA came out with an assessment at the time that said that we don't believe Saddam Hussein can survive more than six months. We believe that his military has been destroyed and he's lost a lot of consequences. credibility there. We believe his economy is a wreck. His economy will continue to be wrecked so long as we keep economic sanctions in place.

And the other thing that gave Saddam Hussein legitimacy was weapons of mass destruction. This is a man who had chemical weapons, used him against Iran. This is a man who fired missiles against Israel, the only Arab leader to do so. And these weapons gave him a lot of credibility. So the decision was made that

they had a problem. They had economic sanctions that were linked to Saddam's occupation of Kuwait. But now that Kuwait's liberated, what do you do? You can no longer justify continuing economic sanctions. We need a new vehicle to continue economic sanctions. And that vehicle became the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations Security Council, prompted by the United States, passed a resolution,

687, that said Iraq had to disarm. This was part of the ceasefire agreement. And if Iraq didn't agree to this, didn't agree to be disarmed, then all bets are off. The military is going to roll and the war will continue. Well, Iraq agree. They said, we're going to be disarmed. I see you're waving your hand. Go ahead. Sorry, but by disarmed, do you mean simply of like NBC chemical, biological, radiological weapons, or like, what did disarmament mean at that time? Right. The resolution dealt with what we call weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's chemical weapons, biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles, that is a missile with a range greater than 150 kilometers and nuclear weapons. So these four categories of weapons were designated to be a little. eliminated and economic sanctions would continue to be applied against Iraq so long as it had not complied with its obligation to disarm.

And this is, this is an important fact. The goal of American policy was to get rid of Saddam Hussein from the very beginning. And this whole disarmament scheme linked to economic sanctions wasn't designed. The sanctions weren't put in place to compel Iraq to disarm. Iraq was called upon to disarm to keep sanctions in place until which time Saddam Hussein was removed from power. Remember, they had a

six-month window. All the inspections were supposed to do is last six months. We were just supposed to go in there and go through the motions of disarming Iraq continuing economic sanctions until which time somebody killed Saddam. Now, the inspectors weren't brought into that picture early on.

Right. The inspections were never designed to succeed. Well, we know that the reality is from a strategic standpoint, the inspections were never intended to succeed. Right, right. They were, they were intended to be. They're basically a false flight. They're basically just justification for keeping the sanctions on or whatever to so that we could like put the squeeze on Saddam and then he would get ousted. Right. Nobody believed that Iraq would willingly give up its weapons of mass destruction.

There was no, there was no, you know, pretense that the Iraqis were going to to play fair. And the other thing is the way the inspections were created, it was a gentleman's game early on. You know, it was a playbook taken out of the experience of the United States during the INF Treaty. in the 1980s. I was actually a plankholder in that organization and one of the first inspectors on the ground in the Soviet Union. You know, the way that works is a nation provides a declaration of what it's supposed to be inspected.

And then inspectors go in and verify that declaration, say, okay, you said you have six missiles, we count six missiles. And then they dismantle the missiles or disdemeanor. It's a gentleman's game. It depends on Iraq telling the truth. And from the very beginning, Iraq lied about everything. Yes, it declared a certain amount of chemical weapons. It had no choice.

But it didn't declare its most dangerous weapons, BX nerve agent. It didn't declare substantial stocks of sarin nerve agent and mustard gas. It didn't declare a biological weapons program at all. It denied ever having a nuclear weapon program. And they kept over 100 missiles and a dozen launchers. hidden. They kept a reserve operational force undeclared hidden from the inspectors. So when the inspectors went in, they were verifying an incomplete declaration. So that's part of the, I call it the stupidity of the game because everybody knew that it was an incomplete declaration, but the

inspectors weren't organized at that point in time to actually carry out a forensic, it's They were gentlemen. They wore coats and ties. Most of them were scientists, legitimate scientists, with thin necks, thin arms, you know, skin prone to sunburn. Easy. Easy. Easy. You want to be, you know, going toe to toe with the Iraqis. Professionals.

All professionals, but they were given an impossible task. So then why don't you tell us about how you came into it and you started this forensic approach? Because you write in your book about how you started bringing in a, uh, uh, you started bringing in CIA, paramilitary people, J-Soc operators to teach sensitive site exploitation, to begin going through this in a very systematic and technical way. And then, you know, as you peel back the layers of the onion will get deeper and deeper into it as we go, I think. But if you could talk about how you came into it and you started bringing these other players into the game. And where was this in the timeline in terms of like that six-month window that you... Well, the resolution was passed in April of 1991, resolution 687.

And the first inspections began in May of 1991. These were the nuclear inspections, which just not to get too complicated, but the nuclear inspections were run by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a separate United Nations organization. To go into Iraq, they had to coordinate with UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission, which was the lead agency. but the nuclear field was managed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. They created their own task force to do that, a bunch of very professional guys. But again, gentlemen, sometime in the summer of 1991, it became apparent that the Iraqis were lying, especially about their nuclear program. And a defector had fled the nuclear program, gone up north,

was taken in by the agency and processed and debriefed. And the defector said that there was this archive in Baghdad. And this archive contained documents that proved that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. And obviously, the Special Commission wanted to get their hands on that archive. But they weren't equipped to do so. They were, again, a bunch of gentlemen Jim who went in to, to verify, you know, declarations. They weren't geared for a search.

Now, I wasn't part of the, of UNSCOM at this point in time. This, this, this, this started in July and proceeded through August and the inspection took place in September. The United States, because it controlled the intelligence, also brought in the resources to effectively exploit this intelligence. This is where the United States brought in people from the special activity, staff at the time it was called from J-Soc Delta Force. These are people who are experts in sensitive site exploitation and rapid evaluation of a situation.

They were also experts in dealing with confrontational environments. This was going to be an inspection where the inspectors were going to go in and basically put themselves in a situation where they could be taken hostage. They were going to try and seize documents. The Iraqis didn't want them to seize. So we needed a special breed of an inspector to do this. The funny thing about these inspectors is that they, of course, came in under false names. So we had to prepare documents for them. So they came in with brand new passports.

And we gave them UN laissez-passé, a little blue UN certificates that said, your UN weapons inspectors using the name on the passport. The inspection, the inspectors gathered in London to do their initial pre-inspection training at that time. And when they first met in the, in the foreign office, they're a big conference room. The chief inspector got up and started, you know, did a roll call. And he starts calling out the names and nobody's raising their hand. Nobody's raising their hand.

And he's like, he gets out of it. He says, all right, we're going to take a five-minute break. And I would request that everybody go outside and re-familiarize themselves with your passports. And they'll do roll call again. And so they came in and, yes, now everybody is president accountable for. That's just a little funny aside. But the bottom line is these guys came in. They did a successful raid.

They got their hands on the documents. It's a very famous event called the parking lot standoff. You know, they found the smoking gun. documents that proved that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, and they were able to get these documents eventually out of Iraq, you know, by forcing the Iraqis to back down. And now Iraq had to admit that it had a nuclear weapons program. This is where I come in. Oh, go ahead. So when you say it was a successful raid, how did, how did that go down? I mean, obviously, they didn't go in all kidded up like operators or whatever. They came in sort of incognito, and

What made it a raid? Like, how did it go down? Well, okay, first of all, they don't go in incognito. You go in as a declared inspector. You have to provide a notification to the Iraqis. You've flown in. At that time, I think we're using a Romanian aircraft. Later on, we went to a German C-120 transvaal,

and then later we got a South African contract C-130. But you fly into the Habania Airfield outside of Baghdad, and then you're bused into the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Baghdad where the inspectors would stay. Then you would meet with your Iraqi counterparts, and you would say we plan to do an inspection. But you don't tell them where you're going. Each inspection site had to be approved in advance by the executive chairman.

He signed a document called a notification of inspection, an NIS. This was a warrant. It gave the inspectors the legal authority go anywhere they wanted to in Iraq. The NIS would not be presented to the Iraqis until the inspection team arrived at the site. What made this a raid is that previously the inspectors were going to sites had been declared by Iraq. So it was a verification exercise. What differed this time is that the inspectors left the Sheraton Hotel in a convoy as if they were going to one location and then diverted and arrived without notice at another location and literally pop out of the car. and go sprinting through the building and get to where they want.

And the Iraqis are scrambling behind them, trying to figure out what's going on. Later on, the Iraqis were able to adapt and have their forces ready to prevent this kind of action. But during this initial effort, the inspectors were able to achieve total surprise and get access to the documents, to the archive, the hidden archive. It's just basically a bunch of containers in a room and they went in and knocked down the doors. brought in guys who had the ability to pick locks, and they gained access to the room and the documents. It was success. And then what happened is the Iraqis surrounded them and said, you can't leave.

So we had a standoff. We had inspectors on the ground in possession of the documents, but the Iraqis surrounding them saying, you ain't going anywhere until you return the documents to us. And there's that kind of a standoff. And the inspectors have no weapons. They have no ability to defend. The only thing that gives them authority is the blue arm band. in the laissez-passes and the notification of inspection site and a big pair of brass balls

because you've got to have a big pair of brass balls to go into Iraq and do this kind of thing. As I was reading your book, I mean these inspections seem like they became more and more confrontational. There's more and more aggression between the inspectors and the Iraqis. Maybe we'll get to it later, I mean, but culminating where you almost got shot a couple times. not just me as well as I was reading the book I mean it just struck me that it felt like

the UN and the United States in particular was like throwing you guys out there almost as martyrs like playing chicken with the Iraqis like you're trying to stare them down you're saying go ahead and do something what are you going to do and as things became more confrontational more aggressive it almost felt like they were using you

as a sacrificial lamb though it's like like they were daring the Iraqis to do something to you guys so that we had the ability to start bombing and doing whatever the hell else we wanted to do. That is, that's definitely a way that it evolved. You know, early on, especially like in that September mission, you know, we had, you know, again, some very capable people assigned to the team. Backing them up in Kuwait, in RR and elsewhere were even more capable people who had weapons and were organized, trained, and equipped to carry out hostage rescue.

And that was a key element of these kind of inspections early on was the fact that there was backup, there was a plan in place, that if the Iraqis ever decided that they were going to seize the inspectors, you know, these gentlemen from J-Soc were prepared to embed themselves with the inspectors. They had certain capabilities that would attract attention for rescuers. And then the rescues would come in hot and heavy and kill everybody and take the inspectors out. So there were operators like standing by on helicopters and Kuwait, like ready to come get you guys, hopefully. I would even say they were standing on helicopters. The doctor's inside Iraq ready to come get us.

Yeah. The notion of a forward operating base being very forward was, it's not unrealistic. I'm not going to confirm or deny it. I'm just going to say that they need to be closer to... Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting.

Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. to the action in Kuwait City.

Scott, for sort of for, I mean, a refresher for me and for like the people, maybe some of the younger people who are watching who aren't for that. Prior to Iraq invading Kuwait,

what had been our relationship with Iraq with Saddam? What had we provided them in their conflict with Iran? Can you walk us through that? And then their invasion into Kuwait, sort of what propelled that, if you can get us to that point? Sure. Well, I mean, we had a complicated relationship with Iraq. Iraq was a strategic Soviet ally. And, you know, much of its military was provided by the Soviet Union.

When Iraq invaded Iran back in 1980, and then that war quickly bogged down into the slug fist, that it turned into. Iraq diversified its armaments, got a lot of weapons from the Chinese, got a lot of weapons from the French, et cetera. At that time, the United States had a policy that was more antagonistic towards Iran than Iraq. I think from a strategic standpoint,

this is a little crass, but as long as Iraqis were killing Iranians and Iranians were killing Iraqis, we were happy because it kept both countries sort of bogged down. But in the end, you know, we put our thumb on the scale in favor of Iraq. And we did so in a number of ways. One was to provide agricultural loans or, you know, a couple billion dollars worth of agricultural

loans that Iraq then diverted to use to procure the technology necessary to build long-range ballistic missiles, to build chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons. You know, this was largely funded by the United States. We also provided Iraq with intelligence. You know, one of a, you know, fast forward a little bit. You know, one of the guy, one of the defectors that I interacted with a lot was a guy named Wafi Samurai. He was the director of military intelligence for Iraq, and he defected in 1994.

And I was able to debrief him frequently and such. And he talked about meeting with U.S. government intelligence officials in Baghdad. And these guys would bring in satellite photographs and they'd bring in SIGAN hits. They'd bring in an entire intelligence package and basically lay out the Iranian order of battle and such that enabled the Iraqis to do effective combat planning. This was especially true in the later phases of the war. in particular in the battle for Alfau Peninsula, I believe, in early 1988, made extensive use of U.S. intelligence. Ironically, that intelligence was a lot of it was targeting intelligence,

specifically tailored for the use of Iraqi chemical weapons. So the United States played a role in helping target Iraqi chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers on Alfow Peninsula. It was there because I did one of these raids on the headquarters of the military intelligence, and I was able to gain access to a couple safes that had documents that dated back to this time. It wasn't my mandate. I wasn't in a position to go through them in detail, but it was just interesting to see that aspect of that history and realize that, you know,

the United States played a role. So the United States was in favor of Iraq prevailing, But one of the problems with Iraq prevailing is that once the war with Iran ended, Iraq began to feel like it was a regional power that was capable of flexing its muscles, especially against another regional power, Israel, who was an American ally. And now Iraq became inconvenient. In the summer of 1990, Iraq had deployed long-range ballistic missiles, tipped with chemical weapons.

into Western Iraq as a means of deterring Israel from any potential Israeli strike against Iraq's nuclear program, et cetera. And this was a problem for the United States. We viewed Iraq as an ally, and we engaged Iraq as an ally. We said, look, we're your friend. You need to back down here, but we'll continue to provide support. The classic picture of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. 1984. Yeah.

One of the big problems also facing Iraq at the time was, you know, that Iran-Iraq war is very expensive. And Iraq went deeply in debt, borrowed a lot of money from European banks, etc. They also turned a blind eye to Kuwait, doing a bunch of slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields and stealing tens of billions of dollars of oil and putting it on the market. Now, Iraq would let that happen because it was war. And Kuwait was using that money to loan it back to Iraq. Whatever. It is dirty.

So those of you don't know what slant drilling is they would basically start on their border. So they were drilling in Kuwait, but they would slant across the border into Iraq, right? And basically siphon Iraqis. And one of the things that happened to Iraq is with all this debt, it had a giant debt load. And the European banks, called the London Group of Banks, was putting pressure on Iraq to repay the loans. In order for Iraq to meet the minimum payment necessary, oil had to be selling it around, it had to be selling it over $14 a barrel. what the Kuwaitis were doing at the time was not just slant drilling but then dumping that oil on the market and depressing the price of oil so that Iraq was going bankrupt. So the Iraqis in July of 1990 actually went to the Arab League, a meeting I believe was in Algiers, and confronted the Arab League and said, look, what's happening to us right now is economic warfare.

This is a existential threat to our national security. And it has to stop. And if it doesn't stop, we will do what we need to do to defend ourselves. Well, the Arab League turned a blind eye to it. Didn't do anything. So the end result was that Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990 because Kuwait was engaged in warfare. It was a different kind of warfare, but it was a warfare that would have destroyed Iraq every bit as much as military power to destroy Iraq economically. Which coincides with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

and George H.W. Bush's, you know, what was it, his New World Order speech, that we're going to create a new world order with America as the quintessential nation, the arbiter of world affairs. Yeah. What is the first part when you, when you... I was just saying that all this kind of coincides with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the George Bush policy of a new world order that America is going to be sort of the quintessential nation. Yeah, one of the interesting things, too, is, again, we talk about, you know,

coincidences of history. You know, Iraq invades in August 1990 at a time when the Soviet Union, the United States, are improving their relations and working together, you know, this, this experiment of disarmament that I began in 1988 through the INF Treaty had now grown into the START Treaty. We're talking about getting rid of strategic nuclear weapons, and there's all this cooperation taking place and Russia or the Soviet Union agreed to align itself with the

United States in terms of holding its former regional ally Iraq accountable. I mean, had this been, you know, a couple years earlier during the height of the Cold War, Russia would have sided with Iraq. There would have been no Security Council resolutions. There would have been no international coalition. But because Russia or the Soviet Union said,

no, no, we're on the side of international law. supporting this concept of a new world order, Russia didn't veto the Security Council resolutions. And as a result, the United States was able to assemble under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, this coalition that ended up liberating Kuwait. So yeah, no, the post-Cold War reality very much played in our favor. So, like I said, we're going to talk about the Gulf War a little bit more later,

but I wanted to, I mean, then jump forward. 1991, the Iraqis, after initially lying to you guys, they unilaterally destroy their WMDs. And they do this for political reasons. I mean, you can elaborate, but I suppose they were afraid they were going to get caught in their lie. So they destroyed, but now because they destroyed the WMDs unilaterally, you guys weren't there to supervise it.

So now, again, there's a verification. issue. Well, we'll start off by noting that when Iraq made the decision to lie and hold on to weapons, this was a decision made at the highest level by Saddam Hussein and by his son-in-law Hussein come on. The weapons that they sought to retain were taken away from the organizations that nominally held them and turned over to to Saddam's personal security force, the Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization. These entities became responsible for safeguarding these weapons. And they were hiding them. They were moving them around. It's a big shuttle game, keeping them away from the inspectors.

Problem is, the inspectors were actually pretty good and pretty diligent. Even though they were gentlemen Jim, they approached the, The issue very professionally in July of 1990, for instance, one of the first missile inspections went to Taji, a camp north of Baghdad. And that's where the Unit 224, the Scud Missile Force, was stationed. They were going there to verify Unit 224 location. But before they landed, the United States had some satellite photographs of what it would look like to be Scuds hidden in a culvert near Taji. and the inspectors were going to try and go there and find this missile. The Iraqis were able to move the missile just in time, and it wasn't discovered.

But the Iraqis at that point in time realized, hey, the game's up. Clearly somebody saw the missile. They were going to right where the missile was. And the only reason why they didn't find is because we moved it. And a decision was made at that point in time that they realized the inspectors weren't going to go away, that you couldn't just pull the wool over the eyes of the inspectors. So a decision was made in July, late July, that all the material, all the physical weapons that the Iraqis had held on to were to be destroyed. And it was going to be destroyed in great secrecy.

They were destroyed by the Special Republican Guard, the Special Security Organization. They were taken out to spots in the desert, blown up in the middle of the night, buried. And the documents that were safeguarded were kept. by the Special Security Organization and Special Republican Guard because Iraq fully intended once sanctions were lifted to reconstitute the totality of its weapons of mass destruction programs. But they needed this archive, this brain trust, that would do this. So what we have here isn't just the Iraqis destroying all the weaponry in secrecy,

but using presidential security to do this. And this will become a point of contention down the road. The one place you guys have a lot of difficulty searching is presidential palaces, places like this. And they are hiding documents and things in those facilities. And it's not just one palace. It's just anything Saddam says is presidential, right? Well, it's not just that. I mean, you know, they have barracks that are outside of the palaces.

They would use their personal villas. One of my most successful inspections was one that took me to the villa that was owned by one of the Special Republican Guard majors who had buried a ballistic missile equipment underneath the concrete in his driveway and underneath the shed. And we went to that villa, surrounded it, and we were able to locate the stuff using ground penetrating radar and then dig it up. But riddle me this, Scott. How in the hell did you know that there was something buried? in this major's driveway to go even look there in the first place. Okay, now we'll fast forward. August 1995, Hussein Kamal, that one of the senior guys

that made the decision to hide weapons and then destroy them, he defected. He was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, and he defected along with his brothers and some cousins, and they went to Jordan, where he was debriefed by Anscom, by the CIA, by the Brits, by everybody. And he spilled the beans. He told the truth. He said, you know, we destroyed everything. We held on to some documents. We held on to some pieces, but more or less, everything's been destroyed.

Well, you know, we can't just accept that at face value. We have to confirm this. We have to go in and confirm this. And one of the big problems was getting the Iraqis to admit that they, in fact, had destroyed this stuff in secret. Because up until now, they had admitted it. They were just saying, no, no, no, we've declared everything. We have an honest declaration.

Don't worry about it. Hussein Kamal was. lured back later in the year and subsequently killed in a shootout with his family members, the Al-Majid tribe, a matter of honor. Even though Saddam said that he would not order his death, the tribe said we have to kill him as a matter of honor, and they did. A big firefight. A lot of people killed women, children. One person who didn't die was a cousin who had defected to to Jordan, but then went to Turkey. He was in Turkey at the time being debriefed by Turkish intelligence when he, when, when

when everybody else went back to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, get in contact with this guy through the Jordanian intelligence service and debrief him. I had his photograph, uh, from an earlier videotape back in 1991, uh, where he and other Special Republican Guards were obstructing an inspection team led by David Kay, an IAEA inspector, who had closed in on a facility that was hiding nuclear weapons manufacturing equipment, EMS and centrifuges and things of that nature. And I was able to show this photograph to a number of Iraqis, and they identified him, and I was able to interview him.

he talked about the role he played in receiving ballistic missile components and how they were shuttled around and ultimately hidden at his villa. So he was able to pinpoint the location of the villa for me and I was able to put together a team and do a raid on that villa and find the material that was buried. And that was interesting because, you know, again, up until then the Iraqis are always saying, no, we're told the truth. There's nothing here. And once again, boom, there we are.

boom their stuff in the ground and now they've got to change their story. And then why don't you get into the concealment mechanism? Because even after they came clean and told you, yeah, we unilaterally destroyed, this issue of the concealment mechanism became like the center of your universe for many years. Yeah, well, let's back up just a little bit and talk about how I got to Unscum. Yeah. You know, I had this experience in the Soviet Union as a weapons inspector. I was an intelligence officer.

And one of my commanders in the Soviet Union was an Army colonel named Doug England. Then I had the experience in the Gulf War, which was a pretty unique experience. We'll talk about it later perhaps. But it focused on scud hunting and getting rid of or hunting down Iraqi scud missiles. So when the war ended, I made a decision at that point in time to get out of the Marine Corps. I joined the Marine Corps to fight the Soviet Union. I'm just going to be honest. My job was to kill the Kami for Mami, pure and second.

That's all I wanted to do. My career ambition was to get promoted to the rank of major and serve at the mission in Potsdam, doing behind the scene stuff, spying on the Soviets. Maybe get promoted to lieutenant colonel and do an Adichet slot in Moscow. That's it.

That was my ambition. So with the Cold War over, those jobs went away. There's no longer, you know, that game isn't being played. And I decided maybe it was time to move on and do something else. So I was trying to find my way in the civilian world in the summer of 1991. When Doug England, he's still on active duty, he's still with the inspection agency, he gets assigned as the chief of staff for UNSCO. And his job is to create an operational organization.

it became apparent to him by August of 1991 that the Iraqis were lying and that Unscom wasn't equipped to deal with the lies. He believed that Unscom needed to create its own intelligence cell. And he called me and asked me if I would come and help set up the cell. I wasn't supposed to run it early on. I was only supposed to come in and set it up as a temporary four-month contract. And I was unemployed and I said, sure, I'll give that a shot. So I came in. Initially, my job was simply to organize information

and been coming into us from other nations. We also had a U2 aircraft flying. It was a U.S. Air Force U2 aircraft painted black, but with U.N. on it, it flew, took pictures, and we get to pictures. But, you know, these photographs would just show up in a bundle of photographs. And my job was to sort them out, create target folders, you know, typical intelligence stuff, nothing too sexy.

then we got caught up in an inspection in December of 1991 called the Great Scud Hunt, Hunscombe 24. And this was where having shown the Iraqis to be liars about their nuclear program, the United States wanted to show that Iraq was lying about its ballistic missile force. At that time, we believed that Iraq was hiding 100 missiles and about a half a dozen operational launchers. So the United States came in with a lot of J-Soc guys, veterans of the great Scut Hunter in the war, a lot of intelligence capability. And they wanted to do this big inspection in Iraq looking for Scud missiles. So I was brought in not as just an intelligence guy, but as an operations guy because of my previous experience. And based upon that inspection, I got a good reputation.

We did the inspection. It didn't go out the way the United States wanted. to be, but I emerged from that inspection with people saying this guy knows what he's doing on the ground. And suddenly, you know, answer this, how do you become the expert in something when you have no experience by being the first person to do it? Right. That's right. If you're the first person to do it, you are now the world's expert.

And I was the first person to do certain things in Iraq as an inspector. And I was also staff at the time. I was on the UN staff when the, you know, most of the, you know, most of the, you know, most of the, the people that do inspections are flown in temporary just for that inspection. And when the inspection ends, they go home. I was left behind in Unscom to do the follow-on planning. So when people said, well, we need to do a follow-on mission, who's going to do that plan? Ritter, you're our expert. The hell no, I'm just a 30-year-old, you know, junior captain equivalent. Why am I getting tasked with this job? Because you've done it, you're the expert, you're going to run this show. And the other thing is,

it'll be in a former Marine and a Marine officer, leadership abhors a vacuum. And one of the things about the United Nations is it's a giant bureaucracy with a lot of leadership vacuums. And a lot of people sitting around waiting for other people to make decisions.

I didn't wait for anybody to make a decision. I was given a task. I was given a mission. I made the decision. I ran with it. I took charge. Perhaps in situations where maybe I shouldn't have. But I insinuated myself into the process. and quickly became the go-to guy for confrontational, intrusive on-site inspections in Iraq.

If you wanted to lead a team to go to an area where you needed to kick down doors and do a rapid-site exploitation, I was the guy that was the one who put it together. I was still too junior to be the chief inspector. We had actually a very great Russian inspector named Nikita Smitovich. Yeah, you spoke very highly of him in your book. Nikita was the, but Nikita and I became a team. Nikita was the, the, the civilized face. Then I was the crazy wild-eyed guy in the background planning this thing and pulling strings

and making the trains run on time. But together we created a very capable team that became the go-to unit within Unscom for intrusive on-site inspections. But this whole scud thing became like your white whale. I mean, it was all like a giant boondoggle in so many ways. Like you kept going and doing these inspections. And this is the running theme, I think, through your book, is you'd come back and say, hey, there's no scuds.

There's no WMDs. And the CIA would just look back at you say, now you're wrong. And they would just dismiss your findings, dismiss the man on the ground. But beyond even that, they would dis- Being a parent can be really challenging.

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Visit child and family resource network.org today. I dismiss the processes that they themselves helped help to develop, which was just mind-blowing to me. No, this was frustrating. And, you know, when we started the inspection work, the lead agency for the CIA working with UNSCOM was the arms control intelligence staff, ASIS. And it basically was a Cold War era unit that advised the director of central intelligence on arms control issues. When I was an inspector in the Soviet Union, I worked very closely with ASIS, you know, doing our work there. ASIS had within its, because it still had this Cold War disarm, you know, disarmament, arms control mission, but they created something called the Iraq Sanctions

Monitoring Task Force. And this basically became the WMD element within the CIA that would advise the inspectors. Later on, it was determined that ASIS wasn't probably the right organization to be doing that. And they created something called a non-proliferation center or MPC. And within NPC, there was an element called. the Iraq Sanctions Monitoring Group. And again, these were where the CIA brought together their analysts who would provide support, analytical support to the inspectors.

And early on, these guys played a very important role because, you know, they've got the weight of the U.S. intelligence community behind them. They would come in and provide briefings on sites. But what happens when a CIA analyst who's never been to Iraq, never been to the site in question, is operating only off of, you know, overhead imagery and some ancillary intelligence, gives his briefing or her briefing. And then I lead a team or I participate in a team that goes into act to that site. And we crawl around that site on our hands and knees and see everything about that site.

Who's now the expert? CIA or us? And there was this power transition that took place where as we did our inspections, we became the experts. The CIA didn't come to brief us. The CIA came to learn from us to say, what do you know about this site? What can you tell us about this site? And there was this very symbiotic relationship between Anscom and the CIA. And not just the CIA.

We had the same relationship with British intelligence, with German intelligence, etc. But we were frustrated because we kept being told, for instance, I was the lead missile guy because of my experience, you know, why is a marina missile guy? Oh, I know about missile guy. Right. Because I was a missile inspector in the Soviet Union, again, a job I probably shouldn't have had, but I excelled at. And then because I was a scud hunter during the Gulf War, again, a job I probably shouldn't have had, but I did all right. I was now the missile guy for Runscom. We had to account for these missiles.

And we had a problem. It's not just, I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but you know, you're giving an example. The Iraqis declared 719 missiles. or no, I'm sorry, 785 missiles. But we had receipts from the Soviet Union of 819 being delivered. So we knew there was a problem right off on the math. Interesting side story, I actually spent two weeks in the basement of the Soviet mission in New York with a team of KGB and military procurement types.

They brought in all their files of all the material that they had exported to Iraq. And I spent two weeks going through these files, pulling out the intelligence that would be useful. It just shows the kind of cooperation that existed at the time. These are guys that a couple years earlier, he is the enemy from hell. We're now cooperating on the issue of Iraq. But the other issue was that in addition to buying missiles, Iraq was building its own missiles. And then to complicate that further, in order to build their extended range of Al-Hu's, Usain missile, had to take a standard Russian scud and cut it up and then weld it together.

And so you had this mixture of, you know, two or three Russian scuds cut up, and then you had parts brought in from Germany and China and elsewhere welded in to create a missile. So when you're accounting for a missile, you have to account for not just the missiles that were purchased from the Soviet Union, but you have to account for all the material that was purchased abroad, brought in. So I had to go to Germany, meet with prosecutors and go through their fires because they were prosecuting a bunch of German businessmen for illegally selling material to Iraq. So I had to go there and get these documents, wade through these documents, negotiate with the Germans on how I could use this because you don't want to interfere with their prosecution, but we still have an operational job to do. It's fascinating, but we would go to Iraq and we did this one inspection, UNSCCOM 42, in August of 19.

92 where we'd sit down with the Iraqis. I came in armed with this briefcase full of documents. And we'd sit down with the Iraqis and we talked about it. Okay, now tell us about this machine building piece of equipment that you bought from Germany. Oh, yes, Mr. Ritter, I remember like it was yesterday. We bought three. We bought three. These were my babies.

These were my babies. And we brought them in and we worked them, this, this. and then you blew them up in the war, and we turned one over to you, and all my babies are dead. Now, I knew for a fact that they bought seven, and I had to sign receipts for them. I had the invoices because I went to Germany and got this stuff. So I'd let them tell their lie.

And then I would say, well, then how do you explain this? And I'd throw the document with his signature on it, showing that he received seven. And he, oh, oh, yes, now I remember there were seven, seven. And, you know, and we would just play this game. And it got to the point where late in the inspection process, we go do our inspections to meet with them, I would sit there and talk to them and I knew they were lying.

I didn't have any more documents to show. But I would go, well, how do you? I start reaching for the bag. They go, oh, no, no, no. Now I remember like it was yesterday, yes. And they would tell the truth. So you'd call their bluff. But we did this and what we were able to do through this inspection

is get a firm grasp on the Iraqi indigenous missile production capability. how many missiles the Iraqis were able to produce themselves. How many missiles were produced by combining imported material with Soviet scuds? And we got a good number, a very good number. This gave us the baseline now to do a final accounting, because now we know exactly how many missiles the Iraqis have. And we were able to prove this and get the Iraqis to admit to it. Say, yes, we lied. These were the missiles.

Another interesting aspect, remember that 100 missile force I told you about? They blew it up and buried it under the ground. Now, have you ever tried to account for missiles that been blown up? It's not easy. So you bring in the bulldozers and you go through the ground and you have to pull up all the bits and pieces. And then you have to go through and collect every unique serial identifier on each unique piece of equipment. And then you have to get the production logs. And this is where, again, working with the Russians help, I was able to get the production logs and the delivery logs.

And then I was able to get from the Germans all the serial numbers of the components that they provided. And then you match them up piece by piece by piece by. piece by piece. And there were 98 missiles that were destroyed in that fashion. We were able to confirm forensically, this is like doing a giant, you know, criminal scene. Jigsaw. Possible. 96 of 98 missiles. How long did that process take you?

Like to sit there and like it's like going through a waste, a waste basket full of shredded papers, right? And like laying them all out. How long did that process take you just for that one site? It would take good days. I mean, we would pull the stuff up and then we'd have to get it out of the ground. Then we would lay it out and then we'd go each piece and collect the serial number. Remember, the data collection is just the first part. Then we got to go back to New York and match that data with the other records and start piecing the stuff together.

And it took a while. But from that process, we were able to come up with a very good number of how many missiles the Iraqis have. But now we have a problem because a lot of the missiles that Iraq, tried to hide from us, they did so by falsely declaring missile tests. And we don't have any parts for this. So now we've got to do inspections to get the log books that document the tests. And we were successful in getting our hands on the actual logbooks and going down. And we were able to match each missile with a specific.

The bottom line is when Iraq said we had 819 missiles, I was able to match each missile with a known destruction event, a confirmed destruction event, say, yes, I can confirm that this missile no longer exists, except the CIA kept saying, no, they got missiles, man, they're lying to you. And I said, well, why are they lying? Because Delta Force destroyed, and the SAS destroyed a bunch of missiles during the war. We have confirmed missile kills, and the Iraqis are saying, no, missiles were killed at all. So now I have to go in and forensically reconstruct the Gulf War. And that was an interesting process. We did that.

I took a team in. We went to all the sites in Western Iraq, all the kill sites, confirmed that there was nothing on the ground to match up. And then I also was able to interview the actual Iraqi missile officers, the officers who ran the war from their commanding general all the way down to the battery commander who fired the missile and go through their launch records, their operational logs from the war. and confirm that not a single missile was destroyed. Now, this pissed off a lot of people in J-Soc because a lot of medals were issued on the belief that things were destroyed. Same thing with the SAS. A lot of medals were issued on the belief that they were destroying scuds.

And they didn't want to acknowledge that they destroyed. I remember coming back from that inspection, Onscombe 45, and going down to the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefing a conference room of the top missile experts and laying out my case for why there were no more missiles. And man, I got feedback, pushed back like you wouldn't believe. People challenged it. And at the end, they couldn't contradict the data.

I remember talking to the L.com's talk about that. He was one of the operators on the ground and the goal for it. I think he was telling me that was like the coldest he's ever been on in his life. Like four or five guys out there patrolling in the desert. And they had a guy killed in a helicopter crash. I mean, yeah, I can understand why they pushed back on it. And what did he say about? Did he say anything about Scud's?

No, he did not tell me anything. I would have to ask him. I don't think we got that far into it. But I'll say this, Scott, a few years ago, I was able to sit down and have dinner with the brigadier who was the commander of the SAS at that time. I think it was Scud Alley and Scud Boulevard, right? Yep, yep. And the SAS had Scud Boulevard. And I asked him point blank, I said, how many Scuds did the SAS destroy during the war?

And he told me none. So, I mean, he gave me an honest statement. Well, one of the interesting things is Scud Boulevard never had a scud on it. The Iraqis never put a Scud into Scud Boulevard. That wasn't part of their MO. And the same thing where J-Soc was operating, you know, J-Socq had this belief that missiles were being operated out of Shabalahiri in the center part of Western Iraq, when in fact the missiles were coming out of Baghdad to the launch site and return. So J-Soc was looking in all the wrong places.

And it was the other interesting thing about that last inspection, not the last, but the one in Unscom 45 in late 1992, we had Delta operatives who were the killers, the guys who said, I killed a missile. I killed it. I, me. I'm the one who called in the airstrike. I'm the one who fired the missile. into the into the scud tell and these are honorable men they don't lie um and they've walked i walked with them we retraced their footsteps and um it was a it was a very it was almost sad thing to see them come to the realization that they hadn't done what they thought they had done was it

i mean was iraqs i'm sorry we have we have a couple questions we need to get to real quick but was iraqs saying up decoys i mean what what yeah because is that what it was if these guys Well, one of the problems was we were, you know, you guys know this. You don't get as close to the target as you'd like to get. Sure. And so target identification is usually done long range. And there's a lot of misidentification. There's a lot of heat signatures.

They were misidentified as scud missiles. One of the critical kill events was actually of a Roland TEL, a Roland service-to-air missile, which is a eight-wheeled vehicle that had a tarp over it. And so you couldn't see that it was a rolling missile launch. You saw a tarp, and they interpreted underneath the tarp was a scud missile. And they actually hunted this thing down like you track a wild animal and got it cornered in a wadi and took it out with a, I think a maverick fired from an A10. Blue an half, saw it blowing up an half. You know, but we were able, I was able to work with the Iraqis and we got the operational lock. in the Iraq, he said, no, there was no scud there.

That was a Roland. And they took me and showed me the unit records, how the roll-and-tel had been destroyed and all that stuff. And the Delta guy was fighting me the whole time. It finally went, yeah, damn, okay. And it's an odd parallel to, you know, how we made the claim for the longest time that the Patriot missile systems worked at shooting down scuds during the war,

and then after the fact it turned out that they probably hadn't shot down or intercepted a single scud. It's not just there. You know, I spent a lot of time in Israel, and the Israelis were also frustrated by that fact that, you know, the Patriot didn't work as advertised. Let's, let's give me a good, just a little story about the Patriot, if you want. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just going to say a little aside about the Patriot. During the Gulf War, you know, I was billeted at a place called Escon Village outside of Riyadh.

And the first night of the scud attack, the alarms go off and all that stuff. Like an idiot, you know, I go to the top of the building to watch the missiles come in. And so, you know, you watch them tracking them across the sky, da-da-da-da-da. All of a sudden the Patriots fire off. And well, the thing about a Patriot is that it does an S-shaped acquisition model. So it's following a parabola, its radar is tracking it. So the missile fires. This is to adjust to hit the scut.

Now, the Patriot was designed to take on aircraft, which are flying a little bit slower. This thing's flying fast. So the Patriot has to do this giant adjustment. So the S is going up and then down. The Patriot fires up and then comes straight out my damn building where I'm on. Right over your head impacts in the ground right behind us. So the Patriots are more deadly than the scuds. Nice.

That's one of the problems. The Patriots is designed to take on the scuds. And then I'll roll into something else here. Okay, well, also, thank you everybody for join us tonight, our guest of Scott Ritter, former chief UN. Lead, lead, unscum, weapons, inspector. Okay. Make sure that you subscribe.

Please hit the bill for notifications. If you like our content, please join our Patreon. The link is in the description. The link is in the description right now. Even a dollar a day. A dollar a day a dollar a day a dollar a month. No, you got a small favor to ask all of you, Pope. Yeah, give him the Bernie Sanders. Oh, I thought it was the old $2.99 or two. The PBS drive is also, you can do one of those. Yeah. Um, so we got a couple of years here. I think both these are from Alex. Thank you, Alex. We really appreciate the donations. It really helps us out. Uh, they did just raise our rent. So we're counting on you guys. Um, so Alex asked, what exactly was the Republican Guard

this from earlier and by extension what exactly are paramilitary forces and then he also he wants to know what your favorite meal you had while working overseas when you were in the Middle East when you're in Iraq

did you have a favorite meal? I had one meal that was a favorite because it was a social event the Iraqis would prepare this giant carp out of the Tigris River and you'd go to a special restaurant down by the by the edge of the river and again the the interesting thing is you know the iraqi's treated us like their guests when we weren't doing inspections when we're doing inspections we were the enemy but afterwards the iraqis you know they're very hospitable people and so the it was you know when it was done they'd invite us to go to this restaurant and i think it's called maskuf i'm not my memory might be off but this giant carp that they pull out of the river and then they They cook it and they lay it down in the middle of the table and everybody reaches in and has the fish and there's the bread and all that stuff.

It was delicious. Not necessarily my favorite meal from a, you know, from a taste standpoint, but the experience, the experience of eating this carp in Iraq on the bank of the Tigris River with the presidential palace lit up behind you, seated with these Iraqis and talking with these people as human beings. you know, and bonding with them as human beings. That was probably my favorite Middle East meal. Was that restaurant, did you go upstairs? Was it on like a second floor? Well, they have several. I mean, at that time, the bank would be,

there was actually a series of restaurants like that. So there were some that fit that model. This one actually had concrete steps going leading up from the river, then sort of a pavilion. And then you go up to steps more where the actual kitchen area was. But we would sit on the pavilion while they would bring the food down from the kitchen. And then he watched so like what was the Republican Guard? I mean, because this is quite a ways before, you know.

Some of the younger viewers might not be acquainted with the order of battle of the previous regime. Yeah. Well, the Republican Guard, you had the, you know, the Iraqi army, standard military force. But, you know, Iraq is very much a tribal society. and also a society that has, you know, sectarian aspects of it, a Shia majority, Sunni minority, Kurdish minority. When Saddam Hussein became president, a decision was made that he would create this elite force that would protect him from any potential military coup.

And this force was the Republican Guard. And initially, to be a member of the Republican Guard, you had to be from a tribe that was deemed to be loyal to Saddam. So they would recruit exclusively from these tribes. Now, during the Iran-Iraq War, the Republican Guard became a core-sized unit and became the premier offensive fighting force. And so they diversified their membership a little bit. And to protect Saddam, a new organization was created called the Special Republican Guard, which was a division-sized organization where you had battalions that would be positioned at each palace where Saddam would stay, each critical location.

And so this was an elite force within the Republican Guard. So you had the Republican Guard, which is this core-sized five, six divisions worth of combat troops, a combat force. Then you had the special Republican Guard, which was a, force protection organization. And then he asked one more. On behalf of my roommate,

how would you recommend someone get into counterproliferation work on the ground floor? There's a couple ways to do it. First of all, you know, counterproliferation means you're countering chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, military weapons, ballistic missiles. So become a chemist. Become a biologist.

become a rocket scientist, become a nuclear physicist, get the expertise necessary to be an expert. And then you, you know, and then you can find your way through the U.S. government bureaucracy and be invited to be a member of, you know, the team as a as a specialist. You know, but counterproliferation isn't just being smart about the weapons. It's also being smart about how things are procured, being smart about how things are hidden. and being smart about operations. I mean, you know, it's an intelligence business. So you become an intelligence officer.

Join the CIA, become a case officer, become, you know, a covert operator. And be that operations guy. And I'm going to tell you, the operations guy runs the show. The specialists, you know, work for the operation. So if you want to be a counterproliferation person, and join the CIA. Now, would somebody like with a background, say, like forensic accounting, is there a call for that, too, just because of the amount of, you know, trying to track everything down? Well, I think you guys interviewed a guy last week or before who, who, I think he talked about taking on the IED procurement networks.

Right. Yeah. And such. And the fact of matter is, yes, I mean, look, a lot of the work that I did was forensic accountant. We, you know, we were able to uncover some covert procurement networks run by the Iraqis, actually run by Palestinians on behalf of Iraq, you know, by going to banks and by pulling up invoices and matching, you know, transactions with deliveries and such and all that. It's been a lot of work doing basically. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey.

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bookkeeping, a forensic bookkeeping to prove that there was this procurement network taking place. And then we would then go into Iraq and try and find the evidence of this procurement network. But no, I mean, when you get into this business, it's life. I mean, basically, it's it's the same thing. If the FBI was taken down a organized crime network, the same skill set that's involved in that is involved in taking down a covert procurement network. Scott, another thing I wanted to get into with you was you were talking a little bit earlier about how there's this friction between the analysts and the operators or the inspectors and how the inspectors would become the experts at a certain point. So there's that friction

there. But the flip side to that is if you ignore analysts, you can run into some problems as well, which I felt was kind of what was coming up during Operation Rollerblade, as it was called, where you had three, or you had one CIA paramilitary officer and two Delta Force soldiers come to you informally and try to get their big mish off the ground, using Unscump to do it. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that. I thought that was particularly interesting. Sure. To back up on Rollerblade, before Rollerblade was an inspection called Cabbage Patch.

A cabbage patch grew out of, if you remember, I went to that DIA conference room and I briefed that we could account for all of Iraq's missiles. And when I came back to New York, a classified cable followed me where the U.S. government said, no, we believe that they're hiding 12 launchers and 200 missiles. I said, well, where the hell did this number come from? And so I'd go back down to Washington, D.C. and say, you know, tell us if you're going to say this, and this was briefed to the Senate. I mean, John Deutsch went before the Senate and briefed this. I said, if you're going to brief the Senate that there's 12 launchers and 200 missiles, we're the goddamn inspectors, excuse my language, we're the inspectors. We need to know how you know this.

That's our job. You can't go there and create political hay and then leave us hanging. You know, because people are going to come to us and say, well, why aren't you doing something about this? Because we don't know anything about it. We believe there's nothing left. We believe we've accounted for everything. You're now telling me there's 12 launchers and 200 missiles. And at first, the U.S. government didn't want to give us this information.

They were very reticent about this. They said the information is too sensitive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, I'm a stubborn SOB, and I kept going down there and banging on the table and saying no. And I got my executive chairman to back me up. The bottom line is we were going to go public and take on the U.S. government and say that they're full of, you know what, unless they tell us this, because this is too important. So finally, the U.S. government said, okay, we're going to brief you. So I went down there and they gave me the top secret briefing of all the sites in Iraq that were buried missiles were.

I mean, we're talking about missiles buried underwater, under rivers, underground, in the middle of mountains. They're all buried everywhere. And this is high quality information. And they said, but now that they said, well, you're probably not going to be able to inspect this. This is this is a frustrating thing about it is they're buried. So there's nothing you can do about it. You're just going to have to accept it. I said, bull, I can do this.

So the first thing I did is I went to the Russians, and I said, tell me about how you train the Iraqis to hide missiles. And I got the Russian ballistic missile experts, the guys who fought in Afghanistan, fired the scuds, the guys who went to Iraq and trained the Iraqis. And they described how they buried missiles. Then I went out to Yuma, Arizona, and got the Marine Corps to replicate this on the ground.

They basically built sky and high sites throughout the human desert. And then I got the CIA to procure ground penetrating radar, which we mounted on helicopters, and we flew over these things to detect it. And we found out that we could detect underground anomalies, et cetera. And then I went to him and I said, we can do this inspection. I can go find all these underground things. We also got divers to come in who could go in underwater and make for missiles underwater. So I built this whole big inspection team.

We went to Edwards Air Force Base and did a month of training, out integrating helicopters, et cetera. Fascinating because we had, you know, KGB operatives with us. And while we're out there doing our business, you know, we got B2 bombers doing low level runs over, and the rest was like, holy, that's a B2. Yep. We were in the F-35 experimental hangar that they evacuated to turn over us

with the painting of the F-35. aircraft there and the Russians are going, that's fascinating. Yeah, it is. So anyways, we did this. We went into Iraq and we did this mission. This mission had a very large J-Sach element. Our helicopters were from a special unit that's flown out of Fort Eustis. Pardon?

The East Squadron guys? Yeah, yeah. They call themselves aviation. support or something like that but basically see that that kind of thing um very good one of the pilots uh just as a side note a guy named fred uh was actually um started his career as an air force uh he's an iranian started his career as an air force linguist uh went into tearon with the advanced party led by dick meadows in the lead up to the uh the attempt was abandoned and um had to get out of uh iran on his own. When he came out, the U.S. military was so

impressively, they said, what do you want to do? And he said, I want to fly helicopters. And he had been a task force 160 helicopter pilots. He was pretty much hand-recruited by Charlie Beckwith and Wade Ishimoto, as I recall. And, yeah, Fred, I mean, Fred's a legend. I met his daughter one time. She's really nice. He was somebody's a good pilot. We had another great pilot guy, AT. These guys were awesome. Air crews were awesome. If anyone who's viewing this wants to go and find out more about Fred, he was awarded the Bull Simmons Award a few years back. And it includes like a biography, a non-classified biography of some of the things he's been involved in.

And you should do yourself a favor and go take a look at that and read that because Fred's, I have never met him. I would love to. But I mean, like I said, he's a legend. And we had also on this team, we had a very large, um, uh, Delta. contingent. This one was from Charlie Squadron. So these guys who weren't scud hunters during the war because Charlie Squadron didn't deploy only Alpha and Bravo. But we had Charlie Squadron guys. We had a large special activity staff contingent. We had a large ISA contingent. So we had a lot of people on this team to help us out. What I didn't know at the time is that the special activity staff

the guys that were supporting us during the Gulf War were actually deployed in Syria where they operated these outposts where they had giant telescopes and they'd be looking across the border into Iraq and one of the places that they were observing was Sinjar Mountain up north to the west of Mosul.

It's sort of infamous today as being the place where the Yazidis were butchered by ISIS. But during the Gulf War, the CIA had this team on on the Syrian side of the border observing Sinjar Mountain and they detected what they thought were scud missiles being driven into tunnels in the side of the of the mountain. They were trying to get the U.S. government to provide this intelligence to unscom so we could

do the inspection, but the powers of B said no. But now these guys, so we're training. this mission, we're ready for it. And these guys come up to me and they say, hey, we need you to also do this follow on stuff. I said, well, you know, I can't just do it. I have to brief my boss, who is everybody's boss here, it's the executive chairman, and I have to get a notification of inspection site. And I can't do this in secret. The U.S. government is going to find out about it. They said, well, but if you brief Achaeus, the Swedish ambassador, and he agrees to it, then the U.S. government will, you know, approve of this.

Yeah. And so this became a follow-on inspection called Roller Blade. And it was purely a special activity staff, J-Soc-driven event. I am convinced that it had nothing to do with missiles. They had a guy that they brought on to team who was an ISA type who, I believe, needed to meet somebody. and they needed to get physical access to this area so he could do something and my team was using because we went there I mean look I'm a marine I plan operations marine style we surrounded surrounded that damn mountain and we flew helicopters all over that mountain we probed every village around that mountain we spent five days doing that and we found nothing that remotely resembled any of the information that they had provided us but it gave this unit five days to the to probe and do whatever it was they were doing and they were happy.

And it wasn't too bad because- One of the things about being a weapons inspectors, we can't allow national agendas to corrupt the legitimacy of our work. And I felt sort of used by that inspection because it was my name, my reputation, my status that got that thing going. And then to spend all this money, time and effort, frankly speaking put guys lives at risk I mean some of the flying up there is pretty hairy

some of the driving is pretty hairy and for it to be in support of something that had nothing to do with our mandate was not a good feeling and that kind of stuff happens a lot more than people might think where you have Rangers planning an operation and then a couple Intel guys come together

on the side with like the units S2 like hey by the way can you take this guy with you on your Humpty and, you know, just drop them off. Like, that kind of stuff happens all the time. But I understand your point. If it's U.S. on U.S., so do it. But you can't come in and compromise the inspection. Because the only thing people have to realize is that the only legitimacy I have as an inspector is my integrity.

Right. The neutrality you got, yeah. Yeah, the moment the Iraqis believe that I'm not doing the mission in the purest possible fashion. They'll just stop cooperating. Not only that, things can get hairy. They'll kill you. And so it puts me in a very difficult situation to be exposed as a facilitator of unilateral US intelligence collection. Yeah, I know I understand that as a UN element. It's inherently compromising. But on that note, I was wondering if you could tell us about the SE because I think one of the biggest reveals in your book is how you created the SCE to detect the Iraqi

concealment mechanism that was sort of a black op, so to speak, a secret operation within unscum to detect the concealment mechanism that the Iraqis had. But as time went on, you came to realize that the SCE itself was a cover operation for an even more secret operation buried underneath it. Back in 1992, when we were trying to figure out how we can uncover the Iraqi lives. I, as an intelligence officer, said, well, things don't happen in a vacuum. The Iraqis have to communicate. And why don't we go in there and do a survey of Iraqi communications

and then tickle the system, find which frequencies activate when we do certain things, isolate on those frequencies, these and then find out what the Iraqis are hiding. And I briefed that to the executive chairman. He approved it. We took it to a guy named Frank Anderson, who was, I think he headed up D-O-N-E at the time. And Anderson loved the idea. He came in and actually brought in some guys from ISA to provide a demonstration of a tactical

collection capability. And we were all in favor of this. I mean, I remember we went to the Helmsley Hotel to a room that the CIA purchased at the last second, swept it real quick, and then we sat there and had this very fascinating briefing of a technical collection capability. And we were all ready to say, yeah, let's bring it on board. Let's start using this. But then the U.S. said, it can only be operated by Americans. Okay, I get that. And you can't know anything about it.

I said, no, no, it doesn't work that way. We run this ship, not you. If I'm going into Iraq, I have to know everything that's taking place. I'm the commander on the ground. Nothing happens without the commander known. Nothing can happen because it's uncum that's ultimately, if you're carrying a covert SIGA device and you get caught. Right.

If I can't vouch for you, you're going to be killed. You're going to be taken into a back alley and popped in the head as a spy. If I can sit there and say, no, he's working for me. He's doing a legitimate activity. You know, tough luck if you don't like it. But that's it. I might be able to save the guy's life, but I have to know. So we shut it down at that point in time in 1992.

We tried to bring it up again in 1993. In 1994, we got very frustrated with the U.S. government's lack of cooperation. So I flew to Israel and I met with the head of Israeli military. military intelligence and made a proposal that the Israelis support us, train us, equip us with SIGAN, covert SIGAN collection capabilities. The Israelis love the idea, but at the end of the day, the Mossad said, we can't allow you to do this because it's too dangerous. You guys aren't, you know, aren't trained to do this the way we are.

So we love the idea, but we can't support it. So I went back to the U.S. I said, can you guys, you know, can we reconsider this? And the U.S. said, sure. And we actually built this giant inspection based upon SIGN collection. We're going to go and tickle the system, collect, rapidly, decrypt, read, follow-up, et cetera. And the U.S. agreed to all this. But at the last second, when we went down to Washington, D.C., to be briefed on this equipment,

we were taken to a off-site, CIA off-site location where instead of the agency briefing us, some Delta guys were there. And they were embarrassed because they basically brought out the Radio Shack special. And they said, you know, here, handheld scanner that you have to

manually manipulate to record. And what, that's going to get us killed. That's not going to help us. That's not what we asked for. But long story short, we didn't do that inspection and I cut off talking with the CIA

on this one. And I went to the Brits. I flew to London and met with the British intelligence. And I said, look, here's the issue. the Israelis are willing to do the analytical work but we need help with the collection and my surprise the Brits said we will provide the collectors

and then the CIA came in and said oh if the Brits are going to give us collectors we'll give you the equipment the stuff you wanted and we'll train them up so it became a multinational effort the Brits gave me a five-man team I took him to Northern Virginia we spent you know, a couple weeks in a hotel intersecting, you know, radio traffic. The Tom Clancy novel.

You know, getting them ready. And then I inserted them into Baghdad. And that's, that's an interesting thing because Baghdad's, you know, again, you have to declare the team's going in. So we had to come up with a cover story. And the cover story was that they were a special security element there to do counterintelligence surveys of the facility to make sure that, you know, that our documentation was protected, that we weren't doing anything funny. And that way they could be secret squirled up in a room and not have anybody asked too many questions. But an important aspect of this, and this is where things started getting fishy, they needed an antenna set up that would enable them to do their collection.

And we had an antenna procured, and I had an entire plan in place to put the antenna in place. at the same time this is taking place. Huntscom is embarked on what we call the full-time monitoring of Iraqi factories, where we would put remote TV cameras in the factories that would collect imagery. And then this imagery would be sent via a series of towers to Baghdad where we could monitor what was happening. So if, for instance, if there was a specific machine tool that we knew could be used to produce ballistic missile, components, we now had it under full-time video monitoring to make sure that the Iraqis weren't producing covert missile components.

We had these cameras all over Iraq, and we had a special team in there that was installing this. That team leader was an Air Force lieutenant colonel. I get to Iraq only to find out that he's installed my antenna. Now, this is disturbing to me on a number of levels. One, he's not supposed to know about this. so now I got an operation that's supposed to be secret and I already got a guy

operationalizing certain tasks that wasn't supposed to know about this at all so I concluded the CIA and they said oh well we yeah we thought this would we were trying to help we apologize as yada yada yada yada yada yada yada all right so I let that go so now I go with my Brits

and we're doing a good job at the quits They're in there. They're doing great work. But now I bring the tapes out, and I take him to Israel, and the Israelis come back and go, it's unreadable. I said, what do you mean, it's unreadable? They said, whoever set this system up designed it to fail. I said, what do you mean? And they described how encryption works, but the bottom line is, you know, when you start an encryption communication,

the two devices talking have to come together and have a handshake. Right. And it's that handshake that you capture that allows you to decryption. the rest of the signal. And what the CIA had done is build our tape collection so that we missed the handshake. So all we got was, you know, digital signal, but no ability to decrypt. Meanwhile, I asked the CIA to give us an initial readout, and they come in and they give us a readout of conversations. I'm going, wait a minute, the Israelis are telling me that the tapes are unreadable, but the agency's coming to me saying, we got to

the conversations. And you realized they were like predated, like they were older conversations before your program started? No. What I realized is that they were conversations that the agency was collecting real time using a capability that was not being declared done scum. What the agency had done is convert all of these remote cameras into signal collection platforms. They were collecting signals intelligence throughout the country. And then they would bring them into this control facility in Baghdad where there was a very interesting character brought in. Initially, the first guys who were brought in on the control facility were all Delta guys. They were all Delta operatives who were brought in.

And I thought that's strange because that's not normally how we would use that capability. But it wasn't my program. So I'm not there to come. But they were there as security. I said, okay, if you want to secure it, maybe Delta is the right organization to secure. But then this other guy comes in. His nickname was Zulu. That was his call sign.

Zulu. Zulu was a California beach bomb. I mean, this guy had the hair. This guy had, hey, man. Dude, what's up, man? Zulu was cool, laid back. Everybody loved Zulu. And Zulu ran that facility.

Long story short, a couple months later, I ended up going to the White House situation room for a briefing on future inspections. And Steve Richter, at that time the head of D-O-N-E, shows up. for the briefing. And he's accompanied by this guy who now has very closely cropped hair, suit and all that. It's Zulu.

Zulu was a CIA case officer. And I'm on, what the, is the CIA doing with a case officer undeclared in my damn facility? Turns out they were doing a SIGG collection operation

the whole time behind our back. I put it together. I finally reverse engineered it all. And I said, you know, I got to tell Rolfo Keas. He's, you know, he's got to know.

And I wrote it up and I went to Charles Dolfer, who was the State Department official, who was the deputy executive chairman, he said, Charles, look what's going on here, man. And Charles read it and he said, Scott, destroy this paper and forget all about it. I said, I can't. Damn.

I said, Scott, if you go forward with this, the FBI is going to arrest you and you're going to go to jail. I said, why? He said, Scott, Unless you want to fight that fight, forget this ever happened. I said, I can't. I'm an unskorn employee. I have a responsibility.

But I'll tell you what, Charles. You're the deputy executive chairman. I'm formally briefing you that this is occurring. I'm letting you know that this is happening. What you choose to do with it is your business. And I walked away. It was a pretty dishonorable moment for me because I knew that he wasn't going to do anything. But what can you do?

I'm an American citizen. The kind of fucked up thing about it. it is that, you know, the British collectors that you had brought on to be a part of the weapons inspection and run a pretty dangerous operation, at the end of the day, they were sabotaged from the moment they set foot in the country and they were really just serving as a cover so that if the CIA operation got compromised, they could blame it on you guys. Yeah, one of the fascinating things is that, you know, when the Israelis identified the problem, I went to the Brits and, you know, eventually.

Eventually we got, we could, I confirmed the CIA and they said, oh, we didn't realize we got the wrong equipment and they gave us the right equipment. But we had a big operation taking place and we needed to get this, this collection activity done. So I went to the Brits and they provided us with equipment out of their stockpile that would give us the ability to get the handshake. U.S. government did not want us to have that handshake, did not want us to have that handshake at all.

And we went in and we did the collection. When I came back, I usually when I finish an inspection, I would travel through London and meet with the Brits, both the defense intelligence people and then MI6, just to touch base on the various things we were cooperating with. And I was brought into a briefing where you had the commander of British intelligence there and all the MI6 players all around this table, and they start passing out this folder. and it's literally top secret strap five all the different British code words and I turned to him and I said hey you guys know I'm a UN employee I I don't have security clarets. They went yeah right wink wink wink nod we we understand yeah you in security yeah sure sure I said no seriously I don't want anybody get in trouble and I don't want anybody to think that I'm laboring under false pretenties I don't have

security clearance they said we don't care you need to read this opened it up it was a cable sent by NSA around the world announcing this operation saying that the British had five-man special collection element in Iraq operating on behalf of the United Nations. Now, the Brits were very concerned.

They said, why would the U.S. do this? Well, the answer is clear. The U.S. wanted to kill a program. Right. Because we were having success that they were no longer and control. And that was a very, that was a disturbing, that was a disturbing moment.

The other, the other thing that we, that happened, these breasts are very good. And they, they, uh, they came to one day and they said, hey,

uh, Scott, we, um, we're getting a burst transmission. That, that, it's unexplainable.

And they said, we deft it. I said, and it's coming for months ago. He said, no kidding. And they, they collect,

it was, it was, we collected when the burst transmission would take place and how much time and all that stuff we were never able

to actually break it out because it was very heavily encrypted but it was timed when a U2 aircraft was flying over Baghdad it was this special collection

this camera collection element that the CIA was running they would gather this stuff and one of the reasons why they had Delta guys and CIA guys is that they had special encryption equipment

that had to be protected 24-7 and compression equipment. And they would take all this collected information, compress it, and then burst transmitted up to the U-2 when it flew over Baghdad. It wasn't just that we got it. We also detected that the Iranians got it. We intercepted an Iranian communication where the Iranians said, hey, there's this burst transmission coming out of the UN headquarters.

It's time to when U-2 goes over, and we believe that it's a SIGAN collection thing. Now, if the Iranians have that, that means the Iraqis had it. And the whole damn thing was compromising. This is, this is troublesome because I'm asking guys to ride in the back of a vehicle doing covert collection at Saddam Hussein's palace, collecting against the Mark 14 secure radio system used by the Special Republican Guard. A lot of people would think that that's a, you know, a precursor to an assassination attempt.

It wasn't. We were trying to find out if they were hiding weapons in that destruction. But, you know, these guys' lives were on the line. and the U.S. government is doing everything they can to get these guys caught and get these guys killed. And that's, that's, I resent that. Scott, do you, so what year was this? This, this collection effort began in 1996. The year that we're talking about the burst transmission up and detecting it was in the May of 1997 is when I, when I made that discovery.

And what year again did the, uh, did, the investigation start or the inspection start? 191. So we're six years into this only five and a half years past the Emmett downfall of Saddam, right?

Yeah. And Saddam is still firmly entrenched in power. Do you, like your, these issues you had with like the CIA and the government and stuff like that, do you believe that, I mean,

where do you think that was coming from? Do you think that they were, do you think they were like any day he's going so we just need to keep this going? We need to keep these sanctions up because you can't hang on much longer. Like where do you think this friction came from? Or what was their end goal here? The end goal is a resumed. Getting rid of, getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Look, we knew this early on. As early as 1992, the U.S. government had said straight up. It doesn't matter if Iraq. disarms, sanctions will never be lifted until Saddam Hussein's removed from power. I mean, that was a statement that was made in March of 1992. And we were confronted by

Terik Aziz, the deputy prime minister. He said, why the hell should we cooperate with you? We're not going to get anything. If we do everything you ask us to do, the United States has made it clear that sanctions won't be lifted. Right. Until our president's removed. And we're never going to agree to remove our president. So this is a hopeless operation to be in with. And we would have to sit down with them and say, look, we're We can't control American politics. All I can tell you is that the only chance you have of sanctions being lifted is to fully cooperate with the inspectors.

We will, if you cooperate and we have a finding that you've disarmed, we will go to the Security Council. We will issue a report. And then the United States is going to have to deal with that fallout. You know, that's a different problem set. But we're not responsible for American policy. And so if we're deep into 97 now, and how long has it been since you guys? have found anything since they said we destroyed everything and you guys confirmed it like

what what are we looking for now what are we trying to confirm yeah and um like i said in in 91 they destroyed our stuff covert that they didn't declare the covert destruction right until later in 92 and then some aspects that weren't declared until 95 so there's there's a lot of forensic um inspection taking place when hussein kamal defected in 1995 he provided some details about what I later went on to call the concealment mechanism. And here's the quandary we have. Hussein Kamal described a mechanism that involves Saddam Hussein's personal bodyguards, Murafakin, the special security organization, the Special Republican Guard.

And these guys were all active in 1991, 1992, hiding stuff from us. Now, the Iraqis say that we destroyed everything. But my problem is I know they had a concealment mechanism in place in 1991. I know the components of it. So when I go to the Iraqis and say, okay, if everything's destroyed, what about the concealment mechanism? In order for me to confirm that everything is destroyed, you've got to tell me how it is destroyed, who destroyed it, who hit it, how they hit it. I have to know all this so I can confirm that it's not happening today. The Iraqi said, oh, no, no, this is just a haphazard thing.

They never wanted to admit that's a special security organization or the special Republican Guard was involved and this was a problem. So now I have to investigate presidential security on two things. One, I have to prove that they were involved in 1991. Because if I can prove they were involved in 1991, I can then investigate today to confirm that they're no longer doing that or maybe they are doing that. And so I had to do a lot of inspections looking for not weapons of mass destruction, but evidence that the Special Republican Guard was involved in the concealment of weapons of mass destruction back in 1991. Now I have to go to their headquarters.

I have to go to their barracks. I have to go to the palaces. I have to inspect their vehicle logs. I have to inspect the people that protect the president. That's tough because it almost sounds like the CIA is trying to kill him, by the way. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, it's tough because it almost sounds like now you have to prove the negative in a way because you don't have no information and you have to go see what you're

find you have that conversation with general ameer and i think it was a hotel lobby at one point where you describe the concealment mechanism you describe it you know there's this box and i know what comes out of it but i don't know what's inside the box and you guys talk about it as pandora's box and he says you can't look in there because if you do you're just opening up you know the doors to hell what do you think he meant by that what the hell was he so scared of that was inside Pandora's box being this concealment mechanism they had engineered. Presidential security. He was trying to protect the president of Iraq.

He knew that I was being legitimate. But if I opened this up and I get into how the president is protected, that this is a red line that the Iraqi government will never permit to be crossed. because it's not just theoretical that the CIA is trying to kill him. They knew the CIA was trying to kill their president. So on that note then, Scott, I would really like to hear about the coup attempt in 1996, which was very interesting to me because it also dovetails with Bob Bear's book, which I read many years ago, See No Evil, where he was up, I think, North in Kurdistan.

And there were allegations, of course, that he went rogue. and was basically writing American foreign policy on his own. But as you point out, there was a lethal finding, and there was a very real effort to actually remove Saddam Hussein. So I was wondering if you could walk us through that from your point of view and some of the things you discovered as to why failed. Sure. Again, it's a fascinating process because we knew that the CIA was gunning for Saddam.

I mean, it was pretty much an open secret that there was this program. And the reason why is you have two organizations. You have Akkut Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. It's not a covert organization. It's there. The links with the CIA are well known. Wafiq Samurai, that general that I told you about that defected and I would debrief. He was out there telling the whole world that they were working with the CIA to try and take down Saddam.

There's another organization called the Iraqi National Accord. And this was an organization that was controlled more by the British. When Bob Baer's element failed up north, when their whole operation collapsed, the attention was transferred to the Iraqi National Accord to bury out this coup effort. The CIA put a lot of effort into that. I didn't know about that up front. One of the things that I would do is work with the Jordanian government to debrief. defectors. And the Iraqi National Accord had been assembling all these high-level defectors in Amman Jordan who were going to help plan this coup attempt against Saddam. These are the guys who

had links to the Special Republican Guard who were going to use this one particular battalion, I think the third battalion who was going to go in and carry out because there was brothers related to uncles related to fathers, et cetera. I didn't know anything about that. But what I did, what I did, What happened is I would go to Amman Jordan and I would meet these guys. And one of these guys was a senior Special Republican Guard officer. And I started debriefing him and I started asking him questions about, you know, special Republican Guard. And he got very angry. And he turned to his Jordanian minder.

He said, I've already answered these questions. The CIA's been here all day long answering me these questions. Why do we have another CIA guy here? And we had to stop at him. I'm unsponed. And at that point in time, I realized that there's something else going on. There's this other effort going on. But again, I didn't link it to any of my work.

The inspection that I was getting to run, I get ready to run, was a very confrontational inspection. And once again, we had a very heavy special activity staff presence over a dozen of these guys on our team. They were our logistics experts and our communications experts. That's a legitimate function. We were talking about extended laying siege to facilities for an extended period of time over a widespread area. So we needed the ability to communicate. We had special overhead collection issues going on, et cetera. So these guys had the skill set that made sense for them to be involved.

We also had a number of J-Soc guys because this was an inspection where we thought we were going to be taken hostage. And this one, I know for a fact, they had a very large element forward deployed that was ready to come in and snatches. They actually trained for that possibility. All this is going on. What I wanted to do with this inspection was hit Special Republican Guard sites, not with the expectation of getting in, but the expectation of them panicking and sending stuff away. And we, like I said, we had overhead collection. I had my special collection element in place to collect the SIGIN, et cetera. We had ground observation teams in place, a whole bunch of whole network of capabilities.

One of the places I wanted to hit was the 3rd Battalion. It was interesting. The CIA approved every target, but they came to me and they said, you cannot inspect the 3rd Battalion. I said, why? it's imperative. He said, no, we don't, none of our intelligence supports what you're doing, that's, I didn't want to get into a pissing contest with them. So, okay, no third battalion.

We'll, we'll do all. Yeah, they're like, leave that one alone. Yeah, we just leave that one alone. Now, we get into Iraq, and it's confrontational. I mean, this is, this is, we're, you know, a lot of the palaces we're trying to go to around Baghdad International Airport, there was a whole sequence of, especially defense infrastructure. We're driving down roads,

getting stopped by roadblocks, the machine guns are coming out. I mean, this is nerve-wracking stuff, but we're pushing, because my whole idea was to be very aggressive, not dangerously, not suicidal, but push the Iraqis to get them.

We were shaking the tree, and we wanted them to move. We wanted them to talk. We wanted to communicate. And they are. But the Iraqis are looking at me the whole time, like, Mr. Ritter, what are you doing?

and I'm like, I'm doing this aggressive inspection, you know, because you're hiding documents from us and you're denying the Special Republican Guard involvement. Well, it turned out at the same time my inspection was going on, they were reading all of the CIA's communications from Amman into Iraq, coordinating the coup. The whole idea of my inspection from the CIA perspective was we were supposed to go and park ourselves outside of Special Republican Guard sites, be denied access, and they'd be withdrawn. And at the moment we were through, the United States would come in and suppress the totality of Iraq's security infrastructure, using as an excuse their denial of entry to UNSCOM. But they would leave the third battalion unscathed. The third battalion would come in under the cover of this bombardment, move into the palace, capture Saddam, kill him. That was what's supposed to happen. And the only correct.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they already have a sizable J-Soc counterterrorism. effort on tap right nearby in case you guys get captured. Presumably they can be utilized for other operations. That was an Iraqi thing. I don't believe they were going to be used to take out Saddam. I think this was supposed to be an internal thing only, an agency operation. But if you're the Iraqis, I mean, I was told by the Iraqis on this, he said, why are your special forces in southern Iraq? I said, where are you talking? I don't know anything about that. They said, well, they're there for you. They're talking about you. And so, So the Iraqis were putting two and two together.

They were believing the worst. They thought I was involved in a CIA effort. Killsadam saying, later on when I gained access to certain documents, I found the document that disbanded the Third Battalion and ordered the execution of its officers. I mean, that unit was purged from the ranks because of its role and the coup. But, you know, that was a, that was, and after that, I have to tell you that, after that inspection, we never again worked with special activity staff. They cut off all relations with us.

at that point in time. It was also very difficult for Jaysoc to... And could you also talk a little bit about how the Iraqis were able to read all this commo traffic? You wrote in their book that there was maybe a double agent from the Mukha Barat who got a hold of one of the encrypted transmitters that the CIA was using to coordinate with their agents and coup plotters in Iraq? Yeah, well, you know, the Amman station would send into Iraq, you know, special communications devices that would, you know, they communicate with. the Mukhavarat rolled these guys as soon as they came in

and basically gave them the following option. You're going to communicate on schedule. We're going to kill you, but your family will live. And the guy said, okay, we'll do that. And they sat there and they maintained their calm schedules all the way up till the end.

And then at the final, at the end when the coup got crushed, the Mukhaverat came up on the channel and communicated to Amman Jordan saying, hey thank you very much for the communications equipment you know another but basically we beat you you lost so sad

too bad and that was that was the end of that that effort this took place in the summer of 1996 the muhaerat is was the Iraqi intelligence yeah I would just letting our viewers know who don't

may not be okay yeah sorry no that's okay bogged down in the jargon. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm right there with you. But that was a bad moment for Unschcom because, you know, and a bad moment for me too. And I'll tell you why.

I mean, to give me an example, later on that summer, I returned to Iraq to lead an inspection. At this point in time, I was one of the most hated people in Iraq. When I would arrive in Iraq, they would run advertisements on TV. They would show my face. Scott Ritter, the dog, the demon, has returned. turned to Iraq. This is the man responsible for economic sanctions being in place. If your children are hungry, this is the man who did it. We, you know, and I actually did an inspection of the Mughabrat headquarters where we were stopped outside. Now, they had showed my face on TV the day before,

and apparently, you know, some bereaved father had driven past, saw me, went home, got his AK-47, and was going to come by and do a drive-by. The Iraqis were able to stop him a couple of hundred yards away, but had he come by, he would have, you know, sprayed me and my, my team. But the other interesting thing there is, once the Iraqis found that out, they actually invited us into the facility, not to inspect, but to get off the street. And the guy who, who met with me was the deputy director of the Macabarat, who was infamous for poisoning people using phallium, which is a poison, you put in tea, you drink it, and you die. And so he brings me in, he sits me down, and his boy comes out, and they,

They bring me tea. What do you want to me to do with this? And he said, are you, are you nervous? I said, well, I've heard rumors about, you know, about you. And he goes, yeah, but are you nervous? I said, no. I picked up the tea and he said, why aren't you nervous? And I said, because you're in Iraqi.

I'm a guest in your country. You would never poison me. Your honor wouldn't allow that. And he was smiling like you wouldn't believe. I mean, I chugged two things of tea just to prove it. I wasn't scared. But he went, yeah, that, you know, that, you're absolutely right.

We would never do that to you because you are our guest where you're here is our guest. And that was sort of the frustrating aspect of is that we were confronting these guys, we're fighting these guys, but they were honorable. They were patriots, Iraqi patriots, doing their job. We were patriots for our own cause. But at the end of the day, you know, these were not, you know, horrible human beings. These were people doing a difficult job. I'll give you another example.

That same summer, we were inspecting a special Republican guard site, and we were stuck outside. And this Porsche 928, metallic, gray, comes screaming by at high speed. And it almost hits one of my inspectors. So I turned to the Iraqis, and I say, stop that car from doing this. The Iraqis won't even look at this car. They won't even look at this car. The car comes by and he does a couple drive-bys like that.

So finally, I get out. and I stop, I jump in front of the car, stop, and I go to the window. You goddash, oh bitch, stop what you're doing? You're doing. Window rolls down, it's Udi. Saddam Hussein's son, staring at me with the look of the, I mean, he hate, I'm screaming out.

Tell him, get out of here, you have no purpose, you're disruptive and inspecting. And he drives off. Well, the special collection element that I told you about, that night they intercept a drunken phone call from Uday to Special Republican Guard guys and he orders my assassination, orders me to be hit.

And so I'm there that night and there was, again, things just happened funny. I had been parked in the same place all day long, but as the sun set, the heat was beaten on the car, so I moved it. And an Iraqi vehicle moved into where I had been at the time when who died drove by. So that night, this red Buick 88,

which is a telltel vehicle used by the Iraqi security services, drives up and these two guys jump out of the car and they they head to that vehicle the one guy they were drunk drunk as skunks the one guy jumps up pulls out his pistol but in the process of so shoots himself in the leg and he's down on the ground bleeding like a stuck pig you know and their acu's are running around going what the hell's going on and we're going on what the hell's going on and uh anyways his partner throws him in the vehicle and they drive off the next morning we have about 80 guys from the Amin Alam, which is a general security service,

sort of like the internal security force, surrounding us, protecting us. And they were there to protect us from Udaai and his assassins because the hit was still out on us and all that stuff. And the Iraqis briefed me on it. They said, you know, you got to be careful for a little while.

You can't, you know. Oh, yeah. Things got interesting sometimes. His sons were monsters. Yes. Oh, well, Udaa. especially. Kusai,

you know, Kusai, I think was the colder, more professional of the two. Not known as a rapist, but Udi was just, was the, again,

I gave you, Udi. We had heard stories about how Udi had been, had assassinated one of his father's advisors during a party

where Hosniu Barq's wife was present. Udi, Dai tried to commit suicide and was taking the hospital and Saddam confronted him. And there's documents that that show that this happened. And, but the rumor was that Saddam had ordered the warehouse inside what is today called the Green Zone in the presidential palace area, a warehouse full of who dies sports cars to be torched.

We thought that was just sort of like, you know, one of those stories that you hear, because you hear a lot of stories that aren't true. Well, fast forward a couple of years and we get access to that area to do the presidential site inspections. And we come across a warehouse. and we opened it up and inside are about 40 torched sports cars. So it was true. Saddam did burn his son's cars.

The whole post script, of course, is, you know, after the invasion, 101st Airborne and Delta caught up to those two. And I know one guy, actually 1001st guy who was there and another guy who's with a unit who maybe, maybe if we ask nicely, he'll tell us the story someday. that they fired like, I don't know, like 100-toe missiles into that building. Well, the operators went up and they received contact, so they withdrew, they fired like 100-toe missiles in there, and then the operators went back in and assaulted and cleaned out whoever was left,

and that was the death of old Uday and QSai. And the younger brother, I think, Ibrahim or something like that. There's like 14. Yeah. But, you know, again, I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that Uday didn't deserve to die. But they fought. Talk to the guys who did the initial assault. Delta was beaten back three times.

Before they brought the tow missiles. And even after the tow missiles were brought in, I think Goudai was killed by the tow missiles. But Khrushai and Ibrahim survived. The last survivor was Ibrahim. And Ibrahim went down shooting. He wounded some Delta guys. I was told she was under a bed, actually,

when they came into the room. Shooting from under the bed? Or hiding? He was armed. He did have a Galachnikov. They had to kill him. because he was armed. Yeah.

But yeah, they, they, apparently they qualified, like, the entire battalion or brigade and held his Nodron 1st on the tow missile that day. Well, you know, yeah. One way to do it. Another interesting clandestine operation that was run through Unscum, with Unscum, was, was, where am I here in my notes? Aerofina in Romania. and how you guys discovered that they were sending missile or missile components to Iraq.

And with MI6, you guys developed this covert operation to find out what was really going on and who the players were behind it. Yeah, this again, we had a lot of liaison activity with a number of countries. and the Israelis, the Brits, Germans, were all given us some information about the old contractual relationships that Iraq had with various, you know, companies around the world. One of the pre-war companies was Arafina, which is a Romanian aerospace company that produces aircraft engines, it produces service to air missiles, guidance and control components, things of that nature.

But what we were finding is that there was an ongoing relationship between Aerophina and Iraq that lasted beyond the war. And the question is, what are they doing? Why are they doing this? How is this? What's happening? And so I went to the British and said, I think there's, the Israelis gave me some intelligence. that said that there's a transaction,

that a delegation is going to be traveling to Romania, to seal a contract, to purchase Farofina on behalf of Iraq using a front company. I went to the British and I said, what can we do? How can we operationalize this? And they sent me to Romania to meet with their chief station in Bucharest and then took me to meet with the Romanian intelligence services.

And we came up with a concept of operations that would involve allowing this Iraqi delegation to travel to Romania, we would recruit their contact. That was the Romanian task, was to turn this Aerophina executive, so that he would allow video and audio monitoring of the meetings. Meanwhile, we would break into the Romanian rooms and photograph their documents and then see where this, let us and

damn thing went off without a hitch we got the technical penetration we got the video we got the audio the British operative broke into the hotel room photographed all the documents and we we have all this stuff and it's it's looking good because now they're going to this contract is going to go down

and then they're going to start shipping components and what I wanted to do is work with the Romanians to tag the components or to put a beacon on them so that they could be brought back into Iraq, and then inspectors would be equipped with, you know, technical devices that would allow us to track the tags to, you know, what we thought would be either a secret factory or a secret warehouse.

But either way, we would uncover what we thought might be a covert scud production capability. CIA killed it. I mean, the thing about the CIA is they found out when I was involved in it. one thing, and I'm not picking on them because it's probably sound operational thing, but the CIA needs to be in charge of everything. The CIA doesn't like to delegate to anybody on anything that, especially when an American is involved. There's a lot of resentment at CIA headquarters that I as an American was getting access

to foreign intelligence services that was being denied their CIA counterparts. And so the CIA basically went into the Romanians and tried to pull themselves into the operation. Romanians got cold feet. And that was the end of that. Again, it's too bad because it had potential. Scott, you know, in the United States, we have like Title 10, Title 50, stuff like that. When you're working for the UN, what regulates like the clandestine activities, like under what authority that the UN gives you? you or does it or were you under the auspice of the Romanian intelligence to be able to break

into their like their rooms and photograph stuff inside Iraq my authority came from the executive chairman and his authority came from Security Council Resolution 687 Iraq was obligated to disarm Iraq was obligated to provide a full final complete declaration Iraq's failure to comply pretty much gave us carte blanche to do anything we needed to do to accomplish our mission. So inside Iraq, I was limited by my imagination and by the approval authority of the executive chair. Outside of Iraq, I have no authority, none whatsoever. I have the status as a UN inspector, but I couldn't break into a hotel room. that was the the the Romanian government had to approve that and it had to be done by a non-unnscom person I couldn't implant a beacon uh the the the the Romanian and give me another example um prior to Aerophina I did a mission in Jordan in 1995 again Israeli intelligence about a shipment coming out of Moscow ballistic missile components uh transiting through Amand Jordan and on to Iraq um I was able to go to Jordan meet with the king and his representative and

and convince them to raid a warehouse and intercept this equipment. And they did that. And we intercepted a shipment of gyroscopes, ballistic missile accelerometers, and things of that nature. Very successful operation. But again, that was done by the Jordanian government, not by being. You want an interesting side on that one? It was supposed to be secret.

No one was supposed to know about my involvement. But the Jordanian government later on leaked it, took credit, said Unscan was involved. Meanwhile in Russia, there's a big investigation how this happened. What turned out is that there was a big mafia organized crime element involved in stealing this stuff. And we get a delegation from the Russian intelligence services comes to Unscom headquarters and says, we need to talk to the guy who did the intercept. We're all like, we don't know what you're talking about. No, no, we need to come to Moscow and testify in the.

the trial. And so the executive chairman said, okay, and he identified me. He said, here's Ritter. He did it. And I met with the guys and they said, yeah, we need to come testify. And it was agreed that I was going to go to Moscow and testify at this trial. Nikita Smitovich, the Russian that I talked about earlier, he comes up to me and he goes, Scott, we need to meet in the Irish bar. That always meant something serious was going down if we're going to meet an Irish bar over Guinness. And he said, you cannot travel to Moscow. I said, why? He said, because you will be killed.

I said, what do you mean? He goes, no, the mafia has ordered your death. And you're being brought to Moscow so they can kill you. I can't go to my, but I said, now what happens now? I mean, do I, are they going to come to New York and get me? Yeah. And that was a, that was a, that was a, there was a period of time where I was living under the fear of, you know, some guy named Boers showing up with a silence pistol or something because

turns out that the hit was only valid in Russia. And, you know, it is what it is. But, yeah, that's the kind of interesting life that you led doing this kind of stupid stuff. So, I'm sorry. So when the UN passes a resolution or something like that, and they're in, do they act as like a sovereign entity? So covert action, a clandestine action, whatever, like the SIGAN collection, stuff like that, you're free to do whatever under their auspice as long as you're within the board. of...

Okay. No. We had a Security Council resolution passed under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which basically gives it the force of law. It means under Chapter 7 that military force can be used to enforce this. The Special Commission was tasked with disarming Iraq. Now, I said Special Commission. There really is a Special Commission. There's commissioners, it does know, from around the world who are appointed, who are supposed to be the body that decides on what.

And early on, the special commission came up with techniques to destroy chemical weapons. They approved certain inspections, et cetera. The executive chairman runs the day-to-day operations, but he reports to the special commission. nothing is supposed to happen in Iraq unless the special commission proves it. Everything I did happened in Iraq without the special commission's knowledge. Not only that, we work for the Security Council. And so our inspections are supposed to be briefed to the Security Council. My inspections weren't briefed to the Security Council.

What I did was a brief. And it led to some pretty interesting things. For instance, once during a particular inspection, my wife at the time worked as a UN tour guide. So she would give tours to people through the Security Council. So she's in the morning preparing to give tours of the security council. And one of the things that they gave her was a sheet that said, what was going to happen in the Security Council.

She had no clue what I was doing in Iraq. She knew I was a weapons inspector, but she didn't know, I don't tell her details. Terrick Aziz goes on national TV and condemns the CIA colonel Scott Ritter, who is spying. He's in Iraq, spying. He's an evil spy, the CIA spy. And then he files a formal complaint to the security council detailing all of my nefarious activities. So the security council is going to have an emergency meeting where the sole person being discussed is the evil CIA spy, Scott Ritter. So my wife picks up the sheet.

So today, the security council is going to be talking about a spy Scott Ritter. Wait, man, that's my husband. We had an interesting conversation because she's like, who do you work for? What do you do? What's going on? I'm like, really, I'm not a CIA spy, trust me. Scott, one of the other real, I mean, we're kind of moving forward towards, you know, ultimately your resignation from unscum, but one of the other really wild revelations in your book,

I found is page 271 in Iraqi confidential. There is a time where Richard Butler, who is the chairman, calls you in to his office to brief you on information that came from National Security Council advisor Sandy Berger telling you about a timeline for the next inspection, that you guys need to do a provocative inspection in Iraq so that you can kick off a bombing case. campaign prior to the Islamic holiday Ramadan beginning. This is the chairman of a UN inspection team telling you you need to go in and kick off this war for the United States that the National Security Council member had briefed him on.

I mean, it sounded like some wag to dog type bullshit going on. I was just forward that a conversation like that was even had. Oh, look, there were some weird conversation. Richard Butler took over in the summer of 1997, and he took over from the Swedish ambassador, Rolfochaas. He was always beholden to the United States to a degree that Rolfochaeus never was. Rolfo Keas made it clear who was in charge, and it was him. Butler, you know, if the U.S. said jump, he would say how high.

In December of 1997, I had been trying to do a, series of very confrontational inspections involving the, you know, the concealment apparatus. And we sent a team in Iraq in December, only they have the U.S. pull the plug midway through as being too confrontational. We said, what do you mean? They said, well, we're not ready to go to war in support of your inspection. All right. So I went back in January, a similar inspection, very confrontational.

The idea was to get, you know, to find out evidence of Iraqi noncompliance. and again, the Iraqis blocked it. This one, I sort of well known because I ended up on the cover of the New York Times newspaper, which is the last thing you want to do if you're trying to have a low profile. But at that time, the U.S. government, again, hold the plug. But this one was interesting because prior to that, I was sort of a hero, what by, you know, Sandy Berger and the National Security Council viewed me as this sort of rock star inspector. But then the FBI came to them and said, we have concerns about his relationship with Israel.

And you need to pull him out of the inspection process. And this was, this led to some fascinating stuff up because I was supposed, when I was pulled out in January, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, went to Iraq and negotiated what's called the sensitive site modalities and the modalities for presidential site inspections. And I was tapped to be the guy who was going to do the initial test of the sensitive site modalities agreement. But Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger said, no, no, no, he's not doing it. And they made that decision when I was in Bahrain training the team to go to Iraq. So I was supposed to go home. My team revolted, actually. They held a mutiny, and they wrote a letter back to Richard Butler saying,

no, if it's not ridder, then no one goes. We're not doing this. This is his inspection. He's the only one who can carry this out. This has got to go forward. And this led to a situation where Buller then turned to a guy named Larry Sanchez, who was the CIA's sort of station chief in New York. Larry Sanchez, Bill Clinton, is in New York at the time,

doing Time Man of the Year or something like that. So now it's a race. Madeline Albright is trying to get to Bill Clinton so that he shuts down my participation. Richard, Bill Richardson needs to get to Bill Clinton to, to let me on the team. And Sanchez gets Richardson, Richardson goes to the building, he beats, he gets Clinton ahead of Albright, and Clinton approves me as chief inspector, which is all fine-danding. Now, back to what you said, before this happened, we met in Bill Richardson's office to discuss the coming inspection. And I had a list of inspections that I wanted to do because our job now wasn't to be looking for weapons of mass destruction per se, but to test the modalities to pick the most sensitive sites possible to see if the Iraqis would indeed cooperate. One of the sites that the Iraqis had always put a red line on was the Ministry of Defense.

They said, you can't go. That's not going to the thing. You can't go to the Ministry of Defense. Terakiz is on record. If you go there, it's going to be war. We're never going to let you up. And the U.S. says you have to go to the Ministry of Defense. So now we're there to discuss it.

So I'm there, Richard Butler, who's the executive chairman, Charles Dolfer, is there, Bill Richardson's there, the deputy ambassador, is there. Larry Sanchez is there. We're all in this conference room. And in the middle of it, Richard Butler stands up and looks and he says, Scott, here's the thing. He said, you have to get you in Iraq by this date. You have to inspect the Ministry of Defense by this date because we have to have a crisis by this date. here so that you can be withdrawn because we need to bomb Iraq before Ramadan.

So your job is to go to Iraq, try and gain access to the Ministry of Defense, and then be withdrawn, and there's going to be this big attack. I'm looking, and I'm looking around, just going, what are you telling me? He said, I said, and I made it clear. I said, I'm chief inspector. He said, yes.

And you're going to give me a, notification of inspection site for the Ministry of Defense, yes, which means you want me to inspect the Ministry of Defense. Yes. It's all right. I can live with that. All your other shit, I don't care about. That's your hocus pocus. So I end up leading the team into Iraq. We get to the Ministry of Defense and we arrive. And again, it's an error. You show up and the boys bring out the guns and put them right in your face right at the bat saying you ain't going anywhere. And Amr Ashid, a senior Iraqi official minister of oil at the time. shows up and he says you can't go in.

I said, hey, we need to sit down and talk. I said, here's the deal. You know and I know what's going on you. Okay. I'm trying to get in. You're going to say no. The team's going to leave. Then they're going to blow the shit out of you.

That's just going to happen. You know that's going to happen. I know that's going to happen. He said, yes. I said, so why do we have to let it happen? And he said, well, that's your job. I said, no, my job is doing an inspection. So if you'll let me inspect this building, we can prevent a war.

He said, but it's the most sensitive place. I said, but I have modalities that allow me. I said, I'll tell you what, what I want you to do is you and I are going to go on a tour of this building. Because you're not. And if you come to a place that's so sensitive that you can't have an inspector there, you identify that to me. And then you take me inside and you explain to me why it's so sensitive. It can't be an inspector. they identified like four places like that i mean we're talking about really really you know

sensitive stuff where the national security of iraq is on the line and i put you know i covered a couple maps i put a safe off limits i put another place off limits but other than that the whole place was open they opened it up to my team we went in there and we spent 12 hours pouring through that building inspecting every document every map everything doing it meanwhile mannallin al rights in france and she's meeting with the French. And she's sitting there, she's all bragging. Like, hey, any minute now, we're going to get a phone call. And the cruise missiles are going to fly.

That'd be beautiful. And the French are like, okay, well, she gets the phone call. It says, inspectors are done. They inspected the facility. And she was furious. And at that point in time, the U.S. government decided that I would never again be allowed to leave an inspectionary because I didn't play, didn't play ball. Man, it brings up some of those stories.

I mean, I think it was, was it Hugh Shelton? who wrote his memoir and wrote that there was a conference meeting where he didn't name her, but they were able to figure out who was in the room and put two and two together that Madeline Albright was suggesting flying a U2 spy plane over Baghdad so that it would be shot down and that would be the pretext for the war. And was it Hugh Shelton or Colin Powell who were like, well, what about the pilot? Yeah. I mean, I don't know about that, but that, you know, we all.

always had concerns. You know, tasking of the U-2 is a very sensitive thing. The U.S. wanted to be in control of that, but when I went to Israel and got the Israelis, in addition to helping with the SIGA, I got the Israelis to do the photo interpretation because the U.S. wouldn't give us, U.S. would provide prints, and these prints would be degraded, so we didn't get the high resolution. And I said, look, this is our airplane. That's our film. Why don't you let me come down to NPEC in Washington, D.C., the National Photographic Interpretation Center. Now sit down on a light table with your interpreters and we'll go through the film so I can pick the targets I need to inspect. They said, no, you won't be allowed access to NPEC.

I said, well, then this film's no good to us because you're basically, it's called UN, but it's U.S. So I said, no, what you're going to do is give me the film. I'm going to fly to Israel. and I would spend two weeks at a time in Israel at their version of NPIC on their light tables going over the targets and getting the information I needed. This ultimately led to the FBI accusing me of espionage. But again, I'm a UN weapons inspector. The CIA gave me the film knowing I was taking it to Israel. Everything I did was approved by the CIA.

But because American politicians decided that Scott Ritter was an inconvenience, I got tapped for being a spy. I want to get into exactly that topic next, but real quick, before that, there's something I really wanted to bring up because there is a rumor, a persistent rumor that goes around to this day, and I heard it just this week, somebody repeated this to me, that, you know, the 2003 premise for us going into Iraq to find WMDs ostensibly, that the reason why we didn't find them was because Saddam packed them all up on the trucks and drove them into Syria and they got away. This is like a Joe rumor that continues to this day. I hear it from people,

army officers, special operations people, they recite this to me all the time. Scott, you were the lead UN weapons inspector. Did that event happen? Well, I wasn't there in 2003 so I can't, you know, say, but what I'll say is this. As of late 1998, we had accounted for nearly the totality of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

capability. Not only could I say for absolute certainty that they didn't have weapons, we were monitoring the totality of their industrial infrastructure, full-time monitoring. They weren't building.

So in order for Iraq to have something in 2003, they needed to reacquire that capability from 1999 onwards. The U.S. has never been able to provide any information to sustain the allegation that Iraq reconstituted its W&D capability. Not only that, in 2002, UNSCCOM's successor organization, Unmovic, the United Nations monitoring and verification inspection commission, went to Iraq, starting in November, and inspected every site given to them by the United States intelligence community that was suspected of having WMD or WMD activity.

They found nothing. Every target the U.S. gave them turned out to be nothing. Nothing. Zero. So we have no evidence that Iraq reconstituted W&D. So my question is, first off, what weapons and mass destruction capability exactly was moved to Syria? Because none existed. second of all why in god's name would to go to syria do you not understand that the bath party in

syria and the bath party in iraq were mortal enemies why would saddam hussein ship all of his wmd off to syria why would syria accept it's a ludicrous proposition one that is not backed up with any credible intelligence information whatsoever it's funny because i had the guy tell me just this week he said it was all over television it happened right in front of UN weapons inspectors they were helpless to do anything it's like a meme or something that it becomes real in people's minds if they tell themselves this this myth enough times it's it's quite odd but anyway yeah what's up we have a couple questions real quick and again sorry that we're just on a roll here so we don't to interrupt Scott too much, but thanks again, Alex, and thank you, DJ. So Alex is asking,

what interesting cultural institutional difference did the UK, KGB, MI6, CIA guys, and their counterparts from Israel have? So what interesting cultural institutional differences did they have when you worked with them? Well, I mean, the CIA is well known. I think you guys have talked to a number of CIA officers. And, you know, it's a, it's a, there's a lot of arrogance with the, with the CIA and, and the British are competent, very, very competent. But, you know, they're a smaller organization and they, they play second fiddle to the United States and pretty much know it.

And so anytime you deal with the British intelligence in relation with the U.S. community. You know, they talk about the special relationship, but the British are definitely, you know, the junior partner in that. The KGB, when I dealt with them, they were a force in transition, you know, from the Soviet Union. So, you know, the Russians were working overtime to try and be seen as viable and credible. And they were. But, you know, they were also. representatives of a government that was collapsing around them. The Yeltsin government was not known for its competence. And frankly speaking, after about 1994, the quality of our interaction with Russian intelligence dropped off.

The Israelis were very, very good. They have their limitations, but I will tell you this, of all the intelligence services I worked with, cooperated with the Israelis were singularly focused on making my mission succeed now of course they did that in their own self-interest

but the Israelis bought into the notion that the Unscom mission was good for Israel and so they bent over backwards to make my mission succeed they did everything I asked of them and more and they were they were just motivated

they gave us the best of their best they gave us their best effort and I just think a lot of people say well why in God's name would you ever go to Israel I mean Israel Israel is not seen as a fair part and my response to that was

in fact is if you remember the Ministry of Defense inspection one of the traps laid to me by General Alma Rashid was while we were eating dinner waiting for people to make a decision about whether or not he would let us go in. He said, so how many times you've been to Israel? And I looked at it and I said, more than once.

And you said, why in God's name would you go to Israel? And I said, why in God's name wouldn't I go to Israel? I mean, understand that we're the United Nations. Israel is a member state. Also understand that if you ever want us to give you a clean bill of health, we need Israeli concurrence. and we're not going to get Israeli concurrence unless we exhaust Israeli intelligence leads. If we try to give you a clean bill of health without going to Israel,

what's going to happen is the day after we give our briefing to Security Council, an envelope is going to be slid under the door that's going to contain some really hot information that's going to expose you guys as being a liar. And then, bam, nobody has any credibility. But if I can go to Israel and make sure that there will be no information it could go into an envelope, because they've given me all that information. I've investigated all that information. I've run all the leads down.

Then you have a chance of getting sanctions lifted. He liked that answer. Later on, he told me one of the reasons why they allowed me into the Ministry of Defense is because they knew I'd been to Israel. And the fact that I didn't lie to them established me as a credible person in their eyes. I actually have to go soon. I have to get to work, but I have one question for you

in terms of the mustard gas and things that they did find in Iraq and the soldiers that were wounded by that was that was that like oh I mean first off was that not I don't know what tiers like are considered weapons of mass destruction or or you know what I mean but like was was that old stuff that just was not accounted for because it was so old like when you were looking for things were you looking for more for scud for delivery systems and whatnot we look for everything. I mean, believe me, I spent a lot of time looking for 155 millimeter artillery shells filled with mustard nerve agent or mustard agent. I look for shells filled with sarin agent. You know, there, a lot of people say, oh, there were WMD in Iraq because we, you know, we have

IEDs filled with sarin. We have IEDs filled with mustard. Obviously, you know, Iraq still had these weapons. It wasn't a lie. No. What happened during the Gulf War is we blew up a lot of Iraq. American depots. And if you've got a warehouse full of conventional 152 millimeter artillery shells, and then 155 millimeter artillery shells filled with mustard agent, and it takes a direct hit from a 2,000 pound bomb, and all that stuff sympathetically explodes and scatters out all over the area, you've got a hell of a mess.

We spent a lot of time scouring the desert picking up individual artillery shells. And we knew that there were, I mean, we knew how many they produced and we knew that we couldn't account for about 500 of them. And we kept trying to get that number lower and lower and lower. But at the end of the day, there was a lot of shells scattered around the desert. Haphasardly. The same thing. During the Iran-Iraq War, you know, the Iraqis would go to a Ford firing area and they would bury

Saren nerve agent in rockets, 122 millimeter rockets. They would bury them in a preparation for the offensive. and then these you know the launchers would come up and they put the but when the war ended not all these sites were um were were unfilled and they were they were forgotten about and you know another case um is the the Iraqis would do tests uh they had a range where they would fire these shells uh yeah i was an artillery option i tell you in 29 palms there's a whole lot of duds when you go out and you know you fire a lot of you can you can fire a battery six and you're going to end up with you know maybe a dozen uh duds on the field the Iraqis did a lot of

of testing of chemical weapons and there's a lot of dud munitions out there that have a fill. And what happened during the insurgency is that the insurgents would find these these shells and then they would, you know, incorporate them their IEDs. But this does not mean that the Iraqis had a W&D production capability in place. Right. So it's kind of left over, it was half hazard. It wasn't a cash or a capability as much as it was just There's remnants. On the 5th of 4 remnants that, you know, again, when you

blow up, if you go to some of these these, I've been to every major ammunition depot in Iraq. And I've personally been into, I'd say 90% of the ammunition bunkers in Iraq. And, you know, these are spread out over, you know, hundreds of square miles. And we blew them up during the war. And there's this ammunition scattered all over the place.

and it's physically impossible to be 100% certain about things. Yeah. And Alex has one more question for you, and you'll probably have to pull it yourself. But he goes, any news on hats, patches, and shirts for the show? Oh, no. We haven't done it. No, no news. We've just been focused on doing the show.

Getting high-call-in-yes. Making it as good as it can be. Scott, I think the next thing we should talk about, really, is your resignation from unscum. You know, what was the straw that broke the camel's back that made you write that letter of resignation and resign ultimately in a very public way? Yeah, and, you know, let's start as my life as an inspector. You know, I didn't seek the spotlight. In fact, is the vast majority of my work required that I not seek the spotlight. When I appeared on the front page in the New York Times, a lot of intelligence agencies said,

we have trouble accepting you into our country right now because if you show up at the airport, your face is now known. They're going to know who you are and what you do. And it became a problem. I mean, the British at one point in time, you know, put together a British passport under a false identity to help me travel abroad. That was cabashed by the United States. They didn't like that idea. But, you know, that was the kind of creativity that we were trying to bring to bear.

after the Ministry of Defense inspection things slowed down because there was you know things got political real quick this was again in March of 1998

and I traveled you know to England and I traveled to Washington D.C. And I was told that the day of shaking the tree is over that we can't just go in and create provocations that we need to have hard, actionable intelligence before we allow an inspection to go forth.

At the same time, too, the United States was dismantling my special collection inspection effort. The SEC. They put pressure on the British. They got the British to withdraw the five-man team. They put pressure on the Israelis, got the Israelis to stop by providing, you know, technical support, decryption, things of that nature. And what they did is they replaced my team with the U.S. capability of it. They basically put together a capability, put it inside a safe and had the safe transported to Baghdad and it did it remotely.

So I was cut out of that loop. And, you know, but, you know, I don't care about being cut out of the collection loop. But what I told them is who's running the product? I mean, what's going on with the product? Because everything I did was focused on inspections. Right. Supporting the inspection, supporting the disarmament effort. Now we have the U.S. with a safe in the middle of Baghdad sucking things out of the aether.

Who has that product and what is it being used for? And I had a problem with the answer because the answer was, well, you just have to trust the NSA. You never trust the NSA. You don't trust anybody. I don't trust any national intelligence service. I only trust Unscom because we're the only ones that care about our mission. Everybody else cares about their national objectives. I care about this arm mission.

So I was a little embittered by that. then the U.S. shut down the Arafina effort. I was embittered by that. Then the British came to me. I had a very good relationship with the MI6. And the British came to me and said, hey, we got something for you. We got a very good human source. We've got ballistic missile components at a bath party facility in downtown Baghdad,

an Ottomia Baghdad. It has to be inspected now because it's the, stuff gets moved every couple weeks. So you have to go now. So I built this, this inspection around that, got it approved, and we were ready to deploy when they were ready to deploy in July when when they pulled the plug on it. And I said, well, why? They said, well, we're not, we're not ready yet. We're not ready. We don't have the, you know, the political pieces in place to confront Iraq on this. It said, we're going to wait until August. I went to the British and I said, what's that due to your intelligence? Well, you're at the far. You're at the far.

end of its viability. But if you go in August, it still might be viable. So we built the big inspection team and I went, we deployed to Iraq and we were all ready to go. But the Iraqis sort of preempted us by deciding they were no longer going to cooperate with Richard Butler. We had a big conference meeting. I was there. It was very dramatic where they basically called him out and said, you're a stooge of the Americans and we will not cooperate with you anymore. Goodbye. Leave. Now, I was. went, we met in a secure conference room and I said, hey, Richard, this is a perfect opportunity. I said, right now the Iraqis have made this about you. But I have an inspection team here.

And I have a site where it's high probability. There's some, you know, W&D related material there. Let me go do the inspection. I'll surround the facility. They'll surround me. We will have an old fashion standoff. And this will be beautiful because now the whole world will be on our side. they'll see that the Iraqis are non-compliant and it won't be about you. Buller liked that idea. He thought that was a good idea. He made some phone calls. He said, okay, you stay, wait, and I'll give you the order to execute.

He flew to Bahrain, got on the phone to Madeline Albright, and she pulled the plug. Next thing, I know I get a phone call. It's, you know, Sandy Berg are saying that I'm not allowed to, I'm not allowed to leave the Canal Hotel because that would send a signal that there's an inspection. So I have to stay in the Canal Hotel. I'm not allowed to speak to the press. I'm not allowed to do anything. And then I was ordered out and returned to Washington, D.C.

And I went back and I said, you guys, what's going on? Am I not ever going to be allowed to do this mission? And I was told that, no, things are changing. I've got to diversify my team. I've got to shut down the consumer team. And I have to find a replacement for me because I'm not going to be allowed to do these And at that point in time, I made the decision that I could no longer be a part of this. And I was going to resign.

I was just going to resign and walk away. I had a friend who was a lawyer. He, you know, sort of a political lawyer, a proponent of Senator Jackson. But he said, look, if you just resign and walk away, then everything you stood for means nothing. because no one's ever going to know. And they'll get away with it. He said, but if you resign publicly, you might be able to affect change.

And I thought about that for a while, and I had a long talk with my wife. My wife was dead set against it. She said, just get the hell out of there. Let's get on with our lives, because you're going to start taking on the U.S. government, and they're going to jam you. Your wife's Russian.

She knows better. You don't take on demand like that. And so I made the decision to resign. I was invited. You got to go. Yeah, it was a pleasure of meeting. Thanks, guys.

I'm sorry, I have to get to work, but. Yeah, no worries, Dave. Dave works. I work days. Dave works nights. So he has to take off

to his night job. Okay. Well, thanks. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Do you want me to finish it? Yeah, yeah.

No, because I, I ultimately prepared a resignation letter and it was known that I was going to resign. And I was invited to the U.S. mission by the,

CIA, Larry Sanchez, who was the CIA sort of chief of station kind of guy. And I was told that the U.S. government wanted to talk to me. And I got there. They put me on the phone with David Welch, who was a senior State Department guy. I worked for the National Security Council. And he was begging me to stay. Please stay. We'll come up and stay.

I said, but will I be allowed to do inspections? No, we're not. We're beyond that. I said, then I have no role. I mean, my whole existence is about inspections. I don't do politics. I don't do this guy. I inspect.

And if I can't do my job, then I can't be a part of this. I hung up the phone, and Larry Sanchez was very sympathetic, but he said, if you go through with this, the FBI is going to you in the butt, use the F word. And he said, basically, your life will be over. The U.S. government is going to come down hard on you, and they're going to destroy you. I foolishly said, well, that's a risk I'll have to take. And I went ahead with the resignation. And that night, the FBI leaked to CBS.

There's a lead story on CBS evening news, Dan Rather. Scott Ritter resigns, and the FBI is investigating him for espionage. Wow. And that began. And understand, espionage is a serious crime. It carries with it the death penalty or the potential for the death penalty. and here I was a guy who was just doing his job accused of a comedian espionage

because you were sharing YouTube spy plane photography with Israel but with the permission of the United States government they had blessed off on it the mission to Israel to do the photo the YouTube film cooperation was approved by Larry

Sanchez in a meeting beforehand, Larry went back to Washington, D.C. and got approval. I would write up a request for the specific imagery, detail it, send it to the CIA. The CIA would come back with, and I would sign a receipt for this. So I would sign for the imagery from the CIA. I put that together with an inventory sheet to Israel, and I had specific security procedures that had been agreed to in dealing with this. So, yeah, the CIA approved everything I did. They approved this mission.

They approved by taking the film. They gave me the film knowing I was taking it to Israel, and I would bring it back and return it to the CIA. You know, so this wasn't Larry Sanchez that caused the problem. The people that caused this problem was Steve Richter and the Iraq operations group who were carrying out the covert efforts to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They never forgave me for what happened in June of 1996. they believe to this date that my interviews of the Iraqi defectors in Amman Jordan highlighted or raised the profile of those guys so much that the Iraqi government was able to pick up on it and that blew the operation.

So they never forgave me for that. And they went to the FBI and they initiated a criminal complaint. accusing me of espionage. And it had been going on for a while. I mean, you know, there was at some point in time, Sanchez, I think in July, warned me that the FBI was getting ready to sweep me off the street and take me in for questioning.

And to protect me, Sanchez went to the CIA's legal counsel. He got the CIA's legal counsel to write a letter to the FBI explaining that everything I did was done with the permission of the CIA. that not only that, I didn't have a security clearance, and therefore I couldn't give classified information to the Israelis, that everything I took to Israel was technically speaking unclassified. So no laws were being broken. That didn't matter.

The knives were out. So how did that end up shaken out? Did the FBI file charges against you? Well, you know, the FBI is a funny organization. My lawyer, Matt Lifflander, wrote to Louis Free and demanded. to know the FBI director at the time. Yeah, he was the FBI director. And the FBI was playing coy.

But ultimately, we kept pushing them and pushing them. And eventually, they acknowledged that I was the target of an investigation. We negotiated what's called a queen of the day agreement. It's a, ever get a federal prosecutor, they'll explain it. It means you get to go in and answer questions and nothing, you're going to. say, as long as it's a truth, can be used to prosecute you. Mary Joe White, who is a very famous prosecutor of the Southern District, New York, was running the investigation. Now, anybody who knows Mary Jo White knows that when she sinks her teeth to do an espionage investigation,

it always ends in conviction. Always ends in conviction. But, you know, I agreed to do it. I went down to their facility in Manhattan, and I went up to an interrogation room. And there were two FBI agents there, a male and a female. And they started questioning. My lawyer was present, but I answered everything honestly. By the time I finished, the male FBI agent was sitting there in stunned silence. The female was crying. They both apologized.

And they literally said, you're an American patriot. Everything you did was for your country. And we're sorry this happened to you. And the FBI dropped the charges, dropped the investigation at that point in time. cost me a lot of money to hire a lawyer to make that happen. You told me that, you know, they had, you were unable to find employment because as long as you have espionage charges hanging over your head, I mean, no think tank is going to hire you. You're not going to be able to go and speak anywhere.

You know, your career is essentially cut short. Your career in government or government related. You know, there was talk about me being a fellow with the council on foreign relations. that got canceled. There was talk about me going up to the Belfare Center and not Harvard. That got canceled because of the espionage charges. I was offered a number of jobs at think tanks. Those officers had to be pulled because the U.S. government said they would withdraw all funding if I was hired.

So it was tough. I mean, I was able to get employment. You know, I wrote a book and got a nice advance for that book. I was hired as an on-air consultant with NBC News. and I got a speaking gig with a greater talent network that, you know, I would do public speaking about the situation in Iraq that generate income. But, you know, all of those jobs are short-term. You're, you're the darling of society for a little while. And I'd say in early 1998, when I resigned, I got a lot of attention.

I was asked to testify before the Senate. I was interviewed all over the place. but once I rack went off the map, you know, my viability disappears. And so the speaking engagements reduce in numbers. There's no follow-in book contract. Let me see Nightly News no longer need you. And now you're left hanging. And this is what my wife was concerned about is that, you know, I have a family.

I have daughters, have her. And now we're in a situation where, you know, there is no viable employment opportunities because you've been labeled a spy. That was the job. the purpose. That was their whole goal, is to make me as non-viable as possible. And then, I mean, we have to point out, in Iraq, this WMD's issue then going on into the invasion in 2003, you were vindicated, you know, over and over again, your inspections, your analysis, your commentary on the status of those weapons was correct. But there's this dark cloud that

hangs over you, largely stemming from these sorts of like Chris Hanson-style arrests that happened in 2001 and then again in 2009 involving, you know, soliciting minors over the internet, these sorts of things. And I have to ask you about those things. You know, we can't just kind of ignore them or pretend it didn't happen. What really happened there? And, you know, were you able to, you know, were you able to to go through some sort of rehabilitation process afterwards? First of all, no crime occurred. I committed no crimes. But you were convicted of some.

You spent time in jail, right? Oh, yeah, no. I mean, look, let's make it clear. When I was charged, I pled innocent, and I am innocent. And I maintain that through trial. Just to give you an example, you know, they said if I would plead to a single charge, But they were threatened me with 40 years in jail.

They said if I plead guilty to a single charge, I would get all probation, no jail time. I said, why in God's name would I plead to something I didn't do? And I went to trial. I lost at trial. And I went to jail. It spent three years in jail, two and a half years on probation. It is what it is. I've appealed it.

I've maintained my innocence. I am innocent. And I have an active appeal in place. It's docketed with the Supreme Court. And I know you want to get into this, but I'm not going to litigate this case. while it's in the appeals process. I'll let the judicial system run its course. And at some time in the future, maybe we can have this conversation.

But it's not a conversation we're going to have right now, except for me to say, I committed no crime. And I've pled innocent. I am innocent, and I maintain my innocence. So this is going to have to get hashed out in the courtroom, what in the coming year? Yeah. I mean, it's at the Supreme Court.

There's a chance that they'll take it up. And if they take it up, I'm confident that I'll prevail. But it's a 1% chance. That's just statistically speaking. It's nothing to do with the quality of the case. It's just the fact that getting your case heard by the Supreme Court is one of the toughest things. It's easier to get into Harvard Law School than it is to get your case heard by the Supreme Court. So the fact that I've got to docketed to the Supreme Court right now is,

I think is a good thing, and we'll see what happens. What is the effect of all that, these three arrests and, you know, three years in jail been on your life in your career? I mean, you were a public speaker. You're going around, you know, kind of blowing the whistle on a lot of these things that were happening in Iraq, and all of that came to a screeching halt. I mean, maybe I should just ask you, you know, what you thought of that New York Times article that was written about your conviction and going to prison that, you know, they were,

I shouldn't, maybe I should not frame it that way, but we just say that one way or another, I mean, eventually you were silenced, you were put into prison. Again, I'm not going to litigate this in public while it's, but what I will say is this. you know, every one of us travels in a circle of friends, colleagues, companions who know you, whether they're your family or your friends. I have not been abandoned by any of my family or any of my friends. The people who know me have stood by me because they know what the truth is. They know who I am.

And they also know a lot of the details about what transpired. and I've been abandoned by nobody. You know, the people who are sniping at me don't know me. I don't know them. And frankly speaking, they're not equipped to have any insight into the events that they talk about. Today, I'm fully employed. I have a great reputation. I've always had a great reputation.

I make a living doing, you know, I make a living, doing, you know, risk management analysis. for energy security. I am published. I speak without impediment, without fear. So those who thought they were going to silence me failed. I may not be on Main Street TV right now. I may not be, you know, anywhere, but nobody who opposed the war is. I mean, the bottom line is your best employment campaign would have been to tell lies,

to tell lies about WMD. be fully employed. The people who told the truth, whether they were arrested or not, don't get any attention. If you don't play the government's game, you don't get to, you know, you don't get to benefit from the government's largesse. That's a decision I made when I resigned, and it's one that I'm comfortable with today. But again, I am who I am. I'm very proud of who I am. I can wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and be damn proud of the man your stares back. You know, there's some people who said, well, you paid your debt. to society. An innocent man never pays his debt to society. I went to jail for three years

based upon, you know, a prosecutorial error. And we're just going to leave it at that. But, you know, I don't accept the fact that I have anything to apologize for. I don't accept the fact that I have any rehabilitation to undertake because I committed no crime. And that's just the way it is. The last question I had, I think, for tonight, because there's some much more we could get into. And, you know, honestly, I think people should go and read the book that I read this week, Iraq Confidential, the book that you authored, that a lot of the questions I've asked tonight were derived out of that book. People should go and read it and really get a full understanding of what InScom was and what was going on there. But I wanted to kind of pull back.

You know, I have this tendency to really ask these sort of like tactical ground game questions, how things work on a very tactical and technical level. But I want to pull back a little bit. I want to ask you sort of a geopolitical question about the things we've been talking about tonight, about the things you experienced in Iraq in the 1990s, the things I experienced in Iraq in the 2000s, the things that our troops continue to experience in Iraq to this day. Why in the world is our government so fucking obsessed with this part of the world?

especially Iraq, especially Iran, Syria, some other places in the Middle East, I mean, it is an absolute obsession when it seems to me quite clearly that our competitors, the people we need to watch out for are over in Asia, and I think most people can understand or infer what country I'm referring to there, but we are just absolutely obsessed with this region. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on that subject. Well, there's two players in the Middle East that when you mention their names, you can get the United States riled up about. One is Israel.

They're our allies. And we are very supportive of the state of Israel. And again, I'll point out that from 1994 to 1998, I traveled to Israel more than 18 times, spent a lot of time there. working with them at the highest levels. I have a lot of respect for Israel's. I have a lot of respect for the Israelis, and I believe in Israel's right to exist. Having said that,

you know, a big part of our heart on against Iraq comes from the fact that Iraq fired ballistic missiles into Israel, and Israel has never forgiven them for that. You know, that's just a reality. We went to war in Iraq, you know, to defend Israel from Saddam Hussein.

that's bottom line. The other country is Iran. And in 1979, the Iranians took over an embassy, took 52 Americans hostage for 400-some-odd days. And we've never forgiven Iran for that. And within the CIA, there's Bill Buckley, there are some of these incidents that institutionally... We have the Marine Barracks,

the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut that we've attached to Iran. So there's a lot of bad blood between, in the United States and Iran. And when Iran undertook a nuclear program that Israel views as an existential threat to its survival, the United States has taken up that cause and we oppose Iran. So a lot of what we're doing in Iraq right now is, A, making sure that Iraq never again poses a threat to the state of Israel akin to what it had under Saddam Hussein. And B, using Iraq as a foil to contain Iran so that Iran doesn't emerge as an existential threat to the state of Israel.

So, you know, a lot of what's driving our policies in Iraq is Israeli-centric. It's very much about, you know, standing up for the state of Israel and seeking to support the state of Israel. The irony is, as somebody who spent a lot of time in Israel, you know, while that may be our intent, I think the outcome is the exact opposite. Israel's never been under more threat than they are today. And that threat is largely derived from, you know, the result of failed American policy in Iraq, failed American policy versus Iran, failed American policy in Syria. It seems the more we do, the worse it gets for Israel.

I mean, when you talk about, you know, Matt and Albright sitting back like, the cruise missiles are on their way, they're coming. I mean, it's like there's this, I know it's geopolitical, but it feels to me like it's emotional on some level. They just cannot let this Iraq thing go. They can't let this Iran thing go. You know, our politicians are on TV all the time, this sort of rhetoric, something has got to be done about Iran. Meanwhile, you know, infrastructure is falling apart in this country. We have all sorts of problems, you know, the inequities and so forth that I've talked about in the media every day, it's just incredible to me. Yeah, on Iran, on Iraq, too, it was personal. Remember, George Herbert Walker Bush

personalized it when he called Saddam Hussein, the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler. And George W. Bush personalized it when he said, well, you know, they did try to kill my dad. Well, and that's another fascinating thing about it. You know, the Iraqis have maintained, and I believe them that there was never an assassination attempt, that they never made an attempt, that this was literally a ploy by Kuwait to get the United States to redouble its efforts to stay the course in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

You know, there's always a tendency at the end of a war for a nation to pull back and send their boys home, loose focus, et cetera. Kuwait was concerned that especially under a new president, Bill Clinton, the United States was going to withdraw. It's true. I'll tell you this.

I'm, again, Amir Rashid, the minister of oil. I met with him in January of 1992, or 1993, or 1993, I'm sorry. And he said, you know, he was laughing. He said, you know, your time as an inspector is almost up. And I said, what do you mean? He says, we're reaching out to the incoming Clinton administration and we're going to reach a deal where we're going to lift sanctions. and give the Americans the ability to, you know,

avoid our oil, bring their national, you know, their companies in, et cetera. It's going to be a, you know, a mutually beneficial relationship. And once that happens, you're not going to need you inspectors anymore. And then you turn around two months later, and you got United States cruise missiles hitting the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters. And Bill Clinton can no longer talk about, you know, a grand bargain with Iraq because Iraq just tried to assassinate his predecessor. So there's every reason to believe that the Kuwaitis set the United States up to prevent Bill Clinton from, you know, trying to end the cycle.

Now Bill Clinton's trapped, one of the reasons why, you know, Bill Barr and or Bill Ba Bear and the others were up in northern Iraq was to get rid of Saddam Hussein because, you know, Clinton now had to follow through with George Herbert Walker Bush's lethal finding. And Bill Clinton made it clear. One of the reasons why the CIA was pushing forward so aggressively in June of 1996 is that he wanted Saddam Hussein gone prior to the presidential elections. And it was an embarrassment to Clinton when the CIA failed. Saddam Hussein's continued survival was an embarrassment to Bill Clinton. It was very personal for the Clinton administration. So, yeah, when Madeline Albright sat there and talked about cruise missiles flying in, it was perfect. personal. She was part of that administration. She was implementing policy that was driven, you know,

by the personal embarrassment of an American president as opposed to the national security of the United States. Is there a way for us out of there, out of Iraq, out of this? I mean, we almost just a lot, not long ago, you know, we almost went to war with Iran. And is there any way for us to get out of what seems like a intractable conflict? Well, yeah, I mean, the way to get out is to get out. I mean, I don't mean to be too blunt about it. There's literally no purpose for us to be in Syria today. It's a sovereign state.

The notion that we're there to safeguard Syrian oil is an affront to international laws, and affront to what American servicemen should be fighting for. We're not there to steal another nation's oil. So we should leave Syria. If you leave Syria, then there's no reason for us to stay in Iraq. So we should leave Iraq. People say, well, what about ISIS? Well, you know, the number one killer of ISIS is the Iranians and the Iraqi Shia militia and the Syrian army.

They're fully capable of taking care of ISIS. Especially it thrives. They've been so degraded. Pardon? Especially now that they've been so degraded by a combined Russian American problem. It's more a political problem than a military problem. And, you know, the politics is going to be decided by the people who have vested interest in the politics, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Iranian, not the Americans. The Americans don't have a, you know, we don't have a dog in that fight.

And then the best way to deal with Iran is, frankly speaking, to get back into the Iran nuclear agreement, to rejoin the agreement. And then use that as a foundation upon which we can begin to use diplomacy. to come to a mutual understanding about, you know, what, what Iran's role in the region should be. A lot of what Iran's doing today that we find to be so-called malign activity is simple reaction to American stimulus. You know, we went into Afghanistan, so Iran's responding to that. We invaded Iraq, so Iran's responding to that. We've sought to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, so Iran's responding to that. maybe if we stopped, you know, kicking the hornets nest, we wouldn't get stung somebody.

Scott, this has been a dynamite episode, just fireworks flying from my point of view and some of the things that you've had to say about all this stuff that went down with Iraq. A lot of it, quite frankly, I was unaware of previously. So I thank you for writing this book and sharing these experiences with us. I know I've kept you for about three hours now, and I still have another short segment to film with you if you're game for it. But I just want to say, you know, thanks so much for joining us tonight. And I think that we're going to have to talk again sometime about Syria and Iran.

But that's, I mean, like I said, we've already gone three hours tonight. It's just too much for one episode. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott. I'm just going to walk over here. And thank you everybody who joined us tonight. Really appreciate it.

And we will see you again next week. We actually have a retired Marine officer who's going to join us. And that's going to be pretty interesting. So anyway, thanks for joining us. And I'll see you again next week.