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an email. We'll talk about special operations covert. Ask me in the Team
House with your hopes. Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey everyone, welcome
to episode two hundred and thirty four of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy
here with David Park and our guest on tonight's show is David Mukoloski. He
is a reformer CIA analyst. He is the author of Damascus Station. This
one was very well reviewed came out a lot like two years ago. Two
years ago. Now this is the new one that's coming out in October Moscow,
X. So next month this one will be out. I read an
advanced copy that your publisher was nice enough to send me really good book,
and so we're excited to talk to you about your work and your career in
the intelligence community as well. So thank you for joining us, David,
and I gotta let people know about our sponsor upfront, Augusta Precious Medals.
If you guys text Team to six eight five nine two or go to Augusta
Precious Metals dot com. They are one of our sponsors. I hope you
guys will check them out. So thank you for doing that. So,
David, I want to jump right into it with you. Tell us a
little bit about sort of like what you're upbringing was like, and what your
career track was like, what took you towards a you know, the intelligence
community. Yeah, sure thing, and thanks for having me, guys.
It's fun to be here. So I grew up in the Midwest, mostly
in Minneapolis. I as a kid just read tons of thrillers and spy fiction
and you know, devoured all kinds of non fiction books about the world,
and you know, I kind of had it from an early age. I
think, a sense of like and there's no sense that I wanted to join
CI, but the sense of like, I'm interested in the world, I
want to travel, I want to understand how things work. Right. I
went to college at a small place outside of Chicago, and we had a
guy come through who at the who ran at the time the Middle East Analytics
shop. So he was like coming through the University of Chicago doing recruiting stuff,
and he was in a lum of my school. It's called Wheaton College,
and he came through kind of just to like talk to an IR one
oh one class, which I was in, and I ended up kind of
getting in in a way that I'm sure would make a lot of our you
know, oss Fourbears turnover in their graves. But it was basically a guy
showing up at a small liberal arts, you know, midwestern school and saying,
hey, you know, here's what the CIA is, here's what a
CIA analyst does, and talking to a class, and I thought it sounded
awesome. I mean it felt at the time like literally my work experience was
I've been I've been digging holes for a sprinkler system company, and I had
been a cashier at Wendy's. Like that was literally the resume, like no
joke, that was the resume that got turned in. And so in the
CIA comes to campus, it's like, all right, this seems pretty interesting.
I'm sure I won't get in, but let me just apply. And
I ended up going through the process and I think, you know, it
turns out one of the things that if you go into a small liberal arts
midwestern Protestant school, you know, you're pretty good at passing polygraphs because you've
got like you haven't done anything really wrong, and you've got this kind of
baseload level of guilt going that's really helpful for the polygraphers, so they know
you're not a sociopath. And I got in. So I actually joined as
an undergrad intern, so I took the poly and the full lifestyle poly and
all the medical and all that kind of stuff, the psych exams, interviews,
all that at nineteen. I showed up the summer when I was twenty
as an intern and they threw me. You know, I kind of describe
it this way, like the CI, at least from an analytic standpoint,
basically hires for kind of two major profiles, again oversimplification, but helpful.
One is like somebody who is extremely knowledgeable on a particular topic, like they
lived in Russia for fifteen years and they did their dissertation on blah blah blah
and like that. That's they speak the language, and okay, bring that
person on, put them on Russia, and then the agency goes after really
you know, pretty young people who they think they can you know, make
into good analysts and get them pretty pretty early. Right, So I fell
into that group, got in and you know, quickly realized that it was
a pretty big step up from Wendy's and I was. I loved it.
I worked the first summer they put me on Syria. Still to this day,
I don't really know why. It's pretty random, I think, and
mostly just because the guy who came to recruit was you know, running the
Middle East shop at the time. And the first summer I was there was
the thirty four day war between Israel and Hezbollah, which you know, this
was two accounts two thousand and six, that's right. So the account you
know, at that time it was pretty small. There just weren't that many
people working on Syria or on Lebanon, and so I had the opportunity to
you know, participate in a lot of briefings and to write stuff that like,
you know, I probably had no business doing. But it's one of
those things where you've got a team of like five or six and you're short
on people and there's a war on. So you know, the intern is
a member of the team, right, And I was fully cleared in working
So got hooked on it dead And then the next summer I came back,
so I go to school, you know, come back for my second summer,
and that was the run up to when the Israelis bombed alkey Bar,
and so I was thoroughly hooked. After those two summers, it felt like,
man, this is exciting. I kind of am getting a sense of
like how does the world actually function, how do government's work, how does
this how does this region work? Right? And that was really addictive to
me. So did deaf for two summers, got the full time offer and
jumped in and I pretty much worked on Syria the whole time I was there.
That is like pretty wild. I don't think I've heard on this show.
I don't think we've heard of somebody who like walked through the door quite
that young. Yeah, I was, I was very young. Yeah,
A lot a lot of people who are like they had graduate degrees, or
they had a military career, or they had a law a law career,
or their lawyers or something. I mean coming in as a as an internet
What did you say nineteen when you first started. Yeah, that's wild,
Yeah, but great. Yeah, it felt it felt like you know,
it was one of those things where even at that age, I was kind
of thinking, this seems like a mistake too. You know, I'm too
young to be doing this. But you know, I think I think there's
a logic to getting people in the pipeline young get Frankly, they are looking
back on it. You know, there's an element here if like, the
further you get into a four year degree, the less likely it is that
you're going to pass a lifestyle polly. And so if the agency can kind
of give you, you know, a pathway early, it creates incentives to
not do things that make you flunk out. You know. So for folks
out there watching, and I know that they're you often are a lot of
young people watching these shows that are interested in pursuing a career in the intelligence
community, Can you kind of lay out what your job as an analyst was
for people who just have like no knowledge and just you know, they maybe
they understand we have spies out there meeting in cafes with people and trying to
get information, But what's what's the analyst side of it? Yeah, so
I think, you know, there's some flaws in this analogy. I but
I think it's helpful to explain it to people who don't understand the inner workings
of the agency. Like I think about it in a way as clanestant journalism.
Right, there's a story, uh, that you're writing for and the
job is primarily you know, writing and briefing. Right, You're you're answering
a question story for a consumer of that information. And that could be the
president, that could be the director of the CIA, that could be you
know, the Secretary of Defense, that could be people on the National Security
Council. You know, people who are making policy right or informing policy.
We're sort of we're not doing that right. We're providing an input to the
policy making process that is trying to answer a particular question about what's going on
in the world and why does it matter for us? And what might we
be able to do to shape that you know thing to be more amenable to
our interests. So you're taking in as part of that process, you're taking
in all different kinds of information. Right, So you might have let's take
Syria as an example. You know, we might have human sources that have
access to people inside the government who are providing us information secrets. Right,
They're providing us with secrets from Syria that help us understand better and you know
what the Syrians are thinking are doing about a particular topic. There's satellite imagery,
there's you know, open source press stuff, there's academic field work.
There's signals, intercepts, phone calls, faxes, emails, things like that.
You're taking all that information in and trying to make sense of it to
answer that question for the policymaker, so that you know, the parallels to
journalism are Okay, you've got sources, right, you have people. Let's
take the case of you know, human sources as an example, Like,
you've got people who are providing this information that maybe they shouldn't be. So
if you're writing a story about you know, corporate misdeeds, in the United
States, you might have sources inside that company who are providing you with,
you know, with with email records or things like that from inside the corporation.
They shouldn't be. You have to think about asset protection and how you
actually communicate with that person all that kind of stuff, you know. But
in this context, it's information that's you know, highly classified and obtained in
ways that were that those sources and methods known, people would get killed or
valuable collection programs would be compromised. So you're you're putting all this stuff together
and you know, frankly, the output of it, you know, is
a little bit underwhelming in some cases, because it's like you might take a
very serious, complicated topic like what's going to happen next in Syria, right,
which is the thing we were constantly trying to answer twenty eleven and twenty
twelve and twenty thirteen, and you boil it down to like a page or
two and that goes to you know, whatever that you know, whoever that
senior policymaker is, and it's one piece of the information that they receive on
that topic. But you're sort of feeding you're feeding that consumer base with with
information about these questions that that are important to the policy making process. And
that's that's pretty much what you're doing as an analyst, you know, and
it's distinct from other aspects of you know, the primary other job inside CEA,
although there are many is you know, the folks who are actually trying
to recruit, develop, you know, and spot human assets and actually collect
that information. So I'm I'm distinct from a collector of information and that I'm
analyzing the information that the collectors provide. But you guys could assist them in
finding like, hey, this guy in this ministry would be a prime target
for you to try to pitch. Yeah, exactly, like we would help
in the process of Now you know, oftentimes, uh, there's a lot
of stovepiping in this business, right, these are big bureaucracies that don't always
function particularly well. But in an ideal world, yes, you know,
we were providing input to the collectors on where there might be gaps there.
You know, are particular are analysts with like targeting specialties who do a lot
of the work that you're describing there, which is like here's the fifteen people
you know that we'd be interested in, you know, in knowing more about
inside the Syrian mod right, and here are the gaps that we have about
you know, the Syrian militaries plans and intentions and capabilities and kind of feed
that stuff to the collectors and the hopes that they can go and find people
who actually have that information. What what was that that communication pipeline like for
you as a junior analyst and then as you know, as you grew and
became known or became sort of got your bona feedees in the sense of first,
you're receiving information and you're always receiving information right where there's the message traffic
that's coming through, but you're putting your analysis, you know, on it.
But were there I know that there are specific people for taskings, but
how much input would you have in those tasks? Could you reach out to
a case saucer and say, hey, these are some other pieces of the
puzzle. Not necessarily this is a person you should target, but in these
sources are these assets that you have, you know, these are the pieces
that were sort of missing. Yeah, yeah, you know, that was
very hit or miss, depending on the personalities involved. I think I can
think of a number of examples where you know, it felt like we just
couldn't really get close to the collectors on things. And then others where you
know, we would actually be in the meetings with the assets because we you
know, knew a ton about the particular topic that that asset was feeding and
you know, sort of the assets reporting on and we're a helpful partner for
the case officer in conducting that meeting right to get the information. Because ideally
you'd say we're in lockstep with the collectors because we're you know, really the
most downstream part of the process before we get to the consumer, right,
So there's a lot of value in the analysts and the collectors being really linked
up. But I found it was pretty pretty spotty how solid that connective tissue
was. And you know, I think that's you know, we're talking a
little bit before the show about modernization. I think that was you know,
one of the primary uh you know, sort of problem statements in that in
that bit of a reorg was like, can we create better connection between you
know, analysts and operations and the tech folks to make sure that this place
actually you know, does espionage better. But it was it was all over
the place, truly, well, I mean as you know, as sort
of the shop, you know, whatever shop you're in, as sort of
the shop as the subject matter experts. I mean, were there ever instances
where you could turn around to like a case officer and go, hey,
none of this fits, Like your source is absolutely full of shit, you
know. I would say there was a slightly different tinge to that conversation when
when we felt like this source was producing stuff that was bizarre. It was
less direct than that. I think that when you go to the operational side
and they're doing the vetting, that conversation can be that blunt, you know,
not in cable traffic but in person. But on the analytics side,
it's a little bit more anodyne. It'd be like, hey, these five
reports, like they don't track with the second right, like what's going on?
You know, or just frankly, it's maybe some a stream of reporting
from from an asset that's like this isn't particularly valuable, yea, you know,
so we would we would not do it that that bluntly because we're frankly,
you know, especially on the analytics, on the analytics side, when
you're not talking about like CT like we're sort of removed enough from it where
we're like not capable of making as you know, sort of direct and harsh
eva. So you never said that, but you never sent a cable back
saying, hey, the taliband, do not have that sixteens. Get your
ship together and and fire this source. No, I mean well we would.
We would, you know, be like hey, this piece of like
third hand human that you collected here is like this is crazy, like what
is this? You know? And and that then kind of filters back into
the DA side of things where they try to piece together like, Okay,
the analyst said, this is garbage. Here's ten pieces of contradictory information.
Did this person make it up because they wanted us to pay them or did
they Is this a game a telephone or is this an effort to sort of
you know, is this a more systematic effort to sort of mislead us on
a particular topic and we need to cut this person loose so that would get
kicked back to the to THEDO side to sort of work through that. Yeah,
So can you tell us about the you know, we've talked about the
farm. You know, people talked about you know, sort of their case
offts or training. Can you tell us about what the the analysts pipeline.
How do they train somebody to be an analyst? So they I think it
took us. It's probably changed, but at the time, you know,
more than ten years ago, they basically took you off your account for somewhere
between four and six months and put you at a you know, you're still
like you weren't living away from your family, but you were going to it,
you know, one of these sort of outbuildings and like herned in or
rest in or one of these other places, and you know, the DC
urbs. And you had a class of people who are with you, all
other analysts from all over the d I uh, you know, maybe twenty
twenty five of us, and they basically walk you through, you know,
a very excruciating deep dive and how you actually think critically, which you know
low and behold a lot of people coming out of before your university are really
smart but don't actually know how to think critically. How do you write clearly
and you know, without value judgments or colorful language or any of this kind
of stuff that you know if you've been again you know, writing papers and
in I our program, you know you have there there's a you know,
a voice that you might have that they try to stamp out and turn into
something that's like, hey, you're writing stuff as You're not writing as David
McCloskey, right, you're you're the CIA, So like, what how do
you strip everything down? This isn't an article in the New Yorker. Correct
correct, So it's really this kind of like down, you know, take
the thing down to the studs, like how do you think? How do
you write? How do you take in? We're going to give you a
lot of the exercises. We're like, here's a packet with like six hundred
pieces of information. You have to write an article on this, and it's
like a page and you know, and like how how do you put together
the what, the why and so what, substantiate it, rite it clearly
you know, and do it in like you know, a page and hand
that off. It's really hard, you know. That's that's that is not
something you know, it's not a skill that's really taught in most most undergrad
programs. And frankly, if someone's coming a lot of analysts, you know,
particularly the kind of analysts who might come in more like mid career,
are coming out of academic backgrou sounds they're not doing that for the most part.
You know, you can learn it, but a lot of people haven't
been practicing that. So it's a lot of that, a lot of briefing
practice. So like you sit down, I mean a lot of a lot
of the customers, you know, down at the White House or DD or
certainly in Congress or like really unpleasant to deal with, surprise, surprise,
and so you know, how do you actually engage with somebody who you know
you need to brief them, but they're also you might hate the CIA,
it might be a dick. You know, how do you interact with people
like that? And it's a lot of role playing and a lot of writing,
So you kind of you do that for almost half a year. You
end up doing also as part of that, at least you used to a
rotation where like they take you and actually put you in a different part of
the agency, so they kind of you get a different perspective on how the
place works that's not on your team, which I think is pretty valuable.
And then they put you back in and you're you're kind of on the line.
But that's more or less the art of it is there for people who
might be interested in this and know if they have what it takes to be
an analyst. Is there like an industry standard textbook out there that you can
get on you know, your favorite bookseller or whatever. Is there? You
know? Are there any sources question? I though, there's a book that's
escaping me. There was a book we used, It's gonna bug me.
There's a book we used about intelligence analysis and sort of how you think about
how you manage different kinds of cognitive biases when you're when you're writing and thinking.
That is kind of the It was the foundational text in the program because
so much of it is like stripping out those biases so that you actually provide
objective and clear information. It's going to drive me nuts. Data. No,
I'll have to I'll have to double back with you on that. But
there's a there is a good book that's publicly available that would give people a
sense of like here's here's if you're going through that. You know that program
at CIA, like everyone's going to read this and go through it. Take
take two minutes to think about it. If you want, I have to
do this. Ad read here real quick. Start to interrupt you but if
you think of it, I'd love to take a look at it myself.
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to you, Back to you, David. Yeah, it's Uh. Now
with with the analysis and when they're training you that you know in this craft,
is it just a matter of like eliminating your cogn and bias and how
to write is there because obviously you guys are using you know, things,
you know, these I don't know if it's if it's classified, but i'll
but these programs, you know, to create link change and things like that,
are they also teaching you sort of how to put these puzzles together and
stuff. Well, I am sure that the trading has become much more rigorous,
like in the types of probably software programs that are used, and frankly,
like now in a world where you're talking about you know, AI assistant
search and things that I don't I couldn't speculate exactly as to what they've you
know, how they've updated it. But you're hitting on something which you're right,
that I've missed, which is like there's a there's a weighing of which
I think is still true even in the you know, the world that we're
living in now. A skill in learning how to weigh the information that you
have in front of you, and frankly, so much of it as contradictory.
It's like what do you do with you know, you take my example
of like here's a packet of six hundred sources of information, Well, you
know, one hundred and fifty of them are crap, but they're not going
to say they're crap. You're gonna have to figure out that their crap.
And you know, another hundred are going to contradict the ones that you actually
need to use to write, Like, so, how do you sort of
sort through that? Because it's not all just going to point in one direction,
right, There's going to be stuff that points you or sends you down
different rabbit trails, And so I think, yeah, you're right, it's
not just the sort of elimination of bias, but it's also like how do
you figure out what's good information and what's bad information? Right? That is
easier said than done, and it's often very unclear, you know, which
is another reason why, like we use a lot of it. It drives
policymakers freaking nuts. They hate it because it's we use this sort of probabilistic
language. Now we're like, hey, we have you know, medium confidence
in something, right, Well, what the hell does that? You know?
What does that mean? I mean we we we wrote stuff was like
we have low confidence in this assessment. And you know sometimes these like you
know, briefing where you're forced to go in with that kind of line.
I mean, you just get this like eye roll from the from the person
across the table where they're like geez, I mean that's like, this is
the most useless piece of garbage you could bring. You know, Obama said
about the Ben Widen raid when they were briefing him, and at some point
he was like, just stop making up the numbers, guys, Like it's
a flip of the coin, right, Yeah, no, that's I mean,
that's you know, that's true. And I mean I think if I
were across the table, I would have wanted to maybe reach across and strangle
a younger version of me multiple times while delivering those kind of mealy mouthed assessments.
But you there is a there's a logic to it, which is like,
we are providing the CIA's assessment. It's not my own personal opinion.
You know, if I'm a think tanker and I go down and I talked
to a bunch of people on the hill, like I'm not speaking for brook
Hangers or the American Enterprise Institute or whatever, you know, the International Crisis
Group, Like I'm I'm speaking for myself, right. Agency analysts aren't doing
that, and so it's a lot more. There's a you know, pretty
big rigamarole to go through to like actually get a piece of paper that has
the ci AS judgment on it, and if you stray from that, you
know, it doesn't go so well for your career. And the thing is
is that, even though it's probably frustrating to the people hearing it, even
if something's low probability, if it's if it's you know, it's like you
know, and it's sort of the carbon methodology of you know, target assessment.
Even if it's low probability but it's high like high consequence, you have
to tell somebody, right, you can't, you can't, you can't go,
well, we know they're going to be you know, asked up at
us if we go and say this is a low probability you know, or
low confidence sort of. Because the flip side to that is like if you
have intelligence of appending terror attack, but you're you think this is all the
sources bus it's almost certainly not going to happen. But if it does happen
and you were sitting on that intelligence, right, oh boy, right,
that's right, yeah, And I think yeah, the most direct you know
that the CT example would be the best one where there's a I think you
know, it's like a duty to Warren, right, it's what it was
called. Like inside CTC, you would sometimes get you know, pieces that
were written, or you know, briefings that were done, or it's like,
I mean the ct analysts would say like, yeah, probably not.
But what am I you know, I can't what am I supposed to be?
I'm supposed to just kind of I can't off and go home without telling
you about this. I mean, yeah, you can't do that. And
there were there were a number of instances on you know, on Syria and
even more sort of strategic topics where you know, it felt like, okay,
the impact of this is such that we need to share the sort of
low confidence assessment with you, you know, but less less so when you're
not talking about like, you know the impact of this being people might die.
Yeah, So let's uh, let's jump into that. Because I'm continually
fascinated with with Syria and our involvement in it. It sounds like you were
there, you were from the very beginning. You were Syria before Syria was
cool, right, right, Yeah, it was not cool at the time.
Yes, that's right, it was. It was a solid one PDB
a year account prior to the war and no more. There wasn't a whole
lot of attention on it. I mean there wasn't a few things, but
it was. Yeah, it just spiked obviously once the uprising started. Yeah.
Yeah, So like maybe we want to talk a little bit about the
prologue to it. I mean, the Arab spring Gadaffi goes down in twenty
eleven and then this thing migrates over to Dara and Syria. As an analyst
sort of what are you seeing, What's what's the vibe in the office around
this time? For time frame, Yeah, you know, I would say
basically every analyst once too Knee just started, which would have been December,
I think of twenty ten. It was before the new year, and Ben
Aley goes I think in like January or something like that, and every analyst
I know who was working on any sort of Middle Eastern autocracy had like a
piece in drafts about why it wasn't going to happen in their country, and
it was said in like slightly It wasn't said that directly, but everybody had
good reasons, low probability or you know, I think the way we ended
up framing it was like, here's all the different obstacles to a protest movement,
right, and let's tick through those, which was an intellectually honest way
of saying, like, yeah, there's a lot of obstacles to it,
but you know, it was it was a fascinating time to be on the
account. I mean, I was actually in the region in January and February,
and I watched like that Night of the Camels and when you know,
when Bark brought in those those goons on like literally riding camels through the protesters
and like schwhacking them with clubs and like polo stick. It was crazy.
I remember watching that in Davascus and like you could just kind of see people
in Syria watching this stuff and realizing that there was a very profound shift occurring
that wasn't predictable, right, but like you just you don't know when these
kind of things would happen, but it was. It was akin to I
think what happened in you know, Eastern and Central Europe in eighty nine,
where all of a sudden, it's just like things are changed and there's this
mass psychological shift that occurs in Syria, they you know, Syrians called it
like the wall of fear, right, that there was this barrier to any
kind of political activity or action or resistance to the security services and the regime
apparatus. And very quickly people realized, you know, maybe it doesn't have
to be this way, and there was a lot of dry you know,
there was a lot of kindling. Obviously in the country. You had pretty
significant socioeconomic deprivation. You had the linger and effects of a drought that had
been going on in the east for four or five years at that point,
had led to these crazy migrations of people around these shanty towns, you know,
around Damascus and Aleppo. You had you know, really predatory regime patronage
networks that extracted from the country and from ordinary people and didn't disperse, you
know it in any way. Equally, you had security services that were really
the only effective arm of the state at that point, you know, I
mean most of the rest of the regime's institutions had been pretty hollowed out out
and were ineffective. Like the only ones that worked really were like the four
major security services in Syria. And so the population, like the surface area
with the population was happening through the security services, which are Alai dominated,
and you know, you have these kind of guys who don't make a lot
of money and have to extract it through graft and corruption from the population.
And it was you know, you have a youth bulge, you have you
have all the things right, like, so this is a place that's pretty
primed for and I mean at that point, the outside family had been in
power for forty years, you know, so you're dealing with a pretty ossified
structure that's lost a lot of its legitimacy, right, And then all of
a sudden people thought it could be different. And there was in Thera down
south there was a group of teenagers who put up some graffiti. They got
arrested. And there's a whole bunch of different varying accounts on this, but
we're probably tortured and certainly significantly mistreated. And there was sort of a back
and forth between some of the elders in the city and the security services,
and the kids probably got killed, a few of them, I believe,
And there were protests and then you sort of had this cycle start of like
protests, people get killed by the security services, there's funeralals. Moore protests
breakout and just sort of spiraled from there. One of the interesting things is
that those kind of incidents like between the population the security services had been going
on for a number of years prior. You know, we tend to think
of it as like, oh, nothing happened, and then all of a
sudden this happened. Well, not really like these kind of things had been
happening, It was just that this was the first time it happened in this
new context of you know, we can push for something to be different,
and maybe the regime won't kill us, you know, maybe we can get
away with it. And that's how it started, you know, And it
started really and truly as a pretty peaceful protest movement for a while, and
then the dynamics change, which we can talk about you guys like to,
but it you know, that first bit of the of The one other thing
I would say which I think is important, is that that first year or
so of the uprising, you know, a lot of the press, like
if you go back and read the regional press, or if you read a
lot of the American press, you would think that the regime had started a
kind of scorched earth military campaign, like right, off the bat, and
it's just not true. The regime's response initially was more waffling than anything.
It was the sort of haphazard use of force so that it wasn't effective,
and then giving concessions too little and too late so that they wouldn't actually appease
people. And they really failed in that first year, I think from a
lack of decisiveness more than anything. And then you know, as things became
more militarized, they started, you know, in early twenty twelve, to
do a much more kind of score shirt military campaign, which was like we're
just going to destroy places in order to suppress the opposition. And then you
had, you know, you mentioned that you were you were living in Damascus
around this time frame. I could you talk a little bit about like your
personal experience as well as like some of your observations, either work wise,
but also just sort of that experience of living there and interacting with the people.
Yeah, so, look, I I was there before the uprising started,
Okay, I I mean it was a absolutely beautiful city filled with people
who you know, were incredibly generous to most Americans that they met. It
is a you know, wonderfully especially in the center I mean, wonderfully cosmopolitan
place, exceptional food, exceptional cult. Like, it's just I loved it,
and it had a very kind of undefiled feel to it because it hadn't
been you know, it hadn't really been open to a lot of sort of
Western consumerism because of the sanctions. Yeah, that's right, and it just
it was pretty a magical place, you know, and it was filled like
at the time, any Syrian even though you could kind of see that people
were watching what was going on in the region and starting you could kind of
almost see the gears turning when you would talk to them. But if you
ask them the question of like, hey, could this happen here, They're
like, no, you know, there's no way, Like it won't happen
here, but you could you could also tell that like something is shifting it
profoundly in the way that that people pausing with a cigarette held between two fingers,
looking just kind of looking off into the distance. Yeah, there's a
certain like a certain wonder I think to seeing something like that happen, right,
But I love I love the city, and you know, it was
interesting though, like being in Damascus and then like I went down, I
mean, I drove down to a month before things started, because there's this
really beautiful Roman amphitheater down there, and that city you could just like,
the vibes are so different to city. You get out of the car and
was that Paul Mira you know, no, no, oh okay, yeah,
you know, I just did like a day trip down there, And
as soon as you get out of the car, it's like this feeling of
hey, people are looking at you like they don't want you here, you
know. And and it had a very different and feel to it that when
I look back and kind of think about the way the protest movement started,
but you can just kind of it's one of those places where you can kind
of feel the the suffering, you know, and the fact that this is
a this is a people who are being excluded from the cultural life, the
economics and the politics of the state, right and and we're pretty we're pretty
primed for something. It felt very different from Damascus, and I mean,
we can we can we move the timeline forward if you want to talk about
how how it developed from there. What of course stands out in my mind
that I'd like to hear your your thoughts on, is how how the protest
movement led to an armed insurrection, and then how that became specifically Islamized.
I think it's it's probably the topic to hit well. So, you know,
the the regime had an interest from early days in militarizing the conflict because
it could not figure out how to deal with, you know, a large,
pretty peaceful protest movement which was like, hey, people are just out
in the streets on Friday in large numbers, demanding significant political change, like
it's very This was not a government that could deal with them, and so
they did have an interest in creating and helping to create an armed opposition to
itself so that it could fight it and it could create fault lines that are
already existed in the society around largely ethnic and sectarian lines, but it could
sort of firm those up and use them as a way to divide and kind
of conquer the political system. And one of the things that the regime did
was they released Joddi's from Sadnaia in April I think of twenty eleven. They
released a number of guys who had fought in Iraq and who had come back
and who had been arrested, probably by SMI Syrian military intelligence, you know,
for for activities in Syria, and a lot of those guys you know
from I LIB up in the northwest, and they became the founders of a
number of very successful salapigiatist groups that fought against the regime, and they were
let go in April of twenty eleven. So I think the regime fed some
of this. At the same time, you also had people, and many
of them were Iraq war veterans who had foughts and you know, against US
in Iraq and then had gone back to Syria. You know, you had
people who very reasonably saw that the regime wasn't going to ansel itself and who
you know, hated the security services with a passion for good reason in many
cases, and who were very excited about the prospect after a few months of
protests and the realization of like, hey, Jem's not going to do anything
to go out and kill security services officers, right, many of whom are
are ALOI and most of the study insurgent, most of the insurgents were Sunni
Arap you know. So there was a dynamic that started really, I mean,
I think it was by spring of twenty eleven, we were starting to
see like, hey, there are some low levels of violence here that could
get out of control pretty quickly. And from there it just kind of you
know, you had the dynamic of just that that sort of spiral internally,
but then you started to have you know, external actors getting involved, to
sort of equipment, you know, fund to train it first of all in
a very haphazard way, but you know, the sort of fuel those dynamics
internally and it became violent. And are you talking about like the two thousand
and eleven to like two thousand and twelve thirteen time frame where yes, that's
right. How was what was American policy like at that time? Because it
initially initially like we were saying that uh Assad was a reformer, uh you
know, we were you know, all on you know, his side,
and then then then our policy is saying he's got to go, and right,
and how one, how did that influence if it did you guys?
And to do you like if if if if the US says Assad has to
go, do people in the country who are against his regime, do they
feel like that's the wink wink we got jaboo of attitude? Yeah? I
think that's bought on. I mean, you know, I would say,
And there were different sort of phases to the way we engage with this,
but one thing that was consistent throughout was the chasm between our rhetoric and what
we actually did. You know, there was just a tremendous gap the entire
time between what we would say and and what happened actually on the ground and
what we did. And that made everybody confused. Not in a good way.
It wasn't it was people in Syria. Say that again, when you
say every made everybody confused? Do you mean people in Syria? Do you
mean people people people in Syria? Allies in the region. You know,
I think we had you know, Syrians who thought, okay, if you
say which I think I believe President Obama in like the late summer of twenty
eleven said ASA, it needs to step aside, said I don't know if
Obama said I know, and you know Syrians took that to mean, okay,
they're gonna the Americans are gonna help us make him step aside for the
most part, and you know Arab partners Sauby's, George's you know, sort
of said okay, that means you're gonna help to you know, fund and
back and maybe equipment, train and opposition, right, And I think that
we we just sort of got half pregnant on that. You know. It
was like, we're gonna do some things kind of in a very tepid way,
We're not really gonna get involved, and we never provided any kind of
clarity. And I think the regime pretty quickly figured this out and sort of
used it to its advantage. But we just never were able to muster.
And you know, there's a good conversation we could have about whether it would
have been in the cards for us to really be involved in a much more
robust way, to like effectively create, you know, an alternative to ASSAD.
I'm not sure if that would have ever been possible. But we didn't
do ourselves any favors by you know, getting totally over our skis with what
we said what was going on in the ground. And I think, you
know, honestly, what was going on with a lot of the stuff we
were writing and with our engagement with the NSC was like they had watched they
meeting the White House had watched Kay Tunisia goes Mubar, it goes now his
regime doesn't go, but like he's gone, good daf he's gone. Never
Mind that we acted as the air force for that, but let's put that
aside for us second. And so there was this sort of narrative of like,
this is predetermined, he's gone. It's just a matter of the circumstances.
And so I think the I think that the Obama administration thought that they
could kind of step to the side, say whatever they wanted, and in
like six to eight months he would be gone and that would be a win
for US policy. And so it was really a policy of sort of strategic
communications above all else. And then he stepped to the side and sort of
let history do its work. And the Syrian regime is a lot more resilient
and determined than any of these other sort of you know, political systems that
had gone down. So they didn't, but that was the dynamic at the
time. So anything we put out as analysts, they would talk about outside
staying power or some of these sort of violent dynamics and the conflict, like
there wasn't there wasn't a receptive audience, you know, downtown for that kind
of stuff. It and it's weird that, you know, after like Tito
and Yugoslavia, after Saddam, you know, after Ghadafi and the violence and
you know, reactivation of the slave trade and all this other stuff that that
like America still hasn't learned that lesson is, yes, there are some really
shitty people running these countries. But then when you eliminate this shitty person who's
just shitty for the for the fact of being shitty, that you know,
these randomly drawn countries breakdown into sectarian tribal like warfare and we have no solution
for it. Right, We're like, we don't like you, so you're
gone and everybody left over. Sorry about that, but hey, you don't
have a dictator anymore. Right. Yeah. I've struggled with this too,
because I am I think it's probably pretty challenging to like look back at the
past generation of US foreign policy decision making and think that we've done a good
job. You know, it's been not great and significantly worse than the generation
of foreign policy making decisions that that sort of came before it. And so
I don't quite know why that is. And I think, I mean,
Sirio is symptomatic of that, where you look at you say Okay, well,
guys, you know, you don't have to be a genius to look
at that and the con sectarian makeup of this country and to do a quick
breeze through how the security services are organized to kind of understand that, like,
this thing isn't going to break well. You know, so maybe we
should be more thoughtful about, you know, or at least more cognizant that
it's been designed that if you break it, it's going to explode and destroy
the country. You know, that was a thing that was known inside you
know, the intelligence community at the time, was like, you can't rip
this thing apart without a significant amount of bloodshed. Now we could debate whether
that's worthwhile to you know, achieve some political outcome, but like it's not
going to go well. I mean, all you had to do is look
at the way that rock broke and say like, well, okay, this
is going to be a huge mass. And there's some sort of willful blindness
to that that I I'm still not quite sure where it comes from or why
it's persistent for so long as you as you talk about this, you know,
I have to wonder if there isn't an aspect the cynical as I am
about about you know, the real politic of things, but that there's maybe
an ideological bent at the White House. I mean, you're you know,
Obama would give that quote about you know, the arc of history moves towards
truth or something like this, and it sounds like that's what you're saying,
that there's this this idea that we could step aside in history would move in
the right direction towards democracy. Yeah. I think that was a significant part
of it. I also think, you know, you look at the I
think you know that that administration and particular came in and said like, we
don't want any more problems in the Middle East, please know, And uh,
I think there was this sort of this like knee jerk, like you
know, like let's just do nothing. Well we had just pulled out of
a rack too, which right, right, yeah, And and there was
probably you know again it's like, yes, we should not be spending you
know, we should not be spending eighty percent of our national security decision making
time on this region. That's a mistake. We're over rotated, right.
But you also, but that doesn't mean that we can just sort of and
I think, I mean ultimately where I where I fault them, because I
wouldn't you know, I don't envy the decisions they had to make, and
I don't think that Syria like there was no clinging answer here from the get
go period. But you know, it's it's sort of willful ignorance to just
basically run the policy as a communications policy and kind of let everything else Jesus
drag behind it in a really sort of, you know, incoherent and flaccid
manner, like you just can't drag all the other elements of policy behind combs.
That's I think what the mistakes. So as that that incoherent, flaccid
policy played itself out, you have the rise of Isis they bust across an
international border into Iraq, wager genocide against the Yazdes and sing Jar start moving
towards Baghdad. Now we have what we would probably call in the military a
clusterfuck a full blow signical term, cluster a shit sam which once again in
that region. And as we discussed this, I think one of the other
important things to talk about is I don't know what your view is, I'd
like to ask you, but I get the sense that there was some conflicting
missions because there was, on one hand, the removal of the Assad regime.
There's a regime change program, but there was also a counter Isis program,
and so now we are trying to remove the government, but also the
group that is also trying to remove the government, like, whoa, what
the hell are we doing here? And I mean, I want to copy
at that by even saying, you know, and to some degree we could,
because you mentioned the Salafis right that that the regime had released and suddenly
these people who ostensibly orchestrated nine to eleven, right, this, this group
of Islamic fundamentalists are now our allies in the region, and we're and this
is pre isis, and we're arming them and giving them the weaponry that you
know, that to to overthrow a side or bashir and they're like, oh,
maybe we'll go this direction instead, Right That that I mean, is
that is that accurate? That that? I think I think we were.
I mean, look, you know, it's it's a it's a war zone,
it's a civil war, so there's going to be mess around where things
end up and all of that. All Right, that said, I think
we were careful about ensuring that we were not linked up with you know,
salafijihatas of the global bent let's say, which I think in this context in
Syria is an important distinction, and it is one that is often kind of
lost in the conversation. It was like there was a distinction between groups that
were of that, you know, a very sort of conservative studdhism is bent.
But we're you know, not at all thinking about attacking Europe, our
allies, US, you know, outside of Syria, like they were prosecuted,
that there would be Islamic nationalists like the Muslim Brotherhood or even the shaban
As opposed to waging external loops, and those groups existed in Syria, right.
That was That's that was a real dynamic in the war from you know,
pretty early on. But I do think that and this and this is
you know, just the reality of this conflict was like, I mean,
was there ever an opportunit community to really create an alternative to ASA that would
have been palatable to us though that could have taken power Intomascus controlled most of
the country and administered the place in a way that was like friendlier to our
interests, you know, I mean, man, that is it's hard for
me to imagine it really is. And you know, you know, I
think Jack, to your point, like the the ct I actually give us
higher marks on the ct mission, right, because we were much more coherent.
Like the Syria policy when Isis started to become a much more significant issue,
sort of broke into two pieces. Was like, you know, sort
of the anti regime policy, which was an incoherent mass, and the anti
Isis campaign, which you know, we you know, you talk about all
kinds of problems there, but like was much more coherent in its objectives and
in its resourcing. We had, you know, a tremendous gap between rhetoric
and resourcing on the regime side, the anti regime side. I think on
the counter Isis side, that gap was much narrower, Right, We were
resourcing a fight to achieve an objective of diminishing the territory and influence of the
Islamic state. But the series of policy effectively kind of became a kind of
risis policy, and the regime stuff just kind of pilled away in my opinion,
over that period of time, because it was also getting to the point
where it's like you know, as you know, that sort of corresponded with
the Russian intervention in the fall of twenty fifteen, Asad starts to retake ground
on the backs of Russian air power, and it becomes pretty clear by you
know, sixteen or seventeen that he's not going anywhere, in my opinion,
and that's why the counter regime program's kind of you're saying, they just sort
of faded away naturally over time as this became sort of an unrealistic option.
I think. So, I don't know, and again I don't think we
ever really said that, right, I mean, you know, it just
sort of became more or less a fact of our policy that like, okay,
we're just gonna I honestly think something collectively happened in said the National Security
BROCNCY, where everyone just kind of threw their hands up and said, you
know what, like it's too hard, Well, I mean, anything with
it. The big inflection point, I mean, didn't it come after Gauda
and some of the chemical weapons attacks and Obama was talking there's there's this talk
about the red line, and and there were things that got there. There
were the machinery of the US government in the Department of Defense. I was
ready to go in and drop the hammer. Yeah, and I mean Obama
took that kind of like famous walk in the Rose Garden with his National security
advisor and came back and said, no, we're not going to do it.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I do think that that was an
inflection point for sure. I mean I think there was that August of August
or September of thirteen after the attack in Duma, and yeah, you know
that that is another great example of just the sort of hey, here's that
is the primary example of we said this thing, and we did just just
like we just didn't. We just didn't do anything. And you know that
one is I think particularly agree just to me, because we didn't have to
remove the regime. We we could have just punished it, which is what
militarily Trump ended up doing early in his presidency. Yeah, like we could
have done that, you know, multiplied by ten and said this is what
happens, don't do it again. You know, you it again. It's
going to be five times worse than this, And we chose not to for
reasons I still I still struggle with. And so I let's see pushing the
conflict forward, we get to that twenty sixteen twenty seventeen time frame, now
the US military is in northeastern Syria, linked up with the the SDF,
you know, the Kurds that we've cobbled together into this Arab alliance. How
did things start to you know, move how did this conflict evolved from an
American foreign policy in even you know, defensive strategy standpoint. Well, I
mean, so at that point things were pretty cantonized, right, I mean,
you effectively had like the idea that Syria would sort of be reconstituted in
the near term as like a functioning political entity was basically gone. The regime
was still very weak relative to you know, pre uprising, but kind of
coalesced into you know, the most powerful militia in the country. And you
had what i mean five external powers that were you know, intervening in some
form or fashion on the regular you know, US, the Israelis, the
Iranians, the Turks, the Russians. So you know you ended up,
i mean, my frame for the conflict at some point sort of became like
this is just a bunch of warlord fiefdoms and it's not useful. It's like
the concept of Syria like is ceasing to be a useful analytic construct, Like
it's just a bunch of you know, mafioso groups that are fighting over populations
and resources with the help of different foreign backers. And you know, we
you know, I think our presence there in that time periods still made some
sense in the counter Isis mission. And you know, this is maybe not
a help, like there's probably some problems with this analytical frame, but like
I kind of look at the very small number of Americans that we had an
Afghanistan that sort of supported this broad there was this broader architecture of like elite
cohesion and political will to do things that was bucked up by having us there.
And I think having a small number of Americans up in the Northeast like
sort of does the same thing for many of our partners. So there,
you know, I sort of see their being continued value in that. But
you know, we effectively came to a point where the Syria policy is articulated
by really both the you know, sort of the Trump and the Biden White
houses kind of became you know, at some point I saw something it was
like five or six different kind of policy objectives and it's like this, there's
almost so much here that there's nothing and it's just on this kind of autopilot
of let's make sure, let's make sure there isn't some kind of like catastrophic
terror attack in Europe or in the United States that emanates from this place,
be at Isis or be at some of the sort of you know og al
Qaida guys who took up roots there in the Northwest, and you know it
it really just kind of sputtered, It sputtered out of the headlines. I'm
sure it has sputtered out of like significant you know, the number of like
Deputies Committee and Principles Committee meetings in the White House on Syria in the past,
you know, a few years. I'm sure it's has gone down to
nothing. It's it's really I don't know, it's it's on one sense,
it's just it's sort of like analytically very difficult to come up with anything useful
to say on like what we should you And you know, it's just like
it's everything is just kind of sputtered out in a very sort of profoundance into
a status quo. Yeah, yeah, exactly where I you know, I
think at some point the regime, you know, the regime will probably continue
to CLAWBAXT some parts in like the northwest and whatnot, and maybe eventually in
the northeast, you know, if we decide to leave, and if they
can reach some kind of deal with you know, with the Kurds up there,
which both of those things would would feel pretty reasonable to me. But
I think that, you know, the Syrian regime is a very patient entity,
or the militia that used to be known as the Syrian regime, it's
a very patient entity, and they'll just kind of wait. I mean,
I think it's a generation of waiting for them, and I mean I think
you touched upon it. But before moving on, I mean, is that
how you see our presence? Why are continued American military presidence presence in northeast
Syria? To your mind, it's about maintaining that at this quote, about
assuring some of our allies, and about ensuring that there aren't external ops directed
out of Syria. Yeah, that's how I see it at this point.
Yeah, you know, I think, and I think relative to the amount
of you know, blood and treasure that's been expended, it feels to me
like it's a pretty reasonable invest But at this point, and it's kind of
I don't know, it's one of those things where you look at it and
you say, well, it could be a lot worse. Right, There
could be a lot you know, there could be external attacks plan from Syria
regularly right there. You know, you could have a situation where, you
know, the Islamic state or rumb elements of it begin to take more tears.
So there's there's all kinds of sort of bad outcomes that I could imagine
if we did not have a small presence there. That to my mind,
sort of if I'm putting my you know, my policy maker shoes on,
it probably continues to justify us have that presence there. I also think that
I bet if you took a poll amost Americans and asked them, you know,
do we have troops in Syria right now? I do wonder if people
my senses, most people, I mean, they wouldn't know where Syria was
in the map. And then B would probably say say no, they're all
they're all in Ukraine now or something crazy like that. You know. So,
And as for you personally, as your career went on in the in
the agency, how did you feel about all these developments one thing after the
next as we slide into this sort of from this sort of fantastical thinking about
regime change and democracy to the sort of like status quo. I don't want
to use the term frozen conflict. It's not that, yeah, but it
is a status sort of a status quo conflict from an American point of view.
Yeah, you know, it made me really sad actually mostly, and
it honestly, it was one of the reasons why I started writing the thing
that became Damascus Station the first book, was because you know, I had,
like I had lived there at that point. I'd spent most of my
young adult life at that stage working on this country and thinking about it,
and a lot of friends who were Syrian and like, it just made me
really sad because the human elements of it. You know, we talked about
that analytic trading up front and our conversation, like you're sort of conditioned when
you're writing at the agency to like strip a lot of the humanity out of
things and to just report report things from a higher level, right, Like,
like that human element the emotions that come with it are not you know,
they're they're they're not encouraged in the writing. And when the war became
this kind of when it became clear it was going to be this long,
bloody kind of grind, and that you know, we were more interested in
prolonging the suffering of the Aside regime than we were in resolving the conflict.
I mean, I don't think we were in a position to resolve the conflict,
but I think we got to a point where effectively we said, look,
there needs to be more violence, so the regime comes to the table
to stop. You know, just as a person as a human, I
kind of, you know, with some skin in the game in the country,
and obviously a lot less skin than any Syrian had, but with more
than most Americans. Man, I was just like pretty frustrated and really kind
of wrecked by it. And so when I left, you know, I
just kind of started to I started to write as a way to kind of
deal with that, because at the at the kind of heart level, it
just didn't really it stops kind of sitting well with me. And there was
a point where it became a little hard to kind of just maintain that you
know, thirty thousand foot view, like just the facts kind of perspective,
because it just felt like, oh, well, you know, we're going
to have just millions and millions of people who are to get displaced in this
whole country is going to get rec all, the infrastructure is going to be
destroyed, It's gonna get taken over in pieced out by the worst warlords and
psychopaths in the game here. And you know, the people who suffer going
to be all the normal people who are like, hey, I just want
to go and work at the bakery and you know, sell cars and like,
you know, just do all the normal stuff and go to school.
And like it's just all those people who are the ones who end up being
you know, the sort of the collateral damage and these kind of conflicts,
and it just kind of made me sick. And what you're with that that
you you left? I left in fourteen Okay, yeah, now out of
curiosity, like not defending a sad because a sad like Saddam like Tito,
like they're they're shitty human beings, right, They're like they're not good people.
But were those people in those you know, villages and those outlying areas
outside of the regime terror were were were they still able to like live their
lives prior to the warlords, like before the uprising started? Or yeah,
yeah, I mean, it was it kind of like it wasn't. I
mean, for a lot of people, it was pretty desperate, right,
But it wasn't this. It wasn't And that's not being off in the town
square, right, right, And well, and yeah, you didn't have
half the population displaced, and you know, you didn't have a ninety percent
poverty rate, and you didn't have you know, two hundred and fifty billion
dollars of infrastructure damage or any of these kind of things. But you know,
the thing that I I think one of the most sad things about this
is that you look at the way society was sort of divided, and you
look at the way the regime was constructed, and there is a certain inevitability
to the violence and chaos and the destruction of like you can't you know,
hafe Zalasa designed his government so that you couldn't just like exercise him and the
family and the country continues to function and you put better people in and then
you're rolling Like he designed it so that you couldn't do that without an extreme
level of violence, and that most people understood that, so that they didn't
do it right. So, you know, but I struggled with this idea
of like there was a certain inevitability to the way this went down, or
at least you would have said it's probably the most likely outcome, right,
And on the one hand, and then on the other hand, you look
at the people who came out to protest early on, who were essentially asking
for dignity in a system that deprived them of that, and that kind of
contrast is just, I think, really a devastating one because you look at
the reasonableness and the humanity of a lot of those of those people right who
are like, hey, I just don't want to have to get approval to
get married from the local head of the political security directorate, or I don't
want to pay bribes to add a second floor to my home that will impoverish
my family and I need that space in order to sort of house my kids.
Like you could not legally work, you can not get a passport,
yeah, I mean, yeah, it's so, you know, and we
see this and again, I mean, I think Iraq as a great example
in the sense of Saddam was horrible, his sons were horrible. Like the
things that they've done to the courage to their own citizens. It's well documented.
We know about it. And then you know, when we look at
a regime like Assad, when we look at these regimes like what particularly in
the Arab world, I think because we do have the Salafi kind of hanging
out in the wings right, like ready the salafis what like for you,
with your experience and your knowledge, if we were to rewind time and you
were the king of America and could make the decisions, do you do you
think there were right or wrong decisions to make in that area? Yeah,
I think think that we Boy, you know it is it's the absolute hardest
question to answer. I think there was probably a period of time that was
like the first six months where and again, you know, I think from
a I struggle with I struggle with answering the question because on a geostrategic level,
when you look at serrior, like not from a human level, but
from the strategic like, is it worth it? Right? Like, is
it worth the amount of attention that we pay on a country that at the
time, you know, it's twenty two million people, they don't have mucleately
weapons, they don't have oil. They have geography that matters, right,
But that's that's kind of it. So I struggle with whether we would ever
be able to really effectively resource something that's like, hey, let's help create
a political alternative to the to the regime that exists. But I think there
was a period in those first six months where we may have had an opportunity
too, you know, more effectively support the protest movement and to create try
to create you know, some kind of coalition inside the region and in Europe
that could have done more to support peaceful protest in the country and to try
to create you know, some kind of you know concession, some kind of
structure where there might have been concessions from the regime or you know, at
least cultivating that protest movement. I think we could have done more. But
as soon as it went violent and started to get really violent, kind of
that fall into the you know, early twenty twelve, so like eight to
twelve months down the road from when the protests first started, you know,
there just weren't there weren't institutions. There weren't institutions in the country, groups
in the country. That's that that we could have really probably affect, like
supported to affect change that would have been amenable with our interest, that would
have been really hard, and it's hard for me to imagine what that could
have looked like for sure, But I think more could have been done early
on. But would it have led to a different outcome? I don't know.
I just think that we could have done more well. And you know,
like sometimes when I look at these situations, I wonder where why Assad
and not Mugabi? Like why aren't we going? Like you know, why
why do we pick one day? But if they had a substantial protest movement
against Mugabi, maybe we would have, you know, maybe. But the
thing is, is it it's it's just a question why do we pick?
Yeah? Right, you know, why not? Why not me? And
right? One? One dictator over another, you know, to say,
oh, this person is a shitty person. Uh, you know, I
mean look at Gadafi, right, Gadafi was playing ball with us essentially well,
And you know, I think I think that if Gadafi, if the
dominoes had gone down in a different order, we I think we might have
done to Asade what we did to Gadafi or something that that was a sads
fear, wasn't it? Well it was, and I wasn't the fact that
Libya wasn't going so well that you know, pretty early that spring was kind
of like, hey, we're already over rotated here, guys. We can't
go and do something in Syria. You know, if if Syria had gone,
if the order had been Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and not Libya in
there, you know, we might be looking at a very different region right
now. But yeah, I mean, you know, you're you're points a
good one, like why why Asad? And you know, why not others?
And you know, I think I do think there was an element here
of he was vulnerable. He's vulnerable, and you know there's there are always
these kind of fever dreams of you know, we're gonna roll back Iranian influence,
and you know, with him with us that being such a critical Irani
An ally, I think there was a sense of like, well, we
can deal the Iranians a blow here, which that that mattered too. I
think a lot of the people making policy that season for sure. But yeah,
that when you go back to the Bush administration and say sort of the
same thing, is it like Iran has never been a friend of ours,
and Saddam, for for all of his evils and faults, was always an
opponent of Iran, and yet and yet we're like, oh screw you,
and and somehow our policy makers because I don't want to see the analysts,
because analysts I think are brilliant. Like analysts I think see this stuff.
And whether people pay attention to them or not is you know, is another
issue. But the whole idea, you know, you talk about our recent
history, right, our recent administrations, you know, in World War Two,
it's like if you break it, you buy it. Like we're not
leaving Germany until Germany is self sufficient. We don't just hand it over like
in a rock. You go, you go in, you break it,
and you go, here are you guys? We're not occupiers. We don't
want to be occupied. This gift of democracy is the gift of democracy.
We're just going to hang out and help you, but we're not gonna rebuild
all of the infrastructure. That's right. Well, And I think, you
know, I think if you dug like Metternick out of his grave, or
you took some of the guys who helped build the system after World War two,
you know, and you sat them down and you're like, hey,
I'm gonna give you like a two hour briefing on us policy in the Middle
East over the past twenty five years. I mean they would probably leave that
and be like, you guys are morons, Like what, I don't understand
fundamentally what you've done, and like it is it's hard. I'm over drastically
oversimplifying. But you know, as you kind of look back at the ark
of all this and think about the way that Syria fits into it, you're
just like, I don't understand, like I do not, I don't get
it has to be the case that there is some combination here of like this
region doesn't matter all that much to us. Really, we can't be you
know, I would say low marks for the sort of humans who have been
making most of the policy over the past two generations on this, you know,
so like or the past generation on this, like they haven't done a
good job. And you know, we're also sort of profoundly enamored with this
region, so there's sort of these fantasies about it that make us behave in
very irrational way stop and go irrational ways of like we're disengaged or you know,
we've got we're fighting, you know, told time, Yeah, right,
make up our mind. Yeah, So David, you left in twenty
fourteen. And what I mean, did you have this idea that you wanted
to go and be a spy novelist right off the bat, or was there
another another job? I mean, presumably you didn't go back to being a
cashier at Wendy's. I mean, what what was what was the next step
off for you? Dust off the old red apron and go back into the
business. I no, I left and took a consulting job and the thing
that became Damaska Station. I started writing, like I basically had three months
after I left the agency, four months after I left the agency to when
I started that job, and that's when I was just kind of processing stuff
and writing and it was all very unstructured. It was very poorly written.
It wasn't I wasn't writing it to be a book, you know, I
was just kind of writing for me. And you know, I took because
at the jobs started, I kind of just put that away. And but
but in that time period I had found like I really love this, Like
I actually loved writing and I found it and you know, again we kind
of we talked about that kind of an adyne analytical writing that you do at
the agency. I felt really like freed from that, you know, for
the first time in a long time off like I can I can actually write
with emotion and color, and like I can play around with language, and
I can play around with I can find my voice and figure out what works.
And that to me was this wonderfully freeing, fun process where I felt
like I was really kind of, you know, in in tune with the
universe. And I loved it. And so I ended up having an opportunity
after about five years of consulting to take some time off, and I was
just I was just burned out. And I went back to the manuscript and
I reread it, and I'm like, Okay, this sucks, but you
know, I want to rediscover that magic. And I think I would like
to write a spy novel, like I'd like to actually try, Like it's
just all to see if I can do it right, like write something that
I want to write, and write something that somebody else might want to read.
And so I kind of came back to it, I think, with
space, with maybe more maturity on the writing side, to think about how
do I actually craft a story that someone wants to consume? And then frankly,
some distance from Syria, where I wasn't just like dealing with it.
I could, I could kind of harnessed that emotion that was still there,
but I could use it in service of the characters in the story. And
so I you know, in those six months, I just started to go
back to the to the writing, and Damascus Station, you know, kind
of by hook and by crook came out of it. So, I mean,
the in the book really is beautifully written and has this sort of like
authenticity that really I think could only come from somebody who you know, lived
in Syria and also has an intimate familiarity with the Central Intelligence Agency that really
comes through in this book. Do you want to tell the folks out there
you know what your book, what Damascus Station is about? Yeah? Sure.
So it's a story about a CIA case officer named Sam and Hysyrian recruit
Mariam, who they break a kind of fundamental rule of espionage and and fall
into this forbidden relationship. They go into Damascus to hunt down the killer of
another CIA case officer, and in so doing really kind of come face to
face with the tension and the conflict and the passion and their own relationship,
but also into conflict with a really pretty brutal pair of Syrian brothers, one
of whom is also much more than than meets the eye, and these guys
are kind of guarding this very dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime.
So, you know, it became I think, as I wrote,
obviously it's a Spine novel, so it's about espionage, and I'm trying to
deal pretty pretty realistically and authentically where possible with you know, the kind of
not just the tradecraft with the agency, but it's it's ethos, it's culture,
or what it's actually like to be ACI you know, officer. But
I hope it's also about kind of love and loyalty and and also like what
it means to be a human in the middle of a really awful conflict.
You know. I told the story through the lens of multiple Syrian that took
multiple Syrian perspectives on this, because I really wanted to try to get down
to the humanity of like what are actual people doing and experiencing in the war
and kind of get away from you know, for me, one of the
cleansing things was kind of getting away from like I don't have to come up
with the answer on Syria policy or say what we should have done. I
can just tell a story from the standpoint of different different Syrians in the conflicts.
So you know, I hope in some sense it's that too. And
yeah, no, I mean now that you say that, it does jump
out there. You know, the sort of Syrian protagonist of the book is
a member of the elite class, maybe doesn't even understand how much privilege she
has. There's that interesting scene where her and her friend break down on the
side of the road and are helped out by people who are literally dirt poor,
and you kind of played that that that culture clash out very well.
Yeah, no, it's it's funny. That's one of my favorite scenes in
the novel, because I think that there's this kind of class, you know,
in central Damascus who they're in a bubble. They're they're all connected to
the regime in some way, shape or form, and you know, you're
sort of some of them, are, you know, presumably coming face to
face with this reality that like there are elements of this being sort of a
slave society that they're running here, you know, And and how do you
in the character in the book, you know, like how do you deal
with that as this very privileged daughter of the elite, who's like not necessarily
doing anything wrong wrong, you know, but who is elevated above these people
and in control of them in some way. What do you do when you
were just sort of dumped into direct, you know, direct direct face to
face kind of confrontation with them where you're forced to see them as people,
you know, and not just as the other or these you know, we
can sort of put them out of these shanty downs and not think about them.
So, you know, a lot of the book, I mean,
there's you know, another Syrian protagonist who's a security officer who kind of is
all be having to wrestle with some of the same questions, but who I
think comes to a very different set of answers, you know, And something
that I think our our listeners will be interested in. What caught my interest
in your book is that part of the plot, without giving too much away,
part of the plot is that their president gives a lethal finding on somebody
in Syria word that David's not allowed to use assassination. It's not an assassination,
it's just a lethal finding. And I thought it was fascinating reading the
novel about that, like you kind of like detail that entire process, and
it's a work of fiction, folks, but it was very fascinating. I
thought to read as you kind of like walk through step by step how that
takes place from the legal side, from the policy side, and how a
finding like that gets pushed through to how out in uh you know, the
Premier Intelligence Services secret facility that we're not allowed to name, where the rehearsals
for that plot are acted out, and how this conspiracy takes shape and ultimately
is enacted in Syria. I thought that whole sequence of events was a very
interesting part of this novel. I had a lot of fun doing that.
And I think, you know, one of the things that one of the
things I wanted the book to be again without it becoming boring or pedantic,
was was a bit of an intelligence perceive droll. You know, I think
you don't there isn't and this isn't This isn't a knock on the genre in
the least, but just there's just not a lot of spy fiction that does
that, you know, And and I when I come across it, you
know, I enjoy that a lot. So I was kind of writing this
for my own, you know, nightstand in a lot of ways of like
I like, I like books that get under the hood a little bit and
give us the inside baseball and kind of make us wait for the payoff and
the action because they kind of build to it, and and so I wanted
to go through those steps because I thought, I think it's really interesting how
this thing of like okay, okay, we're gonna we're gonna kill somebody.
There's a whole system and there's there's a whole system of legality and bureaucracy and
then just sort of like machining like and production that goes into this. It's
like technicians that have this hyper specific job that we're focused on this one thing
that's right. And I thought it was I just think it's fascinating. So
I kind of wanted to do that, do that end to end, and
I was I was glad they didn't edit too much out. Yeah, I
mean you did. Uh, you know, people like you that served in
the agency and even you know, some people might not realize we've read a
novel that has to go through the PRB, the Public Review Award's right,
Well, what was that process like for you was it difficult. It was
actually pretty straightforward. Yeah, you know, I've heard from colleagues who have
to go through the d D process that it's much harder and just like much
more disorganized and chaotic and slow. The agency is actually pretty streamlined at this,
Like I think, you know, I like to think it's because the
person reading the books maybe just really loves them, but they read them pretty
quickly and get them back to me, you know, in I don't know,
under two weeks with pretty reasonable edits both times, like and I source
them because I'm a little bit OCD, so like Damasca Station went to them
with like three hundred footnotes or something like that, like, hey, here's
you know, I because because I worked on Syrian, so with that one
in particular, I wanted to be buttoned up. So I just said,
okay, here's you know in this book, this page, here's where I
got this. So don't you don't have to do a specific thing, like
you don't have to think it came out of my you know, the classified
regions in my brain, right and so, and I'm sorry I interrupt you,
but when you say source, you mean you show them like open source.
Yeah, you know, the open source like references, so that it's
I, look, this is already out there in like the public uh,
you know, in the public knowledge. So I'm saying something that hasn't been
reported on or that's right. And like one one fun example that I think
I actually had the book back here, like there's a there's a there's a
being in the yeah it is. So there's a book by Sam Dagger called
Asad or We Burned the Country, which is a good history of the war
and has he's got some great sources inside the Syrian game. And there's a
thing in there about how assa because Asad's a philanderer and he sleeps with the
wives of other members of the Syrian elite to kind of demonstrate his his control
over the system, and that that's sort of been a pattern and that's a
specific fact. It's referenced in the book. And I wanted to make sure
that, like the PRB isn't like, oh my gosh, where did this
you know, where did this come from? And so it's like, okay,
well it's on you know, page one hundred and thirty five of Sam
Dagger's book footnote you know, you can find the book here's here's the page
number, here's the title. All that and that tends to that that's an
effective way to kind of make sure that, like I'm separating the classified regions
of my brain from what's available in that was actually like a major plot point
in one of Mark Granny's books about about Syria. Was it really yeah,
as Melvis true, as Melbrook says, it's good to be the king and
the other the other thing. You know, So I read your your forthcoming
novel as well. We'll talk about in a moment, but I wanted to
talk for a moment about the commonalities between these two books because when I think
of your work, at least that I'm familiar with so far, the one
thing that really jumped out at me that where you're really strong is in describing
the life of a person, like an actual human being living and existing in
an authoritarian regime. And it's a view that I think is so alien to
Americans. You know that there there are the views are going to be very
black and white, not not a lot of nuance in there. You really
describe these people who are part of the regime, are part of the predominant
system. They're not necessarily bad human beings, but they are part of the
system for all the good or all the bad, whatever you think about that,
they're a part of it, and they're trying to find a way to
exist in it, just a scape, you know, with without having their
heads chopped off. Right, Yeah, no, it's I think that that
is true thematically across both books. And I'll say that neither of them started
with any intent around doing that. It was just sort of discovered the process
of discovering these characters and writing them like that, that reality started to become
very clear to me. So, like in the Syrian example, you know,
there's two primary characters, Mariam and Ali, who are having to deal
with this idea of like, hey, I don't I might actually be very
privileged. There might be a lot of things that I have in the system,
but my level of sort of age and see, it's pretty limited,
and my ability to sort of exist as a human like morally is compromised before
I've done anything, you know, before I've before I've actually made a choice.
There's that line in the book that like we're chained to Asad's throne or
something like that, right, yeah, yeah, no, And I think
I think that is true in the Syrian system. And you know it was
when I when I came to Russia for Moscow X. Like again, I
didn't start with this idea of like I'm going to tell a story about living
in an authoritarian system. But my my major Russian character named Anna is a
Russian intelligence officer. She works for the SVR, Russia's Foreign intelligence service,
and she works effectively as a knock for the SVR. What they would call
there all butcher of the Russian if I say it, but they call it
the apparatus of attached employees. So it's basically she's a an SBR officer who's
a banker. And I was really struck as I just started to kind of
do research on not on like high level questions of Russian policy and history and
whatnot, but like what is it what's it like to be a Russian?
You know? And I was really struck by this concept of like the wily
man. I don't know if you've heard about this, this way of characterizing
kind of Russian interactions with the state of It's just so the parallels to Syria
were very profound because again it's it's it's an authoritarian system. Same as Syria.
It's obviously a different cultural context and a different system in a lot of
ways, but you have this feeling of like how the state sort of just
is. It's both extremely predatory but also worthy and eternal, and you know,
I sort of especially in Russia, you have this idea of like,
Okay, well, I'm not really going to protest. I'm going to be
very patient, I'm not going to resist. I'm just going to kind of
adapt to the system. And i have kind of a passive displeasure or even
like a mockery of the system, but I'm not going to demand kind of
like full rights and freedom in the way that we would define it. And
I think there was like there's like just this idea of I'm trying to eke
out for myself inside this very messed up kind of double speak, double think
world, and I'm going to try to get what I can, and that's
kind of it. So so you have these little moments where people are asserting
their own dignity and their own humanity, but it's far short of how we,
you know, as Americans, would define kind of a full measure of
freedom an agency, and so the character you know, especially this on a
character in Moscow X is like she's coming at the world with that as her
starting point, like like she's not trying to be free in the way that
we are. She's actually there's a line in the novel about how when she
finally sort of I don't want to spoil anything, but she basically says,
like, you know, I've stolen from a thief and I'm going to get
away with it, and like that's the win, Like I you know,
like you're a thief, I'm taking from you. That's my victory. Right,
everybody's getting their own, so I'm going to get mine too. That's
right. That's right, And fundamentally, in a system that's unjust and a
moral is there any such thing as breaking the law? Like like like breaking
the law like that? Like is that is that? Is it a moral
to break the law in an a moral system? You know? Tough questions.
I mean, you know, the one day in the life of Ivan
Denis the Bitch, they're asking those questions, you know, in the Gulag.
But but I feel like that's an ethical question for every citizen of every
country, Like when ye right, wouldn't you believe that laws or certain laws
are immoral or whatever else. The rather commonality between the two books is that
the character Artemis, yes, who is in So these books exist in the
same in the same world very much. Uh So Artemis in Damascus Station is
like, in my opinion, a batshit cos uh you would not want to
work for which? Which? Which is a real thing? Yes? Yes,
fair, fair, fair, that's fair. And then in Moscow X,
she's leading this you know, this special access program called Moscow X that
you guys will read about when the book comes out. Who is Artemis based
on? I mean, I'm not I'm not looking for a name, but
here you are spilled the team, we got it. We can handle it.
So initially, like all all my characters have started, like when I
start to write them, I write, I write scenes, and I write
Baxter and dialogue stuff that I know is probably not going to be in the
finished product, to like just kind of get to know the character. And
most of them start as composites of actual people. And I will not give
the names because if I gave the names for Artemis Proctor, I know I'm
not asking down and I would be hunted down and murdered and I want to
stay alive. But there are a couple case officers that informed her character,
uh and and kind of started like as I was initially crafting her and initially
writing her, like I was thinking about them, and so I just kind
of started riffing with with that a compositive a couple female case officers that I
knew, and like any good character that's gonna work in fiction pretty quickly,
Yeah, that composite got left behind. She became her own entity with her
own voice, and we were just kind of off to the races. But
she was a character you couldn't deny. That's right, Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and most of the most of the good ones are because they
just start to like, Okay, I can kind of hear I know what
she sounds like, I know what she says, you know, like I'm
I'm in communion with with wherever she exists in the universe, so like I'm
moving her onto the page. That But but she is a good vessel for
a lot of great stories that I have gotten from DO colleagues over the years,
like like the most unshamed crazy stuff that you get, you know,
from listening to stories from these guys, Like and there's a lot of crazy
stuff she is because she is so she's some combination of like competent and also
deranged. She's a great sort of you know, mouthpiece for a lot of
that stuff. So talk to us about Damascus X, the book is coming
out next month. What is what? What is this novel about? Because
it's a totally different subject than Damascus Station. Did I say Damas So?
Yeah, that Freudian set. Damascus X was a real thing in real life
when you guys got booted out of Syria and you were living in another place
for a little while. Moscow X the book that's coming out in October.
What what's that? What's this novel about? Yeah? So I am.
I started with a concept and you know, we can talk about how real
events have sort of I mean made writing this thing very hard because I started
and I said, okay, what what would it look like if from a
covert action standpoint, the CIA really took off the gloves against Putin. That's
kind of where it started, is like, what's from a from a CIA
standpoint? What what can we do? So the book, you know,
Moscow X is a fictional component inside the real Russia house that's kind of charged
with this outside the box pretty aggressive approach to dealing with Russians, and the
idea that comes out from some measure of sort of you know, geopolitics,
but also pro Artemis Procter's personal green events, is to convince Vladimir Putin that
a coup is a flipped when one is not, and to destabilize or sort
of weekend, you know, his regime. Accordingly, so the agency taps
two officers under non official cover, commercial cover. One one is a lawyer
in Europe. The other one runs a family thoroughbred horse sort of breeding and
dealing operation in Mexico to go and actually target and recruit one of Putin's money
men to get access to some of his personal funds. The money man is
married to a woman named Anna who we talked about her earlier, who is
an intelligence officer at the CIA. Doesn't know that, and she's also just
sort of playing her own game entirely. And the book is really the cat
and mouse between the agency and between Anna and Vadi and her husband. And
you know, as I wrote it, it kind of became the story of
like vengeance and what does it mean to tell the truth? What does identity
look like in a world where you're most of the most of the intelligence officers
in the book are under pretty exotic forms of cover that are very demanding on
humans, and so like what does identity look like in that world? And
then you know, what does what does all of that look like in kind
of the real context of the sort of covert war between Washington and Moscow.
So that's that's what the book's about. And again, our listeners out there
will be very interested in this book that it's about Knox people who are working
on a nonofficial cover and again the it's fictionalized, but the procedural aspects of
that and like maybe how something like that kind of sort of works, including
like the national resources side of it, how you bring American citizens into maybe
a COVID action program. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this
book that I think people will be interested to read. Yeah, I am,
I agree, I hope so. And you know, it was it
was it was fun to deal with the commercial side of the house, the
commercial cover side of the house here. You know, for a couple of
reasons. One was just the reality of trying to write. You know,
the demands of a story and fiction are such that like if you have if
a big point at the novelist a relationship between the intell pace officers and assets,
like they need to spend time with each other. And if you're writing,
if you're writing a story about agency operations in Russia and you're using officers
who are under like embassy cover, you know you're not spending a lot of
FaceTime with Russian assets inside Russia in that context. Right when you strip away
the sort of you know, diplomatic cover side of it and talk about Knox,
like, you know, from standpoint of fiction, you're in a much
more flexible world where things that wouldn't be possible in kind of the world of
Damascus Station fast forwarded to Russia are all of a sudden possible. And then
you know kind of more I guess technically as you kind of look at the
way that human intelligence is being collected and will be collected in the future because
of you know, ubiquitous technical surveillance all that kind of stuff, Like it's
increasingly challenging for people who are under sort of official forms of cover to even
do this stuff anywhere. So you're you're starting to, you know, see
this kind of flexibility or a need for this kind of flexibility in the way
the CI runs human intelligence gathering operations, and I think playing around with that
and this book was was a lot of fun. So the book comes out
next month. I assume it's got to be up for pre orders now if
people want to go and grab it, I think it's gonna be. I
think it's gonna be a big hit. I enjoyed Moscow X more than I
enjoyed Damascus Stations, So that's good. I think I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it uh, it was harder to write.
It nearly killed me, but I'm I'm really happy with how it with
how it turned out. And I think I don't know, I don't know
who talked about Jack. I think there was some like gunplay. I think
in Damascus Station that that sort of broke you towards the end, because I
just I you know, there were some moments I was wondering, this has
come up on our show before, and I was wondering if if Jack sent
you any hate mail about about weapons. He didn't send me any hate mail,
No, he just he was He gave an honest he gave an honest
review of Damaska Station. If I recall yeah. I mean, I thought
it was a really good book. There are there's a couple scenes of the
female protagonist going rambo that were a little bit I was like, oh my
gosh, those are fun to write. Though. Yeah, no, that's
yeah, that's fair, And I think there's probably marginally less of that in
this novel. I think my sort of sensibility when it comes to these stories
as I like, I like to push that a bit like I'm trying.
I'm not trying to do the full shoot him up thing, which is wonderfully
entertaining but totally divorced from reality. And I'm also not trying to do the
full kind of you know, well many procedures. I will I will.
I will also say, you know, David, because I mean, you
are really a really talented author, and if you were to do a book
that was more looking at either the agency, paramilitary arm and that side of
things, I would be very very interested to read that as well. Like
if you were to write a book more in that direction or the or the
Jaysock Agency collaboration, like I would be I would be all in for that.
If you will just make sure Jack gets a chance to look at it,
because you will get the hate mail about the wrong caliber of weapon,
like I hit up Mark Rainey. Yeah, that's that's what I was thinking
about again, that was that was an advanced copy. I was like hoping
he could fix it before it was published. Yeah, Well, do you
have a writing process? Did you develop one? Do you know the end
of your book when you start? So, uh, it's been you know,
I feel like my process is a total mess, and I just don't
I don't think there's a better, a better way for me to do it,
because I've experimented with like outlining, and I found that doesn't work for
me at all. So what I've done, or where I've sort of landed
is I usually start with an image in my head of the climactic scene in
the novel, like where all of the tension is going to build too and
sort of where it's going to explode. With Damasca Station, it started with
an image of people. It literally started with an image of a couple sort
of face to face in a serial interrogation center, which is what happens in
the book. And then in Moscow X, it started with the image of
a woman riding away from a burning house on horseback, and that was it,
And so I was like, how do I get there? And the
whole process of writing the book was like trying to get to that scene.
And I didn't know, Like the woman on horseback, I didn't know what
her name was, I didn't know she was Russian, I didn't know whose
house it was. But I was like, I felt that that was where
the book should get to, and I started to write with that in mind.
The story actually started. This is why it's such a mess. The
story started in Texas, and it was gonna the whole novel was going to
take place in Texas. And I wrote about seventy five hundred pages of that
and it didn't work, and I just threw it away and started over.
I guess I wasn't right, So I usually start with that image. I
started to play around with the characters, you know, and try to understand
voice and kind of who they are and all of that. But then I'll
just kind of Usually what I do is I try to get about two thousand
to three thousand words in a day, and I'll show up with the coffee
shop. I always write from a coffee shop, same coffee shop, usually
the same table, same cup coffee, and I'll sit down after drop the
kids off in school, all right until lunch. I'll eat lunch, I'll
get another cup of coffee, all right in the afternoon, get those three
thousand words in. It's a good day, and you know, I just
you just knock it out that way I usually end up writing. I would
say, if the novels are somewhere around one hundred and twenty five thousand words,
I probably write about five hundred thousand words to get the novel. And
you know, I don't know how to do it another way. The comparison
I like, or the sort of analogy I like to use is like,
if you're gonna put together a thirteen or fourteen track album, you know you
didn't write thirteen songs. Probably you wrote thirty, right, those were the
tracks that made it, you know, And so it's it's hard to know
what the final thing is going to be unless you write a lot more.
And like, you know, I sort of play around with it that way
and figure out where I'm going to get the most punch, and it's it's
you know, I've sort of I've finished the third one now and and I'm
kind of putting the final touches on that and you know, like I have
started each of them thinking it will be easier this time because I've already written
books and it hasn't gotten easier yet. Let's just put it that way.
What's KEYTS book three at all? Yeah, it's it's a sort of modern
homage to Tinker Taylor. So it's a legit mull Hunt in the CIA.
It's Proctor in the sort of George Smiley role, and uh yeah, it
was. It was. It was very fun to write because it's really it's
really more her like, it's kind of her story. And the working title
right now is the seventh Floor, so the you know, CI executive floor.
But that one is pretty much done and hopefully cool. Have some news
on when that will come out, you know, hopefully pretty soon. That's
awesome, man, we'll have you on when when that book is out or
coming out? Great. Anything else that you want to tell people about,
anything that we failed to cover here tonight, I don't think so. I
mean we hit a lot. This is fun, guys, This is really
fun. Thanks thanks for having me on. It's fun to I'll go back
and relive Syria and talk about the books. This is great. Where where
can people find you, where should they go and look for your books?
Yeah, so you can. You can find me at David McCloskey books dot
com. That's my site. You can find the books pretty much anywhere.
I mean, you know, you can put m on Amazon and get them
on Target, Walmart. If want to support your local indie bookstore, which
is always something I recommend, and go to Indie Bound and find a local
indie near you and they'll hook you up with the book. You can get
it on you know, Apple Books, and you can get it anywhere.
The audio book is not up for pre order yet, which is kind of
frustrating, but it'll be up very soon and it'll be out, you know,
shortly after the release. So for those of you know, those listeners
who just do audio books, that's that's coming and you'll be able to pre
order that really soon. And for our viewers and listeners, they'll be able
link down the description for people want to go and check out his books.
I also want to give a quick shout out to our friends at Kassa Karabeo
who make gave us some really awesome cigars that don Nello Torpedoes are really good.
If you go to Kassa Karabeo dot com. You'll be able to check
them out really enjoying their stuff. I'm we have a few questions, op.
Actually, first off, the sent me an email that he picked up
and chat. Someone chat asked if the book you were referring to is called
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard J. Howard. There you go, There
you go, that's it. Yes, somebody nailed it. Somebody nailed it,
is there. There's got to be another analyst out there watching or something
like that. That's exactly right. That's exactly right, Paul, Thank you
very much for the genation. I don't see a question if there If there
was a question to ask that, please just type in the chat right now
and we'll pick it up olms. Thank you very much. Cheers. And
a couple from our patron subscriber subscribers. How would you explain TikTok to the
everyday person and why they should be worried? Oh? Man, Uh,
I don't know if I feel qualified to answer that question. Uh so,
I don't. I mean, I guess everyone should probably be worried in large
part because it's highly addictive and it's like wrecking people's brains and capacity to focus
on information. So that's one element of it, I mean, on the
other side of it, And again I don't. You know, there are
far more authoritative sources than I on this, but you know, I don't
have a great sense of like how much of this information. I mean,
maybe you guys know the answer better than I do. It was like actually
harvestable by the Chinese, and uh, you know, you have to think
about who you're giving that information too. But I don't have a I don't
have a highly educated answer on this other than I don't. I don't.
My reasons for not using it are purely because I already find my attention fragmented
and I feel like I would prefer to not give it to cat videos and
other such nonsense. I mean, friends don't let friends do communism. Folks
are great, but yeah, I think that like one of the discoveries about
TikTok. Obviously, Facebook and Google they're all they're all horrible in terms of
what they collect personally, But I think TikTok was actually you were getting it
wide wide permissions to access a lot of shit on your phone that it wasn't
even connected to. Yeah, and look, I mean it's it's like it's
like twenty three. Well, I won't say any genetic information, but you
know, it's like, you know a lot of these, you know my
heritage tests, you know where you can get your genetics. It's like the
Chinese own most of those. And you can say, I'm a nobody,
it doesn't matter. But at the end of the day, maybe it matters
to your grandkids, you know that that Yeah, that's that's right, that's
right. I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm just I'm glad I don't
have I I have not. I know. It's a number of authors who
use them for like book promo and stuff like that, and I've so far.
I mean, maybe it's more out of sheer laziness, but I have
so far stayed off the stayed off the talk. Yet do it call me
Ishmael. Do you think that the Intelligent community correctly managed to start of the
Russo Ukrainian War or do you think there was a credibility problem that led to
missed opportunities? I mean, with the caveat that, I you know,
I haven't been reading any of the actual intel on that, right, I'm
just sort of reading what kids leaked out and what's available publicly. I don't
know. I mean, it felt to me like I would give the administration
and the I see pretty high marks from the standpoint of we knew it was
coming and we effectively, you know, I think largely effective sort of leaked
information or provided information into the public sperience allies to like demonstrate that that was
going to occur. So relatively high marks there from sort of a plans and
intentions standpoint, Like, it seems like the assessments were pretty good. Again,
I'm not reading them. What I have seen again from leaks about like
our assessment of the Russian military's capabilities and the Ukrainian you know, military's capabilities,
doesn't seem like the analysis there has held up so well. That's an
inherently harder question to answer, right because you're talking about the dynamics of a
war. But that feels like it was sort of missed. But again,
you know, I'm I'm looking at this from way on the outside, and
I'm coming at a lot of this from the standpoint of, you know,
researching a novel, right, not not writing policy papers for a think tank.
But so I think I'd say relatively high marks on kind of what's putin
up to and then not as great on what will the dynamics of the conflict
actually end up being. I mean, it seems like we dramatically underestimated the
Ukrainians capacity to resist and organize and fights, and we overestimated the Russians.
You know. I think there's sort of this kind of tendency. It's as
either of you the Russians is like completely incompetent or all knowing and all capable
and you know, the answers you know, somewhere in between U. And
it seems like we didn't. We didn't get that right out of curiosity as
an analyst, Uh, you know, were you did you ever feel as
though you were ever that you were ever under political pressure, whether it was
from an administration or from internally in the agency to provide answers that somebody else
wanted? You know? The first thing I'd say on this one is like
the agency, at least on the analytics side, I think we're generally really
does take politicization seriously, or at least it did. I don't know now,
but like they beat that into you right off the bat of like you're
speaking truth to power, You're going to speak up if you know, someone
you know says something that's wrong, Like and I was in meetings with you
know, director Portrayus where like very junior people would like contradict him, you
know, and say things that that he didn't agree with, and you're like,
that's that's positive. Right. There's something in sure sort of bloodstream of
the organization that's that's pushing people to do that. So you know, that
was always very serious, and like if someone raised issues around politicization like that
got noticed, like that you didn't want to be involved as a manager and
like a comp linked about that. I do think that there were sort of
subtle forms of it, Like it was because of that overarching structure, the
way that policy, the way that the you know, the White House would
sort of influence things was a little bit more of like, okay, let's
take this, let's take us out staying power as an example, Like,
it wasn't that a piece would be rewritten to say that he will fall.
It was that things would get watered down through the writing of the PDB,
and oftentimes when things got to like the DNI kind of level, they would
be mushified to either say nothing or to sort of soften the analysis so that
you could kind of ignore it or interpreted in different ways, or things would
just be kind of maybe more omit, like pieces that were very clear and
hard hitting and I think substantiate it would sort of be like, oh,
well, you know, maybe that's just not going to go into the PDB.
Yeah, because there's only like ten articles that'll get in anyway, and
there's always something else that could rise to the top. So maybe that's just
not going to be there. Maybe that's going to go to you know,
the senior director for the Middle East and North Africa. But you know,
it's it's it's not going to go to the president, you know, that
kind of thing. So it's and trying to understand why that was being done
was impossible, you know, like, is it is it? Is it
really because we got bumped because there was a more important China piece that needed
again in the book, or are you looking at this and saying, oh,
this is a stinker. Like I don't want to go into the oval
with this thing, because then someone's gonna yell at me or we're gonna have
an argument, and I don't want to do that because I want to continue
to get invited into the oval. It was always hard to tell, you
know, as an analyst, so you had to tread very carefully before you
started to say, okay, that's that's politicization. But I think I think
there were I think in total you saw that on the serious side of things,
there were We knew that there were analytic lines that the administration just didn't
want to hear well and not and maybe not just the administration, you know,
not pointing it, you know, any president or their administration, but
even and even inside the because the agency isn't this monolithic thing. It's made
up people who want to get promoted, yeah, and and have different motivations
for why they're doing what they're doing. So yeah, I'm not necessarily like
calling out the administration for anything, just that I was just curious as to
was there, Like you said, you know, there was there. Things
might be get watered down. Somebody didn't want to be the very bad news.
I mean, even with Channa. Now we hear that either on the
bank of they're on the brink of bankruptcy and b they are ready to take
over Taiwan and create but it's also two things can be true. Yes,
yeah, that's right, that's that's absolutely right. Two things could be true,
and you know, like you have you can have people who just for
very like it's it's not like a nefarious right, I'm trying to silence the
analysts like that wasn't going on. It's more like, hey, you know,
if I'm the you know, d d N I, and I'm the
one who's kind of in charge of the PDB, and I'm the one going
and I'm the one giving the briefing man, you know, and there's some
real human tension there between bringing bad news and having access. You know,
like you sort of have you have to be really thoughtful about how you kind
of meter that out because you can't you can't be bringing pieces every day that
are like slapping the administration Syria policy and the you know, like there's just
gonna be a limited tolerance for that, and eventually they're gonna be like,
we don't want this guy to come here anymore, like send us somebody else,
you know. So I you know, I think when you get down
to that human level, it starts to become less nefarious and much more just
like someone someone's trying to do their job and kind of get by you.
What is your perspective on sportwashing by Saudi Arabia. Should US sports fans attempt
to push back and Saudia Saudia influence or control over domestic league's teams, or
just except that it's that it's inevitable. Well, I mean I could.
I don't know what we do about it. I can tell you that I
just I find it sort of kind of gut wrenching and sicketing in general,
just to have them buy all this stuff off. I don't really have like
much of an analytic basis behind any of that, other than just you know,
I'd preferred not have all these like wonderful athletes purchased by Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, but I don't know. I mean, what do you do about
it? I don't. I don't know. I haven't. I haven't thought
about it much. It just kind of gives me a knee jerk sick reaction
to see it happening. Yeah, like I'm all fault any of the athletes
for doing it, because it's like this is crazy amounts of money and all
this kind of stuff. But yeah, it's just it's frustrating. It kind
of actually gives me the same sickening feeling like and there's a minor analogy,
but but it sort of says it speaks to the same thing of like when
I look at I'm a big baseball fan, right, and when you look
at what's happened to the game with just things like the name, the way
that stadiums and ballparks are named now and all have corporate, corporate names attached,
or the way that sort of gambling has now totally infused the life of
the sport. Like there you're watching LabTV and they've got all these like parlays
up on the screen and stuff like that. It's like, I don't like
this stuff intruding into the game. And I understand why it's doing this,
and I understand that it's important to the economics game, but you kind of
wish at some point that like some corporation would be like, it's our civic
duty to help sponsor this stadium, but it doesn't mean that we have to
call it, like, you know, Progressive Field, Like we can continue
to it can continue to be called Jacob's Field, but we're going to support
it because like we're a citizen of this city, right, And I think
I feel a similar sort of like nature of like I want to see the
Saudi stuff of, Like I understand why this is the case, and I
really wish that these like beautiful games weren't just bastardized by you know, corrupt
corporate and political entities. Yeah, and then why do you think Arab spring
fell short? And judging by events in the could the same spring happened here
but for the wrong reasons? I don't know if I want to touch that
the latter part of that one. I think, I mean, the Arab
Spring didn't I mean it? Yeah, I think failure is probably right,
although I would say that it was very like the way it came out was
very uneven, and it depended a lot on the sort of political context in
the system and the structure of the society in which those sort of mass kind
of uprisings occurred. Right. Things shook out very differently in sort of you
know, one man or one family sort of presidential republics quote unquote than they
did in like constitutional monarchies. Right, So things came out very differently and
like Jordan, you know, and and in Bahrain even than they did in
like Syria, right, and in Libya. But what I would say is
like in terms of just not getting to really any kind of solid kind of
democratic outcomes in any major Arab state. I mean, I would say,
look, you're talking about generating a couple of generations now of a region that
is extremely uninstitutionalized, dealing with massive socioeconomic issues, youth bulge, you know,
issues with educating and just kind of getting people into jobs, like all
these kind of major systemic problems. You have a tremendous amount of sort of
you know, geopolitical rivalry inside this region between different between largely like a sort
of Saudu led camp and a Irani and camp. So you have all these
like structural problem It's like those things like trying to get to some kind of
stable democratic order in a system like that is like almost impossible. So you
know, that'd be what I'd say, Like, it's just the deck was
completely stacked against any country getting to a much better outcome, and not not
by like millennia of history, but just by like the last couple of generations
of the way this this region has developed. Yeah, I mean basically since
since Westerners redrew the or drew up the country lines. So a lot of
times, yeah, I mean drew up the country lines, like I mean
the way that, uh, it's an extremely militarized region that also lacks a
lot of like institutional structures and processes that kind of limit conflict and things like
that. So it's like, you know, you're not You're not in a
and it's a it's a region that has that has dealt with a huge jimahana
of external and intervention by great powers too, So you're like, you're not,
You're not dealing with like a great Petrie dish here for a for a
democratic experiment. You know. A couple more questions came in Jackson, thank
you very much. Ever interact with ground branch guys, any plans for ground
ground branch specific novel? Do it? I mean like I'd be interested in
doing it. I didn't have much interaction with them when I was on the
inside, to be honest, So it would be I would have to I'd
have to lay some real groundwork in source networks and things like that to actually
understand how it all functions. But I would, I mean, I would
be very open to doing doing a book that that focused there. I imagine
there'd be a tremendous amount of material and it'd be a lot of fun to
do, so very open to it, but no plans as of now.
Uh and M Corbyn, thank you very much. Thoughts on CCP's means of
waging war by ever means up to actual confrontation with US military apparatus, Oh,
the idea that the way the CCP is waging war on the US,
do you think it'll ever mean or lead up to an actual confrontation with your
military? And just whatever your answer is, if we ever do or don't
go to war with the CCP, people will quote this saying you people will
go back. Yeah, this is going to be a very important piece of
the historical records. I need to think, well, we'll live in shame
or on or based on your answer right now? Man, I feel like
this has been a very casual and fun interview up to this point and now
it's not anymore. It always gets here though, like where we are,
got you journalists at the best three drinks later here we are Oh, man,
I mean I like, uh, I mean, I guess the answer
is I don't know. But then beyond that very useful answer, I would
say it would seem it would seem to me like there will be some like
if I were, if I had to put money on it, right,
it seemed like we're headed that direction, right, And you're not talking about
in the next five years or twenty years or one hundred years, but it's
it seems it's going there. It's going there. Yeah, like it just
think structurally, you have a country that's like, hey, we would prefer
to write more of the rules, and East Asia you're doing that right now.
And how is that conflict going to be resolved? You know? So
it seems like it's probably coming And I don't know, I don't have no
concept of what form it will take or anything like that. But you know,
if I had to, if I had to wage or I would think
that would happen in the next you know, generation or so for sure.
And that is the end of the questions. Uh, somebody asked about a
chicken. No, I'm just kidding. No, Uh, that's it all
right. So yeah, thank you David for coming on the show. Man.
I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys, this
was fun. I really appreciate you having me on. And next Friday we're
gonna have Brent Tucker on the show, former Delta operator, So we hope
to see you guys. Then Monday, we don't we have some Monday d
We have a Patreon bonus episode sometime next week. We're gonna figure out a
day. Okay, Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to come in Monday.
And uh uh Moscow relation and Damascus X Damascus Station or Damascus Station of
Moscow. Uh sorry, the MASCO Station of Moscow X. Yeah, but
but read them. Uh you'll get the nitty gritty like real stuff from real
people. I mean, that's what more can you ask for? All Right,
guys, Amen, So we will see all of you next Friday.
Take care of everyone.