Speaker 1: The team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to episode three hundred and sixty eight.
Speaker 2: I am Dave. Here with me tonight is d Our Fearless,
Speaker 2: producer and sometimes hosts and the host of Ayzon. Our
Speaker 2: guest tonight again is Jonathan Hackett. If you didn't see
Speaker 2: his first episode, it was three point fifty one. Tonight,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk a little bit more about his
Speaker 2: Marine Corps background, and we're also going to talk about
Speaker 2: his book, which I oh have right here. Phenomenal book,
Speaker 2: Iran's Shadow Weapons. I'm used to being able to just
Speaker 2: hold it up in the cameras here Iran Shadow. So
Speaker 2: welcome back, Jonathan. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to see you guys.
Speaker 3: Not in the studio this time, but still good see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're having some technical issues at the studio, so
Speaker 2: we're doing this old school.
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Speaker 2: So, Jonathan, can you give us kind of a brief
Speaker 2: summary of your Marine Corps history? And then there are
Speaker 2: a couple of things that we'd like to talk about
Speaker 2: that we didn't get an opportunity to last time before
Speaker 2: we get into the book.
Speaker 3: Sure, I'll just give you guys wavetops. So I was
Speaker 3: in the Marine Corps for twenty years. I started out
Speaker 3: doing signals intelligence, which is collecting on foreign signals, you know,
Speaker 3: communications and things like that, went into cryptography, which is
Speaker 3: a little bit a more niche area of SIGAN, moved
Speaker 3: over to the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade.
Speaker 3: I worked there for a couple of years on some
Speaker 3: special projects, kind of like tailored access operations and things
Speaker 3: for very specific outcomes. After that, I realized I was
Speaker 3: kind of getting too deep into the skiff sometimes a
Speaker 3: skiff within a skiff, and I needed to get outside,
Speaker 3: and so I moved into the kind of intelligence human
Speaker 3: intelligence world and went to training for that in Damn Neck, Virginia,
Speaker 3: and went over immediately to Afghanistan after that for over
Speaker 3: a year doing human first, and then as the mission change,
Speaker 3: we moved into CI a lot more and then came
Speaker 3: back and I went right over to Marsac twenty thirteen
Speaker 3: and I was there for five years because we were
Speaker 3: only allowed to stay for five years, so I stayed
Speaker 3: for it was four months or four years, eleven months,
Speaker 3: and I think it was like twenty nine days that
Speaker 3: I was there, And then had to go, so I
Speaker 3: went over to Dia and I did three years there
Speaker 3: at the US Embassy in Jordan. I'm on Jordan, where
Speaker 3: I worked on not only Jordan issues in the overt capacity,
Speaker 3: but we also worked on a lot of other clandestine
Speaker 3: things going on around the region, most importantly was Syria,
Speaker 3: because Syria doesn't have a US embassy in it, so
Speaker 3: there were a lot of the Syria activities we had
Speaker 3: to handle from Jordan and from Turkey also in some
Speaker 3: other places, so I had some things to do with that.
Speaker 3: And then after that ended, I went to go be
Speaker 3: an instructor in dan Nek, teaching the Marine Corps how
Speaker 3: to do special activities on the counterintelligence human intelligence side,
Speaker 3: all the way up from starting from like very basic,
Speaker 3: you know, debriefing things, through interrogations, through handling, through surveils,
Speaker 3: detection routes, all the way up to principal Asian operations
Speaker 3: where the students do run full phase tonight area activities
Speaker 3: and get certified on that and become kind of children's
Speaker 3: human intelligence specialists for the Marine Corps. And then I
Speaker 3: retired and just started up as an unemployed student at
Speaker 3: Yale Law School now where I'm just getting inundated with
Speaker 3: stuff to read, so I took a little break to
Speaker 3: come talk to you guys.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I can tell you read a lot,
Speaker 2: because about a fifth of your book is references. It's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's something left behind from like the human side,
Speaker 3: where you have to source everything. You should never claim
Speaker 3: anything without something backing it up, because your opinion is
Speaker 3: kind of worthless without something backing it up. And as
Speaker 3: you saw probably there's like multiple citations on each piece,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of converging to show like, hey, this
Speaker 3: isn't my opinion, this is what's actually happening, right right, So.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us some of the things that we
Speaker 2: didn't get a chance to get to about your career
Speaker 2: while you're in there was a strike, there were a
Speaker 2: couple of things that you know, we didn't have an opportunity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked a lot about my kind of SIG
Speaker 3: background and just a little bit about MARSOK. But there
Speaker 3: were some parts we didn't get to, especially the Iraq
Speaker 3: deployment twenty sixteen, when ISIS was really entrenched and the
Speaker 3: US and coalition partners are about to retake Western Iraq
Speaker 3: from ISIS. This is after all the masacers going on
Speaker 3: all that stuff, and I was on a Special Operations
Speaker 3: Task Force eighty one out there, and our job was
Speaker 3: to do in part work with the tribes in Syria
Speaker 3: Eastern Syria and the Kurds in Northeastyria and other groups
Speaker 3: in Western Iraq to start building this kind of ring
Speaker 3: around Mosul, which was the heart of ISIS or dish
Speaker 3: in Western Iraq and actually Iraq generally. And we were
Speaker 3: doing that because the plan was for the counter terrorism forces,
Speaker 3: which was the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, they would come
Speaker 3: in later and actually retake Moscil with conventional strike gigantic operation.
Speaker 3: He was the eighty second airborne came in there. He
Speaker 3: was a huge thing. That was after we left. So
Speaker 3: my mission there was to prepare the environment by doing
Speaker 3: air strikes or controlling air strikes, running really intense human
Speaker 3: source network. I had, For example, I had one principal agent.
Speaker 3: A principle agient is basically a source that works for you,
Speaker 3: that has a subsource network under him doing things for you.
Speaker 3: So basically there's a level of separation between you and
Speaker 3: the actual people doing the thing, and that's for safety reasons.
Speaker 3: That's also to protect the operational security of the mission
Speaker 3: and things. And we had a very intense network like
Speaker 3: that throughout Western Iraq, and one of my principal agents
Speaker 3: had fifty two sub sources working for me, which is
Speaker 3: a lot to keep track of, especially during combat operations.
Speaker 3: A lot of validation going on to make sure that
Speaker 3: what those people were saying was true and all that.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, that particular task force that
Speaker 3: I was on hadn't done any human triggered strikes yet.
Speaker 3: And the human triggered strike is when basically you have
Speaker 3: a human being sitting across the street is typically how
Speaker 3: it works watching a building saying, hey, that building has
Speaker 3: got one bad guy in it or eighty bad guys
Speaker 3: in it. These are their names. We go and monitor
Speaker 3: that facility for up to eight hours, because that's the
Speaker 3: requirement at the time that we had to have eight
Speaker 3: hours of what do you call soak on the target
Speaker 3: before we could strike it, to make sure women and
Speaker 3: children don't come in are out, so that we understand
Speaker 3: the risk profile of the strike. And I'd have one
Speaker 3: of my subsources sitting across the street and he'd be
Speaker 3: giving me information. I'd be passing information along. I would
Speaker 3: get B fifty two s or F eighteen's up in
Speaker 3: the sky, and whenever the moment was right, I'd be
Speaker 3: the one coordinating that bomb hitting that building, and I
Speaker 3: would hear it right through the phone because my source
Speaker 3: would be watching it happen. And the interesting thing is
Speaker 3: to make sure the asset validation was going correctly. We
Speaker 3: would never tell them that we were planning to strike.
Speaker 3: We always had to kind of string them along, so
Speaker 3: they weren't quite sure what was about to happen or
Speaker 3: when was it going to happen. You've got kind of
Speaker 3: an idea, especially after they see their first one, they
Speaker 3: know this will probably happen, but they're always shocked in
Speaker 3: surprise the moment that bombs drop on the building. And
Speaker 3: one that stands out to me was Abu Omar al Shashani,
Speaker 3: who was the equivalent of like the Minister of Defense
Speaker 3: for ISIS. All of ISIS, and we have been tracking
Speaker 3: some lower level guys, especially my source network, have been
Speaker 3: monitoring some like finance guys and some other things. And
Speaker 3: we're doing some smaller strikes, you know, killing twenty people
Speaker 3: thirty people at a time. And we got this new
Speaker 3: piece of technology called Gorgon Stare. Gorgon Stare is like
Speaker 3: it's a series of pieces of equipment that are able
Speaker 3: to monitor almost everything happening based on a single target.
Speaker 3: And what I mean by that is, let's say you
Speaker 3: have a funeral for one of the bad guys we killed. Well,
Speaker 3: isis the way they do their funerals, especially during Ramadan.
Speaker 3: They don't bring the women and children. It's only the fighters,
Speaker 3: you know, like the guys that were there that knew him.
Speaker 3: So what you can do is start tracking all those
Speaker 3: individuals at that funeral, and when they go home, you
Speaker 3: can turn Gorgon Stare on and it will monitor each
Speaker 3: of those individuals where they go and on a heat
Speaker 3: map and you can basically see these like little legs
Speaker 3: coming out and it will continue monitoring all of them,
Speaker 3: building this gigantic pattern of life. Well, that's a new
Speaker 3: stack of targets to start looking at, and we really
Speaker 3: started maximizing the use of that, and as we did that,
Speaker 3: we started getting way more careful about which targets we picked.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of targets at the time. There
Speaker 3: was something like thirty thousand isis spiders active like with
Speaker 3: weapons strapped to their bodies at any time at that time,
Speaker 3: so we really could have hit you know, you could
Speaker 3: have throw a rock and hit an Isis guy across
Speaker 3: the four line of troops. They were everywhere. But we
Speaker 3: don't want to waste time and resources and mission momentum
Speaker 3: by just striking whoever, So what I started to do
Speaker 3: was trace particular activities. One in particular was when we
Speaker 3: hit a certain building. The way that people reacted to
Speaker 3: that strike started telling me something. And there was one
Speaker 3: strike in particular. We blew the building up, killed like
Speaker 3: forty guys, and instead of coming to recover bodies, we
Speaker 3: saw them clear everybody out from the street away from
Speaker 3: the building, and they started sending guys in with plastic
Speaker 3: garbage bags, black garbage bags and coming out with them
Speaker 3: over their shoulder like Santa Claus carrying out whatever. It
Speaker 3: was very heavy, and we figured out that that was
Speaker 3: actually gold because we had struck the bank. And then
Speaker 3: they took a lot of that gold to another place
Speaker 3: that was very important to them, and we began tracking
Speaker 3: that place. It was a lot of these like thing
Speaker 3: after thing, with the domino effect of them kind of
Speaker 3: revealing to us. Based on a very early instigation toward them.
Speaker 3: That sets off all these patterns that we can follow.
Speaker 3: And I'm leaving out a lot of details obviously to
Speaker 3: protect operational security, but this is kind of the gist
Speaker 3: of it. And it turns out that one night in Ramadan,
Speaker 3: one of my subsources told me that, hey, there's an
Speaker 3: ID factory in this place. And you know, back during
Speaker 3: the Iraq War, like the early years, you think ID factory,
Speaker 3: it's a couple of guys with some cans and you know,
Speaker 3: some explosives. This was like an industrial factory. I mean
Speaker 3: it was actually a factory converted, like it had conveyor
Speaker 3: belts and everything converted to produce IDs on an industrial scale.
Speaker 3: It was insane and I was able to figure out
Speaker 3: who ran that facility, and there's some other buildings around there,
Speaker 3: and the way that they had set up the security
Speaker 3: around this place, only there was only one way out.
Speaker 3: I was actually able to get a B fifty two
Speaker 3: from Syria to fly into Iraq and blow this place up.
Speaker 3: And there was something like three thousand rocket tails that
Speaker 3: we were able to count from the footage afterwards. I mean,
Speaker 3: this thing was insane, and the way it blew up,
Speaker 3: I mean you could for miles around. People thought that
Speaker 3: it was our strike that made the explosion.
Speaker 2: It was just it was not.
Speaker 3: It was the explosives in the building that cooked off
Speaker 3: after the smaller, relatively smaller bombs. But then the guys
Speaker 3: exited that one way out and we followed that and
Speaker 3: come to find out, they went over to go notify
Speaker 3: Abu Omar al Shashani's deputy that we had been kind
Speaker 3: of moving up the food chain because he doesn't use
Speaker 3: a cell phone. That's very important. The smart guys don't
Speaker 3: use his cell phone. But we still could get him anyway.
Speaker 3: And there was another night during Ramadan, like three days later,
Speaker 3: we've been watching this location that we thought it was
Speaker 3: actually Abu Bakrel Baghdadi's summer house, which was where this
Speaker 3: other gentleman was at Abu Omar, who's chechen by the way,
Speaker 3: al Shashani, and we were able to start monitoring the
Speaker 3: location and we counted eighty six guys going in there
Speaker 3: throughout the evening and none of them coming out. And
Speaker 3: one of my subsources contacts me through my principal Asian
Speaker 3: and lets me know that this is in fact one
Speaker 3: of those meetings, and it wasn't in just one building.
Speaker 3: It was like multiple compounds around and as we're going
Speaker 3: through the eight hours required soak of the target, the
Speaker 3: sub sources reporting to me on who's in which building,
Speaker 3: So I've got multiple high level names of who's in
Speaker 3: what building, and then eventually we're able to get aircraft
Speaker 3: up there. And then the one star general in charge
Speaker 3: of authorizing these strikes had to wake up a bunch
Speaker 3: of other generals that sit around a table basically and
Speaker 3: make decisions. Because the building that Shani was in was
Speaker 3: a religious building. In order to strike one of these buildings,
Speaker 3: we have to get certain level of concurrence that's different
Speaker 3: than even striking a house, which also requires its own concurrence.
Speaker 3: It's called a Category one removal, which means there's this
Speaker 3: list called Category one targets that we're not allowed to
Speaker 3: touch and we have to get the target removed off
Speaker 3: category one to be able to strike it. And so
Speaker 3: it was something like four o'clock or three o'clock in
Speaker 3: the morning we were able to finally get approval from
Speaker 3: four or five generals that had to all give their
Speaker 3: cut on it. And there were other wrinkles in this.
Speaker 3: For example, there was a US person in one of
Speaker 3: these buildings who was a legal permanent resident States, but
Speaker 3: he was a naturalized US person, which required even higher
Speaker 3: level approval to continue moving forward to strike. So there's
Speaker 3: a lot of risk analysis going on, but also the
Speaker 3: optics were being analyzed throughout this strike process. And I
Speaker 3: was under a lot of pressure because we knew that
Speaker 3: those guys would vacate around six am as soon as
Speaker 3: the sun came up, because they were there for Sohor dinner,
Speaker 3: which is the meal you eat during Ramadan to break
Speaker 3: right before you break your fast in the morning. It's
Speaker 3: that smaller meal right before if Tar, and minutes were
Speaker 3: taken away. It was almost it was almost sunrise, and
Speaker 3: I'm getting worried, you know, And finally we get to
Speaker 3: go ahead and we blew it up and turned out
Speaker 3: it was eighty seven guys in they're dead, and one
Speaker 3: of them was Shashani.
Speaker 2: It's amazing, And how did you guys verify that? I mean,
Speaker 2: so you can't send a team to do bda?
Speaker 3: Right? Yeah, So at the time, there were actually civilian
Speaker 3: hospitals and there were ISIS hospitals. These ISIS hospitals were
Speaker 3: for IIS fighters only they had like their own separation
Speaker 3: between you know, they don't want their fighters being exposed
Speaker 3: to the regular people. And we had sources inside of
Speaker 3: all these hospitals, and I had two particular sources that
Speaker 3: were very good that were in one of the hospitals
Speaker 3: that they usually took the higher level guys to. And
Speaker 3: every time a bodybag went in, that person was there
Speaker 3: verifying with everybody and letting me know. And the thing is,
Speaker 3: they don't know who I'm looking for. I'm only asking
Speaker 3: them for the names of every single person that comes
Speaker 3: in there. And nobody on the ground knew what targets
Speaker 3: we were after at any time. And we never gave
Speaker 3: him feedback like, oh, yeah, we did kill that guy,
Speaker 3: you know, Jim Bob, we don't do that because we
Speaker 3: don't want it to muddy up the process, right, And
Speaker 3: so sure enough, next morning we got confirmation from that
Speaker 3: person that it in fact was him.
Speaker 2: It's amazing any other like kind of big stories from
Speaker 2: that part of your career that you want to talk
Speaker 2: about that we didn't get a chance to touch.
Speaker 3: On, nothing like that. That's that's such a longer thing.
Speaker 2: Really, Yeah, what what was it like going from you know,
Speaker 2: singing into human For you?
Speaker 3: It was an interesting transition because working at the National
Speaker 3: Security Agency, we are told that we have you know,
Speaker 3: the highest clearances and the most access and all this,
Speaker 3: and you know, to some measure that's true. But going
Speaker 3: into the human intelligence world, I didn't. I didn't know
Speaker 3: that there were a completely separate connection of control systems
Speaker 3: and ways of handling information. And that was a big
Speaker 3: learning curve for me because of the way intelligence information
Speaker 3: is handled from san derived information is very different than
Speaker 3: how it's from human controlled systems and from from source
Speaker 3: handling of human beings very different, and the trade craft
Speaker 3: is obviously completely different. With sigent you're kind of protecting
Speaker 3: the instruments and the methods of using those instruments, whereas
Speaker 3: with human beings you're trying to protect them and the mission.
Speaker 3: It's more it's obviously more human like, which requires a
Speaker 3: lot more security considerations. It's much more difficult, it's much
Speaker 3: more in some cases more expensive, especially if you're working
Speaker 3: with cover. If you've got you know, cover Marcial cover,
Speaker 3: for example, it's extremely expensive and it may never get
Speaker 3: you anything depending on how you set it up. And
Speaker 3: that's part of the game, is that some of this
Speaker 3: never produces anything. Some of it produces gold mines, whereas
Speaker 3: with set you kind of know, like that's that guy's phone,
Speaker 3: that's what he said the end. You know, where a
Speaker 3: human you've got to because the human elements there. These
Speaker 3: guys might not be telling the truth, they might not
Speaker 3: know that what they said was wrong. Want money, ideology
Speaker 3: they might have, they might be under coercion, they might
Speaker 3: be doing it for excitement. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of things you have to control. Sometimes you're like a
Speaker 3: therapist with them and you have to learn a lot
Speaker 3: of this stuff that might be frustrating to some people
Speaker 3: at times, like well why do I have to listen
Speaker 3: to this how this guy feels about his spouse. It's like, well,
Speaker 3: that's really important because you're going to use those things
Speaker 3: as buttons to push in the future when you really
Speaker 3: need them. And that's kind of simplifying it. But that
Speaker 3: is a little bit difficult, especially from a singant background,
Speaker 3: but it's true from any background that doesn't deal with people.
Speaker 3: You know, you could be an infantry guy and still
Speaker 3: have and have to learn those same things in the
Speaker 3: same difficult way because that doesn't makes sense for where
Speaker 3: you came from.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, it's interesting. Well, you know, with your
Speaker 2: background and you know your operational experience, your experience both
Speaker 2: in you know, SIG and cyber and in human that
Speaker 2: you seem like the perfect person to write this book
Speaker 2: because you you already had your experience in different fields
Speaker 2: that you covered. So I think I imagine it probably
Speaker 2: gave you a better depth of understanding when you were
Speaker 2: you know, reading the reports and and and all the
Speaker 2: various sources and stuff.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible book. It I mean, I'm surprised how
Speaker 2: much information is in this book, especially considering, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: how closed off Iran is, you know, and and I
Speaker 2: imagine that it's a very hard country to penetrate and
Speaker 2: get information on.
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting because all that that is true, but
Speaker 3: there is so much resistance to the regime, which you
Speaker 3: see in the book. M h. Just like those those
Speaker 3: buttons we were talking about earlier with human sources, there
Speaker 3: are plenty of buttons on Iranian targets to push to
Speaker 3: get information about what's going on behind that walled garden,
Speaker 3: you know. Yeah, And it's because of what the regime
Speaker 3: does to its people. It's not because of what Israel
Speaker 3: does to Iran. It's not because of what the US does.
Speaker 3: It's because the regime oppressing their own people so extremely
Speaker 3: that suddenly there are a lot of people that are
Speaker 3: willing to do things they never would do before because
Speaker 3: of this pressure.
Speaker 2: And that's one of the things that I found interesting
Speaker 2: is you mentioned that the populace is act. The Iranian
Speaker 2: populace is actually the number one target of Iranian intelligence and.
Speaker 3: It has been since nineteen eighty. Yeah. Yeah, there's never changed,
Speaker 3: It's never been a moment.
Speaker 2: How did you get interested in Iran?
Speaker 3: Well, my very first interaction with Iran in intelligence context
Speaker 3: was in Afghanistan and I was doing some counterintelligence activities
Speaker 3: there to protect some of our aircraft that we had.
Speaker 3: And I didn't really know much about Iran and a
Speaker 3: tactical level at that time, or like they're what they
Speaker 3: were doing. I knew a lot of the higher level
Speaker 3: things because when I was work at the National Security Agency,
Speaker 3: I worked on strategic issues like Russia nuclear stuff, the
Speaker 3: North Korea stuff, China stuff, all in the nuclear level,
Speaker 3: and then with Iran and on some other things related
Speaker 3: to that, so I knew that big picture, you know,
Speaker 3: this was a threat, but I'd never seen them in action.
Speaker 3: And I don't think most people actually have. And I
Speaker 3: was there in the desert at a very remote base
Speaker 3: down by the Iran Pakistan Afghanistan Triborder area which is
Speaker 3: called Baluchistan, and suddenly I look up and there's this
Speaker 3: thing that looks like a skateboard flying around in the
Speaker 3: sky and kind of up ahead of us. And actually
Speaker 3: a pilot came running over to me and he pointed
Speaker 3: out to me too. He's liked, you see that thing.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, what is that? And we started taking
Speaker 3: photos of it and sent it over to some of
Speaker 3: the CIA guys that we were connected to, and there said,
Speaker 3: you know, that's a that's an Iranian mohadre for UAV.
Speaker 3: But what was happening It was going in like a
Speaker 3: square holding pattern because whoever was controlling it it had
Speaker 3: gotten too far outside of their control because at the
Speaker 3: time they didn't have one way attack and all this stuff.
Speaker 3: It was very much more rudimentary, and it had lost
Speaker 3: control and went to a holding pattern over the GPS
Speaker 3: grid of where it was supposed to be monitoring. So
Speaker 3: we're just watching it go in a square over the
Speaker 3: base and somebody knocked it down and we took it,
Speaker 3: But that was my first introduction to like an actual
Speaker 3: Iranian threat happening in front of me, which, as I said,
Speaker 3: it's kind of unusual to see because usually people think
Speaker 3: of it like behind the scenes and the shadows and
Speaker 3: all that. Maybe not so much today now, but for
Speaker 3: much of the time, that's how it was viewed. And
Speaker 3: that kind of like piqued my interest a little bit.
Speaker 3: And then when I went to places like Senegal, for example,
Speaker 3: I found out that two streets over from our diplomatic
Speaker 3: facility or our team house in Dakar was a Hesbala
Speaker 3: teamhouse in Dakar that was working with cocaine shipments from
Speaker 3: South America into Dakar, which is the largest The port
Speaker 3: of Dakar is the largest import point for cocaine in
Speaker 3: all of Africa. It's fifty four countries in Africa and
Speaker 3: that's the biggest important location. Wow. And it was just
Speaker 3: kind of interesting because like, we weren't fighting with each other.
Speaker 3: We were both there for different things, which is kind
Speaker 3: of interesting, like, well, why are we here like this,
Speaker 3: Why aren't we fighting each other? You know, So there's
Speaker 3: there's a lot more going too, So I was trying
Speaker 3: to like figure out what's going on here, like higher
Speaker 3: level it's not just it's not just war, you know,
Speaker 3: there's more to it. It's politics involved. Are those politics?
Speaker 3: And those are the kind of questions I started asking
Speaker 3: That kind of got me down that pathway, you know.
Speaker 2: And so going starting into the book, because you talk
Speaker 2: about the politics, you talk about the three talentisms, you know,
Speaker 2: and a lot of misconceptions people have about Iran's motives
Speaker 2: and how that colors the intelligence that they collect and
Speaker 2: how they perceive that intelligence. Can you kind of go
Speaker 2: into those ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And actually I call them sacred talismans because that's
Speaker 3: actually borrowed from Klauswitz, who was kind of talking down
Speaker 3: on other military theorists like Jominy at the time, which
Speaker 3: was a French Napoleonic theorist who had these like grand
Speaker 3: ideas about the world that were all based on what
Speaker 3: they thought the world was and it was like a
Speaker 3: thing that could never be questioned and it can only
Speaker 3: be this way. And he was saying, like, that's not true.
Speaker 3: I mean, you go to war over here, it's different
Speaker 3: than going to war over here. You can't just say
Speaker 3: that the same thing. And so he called those ways
Speaker 3: of thinking sacred talismans. And that's why I call these
Speaker 3: things sacred talismans, because in my opinion, they're flawed at best,
Speaker 3: perhaps mistaken, it's better way to describe it. The first
Speaker 3: one is Israel versus Iran, and I mean, even looking today,
Speaker 3: like everyone's like, oh, yeah, obviously that's what's going on.
Speaker 3: But if you start peeling it back in which I
Speaker 3: do in the book, it's not so clear cut that
Speaker 3: it's Israel versus Iran. I mean, who's the one doing
Speaker 3: the bombings, who's the one killing people? Who's like I mean,
Speaker 3: I could just go on and on about the facts
Speaker 3: and how lopsided one side is versus the other, and
Speaker 3: also about the reaction to those things. It's not what
Speaker 3: you would expect if it was actually a conflict between
Speaker 3: two states as it's described. And a lot of times
Speaker 3: that particular talisman's described as an ideology against ideology, which
Speaker 3: again I think is naive. It's political, especially if you
Speaker 3: look at political realism. You know, states are black boxes
Speaker 3: operating to survive against other states and to keep their
Speaker 3: interests alive. And the regime doesn't care about the state
Speaker 3: of Iran. The regime cares about the regime. So that's
Speaker 3: like a black box within a black box making decisions
Speaker 3: about securing itself, and then an Israel same thing. I mean,
Speaker 3: you have the Likud party keeping itself alive as strongly
Speaker 3: as we can, as long as it can, you know.
Speaker 3: So there's these political decisions that look like ideology, but
Speaker 3: to someone who's actually if you removed the names off
Speaker 3: of the parties, it would be hard to actually make
Speaker 3: the same judgments we might make if the names are
Speaker 3: on the parties. That's the what I call the blue talisman.
Speaker 3: Then there's the red talisman, which is exporting the revolution.
Speaker 3: That idea came up and you hear it in discourse
Speaker 3: A lot people say, like, oh, Iran's exporting the revolution.
Speaker 3: There's this crime terror nexus in Bolivia, or like whatever.
Speaker 3: But really, I mean those are those are drug trafficking
Speaker 3: operations that generate income the end. I mean, they're not
Speaker 3: over there with guns shooting people. They're over there with
Speaker 3: dollar counters and bubble wrap wrapping up bales of cocaine
Speaker 3: to ship it to Africa to make money so they
Speaker 3: can survive because they're heavily sanctioned and they can't access
Speaker 3: the banking system and they're cut off from the swift system,
Speaker 3: so how else are they kind to move their money
Speaker 3: around and make more money? Yeah, it's illegal, but I
Speaker 3: mean that is that a terror nexus? I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe if they're actually doing terror, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: And these might be like off putting questions to people,
Speaker 3: But you have to be able to question anything because
Speaker 3: if you cannot question an idea, this is no longer
Speaker 3: a fact based idea now it's an emotion based idea.
Speaker 3: We have to be factual about how we appro stuff,
Speaker 3: especially things that bring up as many emotions as Iran
Speaker 3: and Israel as we just talked about. Then I get
Speaker 3: down to something called the Black Talisman, which is realism,
Speaker 3: which I kind of alluded to, where these actors are
Speaker 3: generally rational and when I say rational, actually Mahre de Gan,
Speaker 3: who is one of the Masad directors, said Iran is rational.
Speaker 3: They may not be our rational, but they are rational,
Speaker 3: which I think is a great way to describe it,
Speaker 3: because it doesn't matter how we see the world. It
Speaker 3: matters how the actor sees the world. And if it's
Speaker 3: in their interest to do what they think is right,
Speaker 3: they're going to do it, even if it's crazy. And
Speaker 3: hurts people, They're still going to do it because that's
Speaker 3: what they think they need to do to survive, especially
Speaker 3: when they feel like they've been backed up against the wall.
Speaker 3: So that's my perspective. When I look at this book,
Speaker 3: I look at it from a realist perspective, asking, you know,
Speaker 3: there's this thing. John Rawls is a philosopher that wrote
Speaker 3: a lot in the seventies and eighties, and he said
Speaker 3: that there's this thing called the veil of ignorance where
Speaker 3: if someone dropped you down in the society and didn't
Speaker 3: tell you where in that society you fell high class,
Speaker 3: middle class, low class, labor, or rich person. If you
Speaker 3: didn't know which of those things you fell into, how
Speaker 3: would you make the laws. You'd make them much differently
Speaker 3: than you would if you knew where you were, you know.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of the approach that I take with
Speaker 3: this is instead of like labeling everything, let me just
Speaker 3: look at the facts and see what the facts say.
Speaker 3: And when I talk about facts, I don't just mean
Speaker 3: like looking at the news and things like that. As
Speaker 3: you said in the back of the book, there are
Speaker 3: hundreds of declassified American intelligence documents that were top secret,
Speaker 3: secret noebeign and a whole trove of Iraqi documents that
Speaker 3: were top secret and secret that had never been seen before.
Speaker 3: These things are not for the public. These are internal
Speaker 3: political documents, basically our intelligence process feeding political decisions of
Speaker 3: facts that were collect on the ground through human intelligence
Speaker 3: SIGAN and other collection methodologies, with some other information to
Speaker 3: help back it up to put into context for people
Speaker 3: to understand. So that's kind of a long way of
Speaker 3: saying what these talismans are. But it's important to question
Speaker 3: all of them, including my own assertions. People should question
Speaker 3: what I say to and not in a combative way,
Speaker 3: but instead questioning, well, where did you get that, What
Speaker 3: does that mean? What does that mean to me? Because
Speaker 3: I think people don't ask those kind of questions, and
Speaker 3: that's how we end up twenty years in Afghanistan, fighting
Speaker 3: the same war, one year at a time for twenty years.
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Speaker 2: So, uh, can you tell us a little a little
Speaker 2: bit about them the about the intelligence apparatus of Iran,
Speaker 2: we have the vaja uh theurgy see codes and then
Speaker 2: well you go ahead and tell us please.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So a lot of people, even in the intelligence
Speaker 3: community in the United States, and I've seen this, they
Speaker 3: don't know what vaja is. This is a new term
Speaker 3: for a lot of Westerners. This is what Iran calls
Speaker 3: their intelligence service, the equivalent of the CIA, their human
Speaker 3: intelligence service. In the West, we call it the Ministry
Speaker 3: of Intelligence. It's not called the Ministry of Intelligence. Why
Speaker 3: are we calling it that? So that's something I start
Speaker 3: out with, like, why are we using these things that
Speaker 3: we think are true that are not true? So let's
Speaker 3: start with what they call themselves va ja vaja, and
Speaker 3: that is their actual human element that started out as
Speaker 3: their strongest component or their entity. In two thousand and nine,
Speaker 3: there was something called the Green Revolution in Iran when
Speaker 3: the country was almost overthrown. It was the most serious
Speaker 3: moment of overthrow since nineteen seventy nine in the country,
Speaker 3: and the way the regime saw this was as a
Speaker 3: failure of VAJA to suppress the people enough to force
Speaker 3: them not to rebel. This is how it was viewed.
Speaker 3: What they did was they basically reduced the power of VOJA,
Speaker 3: subordinated it to the IERGC. And this is where the
Speaker 3: IRGC Intelligence Organization came out to become a thing. Before that,
Speaker 3: it was a department. An agency is a smaller thing
Speaker 3: with less remit. It was not meant to be inside
Speaker 3: the country doing things. But from that moment forward until today,
Speaker 3: it became this massive intelligence apparatus that now is the
Speaker 3: premier intelligence apparatus in Iran and outside of Iran. And
Speaker 3: VAJA has been relegated to kind of this political intelligence
Speaker 3: gatherer for looking at whatever, what are foreign diplomats doing?
Speaker 3: You know, like nothing that you would expect today's CIA,
Speaker 3: for example, to be doing. All the cover activity is IERGC.
Speaker 3: Now there's very small components that VAJA still does, but
Speaker 3: it's minuscule. It's mostly the IERGC and underneath that, and
Speaker 3: in the book I have a pretty good diagram of
Speaker 3: that there are many different things underneath that. There's like
Speaker 3: forty different departments underneath that. It's it's extremely complex and
Speaker 3: part of what the regime And when I say the regime,
Speaker 3: I don't mean the entire Irunnan government, although they're all complicit.
Speaker 3: I mean that small kernel of decision makers who have
Speaker 3: absolute control over what happens, which is a very tiny
Speaker 3: number of people. The rest of the people in the government,
Speaker 3: which is about one percent of the ninety two million
Speaker 3: people in the country, are just following along because it's
Speaker 3: in their interest to follow along, you know. But there's
Speaker 3: maybe between one hundred to one thousand named individuals that
Speaker 3: are that are the regime that's actually doing this stuff.
Speaker 3: And the IRGC is not designed to protect i running
Speaker 3: of people. It's designed to protect that small group of people,
Speaker 3: that small kernel of people. And you can see it
Speaker 3: because the Iotola's son, for example, can go freely outside
Speaker 3: the country. He can go to Washington, d C. If
Speaker 3: he wants to. Why because he has a black diplomatic passport.
Speaker 3: Why does he have that? Why does he need that?
Speaker 3: And if you look at who in the regime are
Speaker 3: these named individuals that are the powerholders, they all have
Speaker 3: black diplomatic passports. Cost some sole money had two diplomatic passports. Smelgani,
Speaker 3: the current Good Sports Commander, has four black passports. I mean,
Speaker 3: these guys are able to come and go as they please.
Speaker 3: The Iran Central Bank Director, who's the sanctioned bank, you know,
Speaker 3: that is the bank target of the West, has a
Speaker 3: black passport and he's come and gone to Washington, DC
Speaker 3: to World Bank meetings. I mean, these people are heavily protected,
Speaker 3: and they know how to use the system. They know
Speaker 3: how to use the Vienna Convention, which is the thing
Speaker 3: that grants diplomatic community. And they initially relied on VAJA
Speaker 3: to ensure that. And now it's the IERGC that is
Speaker 3: providing that, and it's providing it so that the Iranian
Speaker 3: people remain shut down while these small elites are able
Speaker 3: to have the maximum freedom. They're basically monopolizing freedom at
Speaker 3: the cost of everybody else.
Speaker 2: Right, And I mean there's there's a lot of wealth
Speaker 2: at the top there too, isn't.
Speaker 3: There There is? Actually, when the Shaw fled Iran in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy nine, he had something like six billion dollars
Speaker 3: in today's dollars, not in nineteen seventy nine dollars, a
Speaker 3: very small amount of money. It's about the same as
Speaker 3: Donald Trump claims to have. And he had that much money.
Speaker 3: That was the Shaw that was run out of the
Speaker 3: country for having too much wealth, for being too opulent. Right, well,
Speaker 3: now the Iatola, today's Iotola, how many he has as
Speaker 3: much money as Jeff Bezos, but his assets are liquid.
Speaker 3: Jeff bezos assets are not liquid. They're tied up in
Speaker 3: equity in his businesses. Elon Musk's something like ninety percent
Speaker 3: of his money is tied up in equity in his businesses.
Speaker 3: If he pulled it out, his businesses would collapse. Not
Speaker 3: so for the Iatola. And actually that wealth grew dramatically
Speaker 3: after two thousand and seven, which is when the IRGC
Speaker 3: was first sanctioned by the United States, and there were
Speaker 3: these series of sanctions that grew from that period forward.
Speaker 3: And that if you took a graph and showed the
Speaker 3: sanctions increasing and put it right next to wealth of
Speaker 3: these top elites increasing, they're positively correlated, which means they
Speaker 3: grow together. And especially after twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, when
Speaker 3: we put the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, there's a
Speaker 3: dramatic spike and growth of wealth in these top leaders
Speaker 3: in Iran, and a dramatic decrease in general wealth for
Speaker 3: the population of the people in Iran. In fact, that
Speaker 3: same year that the Iatola's money exponentially grew is the
Speaker 3: same year that there were lines outside of grocery stores
Speaker 3: because there were chicken rations in Iran because there was
Speaker 3: not enough chicken to feed people. There were gas rations
Speaker 3: in a country that's petroleum rich at the same time
Speaker 3: that the Ayatola was one of the richest human beings
Speaker 3: on earth. And that just kind of illustrates to you
Speaker 3: that this is not a democracy. It's not a country.
Speaker 3: It's not a capitalist country that reacts to capitalist measures
Speaker 3: like sanctions, right ins said, it's just it's enriching elites
Speaker 3: handover fist.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. And you know later in the book you
Speaker 2: go into like the sanctions and the effects, and we'll
Speaker 2: get into that. So with the IURGC, we have the
Speaker 2: IGCCI their cyber space, their EW and cyber defense. And then,
Speaker 2: like you said, underneath that, there's just tons and tons
Speaker 2: of like different departments. Is there a lot of competition
Speaker 2: between IRGC and VAJA, and then within the IRGC itself.
Speaker 3: There was between VUDGE and IRGC before two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3: After that no more. But when IRGC grew, the regime
Speaker 3: actually forced it to get so large that it would
Speaker 3: be too large to be controlled by a single individual
Speaker 3: besides the Iatola kind of like a check and balance
Speaker 3: in an authoritarian way, because the IOGC is extremely powerful.
Speaker 3: I mean, even if you took the Iotola out, the
Speaker 3: IRGC could run the country. Right now, they control something
Speaker 3: like forty percent of the entire black market or the
Speaker 3: entire economy, which is mostly a black market thing. Like
Speaker 3: if you want an iPhone in Iran, it has to
Speaker 3: be purchased from an IRGC supplier, and there are many
Speaker 3: iPhones in Iran. There are many Western products in Iran
Speaker 3: that you would think like, oh, there's sanctioned. They can't
Speaker 3: get that. Now you can get it. It's just four
Speaker 3: thousand dollars, you know. And the IRGC was designed that
Speaker 3: way where there isn't one person cost some soul money.
Speaker 3: For example, even when he was, you know, the big guy,
Speaker 3: he couldn't run all of the IRGC. He was in
Speaker 3: the Kods force. He was a lower relatively lower in
Speaker 3: stature compared to the others. Even though he had some
Speaker 3: direct line to the Iotola and was able to get
Speaker 3: tasking from him directly, and a lot he'd get away
Speaker 3: with a lot more than the other two star generals.
Speaker 3: There's only like fifteen two star generals in the entire
Speaker 3: country of Iran, very few, and they're designed that way.
Speaker 3: And actually the Ministry of Defense is actually it's separated
Speaker 3: from the IRGC and it's subordinate to the IRGC. So
Speaker 3: the IRGC has a two star general commander. The Ministry
Speaker 3: of Defense is led by a one star So if
Speaker 3: the Ministry Defense, which you would think would be able
Speaker 3: to upset defense policy, sets a policy, the urgency can
Speaker 3: ignore it, and they do ignore it. They have ignored it,
Speaker 3: which is kind of an interesting tension that it was
Speaker 3: designed that way. And there's a lot of these designs
Speaker 3: where there's these tensions built throughout this system, which is
Speaker 3: again not a democracy, but was created from an authoritarian
Speaker 3: mind of how do how do we keep that authoritarian
Speaker 3: in power? And they're doing a pretty good job of it,
Speaker 3: yeah for sure.
Speaker 2: So you know, in about keeping them in power. Who
Speaker 2: are the top targets for Iranian intelligence operations?
Speaker 3: The number one target is the Mujahadi and ihalk m
Speaker 3: Ek or the People's Mujahideen, which has been a thorn
Speaker 3: in their side since nineteen seventy nine. That Mujahidin has
Speaker 3: existed for a long time before nineteen sixties. It's some
Speaker 3: would argue that it's a Marxist organization. Some would vehemently
Speaker 3: argue against that. There was a divide between them in
Speaker 3: the eighties, but in any case, they were the main
Speaker 3: target and they remained the main target. In fact, when
Speaker 3: in June when Israel's war on Iran started, most if
Speaker 3: not all of the action at the actual action, people
Speaker 3: in Iran doing the stuff that we were seeing like
Speaker 3: lasing targets and doing target reconnaissance and actually setting off
Speaker 3: devices were not Israeli operatives. Those were Iranians that most
Speaker 3: of them worked for Mujahadini Cup, the NEK. If you
Speaker 3: remember back in the early two thousands when it was
Speaker 3: released that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that was
Speaker 3: released through the Mujahidini Cup. And there's another set of
Speaker 3: targets which is the Aziris, not Azerbaijan in the country,
Speaker 3: but Azerbaijan province in section of your on northwest iron
Speaker 3: those nuclear documents that were taken a few years ago
Speaker 3: that Benjaminuttyaw who held up and said, look, we have
Speaker 3: all the proof. Now we stole it was something like
Speaker 3: I think it was a ton of paper from this
Speaker 3: bunker that was a ZII assisted theft out of the country,
Speaker 3: and actually they gave Israel overflight out of Azerbaijan the
Speaker 3: country to take those documents to Israel. And there's a
Speaker 3: lot of these groups that they've been against the government,
Speaker 3: any Iranian government for a very long time. So before
Speaker 3: there was the regime, there was the Shah, and before
Speaker 3: the Shah there was his father, and before that there
Speaker 3: was the Kajars, so it is a long history. But
Speaker 3: the Kurds, for example, the Aziris, the Baluchis, the Ahvazis,
Speaker 3: which are an Arab arab iised group of Iranians in
Speaker 3: the southwest of the country and the border of Iraq.
Speaker 3: These are all separatists aligned people, not all of them are,
Speaker 3: but they're typically an area you can go to if
Speaker 3: you want to do something in Iran. These are the
Speaker 3: people you work with as an outsider to do things
Speaker 3: against the regime, which means these are the people the
Speaker 3: regime wants to get rid of for control, severely controlled,
Speaker 3: and in some cases that's what they do. They just
Speaker 3: go and you know, reduce the amount of resources they have,
Speaker 3: they reduce the freedom of action. In other cases they
Speaker 3: go round them up and kill them, like they did
Speaker 3: the Mujahideen in nineteen eighty eight. If you remember President Rayisi,
Speaker 3: who died mysteriously in a helicopter last year, he was
Speaker 3: considered the hanging judge. He signed off on something like
Speaker 3: three thousand execution orders that Mujahdini Kak were most of
Speaker 3: the people that were executed under his basically by decree
Speaker 3: saying like, yeah, that guy's guilty, no trial, needed to
Speaker 3: go kill him. And he did that in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 3: three thousand people again, Mujahidin people. And so there's this
Speaker 3: tension between these groups that don't feel like they are.
Speaker 3: They don't feel Persian, they don't feel Iranian. Sometimes they do,
Speaker 3: sometimes they don't, but they certainly feel I'm Asiri, I
Speaker 3: am Ahbasi, I am Baluchi, I am Kurdish, you know,
Speaker 3: and especially when you look at the Curds. There's thirty
Speaker 3: five million Kurds. That's the largest stateless group, stateless ethnic
Speaker 3: group in the world period, and they're split up between Turkey, Syria, Iraq,
Speaker 3: and Iran. And Iran has one called the p Jack Pjak,
Speaker 3: which is a Kurdish separatist group in Iran that has
Speaker 3: been a constant thorn in their side that they've been
Speaker 3: blowing up, you know, routinely, sometimes the Turkey's help. And
Speaker 3: these are just a summary of some of them, but
Speaker 3: there are smaller groups too, and the thing they all
Speaker 3: have in common is that they disagree with the regime,
Speaker 3: but there's no democratic mechanism for them to change anything
Speaker 3: with the regime, so instead of having that democratic mechanism,
Speaker 3: they have to resort to violence.
Speaker 2: The other target you mentioned that we've seen is the
Speaker 2: Salafi the Salafis, the you know, Salafi Jihadis. And what
Speaker 2: I thought was interesting as you mentioned that in the
Speaker 2: nineties that Iran actually notified Western intelligence about the cooperation
Speaker 2: between the Taliban and AH.
Speaker 3: Yes, they were actually helping us quite a bit. And
Speaker 3: that relationship was built in Bosnia because during the wars
Speaker 3: in Bosnia and Albania and Kosovo, the Coastal Liberation Army
Speaker 3: and some of the Bosniac groups which are Muslim Bosnians,
Speaker 3: we're working with the IRGC and actually that was the
Speaker 3: QUDS force first overseas deployment to do un conventional warfare
Speaker 3: was in Bosnia and we were there also the I
Speaker 3: four and later on the KFO were there. Then Operation
Speaker 3: Allied Force was there continuously. There was US Western presence
Speaker 3: there with Yukon, and we built relationships with them at
Speaker 3: the time. And actually you can read some of the
Speaker 3: stuff in the book about Clinton. Clinton did a green
Speaker 3: light and actually allowed Iran to ship weapons in there
Speaker 3: to arm the KLA through Croatia. And that was a
Speaker 3: very interesting revelation that most people probably don't know, is
Speaker 3: that the US was not necessarily working hand in hand,
Speaker 3: but we weren't holding the back. And because we were
Speaker 3: diging that relationship, they took it upon themselves to share
Speaker 3: with us something they knew about what was going on
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan, and that was the Taliban housing al Qaida.
Speaker 3: And if you look at some of those targets that
Speaker 3: we struck when Bill Clinton authorized strikes in the late nineties,
Speaker 3: some of those targets were alerted to us by Iran.
Speaker 2: So, you know, you break the book down into the
Speaker 2: official well, I mean into the three different sections, but
Speaker 2: under this talk about like the official cover, the non
Speaker 2: official cover, and then the UW aspects. Can we talk
Speaker 2: about the official cover because you've already mentioned the Black
Speaker 2: passports and the diplomatic community. How effective is that and
Speaker 2: what are some of their greatest abuses of that system.
Speaker 3: Yeah, official cover is very interesting because it's something that
Speaker 3: every country does and no one likes to talk about.
Speaker 3: And there are some obviously good uses of it, and
Speaker 3: then there are some abuses of the diplomatic passport. Is
Speaker 3: what I mean, diplomatic community. This stuff all comes from
Speaker 3: the Vienna Convention of nineteen sixty one that basically says
Speaker 3: that you're allowed to do things in a country as
Speaker 3: an agent of that sovereign power, and that means you're immune,
Speaker 3: you're inviolable, which means you cannot be searched. If you
Speaker 3: have a pouch which could be a backpack, a box,
Speaker 3: a cargo container with a sticker on it that says
Speaker 3: this is a diplomatic pouch that is unvilable. It cannot
Speaker 3: be searched. And as I said, every country does this.
Speaker 3: So when we are wagging our finger at Iran, we
Speaker 3: should remember all the times that we've done the exact
Speaker 3: same thing and every other country does. I mean, this
Speaker 3: is part of what diplomatic status is for. Without getting
Speaker 3: into all the details of what the West does with it.
Speaker 3: Iran has stations overseas, and that doesn't necessarily mean VAJA stations.
Speaker 3: They have VAJA stations and they have IERGC stations, and
Speaker 3: sometimes those IRGC stations are huge. And actually one of
Speaker 3: the very first IRGC stations that we have evidence of
Speaker 3: on the intel side was in Vienna before the Soviet
Speaker 3: Union collapsed, and they had a small little Kods Force
Speaker 3: element and there it wasn't called Kuods Force yet, it
Speaker 3: was called the Office of Liberation Movements. They had a
Speaker 3: little typist in there that was sending codes out, you know.
Speaker 3: But they were there on diplomatic cover. They were there
Speaker 3: as a foreign ministry representative, not as an intelligence officer. Again,
Speaker 3: this is what many countries do, but Iran has certainly
Speaker 3: abused it. At Dubai is a common location where they
Speaker 3: do abuse this, where they'll move cargo containers, gigantic containers
Speaker 3: like off of a ship with a little stick on
Speaker 3: it that says this is a diplomatic pouch. You can't
Speaker 3: touch it, and inside of that our weapons and money
Speaker 3: and whatever you need to put in there to escape scrutiny. Right. Actually,
Speaker 3: just side note, we had a Saudi prince in Lebanon
Speaker 3: when I was deployed there that tried to do the
Speaker 3: diplomatic pouch thing with his jet. He actually pouched his
Speaker 3: jet and it was full of ecstasy. It had like
Speaker 3: two million ecstasy pills in it. But when he landed,
Speaker 3: the door open and they kind of all came out
Speaker 3: and it became like a now we see it thing.
Speaker 3: So he kind of messed that up. But that was
Speaker 3: a little side note. But of it, for sure, Yeah,
Speaker 3: for sure. But they use it for other reasons too.
Speaker 3: So in New York, for example, there's something like twenty
Speaker 3: five accredited Iranian diplomats living there right now that are
Speaker 3: allowed to live there, and they're on a range restriction.
Speaker 3: They're not allowed to leave a certain area of the city.
Speaker 3: But the area that they're in, it's a good part
Speaker 3: of the city. You can do a lot of things there,
Speaker 3: which means you can meet with other people, perhaps sources
Speaker 3: or perhaps handlers if you're being handled. You know, that's
Speaker 3: a place where everybody gets to go together. So it
Speaker 3: could be Israel. He's talking to Iranians, it could be
Speaker 3: Iranians talking to who knows what it is. It's happening
Speaker 3: all the time. They also had an office in Washington,
Speaker 3: d C outside run out of the Pakistani embassy. So
Speaker 3: that let's say you're an Iranian citizen studying in the
Speaker 3: United States and you lose your passport, Well you need
Speaker 3: to get a new one. But how are you need
Speaker 3: to get that if you don't have an Iranian embassy
Speaker 3: in the United States. Well there's a guy in the
Speaker 3: Pakistani embassy whose job it is and he is he
Speaker 3: is an Iranian diplomat in the Washington d C. That
Speaker 3: will get you a new passport. This is this is
Speaker 3: the way, you know, this is the good way that
Speaker 3: this works. This is how it's helpful. Right, And that's
Speaker 3: not cover, that's that's declared on the cover side. Especially
Speaker 3: with commercial cover, it's a whole other animal because think
Speaker 3: about all their shipping lines are sanctioned, all the port
Speaker 3: entries are sanctioned, all their goods are sanctioned. Like I
Speaker 3: just said, the iPhone. How do you get that into
Speaker 3: the country on industrial scale, Well you have to have
Speaker 3: commercial cover, and you have to have companies all over
Speaker 3: the world that look like one thing, but there's something else.
Speaker 3: And that is what they mostly make their money off
Speaker 3: of of how they they enrich the regime and how
Speaker 3: they move people and goods and equipment around the world
Speaker 3: very easily and with very little notice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you went into that quite a bit in your book,
Speaker 2: The The Banyan Banyans Banyard's Bonyards. Yeah. So you know,
Speaker 2: when we talk about things that Iran is doing under
Speaker 2: you know, diplomatic cover, we're talking about a lot of
Speaker 2: known bad actors. Like we know that these people are
Speaker 2: bad actors, how can they just don't get P and
Speaker 2: GT from everyone?
Speaker 3: So that's something called reciprocity. If you start kicking out
Speaker 3: person from country X, person from country X will start
Speaker 3: kicking you out. And we saw this a lot during
Speaker 3: the Obama administration when we were having some escalatory actions
Speaker 3: with Russia where we kicked some Russian diplomats out of
Speaker 3: the United States. Well, the next day Russia kicked the
Speaker 3: exact same number of diplomats out of Russia. And you know,
Speaker 3: we close a Chinese diplomatic facility in Texas. Well, the
Speaker 3: next week there's a US diplomatic facility closed in China.
Speaker 3: So there's a huge risk of if we interrupt this
Speaker 3: process that we all know is going on, the costs
Speaker 3: are higher than the benefits. So sometimes it might be
Speaker 3: better to actually, rather than neutralize, it might be better
Speaker 3: to exploit that thing, Which is exactly the confluence of
Speaker 3: human intelligence and counterintelligence where you get to make the choice,
Speaker 3: do I want to just cut this thing off and
Speaker 3: stop it. You know, if there's a drug vessel full
Speaker 3: of drugs and we see it off the coast of Venezuela,
Speaker 3: do we want to blow it up? Or do we
Speaker 3: want to capture the guys and interrogate them and find
Speaker 3: out where they came from, where they're going and all
Speaker 3: this other stuff. Well, that's a choice between exploiting and neutralizing.
Speaker 3: And neutralizing has a lot of immediate shock value that
Speaker 3: looks good politically and in the news. But exploiting typically
Speaker 3: doesn't get known to anybody. It's a secret, and it
Speaker 3: goes on for a long long time, and it can
Speaker 3: have a huge payoff if you're smart about it. And
Speaker 3: of course that's my bias because I did those things
Speaker 3: and I know how they work, But I will advocate
Speaker 3: for the high value and high impact that they have
Speaker 3: over a very long time that if rather than just
Speaker 3: shutting these things down or kicking these diplomats out, wouldn't
Speaker 3: it be a better to recruit that diplomat as a
Speaker 3: double agent, and then have him work for you for
Speaker 3: thirty years and then recruit his own assets for you
Speaker 3: as a principal agent that you could then further gather
Speaker 3: defectors to keep them defectors in place. I mean, the
Speaker 3: possibilities are endless, the value is endless. Rather than just
Speaker 3: kicking that one guy out and making the country kick
Speaker 3: one of your people out, you know, to me, it's
Speaker 3: a no brainer.
Speaker 2: When we talk about some of the things that you know,
Speaker 2: Iran does in foreign countries and in particularly the United States,
Speaker 2: and they do a lot of this stuff everywhere. Can
Speaker 2: we talk about ms see Elena Jodd.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Masulia Nojod is actually very interesting person. She wrote
Speaker 3: her own book called The Wind in My Hair, which
Speaker 3: I recommend if anyone's interested in Iran, Like what it's
Speaker 3: like to be a person in jail in Iran, political jail,
Speaker 3: Evan prison, getting tortured. She wrote a book about it.
Speaker 3: The regime has been trying to kill her for a
Speaker 3: very long time. They've tried multiple times the first time.
Speaker 3: She lives in New York actually, and she's under FBI
Speaker 3: protection now. But when she came to the US, she
Speaker 3: started talking way more than she used to talk when
Speaker 3: she was in Iran, because now she had some distance.
Speaker 3: But the regime caught up to her. They tried to
Speaker 3: assassinate her once by recruiting some Chechen guys who were
Speaker 3: kind of this high jinks group of guys that were
Speaker 3: pretty sloppy. They did a lot of physical surveillance on
Speaker 3: her home. They were looking at the way that she
Speaker 3: was walking to understand her behavior, and so they're doing
Speaker 3: a lot of early collection activity to see how this
Speaker 3: target looked. And they were interdicted. One of them had
Speaker 3: an AK forty seven in his car. They were using
Speaker 3: their phones way too much. In fact, most of the
Speaker 3: reason we able to catch them is because of what
Speaker 3: they said on their phones. It was very obvious what
Speaker 3: they were doing. So we neutralized them. And a few
Speaker 3: years later the regime still wanted to kill her, but
Speaker 3: they had a more elaborate plan this time. This time
Speaker 3: they wanted to kidnap her in New York, bring her
Speaker 3: to a port in New York, put her on a speedboat,
Speaker 3: take the speedboat to Venezuela, and then take her to
Speaker 3: Iran so they could do a show trial and execute
Speaker 3: her or torture her so that she would recamp and
Speaker 3: make this negative message about what she was saying on
Speaker 3: the media. We were able to catch that as well.
Speaker 3: But there have been some others as well. R. Bob
Speaker 3: cr who's Iranian living in Texas, who is a used
Speaker 3: car salesman. He was recruited by the IRGC to assassinate
Speaker 3: the Saudi ambassador who was in DC at the time,
Speaker 3: eating at a very nice restaurant, and he got very
Speaker 3: close to actually doing it. But there was a confidential
Speaker 3: informant that we had in the drug cartels because he
Speaker 3: was actually buying his weapons from the Zeta's cartel. And
Speaker 3: we actually had a recruited guy in the Zetas cartel
Speaker 3: recruited for something else obviously, who was like, hey, there's
Speaker 3: this Iranian stuff going on. You guys should look into this,
Speaker 3: and so DEA and FBI looked into it. Sure enough, yes,
Speaker 3: he had done quite a few things. He was ready
Speaker 3: to go, and we were able to capture him too.
Speaker 3: But a lot of these are very interesting when you
Speaker 3: look at them, because it's not an Iranian case officer
Speaker 3: or IERGC guy doing this, it's whoever they can get
Speaker 3: their hands on to do it. Because they have such
Speaker 3: few resources available to do these things in States and
Speaker 3: in other countries that they're just kind of grasping at
Speaker 3: straws to see what sticks. They've recruited Hell's Angels guys
Speaker 3: before to organize some assassination attempts more recently. You know,
Speaker 3: they're a very interesting thing to look at about how
Speaker 3: they recruit these guys in Canada and then they have
Speaker 3: illegally entered the United States and then go do their
Speaker 3: target reconstants that they're going to do and then go
Speaker 3: figure out when the time is right. But again, confidential
Speaker 3: informant helps with that and we're able to capture those
Speaker 3: people too. So it's very interesting to see how they're
Speaker 3: doing things in the United States because they're very different
Speaker 3: than how they do them in other countries where they
Speaker 3: have more ability to move. And that goes back to
Speaker 3: the diplomatic thing. So if you look at Iran, which
Speaker 3: countries can Iran go to Iranians without a visa? This
Speaker 3: is an important question to ask. You should away if
Speaker 3: you're an intelligence analysts should always ask, you know, my
Speaker 3: target country, what countries can they go to without a visa?
Speaker 3: Because that means those are countries they can go to
Speaker 3: into a source meeting without being easily noticed. Countries might
Speaker 3: surprise you. For example, Ecuador and say Sheelles and Singapore,
Speaker 3: they can go there without a VA Thailand, Georgia, Armenia.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of countries that are not Muslim
Speaker 3: countries that they can go to and do the activities
Speaker 3: need to do their third country meetings so that way
Speaker 3: they're not meeting the source and the sources home country
Speaker 3: or in Ron, they're doing it in a kind of
Speaker 3: safer area. This is how they kind of do things
Speaker 3: outside of the United States. In the United States, they're
Speaker 3: using a lot of cyber activity where they're and also
Speaker 3: in Israel where they're recruiting their assets through Facebook, sometimes
Speaker 3: posing as lovers and other kind of things. And when
Speaker 3: we see these things exposed, we kind of chuckle at it,
Speaker 3: but I also have to ask, like, why aren't they
Speaker 3: throwing more resources at this stuff? You know, But it's
Speaker 3: because they're more concerned about their survival at home than
Speaker 3: they are about anything else outside the country.
Speaker 2: Something you mentioned like that was surprising to me because
Speaker 2: most people I think of an age are aware of
Speaker 2: Solomon Rushdi and the fetway against him. I did not
Speaker 2: know you mentioned that that over three dozen people have
Speaker 2: been killed trying to kill him and it's still going on. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: just got and there's basically there's basically a fund for
Speaker 2: his death. There was just an increase.
Speaker 3: Yep, it was adjusted for inflation, you know, because it's
Speaker 3: been around for.
Speaker 2: A while, so right right, three point three million. And
Speaker 2: it's crazy to me that that there's just basically like this, Hey,
Speaker 2: if you if you get himmering these people like you
Speaker 2: get a piece of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's basically a beef that the original Ayatola had
Speaker 3: and he is now dead and a beef has survived him.
Speaker 2: Can we also talk a little bit about Merchant, because
Speaker 2: that's pretty recent that it was an assef Merchant.
Speaker 4: Who was that Uh the wasn't he?
Speaker 2: The Pakistani? The gentleman who was uh gonna who is
Speaker 2: gonna try and the Pakistani who's gonna try and kill Trump?
Speaker 3: Oh oh yeah, yeah, there's been a few of those.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much stock I put into that.
Speaker 3: I have an I have a theory that these are
Speaker 3: not like coming from high level ERGYC people. Even the
Speaker 3: r BOBSI are one that I mentioned, the Saudi into
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen assassination project. I think these are lower level
Speaker 3: ergyc This is my theory is I'd had no fact
Speaker 3: to back this up, but I think these are lower
Speaker 3: level ways of trying to do what they can with
Speaker 3: what they can. If the same thing with John Bolton
Speaker 3: and Pompeo and Trump, these are like really low level,
Speaker 3: amateur hour type things that have almost no resources attached
Speaker 3: to them, something like that coming from If it was
Speaker 3: coming from the top levels of the government, I feel
Speaker 3: like there would be more risk analysis in there, some
Speaker 3: more thought about how it looks and how to do it.
Speaker 3: You know, these things and if you compare them to
Speaker 3: other assassination operations that the regime has done, especially against Iranians,
Speaker 3: those are far more advanced methodical. They put a lot
Speaker 3: more thought into it. They still failed a lot, but
Speaker 3: they succeeded a lot. And it wasn't this kind of
Speaker 3: like pie in the sky, like oh, let's just go
Speaker 3: after that guy and go kill them. You know, they
Speaker 3: really thought through how do they do it, where's the
Speaker 3: right place to do it, what resources do we need,
Speaker 3: what country should it be, and who should we recruit.
Speaker 3: In Denmark there were a few of these where they
Speaker 3: killed some MUJA hitting guys and some as MLA guys
Speaker 3: with very methodical ways of doing it even recently. So
Speaker 3: I question, you know, where are these orders coming from?
Speaker 3: And I don't know if those are officially sanctioned things
Speaker 3: like even again back to the r Bob Ziar case,
Speaker 3: when you look at the Treasury sanctions that detail, you
Speaker 3: know what was going on with that case. They implicate
Speaker 3: cost some solo money and two high level IRGC guys
Speaker 3: in addition to the one guy that was on the
Speaker 3: phone with ar BOBZR. But there's no there's no link
Speaker 3: between that low level basically a lieutenant colonel and the
Speaker 3: IRGC and cost some solo money like that doesn't really
Speaker 3: make sense to me, you know. I again, theorizing that
Speaker 3: it's probably someone lowered down the ranks who's like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to make a name for myself and get this
Speaker 3: big hit and then I'm going to be important, that's
Speaker 3: probably more likely.
Speaker 2: Makes sense. So you know, then you go into COVID action.
Speaker 2: Can we talk about the Iran Experts Initiative.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very interesting, more recent actually since the Biden administration.
Speaker 3: This is kind of a classic example of and many
Speaker 3: countries do this Russia does this, China does this with
Speaker 3: their Confucius institutes, where countries will use their academic credentials
Speaker 3: to do intelligence things. And again this is not a
Speaker 3: new surprising thing. This is very common in countries, but
Speaker 3: it was kind of surprising because of how close these
Speaker 3: individuals were to the Biden administration, specifically to the Iran
Speaker 3: team working for President Biden and the Syria team working
Speaker 3: for President Biden. And there was in fact one individual
Speaker 3: on the Iran team, the envoys team, that was telling
Speaker 3: the envoy advice. That advice was coming directly from Sarif
Speaker 3: through emails to that person, which is kind of interesting
Speaker 3: that emails are now in the public domain, so if
Speaker 3: people want to go research them, they can. And all
Speaker 3: the people that were involved in this Iran Experts initiative
Speaker 3: claimed to be the one that we're providing. They said
Speaker 3: that the access they had to the regime was only
Speaker 3: for academic purposes, so that they could help inform the
Speaker 3: US government on the JCPOA. My thought, as an intelligence
Speaker 3: collector and a handler, well that's probably how it started
Speaker 3: out for you, and that the regime kept pushing down
Speaker 3: that button and kept you on and now you're working
Speaker 3: for them, even if you don't know that you are.
Speaker 3: So sometimes you know, ignorance is not an excuse for
Speaker 3: intelligence collection, and we've seen that many times with how
Speaker 3: people believe they're providing something to one country and it's
Speaker 3: a false flag and they're providing it to somebody else,
Speaker 3: or they think is something completely separate, And if you
Speaker 3: look at what they collected and what they did and
Speaker 3: what they said, this is a very clear cut influence
Speaker 3: operation that actually affected how are Iran envoy operated in
Speaker 3: the world. And when you're doing negotiations with a country,
Speaker 3: let's say you're on you have a limited information so
Speaker 3: the information you do have is extremely valuable and you're
Speaker 3: using it to reduce uncertainty and increase your decision advantage. Well,
Speaker 3: the other side wants to take control of that process
Speaker 3: to their own advantage, and we would be ignorant to
Speaker 3: think that they were not, And unfortunately at the time,
Speaker 3: we were ignorant to think that they were not, and
Speaker 3: they did do it. So again, I go in a
Speaker 3: lot of detail on it. I have the actual names
Speaker 3: of the people in there and everything, but it is
Speaker 3: kind of interesting to think about how many other times
Speaker 3: does this happen? You know, that's a question mark this
Speaker 3: should come up that people for future research should be
Speaker 3: looking into, and in the intelligence community should be looking
Speaker 3: at what other things that look benign are not benign
Speaker 3: because that's a that's a great intelligence operation when it
Speaker 3: looks benign. That's what Clandesta's activity is. The activity looks
Speaker 3: like it's something else, you know, right.
Speaker 2: And then you know there's So we're briefly going over
Speaker 2: all this stuff. There are so many great examples in
Speaker 2: this book. I highly highly recommend everybody read this. It's
Speaker 2: Iran's shadow weapons. But let's move into cyber because cyber
Speaker 2: has been Oh the link is going to be in
Speaker 2: the description. Let's move into cyber because cyber has been
Speaker 2: something that you know, Iran was nothing and then we
Speaker 2: hit him or they were hit with stucksnet stucknet, and
Speaker 2: then they became something. And it's been a real evolution
Speaker 2: for them, hasn't it.
Speaker 3: It's really fascinating. Actually, I'm not aware of another country
Speaker 3: having this similar evolution. As you said, they were nothing
Speaker 3: before like two thousand and seven, at a maximum, they
Speaker 3: were defacing websites. Fast forward ten years and they are
Speaker 3: overturning billions of dollars of ransomware and banks and destroying
Speaker 3: giant pieces of infrastructure and SCATA systems, which are industrial
Speaker 3: control systems, like they just they accelerate. Well, how do
Speaker 3: they do that where they get information? Well, as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: stucksnet happened, and they ran immediately reverse engineered stucksnet and
Speaker 3: saw how it was made, and they made their own
Speaker 3: piece of malware that they used that now they knew
Speaker 3: this new information. Well, then they said, well, what if
Speaker 3: we're under threat by other things, let's start investing a
Speaker 3: ton of money in this. And they started recruiting these
Speaker 3: civilian entities, which is actually not unlike the US. The US,
Speaker 3: a lot of our cyber expertise is not uniform service
Speaker 3: members or gs civilians at cybercom. It's contractors, companies that
Speaker 3: have experts in them that the government hires to produce
Speaker 3: tailored items Collard malware. This is the way it actually works.
Speaker 3: There's a couple of really interesting books on it, like
Speaker 3: Countdown to Zero Day, which I recommend by Kim Zetter,
Speaker 3: which goes into how stocks and that was actually made.
Speaker 3: It was not made by the government, It was made
Speaker 3: by other companies that were sold to the government and
Speaker 3: same thing with Israel, Like they have Pegasus that's made
Speaker 3: by a civilian company that's not made by Unit eighty
Speaker 3: two hundred, their second organization. Right.
Speaker 2: Wait, are you saying that the government is not on
Speaker 2: the leading edge of development and conception of of skin,
Speaker 2: they're on.
Speaker 3: The leading edge of anything money to give to those people, Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: because they'll pay a lot of money, a lot of money,
Speaker 3: you know. And the regime does the same thing. And
Speaker 3: they did the same thing. And actually, when Israel wiped
Speaker 3: a bunch of servers in Iran using a white or malware,
Speaker 3: Iran reverse engineered that and turned it into something called Shammoun,
Speaker 3: which they then put on Saudi Aramco and erased all
Speaker 3: of Saudi Aramco's data, which is incredible because, as I said,
Speaker 3: even two years before that, the regime could only deface
Speaker 3: a website. And now they're wiping out the entire oil
Speaker 3: infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, not all of it, but almost
Speaker 3: all of the huge, huge amount. And it wasn't just
Speaker 3: a one hit thing. They had carefully planned it. They
Speaker 3: chose a day during Ramadan when they knew no on
Speaker 3: would be at the place, like everything was carefully thought through.
Speaker 3: It was very deliberate, which is a huge change before
Speaker 3: when they looked like this ragtag group of little hackers
Speaker 3: which they call Sabiri's that were just hired off the
Speaker 3: street to go do forum blasts and you know, take
Speaker 3: websites down with didas attacks. So you see this evolution
Speaker 3: not as their innovation at the beginning, more their reaction,
Speaker 3: but as they reacted to it. They just took everything
Speaker 3: that hit them and then they turned it into their
Speaker 3: own weapon and they use it against us, which is
Speaker 3: the West, Israel, European countries especially like Denmark, Netherlands, other
Speaker 3: countries as well to their advantage. And for that first
Speaker 3: few years, then they rapidly accelerated producing their own things
Speaker 3: that are now novel that would never have existed if
Speaker 3: things hadn't happened before to them that pushed them in
Speaker 3: that direction, which is kind of fascinating, you know, revisionist
Speaker 3: history of like what would have happened if we didn't
Speaker 3: do stuck net or if they didn't discover stuck net.
Speaker 2: Right, And you also mentioned that when Israel used Wiper
Speaker 2: that they uncovered a much more valuable and essay loitering
Speaker 2: tool that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that wasn't like for the NSAY. Yeah, so the
Speaker 3: NSA tool was hidden and had been hidden and was
Speaker 3: totally unknown, and that tool was extremely advanced and was
Speaker 3: capable of pretty much destroying the entire nuclear program and
Speaker 3: a lot of other infrastructure, including much of their non
Speaker 3: nuclear defense infrastructure. And when Israel did that wiper activity,
Speaker 3: it did it in the same kind of area of
Speaker 3: the memory of system that this other malware was. And
Speaker 3: when the regime went to go look, they found both
Speaker 3: and the US unfortunately lost this extremely advanced tool that
Speaker 3: now is no longer functional.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a question.
Speaker 4: Can I ask a question see their cyber operations, what
Speaker 4: is like the percentage between like them going out there
Speaker 4: trying to make money for the regime to like offensive
Speaker 4: operations against state actors and stuff like that, whether it's Israel,
Speaker 4: the US, or any Denmark.
Speaker 3: The money part was earlier and it has really dramatically decreased.
Speaker 3: And in fact, the last time they did a major
Speaker 3: financial operation, they did two that were like really huge.
Speaker 3: One was against a Las Vegas company because the owner
Speaker 3: of the company was Jewish and made a statement about Iran,
Speaker 3: and to retaliate they caused him several one hundreds of
Speaker 3: millions of dollars of damage to his infrastructure. They didn't
Speaker 3: get any money from that though. Then in Georgia, the
Speaker 3: state in the United States or Georgia, they attacked a
Speaker 3: municipal infrastructure and were able to do some ransomware attack
Speaker 3: there After that, which is like more than ten years ago.
Speaker 3: They have drifted away from that and they're mostly focusing
Speaker 3: on offensive cyberactivity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's wild that they now have like five advanced
Speaker 2: persistent threats, at least five that are associated with them.
Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit about the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three attacks on US ships?
Speaker 3: Do you recall that which ones are you talking about?
Speaker 2: The ballast they are relutely yes.
Speaker 3: This is from a group called Shahid Kave, which is
Speaker 3: a very elite cyber unit inside of one of their
Speaker 3: elite cyber units. So you can think of it as
Speaker 3: you know, inside a cybercom there is an elite national
Speaker 3: mission Force, the Cyber Mission Force. You can think of
Speaker 3: Shahid Kaves as a team inside of that cyber mission Force.
Speaker 3: It's kind of analogous. And what Shahid Kave did was
Speaker 3: they were able to actually steal through malware activity. They
Speaker 3: use these things called remote access trojans or rats to
Speaker 3: get this stuff. So they create a rat inside of
Speaker 3: a computer system, trafted the designs for these ballasts, and
Speaker 3: if they wanted to, they could have basic hit a
Speaker 3: button and turn these ballasts off, which would have caused
Speaker 3: these cargo vessels to eventually sink after their machinery broke
Speaker 3: down and things. But the interesting part about that is
Speaker 3: that these were not operations they were going to do. Instead,
Speaker 3: this was a menu of options that they presented to
Speaker 3: the IATOLA, and this was their job, was to basically
Speaker 3: come up with all kinds of ways that if the
Speaker 3: IATOLA wanted to, they could attack the US with cyber tools. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: they haven't used them to our knowledge, not just this tool,
Speaker 3: but other tools. And that kind of goes along with
Speaker 3: what they do, not just in cyber but in intelligence generally,
Speaker 3: where they take a lot of things and put them
Speaker 3: on the shelf and they wait till there's a time
Speaker 3: when they really want to use the thing. That's kind
Speaker 3: of interesting because there's been a lot of opportunities that
Speaker 3: you might think would be a good reason for them
Speaker 3: to use those things. You could think of like June
Speaker 3: for example, as one of those times and they didn't
Speaker 3: do it, And that's kind of an interesting question of
Speaker 3: like why didn't they destroy the ballasts on all of
Speaker 3: the ships in the golf in June? You know, but
Speaker 3: it probably goes toward the more political question of well,
Speaker 3: if they did that, what would happen next? And what
Speaker 3: would that mean for me? You know. So they're probably
Speaker 3: they probably have a lot of things on the shelf
Speaker 3: that they'll never ever use that are probably very powerful.
Speaker 3: But it would mean that their own destruction may be
Speaker 3: invited from using these things.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, where where it turns into basically an act
Speaker 2: of war. Yes, and let's talk about you know, we
Speaker 2: talk about these capabilities, but let's talk about like they're internal,
Speaker 2: like they have they're pretty devious with their own population,
Speaker 2: you know, in terms of like the the apps that
Speaker 2: they create, the software you know that they create where well,
Speaker 2: they they'll put out, hey, here's a censorship. Here's a
Speaker 2: way to circumvent censorship. But it's actually put out by
Speaker 2: the government.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and actually this is all because their internet. It's
Speaker 3: not like our internet. You know, we think like, oh
Speaker 3: I can put a VPN on and I can I
Speaker 3: can use proton whatever. Well, the problem in Iran is
Speaker 3: that they don't have an open Internet. They have something
Speaker 3: called the National Information Network, which is given to them
Speaker 3: by China. This is a Chinese technology about how to
Speaker 3: create a you know, China's Great Firewall, which is pretty successful.
Speaker 3: They gave that to Iran and Iran implemented it, which
Speaker 3: means that people in Iran cannot access the Internet like
Speaker 3: we do. There are entire sections of the Internet that
Speaker 3: they can never reach. There are some VPNs that do
Speaker 3: work there, but they're not always working, and they kind
Speaker 3: of come up and down, and there's a lot of
Speaker 3: volatility there. But within that special ecosystem that they've created,
Speaker 3: as you said, they've got all kinds of little things
Speaker 3: in there that are ready to hook you. And especially
Speaker 3: during times of protest or unrest, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: things that are designed to trick you, track you, or
Speaker 3: catch you or figure out where you are, you know,
Speaker 3: because what their goal is to stop protests that they
Speaker 3: don't want them happening, and they'll go to any length
Speaker 3: to do it. They were at the time during the
Speaker 3: masa Amini protests few years ago, they were throwing girls
Speaker 3: off for roofs because the girls were posting on Instagram
Speaker 3: and were at the actual protests. They were shooting girls
Speaker 3: walking home from school that had no part in the
Speaker 3: protest just because they were there. Lots and lots of
Speaker 3: people were killed during this protest with live rounds. And
Speaker 3: at the heart of it was the Internet, because how
Speaker 3: else can you in a country so oppressed and so controlled,
Speaker 3: how else can you communicate that this protest is going
Speaker 3: down right now at this location. And they have to
Speaker 3: use the Internet. And the problem is they can't access Instagram,
Speaker 3: They can't access a lot of social media that we
Speaker 3: can unless you're a regime person. They have special access
Speaker 3: in the network to be able to go onto Instagram
Speaker 3: and post their pictures and things. But that means that
Speaker 3: people have to use all these little tools and software.
Speaker 3: And if you remember, like back in the nineties when
Speaker 3: you were trying to download music, I wasn't doing it
Speaker 3: because it was illegal, of course, but for those who
Speaker 3: were doing it, you sometimes would download a movie or
Speaker 3: a song and it was actually full of viruses, right
Speaker 3: because they have no way of like verifying like what
Speaker 3: am I downloading? Because it's all nothing's official, and in
Speaker 3: Iran it's like that, and the regime puts a lot
Speaker 3: of stuff out there, like, oh, this is the VPN
Speaker 3: that you can use to get outside the country, But
Speaker 3: it turns out it's actually a government controlled BPM that's
Speaker 3: accessing your entire phone. And that's one small example, but
Speaker 3: that's how the entire system is designed, is to have
Speaker 3: total knowledge of what is every person this country doing
Speaker 3: so we can stop them from rebelling against us.
Speaker 2: It's insane.
Speaker 3: And actually, during during the June War, they shut the
Speaker 3: entire Internet off for two days, not because it wasn't
Speaker 3: Israel that did that, it was the Iranian government because
Speaker 3: they recognize how weak they were during that conflict, like
Speaker 3: that was a great moment if the people wanted to
Speaker 3: stand up and take the country over, that was if
Speaker 3: ever it was then. And so the regime noticed that
Speaker 3: and they turned the entire Internet off. Zero Internet that
Speaker 3: you couldn't make, you couldn't call on WhatsApp, you couldn't
Speaker 3: do anything. And that was a very scary time because
Speaker 3: imagine there's bombs falling all around in big cut cities,
Speaker 3: Israeli bombs and US bombs, and you don't know what
Speaker 3: they're going to hit next, because you don't even know.
Speaker 3: They can't even see the news. You don't know if
Speaker 3: this is the start of an invasion, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: you have no idea. So these people are like living
Speaker 3: in complete fear and darkness, and that's what the regime
Speaker 3: wanted them to feel, which is crazy because their own
Speaker 3: country was under attack and they were trying to increase
Speaker 3: the fear of their own people during that time.
Speaker 2: We talked a little bit about sanctions earlier and how
Speaker 2: their wealth continues to shoot up even with the sanctions.
Speaker 2: Can and you know, and and you know, you have
Speaker 2: some great graphs in there detailing like the vineyards and
Speaker 2: the shipping lanes or you know, all the interest, but
Speaker 2: can you kind of talk about how they circumvent these
Speaker 2: sanctions and why they continue gaining more and more wealth.
Speaker 3: There's a couple of different ways. One of the most
Speaker 3: tried and true methods is something called the huala, which
Speaker 3: is an unofficial mechanism for moving money that doesn't actually
Speaker 3: physically move. So basically, I have a ledger and you
Speaker 3: have a ledger, and on my ledger I say minus
Speaker 3: one hundred dollars, and I sent a note to you
Speaker 3: that says hey, on your ledger, right, plus one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: One hundred dollars never existed. This money is moving theoretically,
Speaker 3: but this is a very common it's illegal system. It's
Speaker 3: not illegal, it's legal in many countries in the world
Speaker 3: because this is how they've traditionally used done bankings for
Speaker 3: several thousand years. The regime relies quite a bit on jualas,
Speaker 3: especially for some of the earlier steps in their money
Speaker 3: movement process. So that because there's no trace from my
Speaker 3: book to your book except from the person who said
Speaker 3: that that money moved. So let's say I want to
Speaker 3: move some money to Dubai, Well, I can do the
Speaker 3: juala to Dubai. Then in Dubai there is money. Well,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of banks in Dubai, and in fact,
Speaker 3: something like a third of the Dubai permanent population are
Speaker 3: actually Iranians. And that's because of the banking system in Dubai,
Speaker 3: which is hugely designed to facilitate money movement, not just
Speaker 3: for Iran but for many countries. That's one of the
Speaker 3: things that Dubai kind of uses a selling point is
Speaker 3: that hey, you can do banking here and we don't
Speaker 3: care what you do. And a lot of the banking
Speaker 3: is based out of those banks there's also a lot
Speaker 3: of banks in Switzerland and banks in South America, and
Speaker 3: in China. There's also a lot of goods for cash
Speaker 3: or good for services activity where for example, if Iran
Speaker 3: brings a cargo boat with millions of barrels of oil
Speaker 3: on it, they can do a ship to ship transfer
Speaker 3: to China, and China does something very similar to the
Speaker 3: whola system where they give them goods in kind for
Speaker 3: that oil, and there's a lot of other ways they
Speaker 3: can do it too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was, like I said, you go into great depth.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about you know, and you mentioned Solomoni.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about what Iran got up to after the
Speaker 2: invasion of Iraq. You mentioned that there were thirty one
Speaker 2: transactions between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: and those were large transactions for weapons systems or ied systems.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: You know, we saw the the EFPs out there that
Speaker 2: were Iranian generated. Can you go into that a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, the kind of the shocking part of that
Speaker 3: is many of those actuators hearts were either made in
Speaker 3: the United States or made in the United Kingdom. So
Speaker 3: like the radios, the Harris radios made in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 3: The actuators were made in the United States, those companies
Speaker 3: had no clue that that's what was happening. But the
Speaker 3: way that the regime does its movement of money and material,
Speaker 3: you're not going to know that you're selling your actuators
Speaker 3: to an Iranian agent, you know. And so what they
Speaker 3: would do is they'd have a guy in the United
Speaker 3: States that would purchase it as a legitimate company, usually
Speaker 3: a cover organization commercial cover, shift that stuff to Dubai
Speaker 3: or to another country. There's a couple of countries that
Speaker 3: I've listed in there, like Malaysia as another example. Then
Speaker 3: move it to another location in that same country, and
Speaker 3: then mark the goods as something else, which is kind
Speaker 3: of tried and true method to do it. Just slap
Speaker 3: a new paper on there that says grain and then
Speaker 3: ship it over to the Straits of Horror Moves or
Speaker 3: to wherever you want to bring it, and then take
Speaker 3: it out of the packages and start making IDs with it.
Speaker 3: It sounds crazy and like super easy, but you have
Speaker 3: to think about these shipping lanes we're talking about are
Speaker 3: some of the busiest places on the planet, especially the
Speaker 3: bab Al mundav Straight, the Persian Gulf, and if you
Speaker 3: go further east in Indonesia the Straights at Malacca. Something
Speaker 3: like sixty percent of the world's goods pass through the
Speaker 3: Straits of Malacca on ships. So there's no way that
Speaker 3: you could stop every ship and look in every cargo container,
Speaker 3: especially if you're paying off people at the ports in
Speaker 3: name your country in Singapore for example, to just not
Speaker 3: even look at what the document says, like they're not
Speaker 3: they don't know what's in the thing. They don't care
Speaker 3: what's in the thing. It's kind of like you know
Speaker 3: the New York Port Authority in the nineteen seventies, right,
Speaker 3: like they don't care what's going over there. They they
Speaker 3: just want the cargo to move and put the money
Speaker 3: in their pocket. Right, It's business, and that's what was
Speaker 3: happening where the regime was clandesseminly moving these Western produced
Speaker 3: pieces of equipment over to the Middle East and then
Speaker 3: killing our own soldiers with these US produced pieces of equipment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's you know, I regards to what people's
Speaker 2: political opinions about Solomony or the effectiveness of the strike,
Speaker 2: I know a lot of veterans saw it as as
Speaker 2: you know, come up and you know, so let's talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about their unconventioned warfare capabilities. You have
Speaker 2: the is it the sabourine, the patient ones.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's kind of the white soft unit. And then
Speaker 3: there's the more black soft type units as well that
Speaker 3: they have.
Speaker 2: And so what are some of the white soft and
Speaker 2: then some of the BLACKSAFT up to these days or
Speaker 2: you know, in the last say fifteen to twenty years.
Speaker 3: It's a really important distinction with Iran's military is that
Speaker 3: they don't have one military they have two. They have
Speaker 3: the Arteesh, which is the like our DoD. Then they
Speaker 3: have the IRGC, which is a completely separate military organization,
Speaker 3: which is larger than the ARTEESH. They're about similar in size,
Speaker 3: but the IRGC is roughly larger. The IRGC's mission is
Speaker 3: to protect the Ayatola and the regime around him. The
Speaker 3: rteche mission is to protect the sovereignty of Iran like
Speaker 3: any other army would be. And a lot of outsiders
Speaker 3: don't understand that distinction. There's a lot of Arteesh people
Speaker 3: that if there was a rebellion right now, they would
Speaker 3: turn their weapons on the regime. They don't want to
Speaker 3: be in this situation. They're just kind of regular people.
Speaker 3: I largely see people are different, right, and that's a
Speaker 3: huge distinction that needs to be made. The Sabaregn you
Speaker 3: mentioned are on the Artes side, and there's a lot
Speaker 3: of Artes whitesft that do the traditional like visit board
Speaker 3: search and seizure of a vessel for example. They'll you know,
Speaker 3: train foreign partners across a border another example. The biggest
Speaker 3: deployment of the Artes though, was in the nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty eight Iran Iraq War. Since eighty eight, the
Speaker 3: Artes never deployed more than a company size element outside
Speaker 3: of Iraq, which is crazy because you think like those
Speaker 3: units need real experience at least not just with the combat,
Speaker 3: but with like perception staging armored movement integration, like moving
Speaker 3: to another country physically. It takes a lot of practice
Speaker 3: and training. They didn't have that from nineteen eighty eight
Speaker 3: until twenty sixteen. The reason they got that in twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen is because of ISIS in Syria. That was the
Speaker 3: first time the regime deployed Artesh as a military force
Speaker 3: outside of Iran since the Iran Iraq War, which is
Speaker 3: kind of interesting because we had the whole conflict in Iraq.
Speaker 3: The US did. There was many other conflicts between nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty eight in twenty sixteen that could have invited the army.
Speaker 3: They didn't send them, which is just to me, it's
Speaker 3: kind of interesting, like why wouldn't you send your army
Speaker 3: to go do something, but didn't until twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 3: they actually had brigades, entire brigades deployed to Syria. Then
Speaker 3: the iurgyc what they're up to. They focus a lot
Speaker 3: on unconventional warfare. Are in the ring of countries around Iran.
Speaker 3: But the way that they do unconventional warfare rit large.
Speaker 3: They separate it by portfolio or file. So there's like
Speaker 3: an Africa file, there's a South America file, there's a
Speaker 3: Middle East file specifically focused on Afghanistan. There's another file
Speaker 3: spoke specifically on Iraq. There's one for Turkey, there's one
Speaker 3: for the Balkans. Like the Bosnia deployment I mentioned, it
Speaker 3: is part of one element of the KODS force going there.
Speaker 3: It's not the whole CUDS force going, it's a group
Speaker 3: that specializes it, kind of like in the US we
Speaker 3: have Fifth Group of Special Forces. They focus on the
Speaker 3: Middle East. They're not deployed to South America, right, And
Speaker 3: that's the IERGC and CUDS Force has a very similar
Speaker 3: mindset and actually cost some solo Moni was the architect
Speaker 3: of that because before he took over in the late nineties,
Speaker 3: there was only one file and that was the Balkans
Speaker 3: because that was their only deployment. But as the US
Speaker 3: started moving and saber rattling about the Middle East and
Speaker 3: then we invaded nine to eleven, happened like, hey, we
Speaker 3: need to do something around this country and separate it
Speaker 3: by task, organization of specialty. The Afghanistan guys, you guys
Speaker 3: are only going to be Afghanistan. And actually smel Gani,
Speaker 3: the current Coulds Force commander, was an Afghanistan file guy,
Speaker 3: Like he only did Afghanistan his entire career, and then
Speaker 3: when Solimani was killed, Ghani was elevated to that position.
Speaker 3: So he's kind of an interesting example of that that
Speaker 3: file mentality.
Speaker 2: Something that you mentioned in the book that did I
Speaker 2: forgot to mention earlier. I didn't know that Iran almost
Speaker 2: invaded Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, forgotten moment of history. Yeah, yeah, that was actually
Speaker 3: Masari Sharif. There were some Iranian diplomats there and a
Speaker 3: journalist and then some other Iranians that weren't affiliated with
Speaker 3: the government, and the Taliban killed them. And this was
Speaker 3: a huge problem inside of Iran because they had just
Speaker 3: come out of the Aaron Iraq War. They were bloodied
Speaker 3: and beaten. Their only deployment overseas in the last decade
Speaker 3: before this happened, which I think was ninety seven, was
Speaker 3: to Bosnia. Like I mentioned, that was a very tiny thing.
Speaker 3: They didn't want to be involved with anything outside of
Speaker 3: the country at the time. They were licking their wounds
Speaker 3: and trying to focus and clamp down the country and
Speaker 3: just like get back to normal. And then this thing
Speaker 3: happens with these diplomats in Masuri Sharif, and there's an
Speaker 3: element of the IRGC that wants to invade Afghanistan. Immediately
Speaker 3: they had a whole brigade ready to go and they
Speaker 3: headed division also getting spun up. They went all the
Speaker 3: way up to the border, and there's this National Security
Speaker 3: Council like element in the Iranian government that includes Ayatola,
Speaker 3: and they kind of were sitting around thinking like, well,
Speaker 3: what happens if we do this, what's next? And the
Speaker 3: reason they did not invade Afghanistan is interesting. It's because
Speaker 3: Ahmed Shah Masud, who was part of the Northern Alliance
Speaker 3: that we were allied with, would be in danger if
Speaker 3: Iran invaded Afghanistan. Well why is that important? Well, because
Speaker 3: Ron was also helping the Northern Alliance because inside the
Speaker 3: Northern Alliance were a lot of Hazara Shia folks who
Speaker 3: were threatened by Taliban and still are threatened by the
Speaker 3: Taliban now, and Iran didn't want to damage that those
Speaker 3: people that they saw as people they wanted to protect,
Speaker 3: and that went into their calculus of why they didn't invade. Again,
Speaker 3: another revisionist history question, like what would have happened if
Speaker 3: they had invaded because this was again like nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: seven ish, we hadn't bombed Camp Feruk yet, which was
Speaker 3: the assamb Bin Laden, one of the training camps, Like
Speaker 3: we hadn't done any of that stuff yet. How different
Speaker 3: would things be if if they had invaded? Wow? What
Speaker 3: a different world?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's fascinating and it's interesting to you where
Speaker 2: you know, you talked about the intelligence quartet, you know,
Speaker 2: sharing intelligence with other countries about Daish, you know, isis
Speaker 2: Daish and and I'm curious. You know, Isis was a
Speaker 2: you know, they were the enemy of everybody, but the
Speaker 2: teams still formed to fight them, you know, separate teams
Speaker 2: still formed. Like this wasn't this global war on Isis.
Speaker 2: You know, it was you know, individual efforts, I take it,
Speaker 2: or not individual, but kind of group efforts. But we
Speaker 2: didn't want to get too chumming with Iran or Russia
Speaker 2: or anybody else. During the year.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you, we were actually doing a strike in
Speaker 3: Iraq and we had the target was soaked for a
Speaker 3: few hours. We had aircraft getting ready to go, like
Speaker 3: we were going to blow this target up. And as
Speaker 3: we're watching it through ISR this team that looks highly
Speaker 3: trained and like clearly a special forces team, not our team.
Speaker 3: And we have the test force, like we know who's here,
Speaker 3: and we see this team coming up out in the
Speaker 3: infrared and we're like, who is that? And we were
Speaker 3: making calls, making calls, trying to figure this out. It
Speaker 3: turns out it was the Germans. Because the Germans didn't
Speaker 3: want to say they were deployed there and they didn't
Speaker 3: want to be part of our coalition, and they were
Speaker 3: doing a raid on a compound and didn't tell anyone,
Speaker 3: or at least didn't tell us, and we were about
Speaker 3: to blow that compound up like minutes, like as they
Speaker 3: were going in there, we would have killed them. And
Speaker 3: it was crazy to me, like how how even on
Speaker 3: the western side we were not fully integrated like you
Speaker 3: were saying like it was, it wasn't a coalition by
Speaker 3: any means.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's crazy. So, you know, there's so much to
Speaker 2: the book, and I hope I haven't left out any
Speaker 2: Have I left out anything major in our discussion?
Speaker 3: I mean, there's so much stuff about the different countries
Speaker 3: that the IRGC works in, but I don't want to
Speaker 3: spoil it because it's that was one of my favorite
Speaker 3: parts to research because it's so interesting to see, like
Speaker 3: in Yemen for example, like how did they get to
Speaker 3: where they are today? And do the who thies even
Speaker 3: care about Iran which is a big question because I don't.
Speaker 3: I would argue that they don't care as much as
Speaker 3: we think they do. Yeah, same with Hesbola, which I
Speaker 3: also go into a lot of detail about where Hasbola
Speaker 3: came from and how it formed and Iran came in later.
Speaker 3: It wasn't you know, like it's a very interesting kind
Speaker 3: of thing that we just take for granted. And as
Speaker 3: we talked about the beginning of the show, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of these things that we just say, like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's the way it is. We should ask is that
Speaker 3: really how it is? Is that? How would have got
Speaker 3: that way? Because if we're using the wrong information and
Speaker 3: we're making decisions with the wrong information, we're gonna end
Speaker 3: up with really bad results that keep ending with failures
Speaker 3: over and over again because we keep using these biases
Speaker 3: every time we try to make a decision.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it is. I don't want to say
Speaker 2: it's a dense book because that, you know, makes it
Speaker 2: sound dry. It's not dry. It's just packed with information.
Speaker 2: I mean packed with information. And I said earlier about
Speaker 2: a fifth of this book is references and sources. It
Speaker 2: is exceptionally well I'll show I'll show everybody. So the
Speaker 2: sources start here. If you guys can the sources, can
Speaker 2: you guys see this all right? Start here?
Speaker 3: Like it's massive.
Speaker 2: It's uh. I was shocked by the amount of information
Speaker 2: you had.
Speaker 4: In this book.
Speaker 3: I wanted to write it like an Intel report, where
Speaker 3: if you want to get more info on that thing,
Speaker 3: you can get it instead of like, well how did
Speaker 3: he come to that conclusion? You know, which is on
Speaker 3: Intel report. You don't do that, and Intel report reports
Speaker 3: are facts, they're not opinions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Well if that's if that's it,
Speaker 2: as long as we haven't left anything out DP.
Speaker 4: So when Israel hit Iran with the that wipe program
Speaker 4: and Iran came across the NSA program that we had there,
Speaker 4: I mean, what's it like when we find out that
Speaker 4: a big important program that we have had there for
Speaker 4: a long time gets exposed.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what. The guys in the watch floor
Speaker 3: were pissed. So this program is called Flame and it
Speaker 3: was like a multi tool you could call it, where
Speaker 3: it doesn't just do one thing. It's like a launch
Speaker 3: pad two that's clandestimly there that you can put a
Speaker 3: bunch of things inside of and then we'll do a
Speaker 3: ton of different functions. Right, And these different functions can
Speaker 3: do pretty much anything to a system. Offensively, defensively. They
Speaker 3: can manipulate to make things look real that aren't real. Like,
Speaker 3: it's incredible what I could do. If you're talking about
Speaker 3: the bureaucrats, they cared about the dollars because the programs
Speaker 3: like Flame are worth millions of dollars. Like I said,
Speaker 3: they weren't developed by people in the Remote Operation Center,
Speaker 3: which is where this came out of at NSA. These
Speaker 3: were developed by civilian companies that are hired for the
Speaker 3: specific purpose, like I need you to make me this
Speaker 3: thing that can do these things. And then you'll get
Speaker 3: multiple companies that are like, oh, I can do that
Speaker 3: and this other companies like I can do that too.
Speaker 3: Here's better, but I'll charge you three million dollars for that,
Speaker 3: you know, And this is how this game works, right, Well,
Speaker 3: we just dumped a bunch of money in this program,
Speaker 3: and this program is extremely expensive, and now it's gone.
Speaker 3: And the problem is if you take Flame apart and
Speaker 3: see how it's made, you can figure out how we
Speaker 3: might access other things with similar analogous methods, which means
Speaker 3: if we had other stuff like in Russia, for example,
Speaker 3: or in China or North Korea, all those are done too.
Speaker 3: So you're talking about like worldwide ramifications. And this was
Speaker 3: because Israel went in there and wanted to delete data. Again,
Speaker 3: this is this is the conflict between exploit versus neutralized.
Speaker 3: When wanted to exploit. Israel wanted to neutralize, which they
Speaker 3: frequently do. That's their frequent approach is to just destroy
Speaker 3: the thing. How much more value can you get if
Speaker 3: you exploit instead? I mean it's immeasurable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's not as if, you know, the different signals,
Speaker 2: intelligence apparati apparatus are checking in with each other to say, hey,
Speaker 2: we're getting ready to attack these guys. You got anything
Speaker 2: hanging out there that you don't want exposed?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And actually with stucks net, it's unique because there
Speaker 3: were five different countries involved with stucks net that were
Speaker 3: coordinating with each other about it, and they weren't the
Speaker 3: five BY partners, you know, it was it was the
Speaker 3: US was the five I partner in that partnership. And
Speaker 3: it was kind of like an interesting collection of people
Speaker 3: working together on this singular purpose, which was timed to
Speaker 3: happen right before the twenty fifteen nuclear agreement, so that way,
Speaker 3: if the nuclear agreement didn't work out, we had this
Speaker 3: covert operation that would destroy the nuclear program anyway. But
Speaker 3: it was discovered right Typically it doesn't happen like that,
Speaker 3: typic were the other countries, so it was Denmark, Netherlands, Israel,
Speaker 3: United States and Germany, which is interesting because the US
Speaker 3: and Germany were two of the countries that were part
Speaker 3: of the original P five countries that were negotiating with
Speaker 3: Israel on Earth with Iran on the twenty fifteen JCPOA, and.
Speaker 2: Germany has a history of helping Iran at times, training
Speaker 2: them in you know, in different things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the early nineties too. Yeah. Actually, all the
Speaker 3: the things that were destroyed, the parts of the centrifuges
Speaker 3: that were exploited by stuck Stent were Semens produced components.
Speaker 3: And how did we know how those Semens components work. Well,
Speaker 3: they're made in Germany, and the German government was able
Speaker 3: to obtain access to all that material, you know. But
Speaker 3: in the nineties they were training them on regular espionage,
Speaker 3: like human espionage, teach them how to use cameras, take
Speaker 3: clandestine photography, do surroualitsy detection routes. Russia was also training
Speaker 3: them too, but Germany actually gifted them a bunch of
Speaker 3: computers and cameras to do espionage and with the knowledge.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting because France also with Germany in this
Speaker 3: time period the early nineties, they knew that Iran was
Speaker 3: going to use this stuff to assassinate Iranians in Europe, right,
Speaker 3: Like Bond Station was being used as a platform for
Speaker 3: assassinations and Paris Station was being used for the same thing.
Speaker 3: But the agreement was as long as you don't kill Frenchmen,
Speaker 3: as long as you don't kill Germans, you can use
Speaker 3: those locations to do that stuff. And here's some cameras
Speaker 3: and computers to help you do it.
Speaker 2: Wow, Wow, Jesus, it's crazy.
Speaker 3: And again that's all in the intel reports, that's not
Speaker 3: in the media. So like that goes to the sourcing
Speaker 3: of like this is stuff people have never seen or
Speaker 3: heard of before probably or like that's not possible. They're
Speaker 3: not friends. Well guess what in the intelligence community, there's
Speaker 3: no friends. There's only interests, right right, Well, Jonathan, is
Speaker 3: a great book.
Speaker 2: We really appreciate you. Thanks for coming back.
Speaker 4: Got to questions actually on questions, Yeah from JJ Can
Speaker 4: mister Hackett share anything about the US funneling arms through
Speaker 4: the Iranians during the Civil war in Bosnia?
Speaker 3: That's super interesting. Actually, there's a whole section in the
Speaker 3: book about that, and some of it is public and
Speaker 3: some of it I have in there from intelligence reports
Speaker 3: and what the Iranians were doing. They were supporting the Bosniacs,
Speaker 3: which Bosniact with a K is the Muslim group that
Speaker 3: was being targeted by still bit On Melosovich and other
Speaker 3: genocidal leaders there and the regime at the time. Remember
Speaker 3: this was like late eighties, early nineties, when the regime
Speaker 3: was trying to help Muslims worldwide, like that was kind
Speaker 3: of their banner, like, let's help these oppressed, that was
Speaker 3: what they were doing. And they saw the Bosniacs as
Speaker 3: oppressed because they were They're being massacred, I mean like it.
Speaker 3: It was horrific, and so the regime went there and
Speaker 3: brought weapons there, trained them. They also taught the intelligence
Speaker 3: service of the Bosniaks how to do intelligence collection. And
Speaker 3: this is where the clash came between US helping Bosnias
Speaker 3: and Iran helping Bosniaks, because there was a group of
Speaker 3: them that we both were helping, and there was a
Speaker 3: group of them that Iran was helping that was harming us.
Speaker 3: And there was actually an ID factory that was discovered
Speaker 3: later on in the war that IF discovered, which is
Speaker 3: the international force there that was IDs to attack IF.
Speaker 3: Which is interesting because at the exact same time we
Speaker 3: were allowing the regime to provide weapons to people in
Speaker 3: Bosnia that were fighting against the Serbs. So there was
Speaker 3: this like overlaying of friend and enemy in the same space.
Speaker 3: Because similar to Isis, where everybody was against the serves
Speaker 3: what they were doing at the time, and some of
Speaker 3: them were against them in different ways, some of those
Speaker 3: ways overlapped. It wasn't clear cut like oh that's my enemy,
Speaker 3: that's my friend. Sometimes it doesn't work like that. Even
Speaker 3: in Iraq, Like again back when I was talking about ISIS.
Speaker 3: When I was there, we actually were careful not to
Speaker 3: strike targets where we knew IRGC people were meeting in
Speaker 3: Iraq because we knew that the sources they were working
Speaker 3: with were fighting against ISIS. So those are kind of
Speaker 3: like off limits places. We never sent them letters or
Speaker 3: anything and told them like, hey, guys, we're not going
Speaker 3: to touch you, but it was like an understood thing,
Speaker 3: like we're going to leave these people alone over here,
Speaker 3: because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and
Speaker 3: we care more about ISIS right now than we do
Speaker 3: about killing a couple of RGC guys that who knows
Speaker 3: what they're doing.
Speaker 4: We got a couple more from Dunk and Idaho. As
Speaker 4: far as I know, there have been ops on US
Speaker 4: soil sponsored directly by Iran, and there have been proxy
Speaker 4: group ops in a few other Western countries, but there
Speaker 4: haven't been proxy group ops on US soil. Is that correct?
Speaker 4: If so?
Speaker 3: Why so? This is an intelligence thing where we don't
Speaker 3: know the answer completely. And actually the FBI has come
Speaker 3: out with competing reports from their own organization at some
Speaker 3: times saying there's like two thousand Hesibla fighters in America
Speaker 3: ready to go at any time. Other reports coming out
Speaker 3: and saying no, the greatest threat in the United States
Speaker 3: is you know, other groups. I won't get into that.
Speaker 3: But then they say, but the hesible threats not that big,
Speaker 3: or they'll say, well, the connections here are tenuous. They're
Speaker 3: actually like relatives of hesbal of people that Hesbola could
Speaker 3: push a button to, like push on them emotionally and
Speaker 3: force them to do something. There's not a lot of
Speaker 3: consensus about exactly what is going on here. And actually
Speaker 3: I was reading a report recently about in the United
Speaker 3: States Iran and Hesbela, how many of them actually came
Speaker 3: across the border during the Biden administration, which is an
Speaker 3: interesting question. I saw one report that said it was like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, six hundred guys or something. That's a tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny percentage of the total people that came across. How
Speaker 3: do we even know it was six hundred? What were
Speaker 3: they doing? Are they doing money laundering? Are they doing
Speaker 3: drug stuff? Are they actually doing plots? Because a lot
Speaker 3: of times when you look at pre attack planning, it
Speaker 3: looks a lot like other types of attack or other
Speaker 3: types of planning. Surveillance, for example, if you don't know
Speaker 3: why they're doing the surveillance, it could look like pre
Speaker 3: attack surveillance. It could also look like surveillance, so you
Speaker 3: could go do an intelligence activity like a source meeting.
Speaker 3: It could also look like a drug deal, like surveillance
Speaker 3: for to find a location that's good for a drug deal.
Speaker 3: You don't really know until the thing actually happens, unless
Speaker 3: you've got recruitment of someone involved in that network, or
Speaker 3: you've got sigan or something else like that. So that's
Speaker 3: kind of a challenge where like with the FBI, for example,
Speaker 3: how are they without doing source operations or having it's
Speaker 3: very tough to know exactly what is the threat. Like
Speaker 3: we might be able to say, like hey, that guy
Speaker 3: I know he is a member of HESBLA. Okay, what
Speaker 3: else do you know? Well, it's hard to know, you know,
Speaker 3: So it's kind of an ambiguous answer to that. But
Speaker 3: it's important to kind of take it with a measured
Speaker 3: approach of like what exactly is this guy doing? That
Speaker 3: way you can ask the right questions and do the
Speaker 3: right intelligence collection to actually figure it out instead of
Speaker 3: just assuming like, oh, he's a drug dealer. Well, if
Speaker 3: we make the assumption that he's a drug dealer but
Speaker 3: he's actually a bad guy terrorist, we've made a bad assumption.
Speaker 3: Same vice versa. If we say like, oh, he's here
Speaker 3: to do terror attacks and we're ignoring all the drug
Speaker 3: dealing he's doing, that's another problem. Right, So we need
Speaker 3: to come at this question objectively, which I trust that
Speaker 3: counter intelligence FBI kind of intelligence is probably doing it
Speaker 3: really well. It has been doing it really well. But
Speaker 3: it's tough. It's really tough, not just in the United
Speaker 3: States but any country. Even when you have a lot
Speaker 3: more ability to do stuff, it's really hard to figure
Speaker 3: out what is that guy doing because you can't see
Speaker 3: inside their brain.
Speaker 4: One more from v how much or any of the
Speaker 4: operations that they have overseas have been self funded, and
Speaker 4: he wrote IRGC sexy car Watch fundraiser.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is they have a lot of money.
Speaker 3: They can put a lot of money at it. But
Speaker 3: what they typically do to fund the overseas stuff is
Speaker 3: use money that's not from Iran, so that means drug money,
Speaker 3: black market stuff, other criminal activity financing that generates income
Speaker 3: from those activities. Especially in Europe for example, a lot
Speaker 3: of illegal immigration fund things that they'll help do human
Speaker 3: trafficking and move people and get money from that, or
Speaker 3: they'll move drugs like Captagon out of Syria into the
Speaker 3: Gulf Arab countries and make a ton of money off that.
Speaker 3: A lot of that money is used to finance these
Speaker 3: activities because again it's really tough to move the money
Speaker 3: out of Iran physically, like take dollars out of Iran
Speaker 3: and bring them outside the country. You can do it,
Speaker 3: but you want to do it for what matters, And
Speaker 3: if an attack has a risk of being discovered, you
Speaker 3: don't want to use your dollars for that. You want
Speaker 3: to use your drug money for that, because that's something
Speaker 3: that you can stand to lose. You know.
Speaker 4: I have one more question about something you mentioned before,
Speaker 4: about your career specifically, when you mentioned you were in
Speaker 4: damn neck training, most people think of damn Neck as
Speaker 4: like we're sealed Team six is. Want to just clarify
Speaker 4: a little bit of what that, you know, I don't
Speaker 4: want people to be as so as your shield Team
Speaker 4: six in the comments and stuff.
Speaker 3: It's funny because people are upset that that you're calling
Speaker 3: me an operator the other day, even though that's the
Speaker 3: of my job. But yeah, it was. It was the
Speaker 3: counter intelligence human intelligence course, which is the Marine Corps
Speaker 3: Intelligence Plandestine Intelligence Activity Training pipeline. So we are a
Speaker 3: validated CIA training organization that CIA comes down there every
Speaker 3: six months to valuate our training, and we also issue
Speaker 3: a counter intelligence credential. So it's the only the Marine
Speaker 3: Corps is the only one that does this. The other
Speaker 3: DTY branches do not combine intelligence human intelligence, and they
Speaker 3: also don't train up to Category one intelligence collection, which
Speaker 3: is the highest level of intelligence collection that clandestine intelligence
Speaker 3: collection that exists. So it's kind of we chose that
Speaker 3: place because it's a good place to do it, obviously
Speaker 3: because the base has a lot of you know, got
Speaker 3: a good fence, and we also transform the area around it.
Speaker 3: The Damn Neck area, the Norfolk and Virginia Beach area
Speaker 3: into a training zone where it's it's a foreign country essentially,
Speaker 3: very similar to how the farm does it, and the
Speaker 3: guys have to go out there and operate as if
Speaker 3: they're in a foreign country and do other ops out
Speaker 3: in downtown Norfolk, you know, in the middle of the night,
Speaker 3: which is sometimes more dangerous than doing it in a
Speaker 3: foreign country.
Speaker 4: No more questions from Patreon, All set, All.
Speaker 2: Right, Hey Jonathan, thank you once again. Thanks for you know,
Speaker 2: thanks for the book, thanks for you know, taking the
Speaker 2: time to write that, and thanks for joining us tonight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to talk about it.
Speaker 3: I think it's super important.
Speaker 2: Topic and ever thank you for joining us and we
Speaker 2: will see you soon.
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