Are Iranian Sleeper Cells Already in the U.S.? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Those links are in the description, or if you're listening, it's in the show notes down below, so you can click it real quick and easy, and it helps us keep the lights on. So we appreciate it, and we appreciate you guys listening. Thanks a bunch. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics, a midweek episode. It's been busy around here, so might as well do an extra episode a week. We have Jack Murphy for our resident Irishman, so happy Saint Patrick's Day to everybody

who celebrates. Jonathan Hackett and Andy Milburn. Lot going on as usual. We just saw yes just like update like terms of news, we saw the Defense Ministry get smoked uh in Iran yesterday or last night, I guess they they confirmed it. We have a bunch of news actually that happened, and we didn't talk about this before him, but we just saw Joe Kent, the he's like head of CT resign and say because of the Iran war

and that Israel basically dog walked us in. I really wanted to talk about because I've seen it like popping up in the press and like actually talking to like regular people that are like a lot of people are worried about like a possible like Iranian sleeper cell attack or or hesbla sleeper cell attack, and I wanted to talk to the experts to see like what the actual like is it actually possible? Is there a real threat?

We've seen a couple three actually attacks, one in a synagogue that was a Lebanese person who's whose family died.

He rammed into the synagogue and killed a few people. We also saw the tech the Austin shooter and the uh what was what for? Was he at what? There's another guy too that shot up a bunch of people and then the cadets stabbed.

want to do stuff inside this country? And they have people here, they have ideas, they have goals that they want to achieve. But there's a missing ingredient for any threat, and that is capability. So they could have intent all day long, they can dream about these big plans, but if they don't have the capability to do it, it's very low threat, right. So that's what we're always looking for from the exploitation side and the neutralization side as

far as counter intelligence is concerned. That's what the FBI is going to be looking at right now, is Okay, they have the intent. Not much we can do about that. You can't kill an idea, but we can reduce capability on their side, or we can look at the things they might be interested in and get ahead of them so that when they go try to use those capabilities they don't work out the way they expected them to. This is kind of a basic level to look at

this picture. When we talk about sleeper cells, it's important to find what does that mean, because, like you mentioned d, there might be an inspired lone wolf that just doesn't attack.

That's not a sleeper cell. Sleeper cell, but definitily is a much deeper, long term thing where the person was sent there way ahead of time with a very simple mission statement, and they remain quiet and integrated into the community, working in that community like a normal person for a long time until they receive some form of activation to do whatever it is the task was that they were sent there to do. That means that years, many years in some cases, that they have to be doing this.

The mission has to be very simple because things will change over time, and if you give them too detailed of a mission, that mission might not even exist, that capability might not exist in the future when they're activated. And that's important to think about now because this is kind of a black Swan situation where the way the US and Israel are attacking Iran, that's very difficult to

predict when and how that would have happened. It could have just been something like if there is a war in Iran, do x It might be something this simple, and the individual that is a sleeper would not be sent there alone. They wouldn't know the others in the network, but they would not be alone. And this means there's compartmentalization that has to happen, and there has to be a handle or overhead that's actually helping to coordinate the

activities of these individuals. So that introduces another layer of complexity. And we have seen how Iran has done things in Unit States in the past, and also compared to other countries, it's very different than how they operate in the United States. I can get into official and non official activities they've done, especially using business cover for commercial activity, cover what they're doing in the United States, but on the whole They've

been pretty amateur in the United States. And it's not because they just suck. It's because their capability level, like I mentioned earlier, is low for a variety of reasons, not least of which is it's difficult for a handler to get into the United States, which means they typically have to communicate over distance through phones or other electronic means, or through non non personal communications like leaving notes somewhere or something like this. That's a limitation on their capability.

It's a limitation on what they can actually achieve when they're here. The other problem is money. They're not part of the swift banking system they have in Bens in

twenty eighteen, so they either have to use it a huala or some kind of other activity to conceal the origin of the money they're using to pay for these activities. There is an example on in twenty eleven where it was around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They were trying to pay to a cartel member to give a weapon to a gentleman in Texas who was supposed to go assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, d C. The

cartel member said Hey, I'm a cartel guy. I'm going to go tell the DEA that this is going on because I don't want to be involved in your own And that's actually how the US found out about that, which is kind of interesting, and that was a very expensive operation that just evaporated because the capability was so low. I'll stop there at that kind of functional level and we can talk more about it. But that's how I would kind of like set the frame around this discussion.

So when you see a bunch of strikes like that happening, it lends itself to the safe assumption that there is an intelligent entity behind this. It's not lone wolves, it's not you know, it's not just dissident groups. I mean, dissident groups don't come out of nowhere with a capability like that. It takes them time to evolve and find their way with those things. So that's one interesting example

to look at. The other I was mentioned into John before the show was the and we get into a little bit in detail, but the book Burnbomb Destroy about the German sleeper cells that were here during World War One conducting acts of sabotage, also quite amateurish, but it evolved over time, and they used incendiary devices, probably not that different than the stuff that the cells in Russia used, you know, one hundred years later to destroy ships, you know,

ships that were on their way to Europe. And when it really got effective again this question of capability was when you're using sleepers, you're using a surrogate force or something of this nature. I've had a CIA officer describe it to me because he tried to he did do

this in Afghanistan. He's like, imagine trying to play pool and you're sitting on top of overturned trash can ten feet away from the pool table, and you got like three queues that are like duct taped together, and you're like trying to like hit the hit the ball and knock the eight ball in the corner pocket. He's like, that's kind of what you're trying to do. The further away from it you are, the harder it becomes to

control those operations. With the German case, you know, they became effective once they got a no shit German intelligence officer into the country to start coordinating and running some of that stuff. And then that brings us to more current situation with Iran and are their sleeper cells in the United States Just a couple of things to tag on to what John already illuminated there. There's one case back in the nineteen nineties. I just had to look it up to get the name right. It was Captain

Will Rogers three. The skipper of the USS Vincennes in San Diego, there was a bomb found in his van, and to this day, I don't think it's ever been fully explained what that was about. There's thoughts in the intelligence community or there has been over the years that that was an Iranian plot. But the Iranians also whack people globally. I mean, they're not like cautious about that there is an Iran and op And I'm just saying in Europe that the bomb didn't go off, but when

they deconstructed it, it was a very advanced bomb. It shocked a lot of people in the security community in Europe. So the Iranians don't have a lot of hesitation with this sort of stuff. But now, you know, are these cells in the United States? And I think I think we have some pretty good proof that they aren't, that those cells just don't exist. After the Solemani strike, you

would have expected something to have cooked off, And now we're, you know, bombing the hell out of Iran and fixing the due potentially a ground invasion. I mean, if the Iranians are not activating those cells now, then explain to me what the trigger is, because they're already in an existential crisis right now. I mean, they're not going to topple easily. But if not now, then when that's that would be my question, And I think that's sort of the counterfactual. You could look at this to try to

determine if these cells even exist. I would say they probably don't. However, there are people in this country. They could be lone wolves, they could be you know, support agents, people who are sympathetic towards the Iranian regime who take action on their own or maybe at direction from you know, back back in Iran. One thing that I was told about just yesterday is a bunch of suspicious packages have been showing up at McDill Air Force Base, directed towards

Sentcom Central Command. The FBI is investigating this, they're involved. I have not heard that an actual bomb has turned up yet, but I mean this could even just be a psychological operation to send packages that look like bombs to just you know, get people on the base, you know, cautious or afraid. So we'll see what happens with that. I don't know what's uh, John, is anything I'm missing here that you'd like to elaborate on.

The four types of targets are persons, organizations, installations, and then people generally, and there's a specific type of attack that targets each one of these. So, for example, attacks against persons are typically espionage related, attacks against organizations are subversion related. Then against installations it's sabotage. Then against people or other things to get terrorism as that kind of

catch all at the end. But when we're trying to protect against these things to produce that capability I was talking about, you know, like you mentioned, there might be a low moul or even a person in contact with some goods forced guy overseas. They could have that intent all day long. But if we can actually go after the persons, organizations, and installations to defend those those categories,

we can more precisely protect them. So even if the adversary had some really good intent and maybe even a little bit of capability, the target suddenly becomes too hard to strike and they're going to have to flow around it and go somewhere else. So this is kind of the thing we look at when we're trying to preemptively neutralize these activities is evaluating our own installations, like McDill

Air Force Base, for example. We'd be thinking about how the vehicles get in on the base, how to packages go around here, like where are the cameras? All these things to get these things already ahead of time. So if something like this comes up, the person approaching their vehicle already understands how to evaluate their vehicle before getting into it due to heightened threat environment situations for example.

So these are the things to keep in the back of the mind as a person evaluating what are these actual threats and what is the actual capability. And I'll mention the Bojinka plot, which was a pre al Qaeda type plot in the nineteen nineties that college Sai Muhammad and some others were planning to bring a bunch of aircraft and crash them into buildings, which sounds a lot

like September eleventh, but this was before September eleventh. The reason they weren't able to do that they had a really good plan, excellent ideas, and a lot of intent, that they had almost no capability to do it. It wasn't until later on that they actually shifted their operations to be able to have the capability years later in two thousand and one, to actually execute such a threat

with the capability required to do it. And I only highlight that because the intent didn't change the entire time. What did change was their ability and the opportunity to do that attack.

League baseball and this sort of stuff. And he was like, yeah, I have like this trunk of like rusty military gear in my basement if you guys want to come get it, Like,

I don't give a fuck. And I think this is a problem too with that a country like a Ran would have you send sleepers to the United States when they're here for a prolonged period of time building their cover and building their capabilities, unless they are the most hardcore ideological dude, they are going to start finding a woman, They're gonna get a job, they're gonna have kids, the kids are gonna get into school, and then when that

activation code finally comes thirty years later, they're like, do I really want to like screw up my whole life here and end up in a supermax for the rest of my rest of my days because this authoritarian regime that doesn't give a shit about me wants me to go and kill a bunch of innocent people. So I think that's another dynamic that comes into play when you're trying to use sleeper agents.

Those diplomats are not allowed to return back to Pyongyang ever, they have to rotate around the embassies in Northwest Africa because the government au oritarian government is worried about the exposure they've had to things like alcohol and parties and restaurants and freedom even in Northwest Africa, to the extent that they will not allow them to return back to rotate back to the mainland.

for CIA.

That's not the way that the Ranians operate. They can't afford to operate that way, as you know, as Jack pointed out, what put a cell into the United States and with the instructions to act if a war comes, you know, if war occurs. I mean, neither cou'sforce nor

has BOLLA has that kind of resources. Although and that's just not that modus operati, right, I mean, they plan for specific operations, and they insert people for those operations, but they don't send people to the United States for two or three decades and have them integrate in the American society, apply for green cards and residents. All of this just on the contingency that something might happen. And I think, you know, although it's say it, there's another

factor to this, right or the gain. I mean, although this is a super sexy topic that's likely to get everyone's attention, if you are planning this from an Iranian perspective, domestic attacks within the United States are actually a relatively hard target. You've got plenty of softer targets spread out across not just Middle East, but globally. US interests, overseas,

diplomatic missions, military bases as we've seen. You know, even military bases that should be hardened in the Middle East are still subject to attack from from the Uranians, where they can cause casualties without all the planning and everything else involved in putting action cells within within the US. So you know, i'd say that there's there's just no chart, I mean, very little chance of a Hollywood sleeper cell

type scenario. And what we've seen historically a small targeted networks you know, that are that are that are put in for a specific mission, and we've kind of the

other thing is I think we kind of conflated. And I like to give your thoughts on this, John Iranian direct Granian action, which would be Kup's force, right, which is the Forron six Stone operations, arm I gcs except and and proxies like Hesbala Hosbala does have and overseas you know, a section that's focused on overseas operations, and I forget what it's called. It's like the i JO

or something. John, You'll probably probably know that Islamic organization. Yeah, but they but as far as I mean, there was an attempt to attack on the Saudi ambassador right back in twenty eleven. But aside from that, we've seen mainly you know, fundraising, logistics, procurement, that's kind of things that they focus on mostly, and and and integration with criminal networks in the Western hemisphere. That's a great point, actually

seems to me. I'm sorry, it just seems to make just go ahead, Jim.

either Druze or Shia descendants from Lebanese diaspora. And Hesbola's main source of money, even though the regime pays them a lot of money, their main source of money is drug sales, and a lot of those drugs are from South America, especially cocaine being sold in Africa, and Dakar, Senegal is the main entry point into all the entire continent of Africa from Latin America, which is a Hesbola

controlled throughway. And actually in Dakar, Senegal, there's a big Hesbula problem, and there's absolute Iranian embassy right down the

street from the Hesbela house that they live in. Our team house was across the street from where the Hesbola house was when I was there, and it's a very interesting little microcosm of what they're trying to do to fund themselves, and part of the reason they have this Islamic Jihad organization, even though the name of it sounds like an ideological thing, is actually more of a force protection asset to protect the money and drugs moving back

and forth between these nodes, to make sure that people aren't going to steal it or do something to it so they can bring it to the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a huge purchaser of these drugs, so was Syria. We had a thing in Lebanon when I was there where we had an aircraft that was a Saudi prince's aircraft that is full of ecstasy pills that has bulahead manufactured, and this disc prince was selling them and we found it on his aircraft even though it was diplated or dipnoted.

And these drug networks require a lot of strong arm muscle, including these overseas operatives who may be trained to protect the stuff, but could also be activated and turned to do other things like we were talking about earlier. They could do sabotage, they could do subversion, they could conduct terrorism if they need to, especially because they have these networks that can already move in between in and out of between these different countries, especially into Latin America.

problems on its hands in in Lebanon itself. You know, I just again, it just seems to me are far fetched, but but attention grabbing topic, that is, that has surfaced without any foundation and uh in in uh in in

in fact, right, I'm not I'm not dismissing the risk, and of course it's always a risk, but minimal compared to its real risks facing us, right like the collapse of the global economy and uh and and and continued attacks on on U S forces and interests and related interest overseas.

first choice of MEW. It's a four deployed amphibious landing force, but it's very small. You'll hear a lot of talk about two thousand marines, but actually those who go ashore it's pretty near a twelve hundred, which is a relatively very small So, you know, I think if they do go ashore, it's going to be very quick. They're going

to hit specific targets, the raids, and then withdraw. They're not going to invade Iran, which is what I've seen, you know, And that's the problem, right you're here talk about ground force and people don't understand the nuances. So there's certainly the general public. So marine expedition units I mentioned about two thousand marines, amphibious ships typically three or five.

They have helicopters, tilt rotor aircraft, limited aviation support, and it's primarily for raids crisis for US sponse Straits of Horror moves, potentially targeted raids within the Straits of Horror moves the islands there because because as we've seen, you know, you can't there's a couple of problems with the air campaign, and I mean there are certain things that you that as we've we've found out, hard to destroy, locate and destroy,

missile launchers being one of them, drones, faster tag boats can be hidden, coastal radar and mines. You know, all these things can be can be moved around quite easily. And although we've seen very optimistic rejections about what we've destroyed, the real truth is, as anyone who's dealt with battle damage assessment knows, is that once you get past kind of like an estimate of fifty percent pass part fifty estimate that you destroy the enemy's capability, it's really difficult

to be precise about it. And the point here is, at what point do we say the Strait of hor Moose is open for traffic? Right, because unless we're really sure we've eliminated the risk, Well, how are you sure you eliminated the risk unless you put someone ashore to do that kind of assessment, to conduct rates, to destroy UH targeted operations, to destroy enemy infrastructure, and then and then report it. So you know, I so I mentioned,

I mentioned missile launchers. There's on on these islands. There's there's also potential for underground storage that of of missiles and other weapons systems. Another another factor disrupting battle damage assessment and the Gulf is undoubtedly the Ringians used decoys and camouflage just the way that you know we would and the way that Ukrainians have have continue to do in that conflict. So what value do they bring? Okay,

why would we land them? Spell clear tunnel complexes, you aside from the missile launches, destroy radar systems, eliminate drone launch sites and confirmed targets and neutralize those are all things. I know we're going to talk about separately the enriched uranium problem. But if we're just talking about kind of conventional targeting for raids in the Gulf, that's that's more or less what we're talking about. And there's a series

of violence. John, I'm going to butcher the names, but there's ab Abu Musa right, the one right at the entrance to the strait. I think if we were, you know, normally, we'd have to point these out on a map, but we haven't got that far far technology yet. And then there's like the it's spelled t u n B Tunb, a couple of islands over that which are directly overlooking the shipping lanes right and Kesherm Island, which is near

Bandura bas which is major of Courserinean support. And we know that at least open source intelligence suggests that that's been supporting drones drone attacks. So any of those islands could be the target for raids. But of course you put twelve hundred marines are sure it's not quite as simple as that. You're going it's a major, major operation. You're going to have to have all kinds of support for that, and of course you elevate the risk it's huge.

Oh hey, I mentioned I forgot carg Island, which is our favorite topic. Right, it's primary arounds, primary oil export terminal critical to each economy. As we've heard some back and forth about whether we're going after the oil terminals on that island or whether we want to preserve them, and perhaps a difference of opinion there with the Israelis that we can talk about. So you know, a rate of seizure of car could I could disrupt further Iranian

oil oil exports of that. Indeed, that's one of our our objectives. But also again conduct battle damage assessment, which which as I've said, is a is a significant problem. So when you step back, so the MEW moving towards the Middle East, all it does is represents it more options, right I doubt I don't know I'm speculating. I doubt that they're being moved there with a specific mission in mind.

There will probably be a series of contingencies, and probably the decision hasn't been made whether or not to land them. And by the way, you know the last thing I'm saying, this is a mew A Marine Expeditionory unit. I explained how small it is. Arguably you get more out of it while it's at sea, right, it has kind of an operational impact then, because you could land it anyway,

you keep the NB casting. Once you've landed it, it becomes very tactical and you elevate your risk, right because now you've sucked into that one location.

per day. Roughly, there were eleven Iranian vessels in Persian Gulf in the past couple of weeks that were able to transit out and bring oil to China, which is why they're actually selling more oil right now than they were before the conflict started. And the only vessel that has actually gone out and exited the straits with oil was yesterday. It was a Pakistani flag vessel that had agreed with the Iranian Foreign Ministry to allow to transit

through for various political reasons. And there were two Indian vessels that are allowed to move back to repatriate some Iranian bodies from the Sri Lanka coastline that were bombed by the submarine a few days ago. So if we're looking at that, it's down down below single digit percentages of transits through there. It's absolutely not secured. In no

reality is it safe to transit through there. And the other challenge is maybe from a military perspective, it's physically safe, but if you're an insurance company that's ensuring a Marek ship with three hundred million dollars worth of oil on it, you may be very hesitant to ensure that ship. And so this is another like political external factor that the

military can't really control. It's going to have to be at the political level that this problem is solved, or else these vessels won't feel safe enough and the insurance companies won't feel safe enough to ensure those vessels even

if it is physically safe to pass through. So that's another step that has to occur, as far as messaging from the US side and from the Israeli side to tell the world that hey, it is actually safe, or the US can absorb some of that risk by promising those insurance companies that they'll almost subsidize that insurance, kind of like the federal deposit insurance we have for deposits and banks, which is something that has been discussed but

isn't fully in place yet. And then on the MEW portion of it, you mentioned, it's this small, versatile entity, and it's actually the smallest of a certain type of marine task organization called a Marine Air Ground Task Force, which is something unique to the Marine Corps. For listeners who don't know this, this task force is very scalable.

From that MEW size, which is roughly twenty two hundred total people including logistics and other support and command element, it can move up to a brigade size element and it can move up to a force size element. These are kind of like increasing scale echelon for what a

command might need. And by comparison, during the two thousand and three invasion of Iraq, there were mews that were there, but they were part of larger, much larger entities doing a ground force invasion of Iraq, which is arguably a far less complex invasion than the terrain facing the ground forces in Iran, which would require many, many more units of a much higher scale to actually traverse and secure those high terrain features to safely move into the country

from a conventional ground force invasion perspective, So when looking at this MEW, people are thinking about boots in the ground, probably of some kind of conventional combat force, and it's important to be hesitant there in question, well, how much would that MEW actually achieve and would it even be safe for it to go aground with the small size it has, because that's not what the MEW is for alone.

As Andy mentioned that MEW is to do things amphibiously from sea ship to shore and then back to ship. That's really what it's supposed to be for. That could be seizing a beach, holding a beach securing a location for follow on forces to flow through things like this. They're not supposed to be their long term and they're not supposed to be the main combat element. That's what things like the eighty second Airborne and Marine Divisions are for.

We have a great map up here. We can see straits of war moves.

launchers and drones, small boats, all these things that are could significantly remain a threat are easy to disperse and conceal.

So it doesn't matter what you have. So so these press conferences where we are trotting out all the things that we have done don't really answer the mail the real question is what does Iran have left and that that arguably could be what Marines Ashore could do, although personally I think I would just for a number I mean, I would select different special operations forces to do that. If you if you're concerned as BDA and two thousand

marines one view once, once you committed them. As I made the point earlier, you committed them, right, it's not something that I mean, yes, you backload them on ships, but it's not as though you can hop all around the straits and whole moves using them again and again.

things and all that. And even that when we were we had the ability to get inside the night area and actually measured the BDA, we had a very hard time to get accurate BDA on the ground where we actually were because you have human intelligence that's not always accurate. You have signals intelligence that only gives you a piece of the picture. When you look at the physical infrastructure,

that doesn't actually tell you about capability. It just tells you about the building, right, And if there's bodies in there, we don't know which bodies. You have sources at the hospital trying to tell you who they were, but you still don't know. And that's when you're actually physically there. And we don't have that scale of deployment in Iran,

which on a much larger scale of destruction already. That's going to require precise bda to actually measure did we hit the right things with the right equipment and with the right follow on effects.

know what's in there. And that's not human sources, because even the sources might not know because they're not digging in the soil. They might be just guessing and saying, well, it looks like this was destroyed, so I guess that's probably what this is. You would actually need to go there and measure with some technical equipment to figure out what amount of material remains underground, and the only way

to do that is to obviously dig underground. It's a very challenging thing to do because these facilities were very deep underground in the first place. If you've seen some of the strikes that we did that were the penetrators that went that, they basically are very heavy. They hit the ground, go underground before they explode, this little pinpoint hole in the ground before they go in, and they

do it with a bunker buster explosion deep underground. You have no way to measure what the efficacy of that was, or even if that was the right location in that complex where you should be hitting it, because nobody's got a flag there saying the uranium is here, even if at the facility they might have moved it to a

different wing. There might be other tunnels. We can do a lot of measurement in signature intelligence or amazing to see what soil was moved where, when, how much soil was removed, So we can estimate how large the tunnels are based on what the amount of material that's been removed is, but that doesn't tell you what the configuration of the tunnel is and all these other things. There could be some side room that we never knew existed. So there's a lot of variables and difficulties on top

of this. Even if you had a good human network in the country, it's a kind of a black box without actually physically being there with the tools you need to measure this material.

enriched uranium itself, right, you see that speculation. I mean, one of the core problems is aside from the fact that as we talked about, damaged facilities doesn't necessarily mean that what we see from damaged facilities doesn't necessarily give us an accurate picture, and trying to track where that material is, what condition it's in, whether it has been moved, whether it can be moved that short notice, all those things are questions that are going to be very tough

to answer if indeed that becomes the same mission.

contained in a pretty obvious structural container. But once you start putting it in the centrifuge cascades, which one uses the specialized cascade system of centrifugees because they're not allowed to get the larger centrifuges that the nuclear powered countries have, so you basically have these very long lines of centrifuges, all produced by the German company Siemens. That's another thing to talk about how they got there. Anyways, they're there.

They've got these things all linked together, and these very long, almost like tubes of many centrifuges spinning at different speeds to try to separate and enrich the uranium in a particular facility like natons for example. They maybe thousands of these centrifuges and they're pretty good. They're bigger than my head per centrifuge, right, So, I mean, if you want to go get these things out, you're not talking about a guy going in with a backpack and just putting

the uranium in his backpack and walking out. You're talking about a very long tailed logistical requirement to support just the movement. Not talking about the safety or these other things, but just the actual logistics of getting this stuff out. How many people would you need, what kind of equipment

would you need? There might even be a thought going on in the decision making process about what if we just physically destroy enough so that nobody can dig down there and get the stuff, Because that might actually be a better solution than going over there and actually digging

with heavy machinery to get this out. And I'm sure this kind of discussion is going on right now with the National Security Council, and I'm sure Marco Ruby is talking to himself in the different positions that he holds to try to figure out how to advise himself to tell the President about how to get this uranium out.

it kicks into high gear. Or in the nine teen eighties when Gadaffi had an underground chemical weapons facility in Tarhuna and Jaysock was tasked with a mission or planning a mission to go in and destroy it. And interestingly, the way it was planned was that Marine Corps hovercraft would come up over the coast of Libya, come as far as inland as they could. Then they would offload

trucks with the Jaysok guys on it. They would then drive to Tarhuna using industrial drilling equipment drilled down from the surface into the facility and then in basically cement mixer trucks pour an explosive slurry down into the facility and detonate it. So it was a pretty crazy plan. I guess it's for the best that it never had to be executed. That situation was resolved diplomatically and Gadaffi

shut that facility down. But that was sort of the beginning of Jaysock sort of looking at this problem set, and it's evolved over the years. It's been called the deep Underground Mission or the hardened deeply buried target mission, and over the years that has evolved into essentially, you know, Jasok going in to conduct WMD sabotage to like just go in and destroy those facilities, and it could be like chemical weapons vats, it could be physile material, whatever the case may be.

And they've done this and I mean all the way up until yeah, some other stuff I won't even get into right now. But the cbrnpeck to the radiological material aspect of it makes this mission that much more dangerous, especially if you're going into targets that have already been hit with air strikes. You don't know like have those vats been cracked open? Did they topple over? Is this stuff already in the ground. So it's it's a very technically and logistically complicated operation to pull off.

a mission assigned to the marine expeditionary unit. But it's never been done before, right, It's not something specifically that marine strainfall for that period of time. And you can imagine, I mean, so you so you've got all that, You've got all that inner problems right inside that court, and all the problems that you're going to have to deal with locating the material, verifying it, securing it, either destroying

it or removing it. And then you've got the you've got the external security problem, which is immensely complex too and makes you all of which makes you hugely vulnerable.

Bin Laden raid or something like that. Actually, what I would look to is there was an operation in the early years of the War on Terror in the early two thousands, so CALM was somewhat involved, but mostly it was DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, went to a island in Uzbekistan where the Soviets had a chemical weapons facility back in the day, and there was tons and

tons of anthracs in the ground. If terrorists wanted, they could just go to this island and dig anthrax out of the ground and they'd have their sample ready to go. So DITTRA goes in there with all their subcontractors and raytheon contractors and everyone else, and they destroyed that material. They dug it up out of the ground and destroyed the I think like sixty tons of anthracs it came out to. Now, the difference, of course, is this was

a permissive environment. This was done with the cooperation of the government of uzbeka Stan. You know, we want to go in and destroy these WMDs and keep the world safe and use Beckastan's like okay, bring your boys in, we do this. It wasn't an armed military operation, but what we're talking about in Iran would have more in common with what I just described than with like a Maduro raid.

of complexity, new opportunities for attack. Because let's say you do it like three times, Well, the adversary is going to measure how you did those three times and figure out all kinds of ways to exploit the next nine times. You have to do this because you're going to have to keep repeating the same TTPs every time. And if you reveal your clandestine methodologies in that first couple of goes, you can't use them anymore in the same way that you did previously.

even that you know, President Trump seems to desire. I don't think it gets us closer to his own stated objective here.

that there's so much complexity in there. And it only takes one crash at a fuel bladder in a desert to change the whole thing in a direction that you didn't expect and that people just will not accept.

for X period of time. Then these are the conditions that need to exist, and we are one week, two weeks away from those conditions, right, that's kind of the conversation that should take place. But Boss, if you want to destroy the nuclear facilities and set them back six months, one year, two years, then we need to extend the campaign by X number of time. And finally, if you want to regime change, we just can't get that from here,

not within their campaign. Hopefully these conversations are taking place.

has about the way it ages war. We owe to the American public, normally via their elected representatives, and explanation of why we're at war and what the objectives are because everyone's aware of the cast or perhaps they're not at this stage, which is a good point that I'll finish on. Really, and you know, I'm not being a hand ringer here, but I don't think anyone has a

clear picture of the overall cost of this war. I'm not talking about the billions a day that we're spending, and I'm talking about the effects on the global economy, the effect on our alliance networks, alliances. Sorry, that was a poorly worded phrase.

individual that's closely affiliated with Amah Najad? If everyone remembers this colorful individual from the presidency that caused the Green Revolution two thousand and nine, So he just opened up thirty three new luxury apartments in London using investment money that he got from Iran, which is fascinating because they're not part of the international banking system, they're not part of the Swift banking system, and the money was taken

from a regime affiliated account, right So that's all opening up. But that's not even the biggest dollar amount because right now Mochtaba, the potentially alive or dead leader of Iran, has a one hundred million dollar real estate investment in London as well. That was just talked about a few weeks ago that the British government approved this purchase. It's just fascinating thing because people think, like, aren't they heavily sanctioned, aren't they not part of the banking system? How are

they getting this money? The thing is, you know, the sanctions have certain levels of efficacy. There studies done that say that it's actually not as effective as you think, and they're not really effective against an authoritarian state because

that authoritarian state controls the market. So it's the regular people that can't access the banking system and then these the small group of elites, can get outside of it and go do things outside of the country like we see right now, and a great example of that, Andy and I think we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago with how are they selling oil? And what they're doing is they have these banks all over the world. Bank Melli is an Iranian owned bank. It's

a state owned bank. Bank Melli has a branch in Hong Kong and it has a branch in London. It's got a branch in Hamburg, in Paris, and these banks are in those countries. They can actually do business in those countries. So if you sell your oil in China for three hundred million dollars per vessel, you take that three hundred million dollars. You don't send it back to Iran. You bring it over to Bank Melly in Hong Kong and then wire it to London and then go open

up your real estate business in Seville Row right. And this is what's going on. It's very interesting because most about for example, the new Supreme Leader, he's never worked, he's never earned a paycheck, and he has one hundred million dollars that he can use to open up businesses in real estate in London. And this is just very important for listeners to understand about exactly when we talk about the regime. They're terrible to their own people. But

they're also highly corrupt. And this corruption is the thing that you can see outside the country. You know, Canada, for example, a few years ago, the former Central Bank director of Iran fled to Canada with three point seven billion dollars in assets. You don't bring that in a suitcase to Canada. That's wired to Canada. And the government of Canada proves that. We actually have a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who's the son of masume Ebtycar.

And if you remember during the hostage crisis, there was a woman that was the speaker in English during the hostage crisis inside the US embassy in Tehran that was the spokesperson for the new colonel of the regime. Her son is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. How is that possible? Right, Zaref former foreign minister went to Ohio State University. Right. The more you look at this, the more you realize that these elites, they just escape

all of our restrictions. And this is why there's such a problem right now to disconnect between the people in Iran and these elites. No matter what you do, they're going to find a way to snake around it because it's not a democracy. You know, they can be as corrupt as they want and the people can't do anything about it because first of all, they don't have any guns.

So we used to operate. And this ties in with Okinawa too, because this is the liberty policy in Okinawa that two marines. It used to be the buddy program, right, But then we discovered of the course of oh, I don't know, maybe four decades, that where one marine gets drunk, the others likely also to get drunks. So the policy became they had to travel in a troika. But guess what we found that the same.

getting a chemical engineering degree, but they're a Chinese. That's who the MSS will go after because they know they have the very like they can measure that loyalty, and it's they don't have to develop it as much as we would have to develop, for example, recruiting an Egyptian guy to work for US in Egypt.

a Chinese intelligence nexus. But I've heard enough stories like this over the years you start to wonder, like is it really about making money or is it this guy just acting as a chaos agent, like selling ghost guns to Latino and African American gangs in New York City In this case, all.

a flex just show us one one. No, all right, we'll do that after.

The Most Dangerous Man. I read it. It's really good. Uh yeah, all those links are in the descriptions. Support to show, Patreon dot com, slash the Teamhouse. You get both eyes On and Teamhouse episodes AD free and early and there's always a pleasure. Guys.

I took that and I took a century old short story, The Most dangerous game and modernized it. And the product is this book, which I think will feel temporary and resonate with audiences today.