Inside Iran's Covert Operations | Jon Hackett | Ep. 368

Iran's Shadow Weapons. I'm used to being able to just hold it up in the cameras here Iran Shadow. So welcome back, Jonathan. We really appreciate it.

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for very specific outcomes. After that, I realized I was kind of getting too deep into the skiff sometimes a skiff within a skiff, and I needed to get outside, and so I moved into the kind of intelligence human intelligence world and went to training for that in Damn Neck, Virginia, and went over immediately to Afghanistan after that for over a year doing human first, and then as the mission change, we moved into CI a lot more and then came back and I went right over to Marsac twenty thirteen

and I was there for five years because we were only allowed to stay for five years, so I stayed for it was four months or four years, eleven months, and I think it was like twenty nine days that I was there, And then had to go, so I went over to Dia and I did three years there

at the US Embassy in Jordan. I'm on Jordan, where I worked on not only Jordan issues in the overt capacity, but we also worked on a lot of other clandestine things going on around the region, most importantly was Syria, because Syria doesn't have a US embassy in it, so there were a lot of the Syria activities we had to handle from Jordan and from Turkey also in some other places, so I had some things to do with that.

And then after that ended, I went to go be an instructor in dan Nek, teaching the Marine Corps how to do special activities on the counterintelligence human intelligence side, all the way up from starting from like very basic, you know, debriefing things, through interrogations, through handling, through surveils, detection routes, all the way up to principal Asian operations where the students do run full phase tonight area activities and get certified on that and become kind of children's

human intelligence specialists for the Marine Corps. And then I retired and just started up as an unemployed student at Yale Law School now where I'm just getting inundated with stuff to read, so I took a little break to come talk to you guys.

from ISIS. This is after all the masacers going on all that stuff, and I was on a Special Operations Task Force eighty one out there, and our job was to do in part work with the tribes in Syria Eastern Syria and the Kurds in Northeastyria and other groups in Western Iraq to start building this kind of ring around Mosul, which was the heart of ISIS or dish

in Western Iraq and actually Iraq generally. And we were doing that because the plan was for the counter terrorism forces, which was the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, they would come in later and actually retake Moscil with conventional strike gigantic operation. He was the eighty second airborne came in there. He was a huge thing. That was after we left. So my mission there was to prepare the environment by doing air strikes or controlling air strikes, running really intense human

source network. I had, For example, I had one principal agent. A principle agient is basically a source that works for you, that has a subsource network under him doing things for you. So basically there's a level of separation between you and the actual people doing the thing, and that's for safety reasons. That's also to protect the operational security of the mission

and things. And we had a very intense network like that throughout Western Iraq, and one of my principal agents had fifty two sub sources working for me, which is a lot to keep track of, especially during combat operations. A lot of validation going on to make sure that what those people were saying was true and all that. And at the same time, that particular task force that I was on hadn't done any human triggered strikes yet.

And the human triggered strike is when basically you have a human being sitting across the street is typically how it works watching a building saying, hey, that building has got one bad guy in it or eighty bad guys

in it. These are their names. We go and monitor that facility for up to eight hours, because that's the requirement at the time that we had to have eight hours of what do you call soak on the target before we could strike it, to make sure women and children don't come in are out, so that we understand the risk profile of the strike. And I'd have one of my subsources sitting across the street and he'd be

giving me information. I'd be passing information along. I would get B fifty two s or F eighteen's up in the sky, and whenever the moment was right, I'd be the one coordinating that bomb hitting that building, and I would hear it right through the phone because my source would be watching it happen. And the interesting thing is to make sure the asset validation was going correctly. We would never tell them that we were planning to strike.

We always had to kind of string them along, so they weren't quite sure what was about to happen or when was it going to happen. You've got kind of an idea, especially after they see their first one, they know this will probably happen, but they're always shocked in surprise the moment that bombs drop on the building. And one that stands out to me was Abu Omar al Shashani, who was the equivalent of like the Minister of Defense

for ISIS. All of ISIS, and we have been tracking some lower level guys, especially my source network, have been monitoring some like finance guys and some other things. And

we're doing some smaller strikes, you know, killing twenty people thirty people at a time. And we got this new piece of technology called Gorgon Stare. Gorgon Stare is like it's a series of pieces of equipment that are able to monitor almost everything happening based on a single target. And what I mean by that is, let's say you have a funeral for one of the bad guys we killed. Well, isis the way they do their funerals, especially during Ramadan.

They don't bring the women and children. It's only the fighters, you know, like the guys that were there that knew him. So what you can do is start tracking all those individuals at that funeral, and when they go home, you can turn Gorgon Stare on and it will monitor each of those individuals where they go and on a heat map and you can basically see these like little legs coming out and it will continue monitoring all of them,

building this gigantic pattern of life. Well, that's a new stack of targets to start looking at, and we really started maximizing the use of that, and as we did that, we started getting way more careful about which targets we picked. There were a lot of targets at the time. There was something like thirty thousand isis spiders active like with weapons strapped to their bodies at any time at that time, so we really could have hit you know, you could have throw a rock and hit an Isis guy across

the four line of troops. They were everywhere. But we don't want to waste time and resources and mission momentum by just striking whoever, So what I started to do was trace particular activities. One in particular was when we hit a certain building. The way that people reacted to that strike started telling me something. And there was one

strike in particular. We blew the building up, killed like forty guys, and instead of coming to recover bodies, we saw them clear everybody out from the street away from the building, and they started sending guys in with plastic garbage bags, black garbage bags and coming out with them over their shoulder like Santa Claus carrying out whatever. It was very heavy, and we figured out that that was

actually gold because we had struck the bank. And then they took a lot of that gold to another place that was very important to them, and we began tracking that place. It was a lot of these like thing after thing, with the domino effect of them kind of revealing to us. Based on a very early instigation toward them. That sets off all these patterns that we can follow. And I'm leaving out a lot of details obviously to protect operational security, but this is kind of the gist

of it. And it turns out that one night in Ramadan, one of my subsources told me that, hey, there's an ID factory in this place. And you know, back during the Iraq War, like the early years, you think ID factory, it's a couple of guys with some cans and you know, some explosives. This was like an industrial factory. I mean it was actually a factory converted, like it had conveyor belts and everything converted to produce IDs on an industrial scale.

It was insane and I was able to figure out who ran that facility, and there's some other buildings around there, and the way that they had set up the security around this place, only there was only one way out. I was actually able to get a B fifty two from Syria to fly into Iraq and blow this place up. And there was something like three thousand rocket tails that we were able to count from the footage afterwards. I mean, this thing was insane, and the way it blew up,

I mean you could for miles around. People thought that it was our strike that made the explosion.

after the smaller, relatively smaller bombs. But then the guys exited that one way out and we followed that and come to find out, they went over to go notify Abu Omar al Shashani's deputy that we had been kind of moving up the food chain because he doesn't use a cell phone. That's very important. The smart guys don't use his cell phone. But we still could get him anyway.

And there was another night during Ramadan, like three days later, we've been watching this location that we thought it was actually Abu Bakrel Baghdadi's summer house, which was where this other gentleman was at Abu Omar, who's chechen by the way, al Shashani, and we were able to start monitoring the location and we counted eighty six guys going in there

throughout the evening and none of them coming out. And one of my subsources contacts me through my principal Asian and lets me know that this is in fact one of those meetings, and it wasn't in just one building. It was like multiple compounds around and as we're going through the eight hours required soak of the target, the sub sources reporting to me on who's in which building, So I've got multiple high level names of who's in what building, and then eventually we're able to get aircraft

up there. And then the one star general in charge of authorizing these strikes had to wake up a bunch of other generals that sit around a table basically and make decisions. Because the building that Shani was in was a religious building. In order to strike one of these buildings, we have to get certain level of concurrence that's different than even striking a house, which also requires its own concurrence.

It's called a Category one removal, which means there's this list called Category one targets that we're not allowed to touch and we have to get the target removed off category one to be able to strike it. And so it was something like four o'clock or three o'clock in the morning we were able to finally get approval from four or five generals that had to all give their cut on it. And there were other wrinkles in this.

For example, there was a US person in one of these buildings who was a legal permanent resident States, but he was a naturalized US person, which required even higher level approval to continue moving forward to strike. So there's a lot of risk analysis going on, but also the

optics were being analyzed throughout this strike process. And I was under a lot of pressure because we knew that those guys would vacate around six am as soon as the sun came up, because they were there for Sohor dinner, which is the meal you eat during Ramadan to break right before you break your fast in the morning. It's that smaller meal right before if Tar, and minutes were

taken away. It was almost it was almost sunrise, and I'm getting worried, you know, And finally we get to go ahead and we blew it up and turned out it was eighty seven guys in they're dead, and one of them was Shashani.

that they usually took the higher level guys to. And every time a bodybag went in, that person was there verifying with everybody and letting me know. And the thing is, they don't know who I'm looking for. I'm only asking them for the names of every single person that comes in there. And nobody on the ground knew what targets

we were after at any time. And we never gave him feedback like, oh, yeah, we did kill that guy, you know, Jim Bob, we don't do that because we don't want it to muddy up the process, right, And so sure enough, next morning we got confirmation from that person that it in fact was him.

and ways of handling information. And that was a big learning curve for me because of the way intelligence information is handled from san derived information is very different than how it's from human controlled systems and from from source handling of human beings very different, and the trade craft

is obviously completely different. With sigent you're kind of protecting the instruments and the methods of using those instruments, whereas with human beings you're trying to protect them and the mission. It's more it's obviously more human like, which requires a lot more security considerations. It's much more difficult, it's much more in some cases more expensive, especially if you're working

with cover. If you've got you know, cover Marcial cover, for example, it's extremely expensive and it may never get you anything depending on how you set it up. And that's part of the game, is that some of this never produces anything. Some of it produces gold mines, whereas with set you kind of know, like that's that guy's phone, that's what he said the end. You know, where a human you've got to because the human elements there. These guys might not be telling the truth, they might not

know that what they said was wrong. Want money, ideology they might have, they might be under coercion, they might be doing it for excitement. You know, there's a lot of things you have to control. Sometimes you're like a therapist with them and you have to learn a lot of this stuff that might be frustrating to some people at times, like well why do I have to listen

to this how this guy feels about his spouse. It's like, well, that's really important because you're going to use those things as buttons to push in the future when you really need them. And that's kind of simplifying it. But that

is a little bit difficult, especially from a singant background, but it's true from any background that doesn't deal with people. You know, you could be an infantry guy and still have and have to learn those same things in the same difficult way because that doesn't makes sense for where you came from.

It's because the regime oppressing their own people so extremely that suddenly there are a lot of people that are willing to do things they never would do before because of this pressure.

were doing. I knew a lot of the higher level things because when I was work at the National Security Agency, I worked on strategic issues like Russia nuclear stuff, the North Korea stuff, China stuff, all in the nuclear level, and then with Iran and on some other things related to that, so I knew that big picture, you know, this was a threat, but I'd never seen them in action.

And I don't think most people actually have. And I was there in the desert at a very remote base down by the Iran Pakistan Afghanistan Triborder area which is called Baluchistan, and suddenly I look up and there's this thing that looks like a skateboard flying around in the sky and kind of up ahead of us. And actually a pilot came running over to me and he pointed out to me too. He's liked, you see that thing.

I'm like, yeah, what is that? And we started taking photos of it and sent it over to some of the CIA guys that we were connected to, and there said,

you know, that's a that's an Iranian mohadre for UAV. But what was happening It was going in like a square holding pattern because whoever was controlling it it had gotten too far outside of their control because at the time they didn't have one way attack and all this stuff. It was very much more rudimentary, and it had lost control and went to a holding pattern over the GPS

grid of where it was supposed to be monitoring. So we're just watching it go in a square over the base and somebody knocked it down and we took it, But that was my first introduction to like an actual Iranian threat happening in front of me, which, as I said, it's kind of unusual to see because usually people think of it like behind the scenes and the shadows and all that. Maybe not so much today now, but for

much of the time, that's how it was viewed. And that kind of like piqued my interest a little bit. And then when I went to places like Senegal, for example, I found out that two streets over from our diplomatic facility or our team house in Dakar was a Hesbala teamhouse in Dakar that was working with cocaine shipments from South America into Dakar, which is the largest The port of Dakar is the largest import point for cocaine in all of Africa. It's fifty four countries in Africa and

that's the biggest important location. Wow. And it was just kind of interesting because like, we weren't fighting with each other. We were both there for different things, which is kind of interesting, like, well, why are we here like this, Why aren't we fighting each other? You know, So there's there's a lot more going too, So I was trying to like figure out what's going on here, like higher level it's not just it's not just war, you know,

there's more to it. It's politics involved. Are those politics? And those are the kind of questions I started asking That kind of got me down that pathway, you know.

than going to war over here. You can't just say that the same thing. And so he called those ways of thinking sacred talismans. And that's why I call these things sacred talismans, because in my opinion, they're flawed at best, perhaps mistaken, it's better way to describe it. The first one is Israel versus Iran, and I mean, even looking today, like everyone's like, oh, yeah, obviously that's what's going on. But if you start peeling it back in which I do in the book, it's not so clear cut that

it's Israel versus Iran. I mean, who's the one doing the bombings, who's the one killing people? Who's like I mean, I could just go on and on about the facts and how lopsided one side is versus the other, and also about the reaction to those things. It's not what you would expect if it was actually a conflict between two states as it's described. And a lot of times that particular talisman's described as an ideology against ideology, which

again I think is naive. It's political, especially if you look at political realism. You know, states are black boxes operating to survive against other states and to keep their interests alive. And the regime doesn't care about the state of Iran. The regime cares about the regime. So that's like a black box within a black box making decisions

about securing itself, and then an Israel same thing. I mean, you have the Likud party keeping itself alive as strongly as we can, as long as it can, you know. So there's these political decisions that look like ideology, but to someone who's actually if you removed the names off of the parties, it would be hard to actually make the same judgments we might make if the names are on the parties. That's the what I call the blue talisman.

Then there's the red talisman, which is exporting the revolution. That idea came up and you hear it in discourse A lot people say, like, oh, Iran's exporting the revolution. There's this crime terror nexus in Bolivia, or like whatever. But really, I mean those are those are drug trafficking operations that generate income the end. I mean, they're not

over there with guns shooting people. They're over there with dollar counters and bubble wrap wrapping up bales of cocaine to ship it to Africa to make money so they can survive because they're heavily sanctioned and they can't access the banking system and they're cut off from the swift system, so how else are they kind to move their money around and make more money? Yeah, it's illegal, but I mean that is that a terror nexus? I don't know.

Maybe if they're actually doing terror, what does that mean? And these might be like off putting questions to people, But you have to be able to question anything because if you cannot question an idea, this is no longer a fact based idea now it's an emotion based idea. We have to be factual about how we appro stuff, especially things that bring up as many emotions as Iran

and Israel as we just talked about. Then I get down to something called the Black Talisman, which is realism, which I kind of alluded to, where these actors are generally rational and when I say rational, actually Mahre de Gan, who is one of the Masad directors, said Iran is rational. They may not be our rational, but they are rational, which I think is a great way to describe it, because it doesn't matter how we see the world. It

matters how the actor sees the world. And if it's in their interest to do what they think is right, they're going to do it, even if it's crazy. And hurts people, They're still going to do it because that's what they think they need to do to survive, especially when they feel like they've been backed up against the wall. So that's my perspective. When I look at this book, I look at it from a realist perspective, asking, you know,

there's this thing. John Rawls is a philosopher that wrote a lot in the seventies and eighties, and he said that there's this thing called the veil of ignorance where if someone dropped you down in the society and didn't tell you where in that society you fell high class, middle class, low class, labor, or rich person. If you didn't know which of those things you fell into, how would you make the laws. You'd make them much differently than you would if you knew where you were, you know.

And that's kind of the approach that I take with this is instead of like labeling everything, let me just look at the facts and see what the facts say. And when I talk about facts, I don't just mean like looking at the news and things like that. As you said in the back of the book, there are hundreds of declassified American intelligence documents that were top secret, secret noebeign and a whole trove of Iraqi documents that were top secret and secret that had never been seen before.

These things are not for the public. These are internal political documents, basically our intelligence process feeding political decisions of facts that were collect on the ground through human intelligence SIGAN and other collection methodologies, with some other information to help back it up to put into context for people to understand. So that's kind of a long way of saying what these talismans are. But it's important to question

all of them, including my own assertions. People should question what I say to and not in a combative way, but instead questioning, well, where did you get that, What does that mean? What does that mean to me? Because I think people don't ask those kind of questions, and that's how we end up twenty years in Afghanistan, fighting the same war, one year at a time for twenty years.

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we think are true that are not true? So let's start with what they call themselves va ja vaja, and that is their actual human element that started out as their strongest component or their entity. In two thousand and nine, there was something called the Green Revolution in Iran when

the country was almost overthrown. It was the most serious moment of overthrow since nineteen seventy nine in the country, and the way the regime saw this was as a failure of VAJA to suppress the people enough to force them not to rebel. This is how it was viewed. What they did was they basically reduced the power of VOJA, subordinated it to the IERGC. And this is where the IRGC Intelligence Organization came out to become a thing. Before that, it was a department. An agency is a smaller thing

with less remit. It was not meant to be inside the country doing things. But from that moment forward until today, it became this massive intelligence apparatus that now is the premier intelligence apparatus in Iran and outside of Iran. And VAJA has been relegated to kind of this political intelligence gatherer for looking at whatever, what are foreign diplomats doing? You know, like nothing that you would expect today's CIA, for example, to be doing. All the cover activity is IERGC.

Now there's very small components that VAJA still does, but it's minuscule. It's mostly the IERGC and underneath that, and in the book I have a pretty good diagram of that there are many different things underneath that. There's like forty different departments underneath that. It's it's extremely complex and part of what the regime And when I say the regime, I don't mean the entire Irunnan government, although they're all complicit.

I mean that small kernel of decision makers who have absolute control over what happens, which is a very tiny number of people. The rest of the people in the government, which is about one percent of the ninety two million people in the country, are just following along because it's in their interest to follow along, you know. But there's maybe between one hundred to one thousand named individuals that are that are the regime that's actually doing this stuff.

And the IRGC is not designed to protect i running of people. It's designed to protect that small group of people, that small kernel of people. And you can see it because the Iotola's son, for example, can go freely outside the country. He can go to Washington, d C. If he wants to. Why because he has a black diplomatic passport. Why does he have that? Why does he need that? And if you look at who in the regime are these named individuals that are the powerholders, they all have

black diplomatic passports. Cost some sole money had two diplomatic passports. Smelgani, the current Good Sports Commander, has four black passports. I mean, these guys are able to come and go as they please. The Iran Central Bank Director, who's the sanctioned bank, you know, that is the bank target of the West, has a black passport and he's come and gone to Washington, DC to World Bank meetings. I mean, these people are heavily protected,

and they know how to use the system. They know how to use the Vienna Convention, which is the thing that grants diplomatic community. And they initially relied on VAJA to ensure that. And now it's the IERGC that is providing that, and it's providing it so that the Iranian people remain shut down while these small elites are able to have the maximum freedom. They're basically monopolizing freedom at the cost of everybody else.

country for having too much wealth, for being too opulent. Right, well, now the Iatola, today's Iotola, how many he has as much money as Jeff Bezos, but his assets are liquid.

Jeff bezos assets are not liquid. They're tied up in equity in his businesses. Elon Musk's something like ninety percent of his money is tied up in equity in his businesses. If he pulled it out, his businesses would collapse. Not so for the Iatola. And actually that wealth grew dramatically after two thousand and seven, which is when the IRGC was first sanctioned by the United States, and there were these series of sanctions that grew from that period forward.

And that if you took a graph and showed the sanctions increasing and put it right next to wealth of these top elites increasing, they're positively correlated, which means they grow together. And especially after twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, when we put the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, there's a dramatic spike and growth of wealth in these top leaders in Iran, and a dramatic decrease in general wealth for

the population of the people in Iran. In fact, that same year that the Iatola's money exponentially grew is the same year that there were lines outside of grocery stores because there were chicken rations in Iran because there was not enough chicken to feed people. There were gas rations in a country that's petroleum rich at the same time that the Ayatola was one of the richest human beings on earth. And that just kind of illustrates to you that this is not a democracy. It's not a country.

It's not a capitalist country that reacts to capitalist measures like sanctions, right ins said, it's just it's enriching elites handover fist.

entire economy, which is mostly a black market thing. Like if you want an iPhone in Iran, it has to be purchased from an IRGC supplier, and there are many iPhones in Iran. There are many Western products in Iran that you would think like, oh, there's sanctioned. They can't get that. Now you can get it. It's just four thousand dollars, you know. And the IRGC was designed that way where there isn't one person cost some soul money. For example, even when he was, you know, the big guy,

he couldn't run all of the IRGC. He was in the Kods force. He was a lower relatively lower in stature compared to the others. Even though he had some direct line to the Iotola and was able to get tasking from him directly, and a lot he'd get away with a lot more than the other two star generals. There's only like fifteen two star generals in the entire country of Iran, very few, and they're designed that way. And actually the Ministry of Defense is actually it's separated

from the IRGC and it's subordinate to the IRGC. So the IRGC has a two star general commander. The Ministry of Defense is led by a one star So if the Ministry Defense, which you would think would be able to upset defense policy, sets a policy, the urgency can ignore it, and they do ignore it. They have ignored it, which is kind of an interesting tension that it was

designed that way. And there's a lot of these designs where there's these tensions built throughout this system, which is again not a democracy, but was created from an authoritarian mind of how do how do we keep that authoritarian in power? And they're doing a pretty good job of it, yeah for sure.

target and they remained the main target. In fact, when in June when Israel's war on Iran started, most if not all of the action at the actual action, people in Iran doing the stuff that we were seeing like lasing targets and doing target reconnaissance and actually setting off devices were not Israeli operatives. Those were Iranians that most

of them worked for Mujahadini Cup, the NEK. If you remember back in the early two thousands when it was released that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that was released through the Mujahidini Cup. And there's another set of targets which is the Aziris, not Azerbaijan in the country,

but Azerbaijan province in section of your on northwest iron those nuclear documents that were taken a few years ago that Benjaminuttyaw who held up and said, look, we have all the proof. Now we stole it was something like I think it was a ton of paper from this bunker that was a ZII assisted theft out of the country, and actually they gave Israel overflight out of Azerbaijan the

country to take those documents to Israel. And there's a lot of these groups that they've been against the government, any Iranian government for a very long time. So before there was the regime, there was the Shah, and before the Shah there was his father, and before that there was the Kajars, so it is a long history. But the Kurds, for example, the Aziris, the Baluchis, the Ahvazis, which are an Arab arab iised group of Iranians in the southwest of the country and the border of Iraq.

These are all separatists aligned people, not all of them are, but they're typically an area you can go to if you want to do something in Iran. These are the people you work with as an outsider to do things against the regime, which means these are the people the regime wants to get rid of for control, severely controlled, and in some cases that's what they do. They just go and you know, reduce the amount of resources they have,

they reduce the freedom of action. In other cases they go round them up and kill them, like they did the Mujahideen in nineteen eighty eight. If you remember President Rayisi, who died mysteriously in a helicopter last year, he was considered the hanging judge. He signed off on something like three thousand execution orders that Mujahdini Kak were most of the people that were executed under his basically by decree saying like, yeah, that guy's guilty, no trial, needed to

go kill him. And he did that in nineteen eighty eight, three thousand people again, Mujahidin people. And so there's this tension between these groups that don't feel like they are. They don't feel Persian, they don't feel Iranian. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but they certainly feel I'm Asiri, I am Ahbasi, I am Baluchi, I am Kurdish, you know, and especially when you look at the Curds. There's thirty

five million Kurds. That's the largest stateless group, stateless ethnic group in the world period, and they're split up between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. And Iran has one called the p Jack Pjak, which is a Kurdish separatist group in Iran that has been a constant thorn in their side that they've been

blowing up, you know, routinely, sometimes the Turkey's help. And these are just a summary of some of them, but there are smaller groups too, and the thing they all have in common is that they disagree with the regime, but there's no democratic mechanism for them to change anything with the regime, so instead of having that democratic mechanism, they have to resort to violence.

Allied Force was there continuously. There was US Western presence there with Yukon, and we built relationships with them at the time. And actually you can read some of the stuff in the book about Clinton. Clinton did a green light and actually allowed Iran to ship weapons in there to arm the KLA through Croatia. And that was a very interesting revelation that most people probably don't know, is that the US was not necessarily working hand in hand,

but we weren't holding the back. And because we were diging that relationship, they took it upon themselves to share with us something they knew about what was going on in Afghanistan, and that was the Taliban housing al Qaida. And if you look at some of those targets that we struck when Bill Clinton authorized strikes in the late nineties, some of those targets were alerted to us by Iran.

you're inviolable, which means you cannot be searched. If you have a pouch which could be a backpack, a box, a cargo container with a sticker on it that says this is a diplomatic pouch that is unvilable. It cannot be searched. And as I said, every country does this. So when we are wagging our finger at Iran, we should remember all the times that we've done the exact same thing and every other country does. I mean, this

is part of what diplomatic status is for. Without getting into all the details of what the West does with it. Iran has stations overseas, and that doesn't necessarily mean VAJA stations. They have VAJA stations and they have IERGC stations, and

sometimes those IRGC stations are huge. And actually one of the very first IRGC stations that we have evidence of on the intel side was in Vienna before the Soviet Union collapsed, and they had a small little Kods Force element and there it wasn't called Kuods Force yet, it was called the Office of Liberation Movements. They had a little typist in there that was sending codes out, you know. But they were there on diplomatic cover. They were there

as a foreign ministry representative, not as an intelligence officer. Again, this is what many countries do, but Iran has certainly abused it. At Dubai is a common location where they do abuse this, where they'll move cargo containers, gigantic containers like off of a ship with a little stick on

it that says this is a diplomatic pouch. You can't touch it, and inside of that our weapons and money and whatever you need to put in there to escape scrutiny. Right. Actually, just side note, we had a Saudi prince in Lebanon when I was deployed there that tried to do the diplomatic pouch thing with his jet. He actually pouched his jet and it was full of ecstasy. It had like

two million ecstasy pills in it. But when he landed, the door open and they kind of all came out and it became like a now we see it thing. So he kind of messed that up. But that was a little side note. But of it, for sure, Yeah, for sure. But they use it for other reasons too. So in New York, for example, there's something like twenty five accredited Iranian diplomats living there right now that are allowed to live there, and they're on a range restriction.

They're not allowed to leave a certain area of the city. But the area that they're in, it's a good part of the city. You can do a lot of things there, which means you can meet with other people, perhaps sources or perhaps handlers if you're being handled. You know, that's a place where everybody gets to go together. So it could be Israel. He's talking to Iranians, it could be Iranians talking to who knows what it is. It's happening all the time. They also had an office in Washington,

d C outside run out of the Pakistani embassy. So that let's say you're an Iranian citizen studying in the United States and you lose your passport, Well you need to get a new one. But how are you need to get that if you don't have an Iranian embassy in the United States. Well there's a guy in the Pakistani embassy whose job it is and he is he is an Iranian diplomat in the Washington d C. That will get you a new passport. This is this is the way, you know, this is the good way that

this works. This is how it's helpful. Right, And that's not cover, that's that's declared on the cover side. Especially with commercial cover, it's a whole other animal because think about all their shipping lines are sanctioned, all the port entries are sanctioned, all their goods are sanctioned. Like I

just said, the iPhone. How do you get that into the country on industrial scale, Well you have to have commercial cover, and you have to have companies all over the world that look like one thing, but there's something else. And that is what they mostly make their money off of of how they they enrich the regime and how they move people and goods and equipment around the world very easily and with very little notice.

we close a Chinese diplomatic facility in Texas. Well, the next week there's a US diplomatic facility closed in China. So there's a huge risk of if we interrupt this process that we all know is going on, the costs

are higher than the benefits. So sometimes it might be better to actually, rather than neutralize, it might be better to exploit that thing, Which is exactly the confluence of human intelligence and counterintelligence where you get to make the choice, do I want to just cut this thing off and stop it. You know, if there's a drug vessel full of drugs and we see it off the coast of Venezuela,

do we want to blow it up? Or do we want to capture the guys and interrogate them and find out where they came from, where they're going and all this other stuff. Well, that's a choice between exploiting and neutralizing. And neutralizing has a lot of immediate shock value that looks good politically and in the news. But exploiting typically doesn't get known to anybody. It's a secret, and it goes on for a long long time, and it can

have a huge payoff if you're smart about it. And of course that's my bias because I did those things and I know how they work, But I will advocate for the high value and high impact that they have over a very long time that if rather than just shutting these things down or kicking these diplomats out, wouldn't it be a better to recruit that diplomat as a double agent, and then have him work for you for thirty years and then recruit his own assets for you

as a principal agent that you could then further gather defectors to keep them defectors in place. I mean, the possibilities are endless, the value is endless. Rather than just kicking that one guy out and making the country kick one of your people out, you know, to me, it's a no brainer.

protection now. But when she came to the US, she started talking way more than she used to talk when she was in Iran, because now she had some distance. But the regime caught up to her. They tried to assassinate her once by recruiting some Chechen guys who were kind of this high jinks group of guys that were pretty sloppy. They did a lot of physical surveillance on

her home. They were looking at the way that she was walking to understand her behavior, and so they're doing a lot of early collection activity to see how this target looked. And they were interdicted. One of them had an AK forty seven in his car. They were using their phones way too much. In fact, most of the reason we able to catch them is because of what they said on their phones. It was very obvious what

they were doing. So we neutralized them. And a few years later the regime still wanted to kill her, but they had a more elaborate plan this time. This time they wanted to kidnap her in New York, bring her to a port in New York, put her on a speedboat, take the speedboat to Venezuela, and then take her to Iran so they could do a show trial and execute her or torture her so that she would recamp and make this negative message about what she was saying on

the media. We were able to catch that as well. But there have been some others as well. R. Bob cr who's Iranian living in Texas, who is a used car salesman. He was recruited by the IRGC to assassinate the Saudi ambassador who was in DC at the time, eating at a very nice restaurant, and he got very close to actually doing it. But there was a confidential informant that we had in the drug cartels because he

was actually buying his weapons from the Zeta's cartel. And we actually had a recruited guy in the Zetas cartel recruited for something else obviously, who was like, hey, there's this Iranian stuff going on. You guys should look into this, and so DEA and FBI looked into it. Sure enough, yes, he had done quite a few things. He was ready to go, and we were able to capture him too.

But a lot of these are very interesting when you look at them, because it's not an Iranian case officer or IERGC guy doing this, it's whoever they can get their hands on to do it. Because they have such few resources available to do these things in States and in other countries that they're just kind of grasping at straws to see what sticks. They've recruited Hell's Angels guys

before to organize some assassination attempts more recently. You know, they're a very interesting thing to look at about how they recruit these guys in Canada and then they have illegally entered the United States and then go do their target reconstants that they're going to do and then go

figure out when the time is right. But again, confidential informant helps with that and we're able to capture those people too. So it's very interesting to see how they're doing things in the United States because they're very different than how they do them in other countries where they have more ability to move. And that goes back to the diplomatic thing. So if you look at Iran, which countries can Iran go to Iranians without a visa? This

is an important question to ask. You should away if you're an intelligence analysts should always ask, you know, my target country, what countries can they go to without a visa? Because that means those are countries they can go to into a source meeting without being easily noticed. Countries might surprise you. For example, Ecuador and say Sheelles and Singapore, they can go there without a VA Thailand, Georgia, Armenia.

So there's a lot of countries that are not Muslim countries that they can go to and do the activities need to do their third country meetings so that way they're not meeting the source and the sources home country or in Ron, they're doing it in a kind of safer area. This is how they kind of do things outside of the United States. In the United States, they're using a lot of cyber activity where they're and also in Israel where they're recruiting their assets through Facebook, sometimes

posing as lovers and other kind of things. And when we see these things exposed, we kind of chuckle at it, but I also have to ask, like, why aren't they throwing more resources at this stuff? You know, But it's because they're more concerned about their survival at home than they are about anything else outside the country.

I don't know how much stock I put into that. I have an I have a theory that these are not like coming from high level ERGYC people. Even the r BOBSI are one that I mentioned, the Saudi into twenty thirteen assassination project. I think these are lower level ergyc This is my theory is I'd had no fact to back this up, but I think these are lower level ways of trying to do what they can with

what they can. If the same thing with John Bolton and Pompeo and Trump, these are like really low level, amateur hour type things that have almost no resources attached to them, something like that coming from If it was coming from the top levels of the government, I feel like there would be more risk analysis in there, some more thought about how it looks and how to do it.

You know, these things and if you compare them to other assassination operations that the regime has done, especially against Iranians, those are far more advanced methodical. They put a lot more thought into it. They still failed a lot, but they succeeded a lot. And it wasn't this kind of like pie in the sky, like oh, let's just go

after that guy and go kill them. You know, they really thought through how do they do it, where's the right place to do it, what resources do we need, what country should it be, and who should we recruit. In Denmark there were a few of these where they killed some MUJA hitting guys and some as MLA guys with very methodical ways of doing it even recently. So I question, you know, where are these orders coming from?

And I don't know if those are officially sanctioned things like even again back to the r Bob Ziar case, when you look at the Treasury sanctions that detail, you know what was going on with that case. They implicate cost some solo money and two high level IRGC guys in addition to the one guy that was on the phone with ar BOBZR. But there's no there's no link between that low level basically a lieutenant colonel and the IRGC and cost some solo money like that doesn't really

make sense to me, you know. I again, theorizing that it's probably someone lowered down the ranks who's like, I'm going to make a name for myself and get this big hit and then I'm going to be important, that's probably more likely.

new surprising thing. This is very common in countries, but it was kind of surprising because of how close these individuals were to the Biden administration, specifically to the Iran team working for President Biden and the Syria team working for President Biden. And there was in fact one individual on the Iran team, the envoys team, that was telling

the envoy advice. That advice was coming directly from Sarif through emails to that person, which is kind of interesting that emails are now in the public domain, so if people want to go research them, they can. And all the people that were involved in this Iran Experts initiative claimed to be the one that we're providing. They said that the access they had to the regime was only for academic purposes, so that they could help inform the

US government on the JCPOA. My thought, as an intelligence collector and a handler, well that's probably how it started out for you, and that the regime kept pushing down that button and kept you on and now you're working for them, even if you don't know that you are.

So sometimes you know, ignorance is not an excuse for intelligence collection, and we've seen that many times with how people believe they're providing something to one country and it's a false flag and they're providing it to somebody else, or they think is something completely separate, And if you look at what they collected and what they did and what they said, this is a very clear cut influence operation that actually affected how are Iran envoy operated in

the world. And when you're doing negotiations with a country, let's say you're on you have a limited information so the information you do have is extremely valuable and you're using it to reduce uncertainty and increase your decision advantage. Well, the other side wants to take control of that process to their own advantage, and we would be ignorant to think that they were not, And unfortunately at the time, we were ignorant to think that they were not, and they did do it. So again, I go in a

lot of detail on it. I have the actual names of the people in there and everything, but it is kind of interesting to think about how many other times does this happen? You know, that's a question mark this should come up that people for future research should be looking into, and in the intelligence community should be looking at what other things that look benign are not benign because that's a that's a great intelligence operation when it

looks benign. That's what Clandesta's activity is. The activity looks like it's something else, you know, right.

then they became something. And it's been a real evolution for them, hasn't it.

they do that where they get information? Well, as you mentioned, stucksnet happened, and they ran immediately reverse engineered stucksnet and saw how it was made, and they made their own piece of malware that they used that now they knew this new information. Well, then they said, well, what if we're under threat by other things, let's start investing a ton of money in this. And they started recruiting these

civilian entities, which is actually not unlike the US. The US, a lot of our cyber expertise is not uniform service members or gs civilians at cybercom. It's contractors, companies that have experts in them that the government hires to produce tailored items Collard malware. This is the way it actually works. There's a couple of really interesting books on it, like Countdown to Zero Day, which I recommend by Kim Zetter, which goes into how stocks and that was actually made.

It was not made by the government, It was made by other companies that were sold to the government and same thing with Israel, Like they have Pegasus that's made by a civilian company that's not made by Unit eighty two hundred, their second organization. Right.

they did the same thing. And actually, when Israel wiped a bunch of servers in Iran using a white or malware, Iran reverse engineered that and turned it into something called Shammoun, which they then put on Saudi Aramco and erased all of Saudi Aramco's data, which is incredible because, as I said, even two years before that, the regime could only deface a website. And now they're wiping out the entire oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, not all of it, but almost

all of the huge, huge amount. And it wasn't just a one hit thing. They had carefully planned it. They chose a day during Ramadan when they knew no on would be at the place, like everything was carefully thought through. It was very deliberate, which is a huge change before when they looked like this ragtag group of little hackers which they call Sabiri's that were just hired off the street to go do forum blasts and you know, take

websites down with didas attacks. So you see this evolution not as their innovation at the beginning, more their reaction, but as they reacted to it. They just took everything that hit them and then they turned it into their own weapon and they use it against us, which is the West, Israel, European countries especially like Denmark, Netherlands, other

countries as well to their advantage. And for that first few years, then they rapidly accelerated producing their own things that are now novel that would never have existed if things hadn't happened before to them that pushed them in that direction, which is kind of fascinating, you know, revisionist history of like what would have happened if we didn't do stuck net or if they didn't discover stuck net.

the memory of system that this other malware was. And when the regime went to go look, they found both and the US unfortunately lost this extremely advanced tool that now is no longer functional.

get any money from that though. Then in Georgia, the state in the United States or Georgia, they attacked a municipal infrastructure and were able to do some ransomware attack there After that, which is like more than ten years ago. They have drifted away from that and they're mostly focusing on offensive cyberactivity.

get this stuff. So they create a rat inside of a computer system, trafted the designs for these ballasts, and if they wanted to, they could have basic hit a button and turn these ballasts off, which would have caused these cargo vessels to eventually sink after their machinery broke down and things. But the interesting part about that is

that these were not operations they were going to do. Instead, this was a menu of options that they presented to the IATOLA, and this was their job, was to basically come up with all kinds of ways that if the IATOLA wanted to, they could attack the US with cyber tools. Interestingly, they haven't used them to our knowledge, not just this tool,

but other tools. And that kind of goes along with what they do, not just in cyber but in intelligence generally, where they take a lot of things and put them on the shelf and they wait till there's a time when they really want to use the thing. That's kind of interesting because there's been a lot of opportunities that you might think would be a good reason for them

to use those things. You could think of like June for example, as one of those times and they didn't do it, And that's kind of an interesting question of like why didn't they destroy the ballasts on all of the ships in the golf in June? You know, but it probably goes toward the more political question of well,

if they did that, what would happen next? And what would that mean for me? You know. So they're probably they probably have a lot of things on the shelf that they'll never ever use that are probably very powerful. But it would mean that their own destruction may be invited from using these things.

They gave that to Iran and Iran implemented it, which means that people in Iran cannot access the Internet like we do. There are entire sections of the Internet that they can never reach. There are some VPNs that do work there, but they're not always working, and they kind of come up and down, and there's a lot of volatility there. But within that special ecosystem that they've created, as you said, they've got all kinds of little things

in there that are ready to hook you. And especially during times of protest or unrest, there's a lot of things that are designed to trick you, track you, or catch you or figure out where you are, you know, because what their goal is to stop protests that they don't want them happening, and they'll go to any length to do it. They were at the time during the masa Amini protests few years ago, they were throwing girls off for roofs because the girls were posting on Instagram

and were at the actual protests. They were shooting girls walking home from school that had no part in the protest just because they were there. Lots and lots of people were killed during this protest with live rounds. And at the heart of it was the Internet, because how else can you in a country so oppressed and so controlled, how else can you communicate that this protest is going down right now at this location. And they have to

use the Internet. And the problem is they can't access Instagram, They can't access a lot of social media that we can unless you're a regime person. They have special access in the network to be able to go onto Instagram and post their pictures and things. But that means that people have to use all these little tools and software.

And if you remember, like back in the nineties when you were trying to download music, I wasn't doing it because it was illegal, of course, but for those who were doing it, you sometimes would download a movie or a song and it was actually full of viruses, right because they have no way of like verifying like what

am I downloading? Because it's all nothing's official, and in Iran it's like that, and the regime puts a lot of stuff out there, like, oh, this is the VPN that you can use to get outside the country, But it turns out it's actually a government controlled BPM that's accessing your entire phone. And that's one small example, but that's how the entire system is designed, is to have total knowledge of what is every person this country doing so we can stop them from rebelling against us.

do anything. And that was a very scary time because imagine there's bombs falling all around in big cut cities, Israeli bombs and US bombs, and you don't know what they're going to hit next, because you don't even know. They can't even see the news. You don't know if this is the start of an invasion, right, I mean,

you have no idea. So these people are like living in complete fear and darkness, and that's what the regime wanted them to feel, which is crazy because their own country was under attack and they were trying to increase the fear of their own people during that time.

but this is a very common it's illegal system. It's not illegal, it's legal in many countries in the world because this is how they've traditionally used done bankings for several thousand years. The regime relies quite a bit on jualas, especially for some of the earlier steps in their money movement process. So that because there's no trace from my book to your book except from the person who said that that money moved. So let's say I want to move some money to Dubai, Well, I can do the

juala to Dubai. Then in Dubai there is money. Well, there's a lot of banks in Dubai, and in fact, something like a third of the Dubai permanent population are actually Iranians. And that's because of the banking system in Dubai, which is hugely designed to facilitate money movement, not just for Iran but for many countries. That's one of the things that Dubai kind of uses a selling point is that hey, you can do banking here and we don't

care what you do. And a lot of the banking is based out of those banks there's also a lot of banks in Switzerland and banks in South America, and

in China. There's also a lot of goods for cash or good for services activity where for example, if Iran brings a cargo boat with millions of barrels of oil on it, they can do a ship to ship transfer to China, and China does something very similar to the whola system where they give them goods in kind for that oil, and there's a lot of other ways they can do it too.

to an Iranian agent, you know. And so what they would do is they'd have a guy in the United States that would purchase it as a legitimate company, usually a cover organization commercial cover, shift that stuff to Dubai or to another country. There's a couple of countries that I've listed in there, like Malaysia as another example. Then move it to another location in that same country, and then mark the goods as something else, which is kind

of tried and true method to do it. Just slap a new paper on there that says grain and then ship it over to the Straits of Horror Moves or to wherever you want to bring it, and then take it out of the packages and start making IDs with it. It sounds crazy and like super easy, but you have to think about these shipping lanes we're talking about are some of the busiest places on the planet, especially the bab Al mundav Straight, the Persian Gulf, and if you

go further east in Indonesia the Straights at Malacca. Something like sixty percent of the world's goods pass through the Straits of Malacca on ships. So there's no way that you could stop every ship and look in every cargo container, especially if you're paying off people at the ports in name your country in Singapore for example, to just not even look at what the document says, like they're not they don't know what's in the thing. They don't care

what's in the thing. It's kind of like you know the New York Port Authority in the nineteen seventies, right, like they don't care what's going over there. They they just want the cargo to move and put the money in their pocket. Right, It's business, and that's what was happening where the regime was clandesseminly moving these Western produced pieces of equipment over to the Middle East and then killing our own soldiers with these US produced pieces of equipment.

any other army would be. And a lot of outsiders don't understand that distinction. There's a lot of Arteesh people that if there was a rebellion right now, they would turn their weapons on the regime. They don't want to

be in this situation. They're just kind of regular people. I largely see people are different, right, and that's a huge distinction that needs to be made. The Sabaregn you mentioned are on the Artes side, and there's a lot of Artes whitesft that do the traditional like visit board search and seizure of a vessel for example. They'll you know, train foreign partners across a border another example. The biggest deployment of the Artes though, was in the nineteen eighty

nineteen eighty eight Iran Iraq War. Since eighty eight, the Artes never deployed more than a company size element outside of Iraq, which is crazy because you think like those units need real experience at least not just with the combat, but with like perception staging armored movement integration, like moving to another country physically. It takes a lot of practice and training. They didn't have that from nineteen eighty eight until twenty sixteen. The reason they got that in twenty

sixteen is because of ISIS in Syria. That was the first time the regime deployed Artesh as a military force outside of Iran since the Iran Iraq War, which is kind of interesting because we had the whole conflict in Iraq. The US did. There was many other conflicts between nineteen eighty eight in twenty sixteen that could have invited the army.

They didn't send them, which is just to me, it's kind of interesting, like why wouldn't you send your army to go do something, but didn't until twenty sixteen, and they actually had brigades, entire brigades deployed to Syria. Then the iurgyc what they're up to. They focus a lot on unconventional warfare. Are in the ring of countries around Iran. But the way that they do unconventional warfare rit large.

They separate it by portfolio or file. So there's like an Africa file, there's a South America file, there's a Middle East file specifically focused on Afghanistan. There's another file spoke specifically on Iraq. There's one for Turkey, there's one for the Balkans. Like the Bosnia deployment I mentioned, it is part of one element of the KODS force going there. It's not the whole CUDS force going, it's a group that specializes it, kind of like in the US we

have Fifth Group of Special Forces. They focus on the Middle East. They're not deployed to South America, right, And that's the IERGC and CUDS Force has a very similar mindset and actually cost some solo Moni was the architect of that because before he took over in the late nineties, there was only one file and that was the Balkans

because that was their only deployment. But as the US started moving and saber rattling about the Middle East and then we invaded nine to eleven, happened like, hey, we need to do something around this country and separate it by task, organization of specialty. The Afghanistan guys, you guys

are only going to be Afghanistan. And actually smel Gani, the current Coulds Force commander, was an Afghanistan file guy, Like he only did Afghanistan his entire career, and then when Solimani was killed, Ghani was elevated to that position. So he's kind of an interesting example of that that file mentality.

to Bosnia. Like I mentioned, that was a very tiny thing. They didn't want to be involved with anything outside of the country at the time. They were licking their wounds and trying to focus and clamp down the country and just like get back to normal. And then this thing happens with these diplomats in Masuri Sharif, and there's an element of the IRGC that wants to invade Afghanistan. Immediately they had a whole brigade ready to go and they

headed division also getting spun up. They went all the way up to the border, and there's this National Security Council like element in the Iranian government that includes Ayatola, and they kind of were sitting around thinking like, well, what happens if we do this, what's next? And the reason they did not invade Afghanistan is interesting. It's because Ahmed Shah Masud, who was part of the Northern Alliance that we were allied with, would be in danger if

Iran invaded Afghanistan. Well why is that important? Well, because Ron was also helping the Northern Alliance because inside the

Northern Alliance were a lot of Hazara Shia folks who were threatened by Taliban and still are threatened by the Taliban now, and Iran didn't want to damage that those people that they saw as people they wanted to protect,

and that went into their calculus of why they didn't invade. Again, another revisionist history question, like what would have happened if they had invaded because this was again like nineteen ninety seven ish, we hadn't bombed Camp Feruk yet, which was the assamb Bin Laden, one of the training camps, Like we hadn't done any of that stuff yet. How different would things be if if they had invaded? Wow? What a different world?

or not individual, but kind of group efforts. But we didn't want to get too chumming with Iran or Russia or anybody else. During the year.

making calls, making calls, trying to figure this out. It turns out it was the Germans. Because the Germans didn't want to say they were deployed there and they didn't want to be part of our coalition, and they were doing a raid on a compound and didn't tell anyone, or at least didn't tell us, and we were about to blow that compound up like minutes, like as they

were going in there, we would have killed them. And it was crazy to me, like how how even on the western side we were not fully integrated like you were saying like it was, it wasn't a coalition by any means.

we think they do. Yeah, same with Hesbola, which I also go into a lot of detail about where Hasbola came from and how it formed and Iran came in later. It wasn't you know, like it's a very interesting kind of thing that we just take for granted. And as we talked about the beginning of the show, there's a lot of these things that we just say, like, oh, that's the way it is. We should ask is that really how it is? Is that? How would have got

that way? Because if we're using the wrong information and we're making decisions with the wrong information, we're gonna end up with really bad results that keep ending with failures over and over again because we keep using these biases every time we try to make a decision.

was like a multi tool you could call it, where it doesn't just do one thing. It's like a launch pad two that's clandestimly there that you can put a bunch of things inside of and then we'll do a ton of different functions. Right, And these different functions can do pretty much anything to a system. Offensively, defensively. They can manipulate to make things look real that aren't real. Like,

it's incredible what I could do. If you're talking about the bureaucrats, they cared about the dollars because the programs like Flame are worth millions of dollars. Like I said, they weren't developed by people in the Remote Operation Center, which is where this came out of at NSA. These were developed by civilian companies that are hired for the specific purpose, like I need you to make me this

thing that can do these things. And then you'll get multiple companies that are like, oh, I can do that and this other companies like I can do that too. Here's better, but I'll charge you three million dollars for that, you know, And this is how this game works, right, Well, we just dumped a bunch of money in this program, and this program is extremely expensive, and now it's gone.

And the problem is if you take Flame apart and see how it's made, you can figure out how we might access other things with similar analogous methods, which means if we had other stuff like in Russia, for example, or in China or North Korea, all those are done too. So you're talking about like worldwide ramifications. And this was because Israel went in there and wanted to delete data. Again, this is this is the conflict between exploit versus neutralized.

When wanted to exploit. Israel wanted to neutralize, which they frequently do. That's their frequent approach is to just destroy the thing. How much more value can you get if you exploit instead? I mean it's immeasurable.

US was the five I partner in that partnership. And it was kind of like an interesting collection of people working together on this singular purpose, which was timed to happen right before the twenty fifteen nuclear agreement, so that way, if the nuclear agreement didn't work out, we had this covert operation that would destroy the nuclear program anyway. But

it was discovered right Typically it doesn't happen like that, typic were the other countries, so it was Denmark, Netherlands, Israel, United States and Germany, which is interesting because the US and Germany were two of the countries that were part of the original P five countries that were negotiating with Israel on Earth with Iran on the twenty fifteen JCPOA, and.

clandestine photography, do surroualitsy detection routes. Russia was also training them too, but Germany actually gifted them a bunch of computers and cameras to do espionage and with the knowledge.

And it's interesting because France also with Germany in this time period the early nineties, they knew that Iran was going to use this stuff to assassinate Iranians in Europe, right, Like Bond Station was being used as a platform for assassinations and Paris Station was being used for the same thing. But the agreement was as long as you don't kill Frenchmen, as long as you don't kill Germans, you can use those locations to do that stuff. And here's some cameras and computers to help you do it.

genocidal leaders there and the regime at the time. Remember this was like late eighties, early nineties, when the regime was trying to help Muslims worldwide, like that was kind of their banner, like, let's help these oppressed, that was what they were doing. And they saw the Bosniacs as oppressed because they were They're being massacred, I mean like it. It was horrific, and so the regime went there and brought weapons there, trained them. They also taught the intelligence

service of the Bosniaks how to do intelligence collection. And this is where the clash came between US helping Bosnias and Iran helping Bosniaks, because there was a group of them that we both were helping, and there was a group of them that Iran was helping that was harming us. And there was actually an ID factory that was discovered later on in the war that IF discovered, which is the international force there that was IDs to attack IF.

Which is interesting because at the exact same time we were allowing the regime to provide weapons to people in Bosnia that were fighting against the Serbs. So there was this like overlaying of friend and enemy in the same space. Because similar to Isis, where everybody was against the serves what they were doing at the time, and some of them were against them in different ways, some of those ways overlapped. It wasn't clear cut like oh that's my enemy,

that's my friend. Sometimes it doesn't work like that. Even in Iraq, Like again back when I was talking about ISIS. When I was there, we actually were careful not to strike targets where we knew IRGC people were meeting in Iraq because we knew that the sources they were working with were fighting against ISIS. So those are kind of

like off limits places. We never sent them letters or anything and told them like, hey, guys, we're not going to touch you, but it was like an understood thing, like we're going to leave these people alone over here, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and we care more about ISIS right now than we do about killing a couple of RGC guys that who knows what they're doing.

or they'll say, well, the connections here are tenuous. They're actually like relatives of hesbal of people that Hesbola could push a button to, like push on them emotionally and force them to do something. There's not a lot of consensus about exactly what is going on here. And actually I was reading a report recently about in the United States Iran and Hesbela, how many of them actually came across the border during the Biden administration, which is an

interesting question. I saw one report that said it was like, I don't know, six hundred guys or something. That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the total people that came across. How do we even know it was six hundred? What were they doing? Are they doing money laundering? Are they doing drug stuff? Are they actually doing plots? Because a lot of times when you look at pre attack planning, it looks a lot like other types of attack or other

types of planning. Surveillance, for example, if you don't know why they're doing the surveillance, it could look like pre attack surveillance. It could also look like surveillance, so you could go do an intelligence activity like a source meeting. It could also look like a drug deal, like surveillance for to find a location that's good for a drug deal. You don't really know until the thing actually happens, unless you've got recruitment of someone involved in that network, or

you've got sigan or something else like that. So that's kind of a challenge where like with the FBI, for example, how are they without doing source operations or having it's very tough to know exactly what is the threat. Like we might be able to say, like hey, that guy I know he is a member of HESBLA. Okay, what else do you know? Well, it's hard to know, you know, So it's kind of an ambiguous answer to that. But it's important to kind of take it with a measured

approach of like what exactly is this guy doing? That way you can ask the right questions and do the right intelligence collection to actually figure it out instead of just assuming like, oh, he's a drug dealer. Well, if we make the assumption that he's a drug dealer but he's actually a bad guy terrorist, we've made a bad assumption. Same vice versa. If we say like, oh, he's here to do terror attacks and we're ignoring all the drug

dealing he's doing, that's another problem. Right, So we need to come at this question objectively, which I trust that counter intelligence FBI kind of intelligence is probably doing it really well. It has been doing it really well. But it's tough. It's really tough, not just in the United States but any country. Even when you have a lot more ability to do stuff, it's really hard to figure out what is that guy doing because you can't see inside their brain.

from those activities. Especially in Europe for example, a lot of illegal immigration fund things that they'll help do human trafficking and move people and get money from that, or they'll move drugs like Captagon out of Syria into the Gulf Arab countries and make a ton of money off that. A lot of that money is used to finance these activities because again it's really tough to move the money out of Iran physically, like take dollars out of Iran

and bring them outside the country. You can do it, but you want to do it for what matters, And if an attack has a risk of being discovered, you don't want to use your dollars for that. You want to use your drug money for that, because that's something that you can stand to lose. You know.

Corps is the only one that does this. The other DTY branches do not combine intelligence human intelligence, and they also don't train up to Category one intelligence collection, which is the highest level of intelligence collection that clandestine intelligence collection that exists. So it's kind of we chose that place because it's a good place to do it, obviously because the base has a lot of you know, got a good fence, and we also transform the area around it.

The Damn Neck area, the Norfolk and Virginia Beach area into a training zone where it's it's a foreign country essentially, very similar to how the farm does it, and the guys have to go out there and operate as if they're in a foreign country and do other ops out in downtown Norfolk, you know, in the middle of the night, which is sometimes more dangerous than doing it in a foreign country.

Jason Lyons mcmulroy that one. You will also get all of those episodes ad free, and you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company and this small business survive, especially during our early years, and you are what continues to help this thing going even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising.

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