#220 Simone Ledeen - Fmr. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy

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Simone Ledeen, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Great to be here.

It's good to have you here.

I've been wanting to have you on for quite a while, but I think

right now is the perfect time.

So thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me.

Hey, it's my pleasure.

It's my pleasure.

But

yeah, lots of things going on in the news right now.

I saw a tweet talking about Intel analysts and stuff that I'll read off here in a minute that really caught our attention.

And so I really, I want to dive into that

because

just a lot to talk about.

And that tweet was,

it caught me.

So I'm going to start you off with an introduction here real quick.

Simone Ledeen, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, national security, counterterrorism, and intelligence expert with a career spanning decades across the Pentagon, Treasury, and global battlefields.

Iraq and Afghanistan war vet.

You led efforts to follow the money-fueling insurgencies.

A former senior civilian leader in the Pentagon during pivotal moments like the Abraham Accords and operations targeting Baghdadi and Soleimani, a pioneer in counter-threat finance, coordinating the SWIFT program at the Treasury and exposing terrorist financial networks, testified before Congress on the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and managing director at Maven Defense Solutions, a senior fellow at UT's Strauss Center, and an advisor shaping the future of defense technology.

Am I missing anything?

That's good.

It's quite the resume there.

That's quite the resume.

Thank you.

But

so, a couple of things, real quick here.

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Thank you.

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So, but

yeah, so getting into

this tweet that caught my attention

from you.

At a fundamental level, a lot of our analytic corpse needs to be completely destroyed and rebuilt.

A lot of these people are coming from you-know-which schools, so they're totally indoctrinated and they don't know

what they're talking about because they're not properly educated, anyways.

That really caught my attention.

And

so, I wanted to, I know we're going to dive into this more in a little bit, but I just, what was

the premise of that?

Well, I said that in the aftermath of the leaked

intelligence assessment right after

our strike against Fordow.

And the

seemed like there was this intelligence product, this assessment that was leaked that said, and it was like within 24 hours or within 12 hours of the strike occurring

that there was no significant damage.

And

now I understood later after that tweet that they did, the analysts did characterize it as low, that they had low confidence in their assessment.

And that was not included in the original, I think it was CNN that originally published that.

They left that out.

But be that as it may.

You know, if you're looking at a satellite image of a bunker buster, you just see the entry point for the bunker buster.

You don't see down, down, down where it actually exploded and you don't see what the the damage is.

So there's no possible way of knowing within that time period what the damage was or was not.

So that was kind of the context of

my tweet.

But

I also wanted to make the point more broadly because it's a problem that I've seen for a few years now.

And I don't, you know, I don't look at, I'm just a normal person now.

I don't look at our intelligence assessments anymore on a regular basis.

But

I do know these schools, these universities are

institutions of higher learning where, you know, people go, it's very hard to get in still.

They get a brand, right?

You're like stamped with a brand of one of these schools.

And that means you're supposed to know something.

That means that people are supposed to listen to you.

And that's been

one of the pillars of our,

you know, of our society really has been

we've have our different institutions, right, that we have all bowed down to and have all said, yes, we, you know, these are the people who are, who are our leaders.

These people become our presidents and our senators and our titans of business.

But we've also seen in the past few years that they're, they're completely indoctrinated by,

I will say, Marxists.

And

they come out

saying these

political platitudes without actually understanding anything that's behind what they're saying

because they're not learning how to think critically.

This is really the point.

Universities are meant to build critical thinkers, people who can look at a topic from many different points of view and then come to a conclusion instead of only being taught one way because all the other ways are offensive or all the other ways are,

you know, put a label on it.

The professors that used to teach a lot of those different points of view have been driven out of these universities.

And

what are you left with?

You're left with this one perspective.

That's what these students are taught.

And then they are released out into the wild.

Some of them become intelligence analysts.

And what we're left with is intelligence analysis from people who have not been taught how to think critically.

Now, I'm not, I don't want to cast aspersions on like our entire intelligence community,

all analysts in the community, because I have some good friends who are absolutely brilliant.

And please, you know, don't ever leave, but, but there are

a lot of others, unfortunately, and it's a struggle.

And

the more you have decision makers, this is also how the problem plays out.

You have all these decision makers who come from different backgrounds, who don't understand these nuances that nerds like me and these Intel analysts know.

So they look at a piece of analysis and they're like, oh, well, the intelligence community says this.

They don't understand the nuance of we assess with low confidence.

That doesn't matter to them because they don't know how to read that.

And everyone knows that.

um

so

everyone who's writing for them knows that so it's um

that that really was the motivation behind my writing that um and i there's a lot more there's a lot more to it and i'm actually grateful to have this conversation because a lot of people know this is true i'm not the only one

i know it's true

Exactly.

I mean, you know, I don't think it's just the universe.

I think it's, it's, I don't think it's just Ivy League universities that are doing this.

I mean, I think this is

this is a broader problem.

I mean, everybody wants to live in their own echo chamber, and they only want the perspective that

fills whatever

their

wants and maybe not needs, but you know what I'm saying?

And it's,

it's,

man, it's become just like such a problem, man.

I mean, I just, I just had Gavin Newsome on my show last week and I got

blasted for it.

And I knew I would get blasted for it, but I mean, I'm just so tired of being,

it's just everywhere.

I mean, there's you're either right or you're left, you're either MAGA or you're not.

You're,

I mean, the algorithms of the social media platforms, X, Instagram, Facebook, all of them.

I mean,

you only get one perspective because the algorithms are so good at, you know,

segregating those two camps.

And, and,

and so, you know, I wanted to

wanted to talk to the other side and just ask some questions and, and, and people are outraged about it.

It's crazy to me.

It's like,

I don't know how to get through this.

I mean, nobody's doing it.

Nobody's talking to the other side.

on either side.

And

I mean, how are we supposed to have any

civil discussions?

You know what I mean?

When it's that tribal?

We don't.

I mean, we don't have.

And then we don't have civil discussions right now.

I mean, as you see the way you're being attacked, then, you know,

with, I mean, with respect to Gavin Newsom, I mean, he just,

my, my perspective is he just says whatever.

And he's, you know, trying to build a larger platform for himself outside of California.

It's probably why people are mad at you because they might feel like you're giving him that opportunity.

But also, why are people not critical thinkers anymore?

Can you not hear, like, can you not hear him saying what he's saying and understand what's behind that?

That's pretty shocking, to be honest with you.

I agree that it's...

there should be a plurality of voices out there.

And

I mean, just for going back to intelligence analysts for a minute, their entire job is to ingest lots of different types of data perspectives and come to a conclusion based on all of the data and all of

these different reflections.

And

it's quite alarming.

I mean, I, you know, I served in the first Trump administration and I still don't understand

what a lot of people believe MAGA to be.

I like ask

three people what they think MAGA is and you'll get five opinions.

But the person who started MAGA was Donald Trump.

And so

does he get to kind of say what MAGA is and not?

I'm not like deep into the U.S.

politics.

for a good reason, which is I don't want to be attacked like you've been attacked.

But I mean, it's, it's like, it's weird.

I don't get it.

I, um,

yeah, it's, it's a mystery to me, too.

I campaigned for it for him and everything, but

I don't know.

I, uh, I'm certainly grateful that, uh, that he won and Camel Harris lost.

I mean, how, how do you, how do you fix this within the intelligence agencies?

I mean, is this a total gut job?

Well, that was.

And then where would the new ones come from?

This is the problem.

I mean, we

can't.

What are we?

What are we going to do?

We do need a new generation of critical thinkers.

And I'm grateful there are different institutions out there now that are.

that offer alternatives to some of these woke schools.

But also what's great is the government is now going after some of these schools and saying, if you're only going to teach, and this isn't only Ivy Leagues, but the problem is especially bad in the Ivy Leagues is if you're going to discriminate

based on, you know, XYZ categories, like that's against the law.

You will not get federal funding

for that.

And that has, that is going to cause change.

That will, they must change because the amount of government funding to some of these schools is like they can't survive without it.

So that's really motivating.

That's how you start to change this.

But also, I mean, people that are reading intelligence, you can grade what you're seeing and say like, this is not useful because XYZ.

But again, a lot of people who

ingest that, who are the, what they call the customers, don't actually

always understand that they're seeing something that's filtered through this like woke mind virus.

And so, yeah, so it's, it's a problem, but that's why also you're supposed, you have these senior analysts, you have the leaders who are seasoned,

but

they're also captured in many cases.

They're also captured.

And it's hard to fight against a system that only wants you to put out certain things.

And

you will get in trouble if you say other things.

And I've seen people fired for making truthful

publishing truthful assessments that were very unpopular.

Could you give me, could you just give a specific example of that?

Just so

I want the audience to understand with examples of how this could affect intelligence.

Sure.

Back in the day,

you were not allowed to say that al-Qaeda leadership was living in Iran.

You could not say it.

Why?

Because

We might have had to do something about that.

We were in the global war on terror at the time and we were going after al-Qaeda everywhere it was.

We didn't want to, I believe our leadership did not want to acknowledge that al-Qaeda leadership was in Iran because then perhaps we would have had to do something about it.

So, yeah, I saw.

reporting on that that was like highest level of classification.

So only very few people could actually ever see it.

And so also because it couldn't be published in like broader assessments that were going out to more people

at lower classification levels.

And then, you know,

fast forward a couple of years, like I got out of government, went and did other things, came back in,

and

it was, it was like just a thing that everyone acknowledged.

Oh yeah, Al-Qaeda's in Iran.

Al-Qaeda,

Al-Qaeda senior leadership's living in Iran.

They've been there for a long time.

It blew my mind.

I'm like, oh, we're just saying that now?

Like, that's crazy to me.

There's someone I know got fired for writing that.

Wow.

Wow.

So

basically what you're saying is when hard intelligence facts are gathered, if it doesn't fit whatever narrative that

is in play at the time, then that will never get reported.

To who wants to go to?

I wouldn't say that in like so broadly, but yes, there are, there are definitely times when things are purposely not promulgated out there.

Maybe it's like point to point, you know, only a few people know about it because it's so dangerous for that information to get shared more broadly.

That's one of the problems that we have.

People are working off of

sometimes, you know, misinformation or not all the information, even though we have it.

It's just very, very tightly held for a variety of reasons.

You know, sometimes, to be fair, it's not because it's like politically

damaging potentially, or puts the United States in an uncomfortable position, but because the source, you know, we want to protect the source or how we collected the information in the first place.

So it's, it's not always that way.

I want to be fair, but

it's not, it's not always

just to protect sources and methods either.

Well, I mean, talking about al-Qaeda camping out in Iran, I mean, Iran just got bombed.

Lot of

controversy over Israel right now and what's going on over there.

So I wanted to unpack a couple of things that are going on.

And so let's start with.

I mean, I woke up this morning, pulled up X.

First thing I saw, Israel bombed Syria.

So Israel's bombing Syria, Israel's bombing Iran, Israel is

killing lots of people in Gaza.

I mean what is going on over there?

Let's start with Syria, the latest.

Okay.

I would just contextualize all the things that you've that you've like that list that you just ran down,

contextualize that with October 7th, which is really was the gen, like, this is where all this started and where Israel was like, right, we're done.

We're, we're done with kind of the way we were doing things before, kicking the can down the road, kind of like trying to deal with situations rather than just completely, you know,

turn,

you know, turn Gaza into a parking lot.

But

it it changed their perspective.

And by the way, if you look at internal polling, Israeli internal polling, they're very pro what's going on now because

they suffered tremendously.

I mean, it was horrific.

October 7th was terrible.

So I just wanted to provide a little bit of context for this.

So Syria.

Syria.

This is not a short answer, Sean.

Syria has been,

there's so many players.

Syria is not just about Syria.

Over the past, since

the quote-unquote Arab Spring, which was, as we know, not a spring at all,

there have been a lot of different forces in Syria fighting each other, plotting external attacks.

Some of them,

Iran had a very serious foothold in Syria through Hezbollah.

Um, and they had like cut a deal with Assad, who was

threatened.

I mean, Assad wouldn't have survived the Arab Spring if it hadn't been for Russia and Iran.

Um, and so he became beholden to them.

Where is he today?

Moscow.

Um, so he became beholden to them, he became like their

um puppet.

Um, so

also,

if you consider the geography, like where

Israel and Syria meet, there's only a small area,

the Golan Heights, where they share a border.

But Israel's been concerned about this for many years.

First, there was Hezbollah kind of massing there, getting ready to do something.

Who knows?

There's ISIS.

There's all this.

uh all these different forces in play that ultimately threaten the state of Israel.

And again, after October 7th, this became like we're going to have to do something eventually.

I don't think that Israel ever thought they would have the opportunity to address these Iranian proxies one by one.

I think they always, their plan was always, how are we going to fight everyone at the same time?

So it's worked out well for them.

And they've been incredibly masterful at how they've kind of addressed each one of these Iranian proxies.

But

you know now there's a new there's a new manager in town

formerly a guest of ours at Camp Buka

the new leader of Syria Jalani he has turned a new leaf as he is portraying to the world.

He's no longer wearing his jihadi garb.

He wears a suit.

He's been welcomed into the international community.

And our own government really,

you know, we want a new Abraham Accords with Syria joining the Abraham Accords.

We've lifted a lot of sanctions.

We want to do business there.

And I hope, personally, I hope for that.

I hope that that happens.

However, you got Jalani in Damascus, and then you have kind of

his lieutenants or loosely aligned groups that are still sort of running things outside of Damascus.

And he needs to get better control over that.

Now there's a debate about

was he responsible for what's happened over the past few days, which is

horrific attacks against the Druze community.

The what community?

Druze.

What is that?

Their minority.

They're a minority minority group.

And they're not just in Syria.

They're in Israel as well.

They're actually very active in the Israeli security services.

They serve in the IDF.

And they play an important role in Israel and Israeli national security.

So they were attacked in a...

pretty horrific way.

There's videos all over social media about like,

you know, murders of hundreds of people that were filmed the humiliations that were forced on the druze um before they were murdered including some of their um you know some of their religious leaders it's like bad it's not it's it's very bad and so these are these are basically the druze is basically muslim israelis no they're not correct they're they're druze so they're they live in israel they live in syria they're they're spread out like if you consider you know Kurds who kind of live in a bunch of different countries

they're the kind of their own tribal network that's the Druze they have their own tribal network they're they're spread across Syria Israel

and

maybe more than that I cannot say I'm like a deep deep Syria expert but what I do know is

that they have they were attacked pretty badly.

And there were attacks against Christians prior to that,

you know, in inside of churches, murders, rapes.

And this was the second attack against the Druze under this kind of new Jalani government.

And I don't, actually, I don't want to, it is a Jalani government that

they've been acknowledged into, you know, by our leadership.

So

anyway, all that to say, um,

Israel acted in defense of the Druze.

Okay.

Um, and that's, that was what they did this morning.

They, apparently, they'd been messaging for a while, like, cut the shit out.

This is really bad.

We don't like to see this, but it didn't stop.

And

they had a problem too, which was

I read a report that said over a thousand Drews from Israel like knocked down the fence between Israel and Syria and just like went into Syria to fight with their Druze brothers.

And Israel was like, whoa,

we don't want our citizens to get killed in Syria.

They didn't want, they don't want any bigger problems.

Do you know what I mean?

Everyone wants us to calm down.

quiet down we're going in a good direction please stop killing each other um

and that was the point of this attack uh the israeli Israeli attack today.

Okay.

I really

hope that's the end.

What would you think if U.S.

got involved in that?

Do you think it's our place?

No,

definitely not.

Do you think it was our place with the Iran stuff?

I think specifically targeting Ford,

nobody else could have done it but us.

And President Trump had said for so many years, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon, that he had his own credibility riding on that, and he had to.

But yes, I do also think it was the right thing to do.

I never thought that this would turn into American boots on the ground.

It won't.

It can't.

We're not doing that.

You don't think so?

No.

Well, that's good to hear because that's, that was my worry is, you know, and, and

look,

I'm not an Israel expert.

I'm not an Iran.

I'm not a Middle East expert.

But, you know, I mean,

Trump ran his campaign.

We're not going to get into any more forever wars.

And that seems to be kicking the hornet's nest in my book.

And, you know, and the thing is, I'm not saying Israel was right or wrong in having,

in doing what they did, you know, with Iran.

But

you just mentioned it.

I know we're going to dive in a lot more.

I mean, Iran has used terrorist organizations as proxies

from what I know.

throughout the entire 20 whatever year war.

Yep.

Right.

Yes.

And we never did a damn thing about it.

Nothing.

My fucking friends were getting killed out there by this shit.

Nobody gave a fuck.

You know, now Israel gets involved and all of a sudden it's like at the snap of a finger, fuck it, we're bombing them.

And that to me is like a slap in the face.

That's like,

so when it's when it's Americans that are getting killed, we don't do shit.

But when Israel's involved, then we're going to step in and do something.

I don't understand that at all.

And I'm not, you know, I'm not getting into the conspiracy stuff about all the shit that you read online, but that's just, that's just, that's just how I feel.

And I, and that's how a, a

very large percentage of the veteran population feels.

Yeah.

Is

what's going on?

Like, why weren't you there for us?

I mean, I could not agree more in the sense that

And that goes through Trump's last administration and Obama administration and the Bush administration.

That's all of them.

Yeah.

And the Biden administration.

I mean,

we

I was tracking like

we saw Iranian money moving through like in early days of Iraq.

We were just watching it and and there were a few things that happened where

it's just a deep sigh because of all of the the terrible loss and missed missed opportunities.

But,

you know,

I was there during the Bush administration.

And

yeah, I mean, there was a policy decision, even though we knew what was happening, what they were building, who they were dealing with.

We let them.

And then they started killing us.

And essentially, we let them

with very few exceptions.

And

I agree with you.

That is messed up.

And

I mean, we should all be incredibly angry about that.

I

will

also say

that,

I mean, I'm not making excuses for anybody.

Like, I demand accountability like everybody else.

You know, we have had none and we deserve it.

And our dead friends deserve it and their families.

But I will say, this is like,

this is not the same thing.

Like, you want this

this uh regime that creates these terror proxies

that we know have killed americans like aggressively gone after us you want them to have a nuke you want them to give that

you know nuclear weapon technology to the freaking houthies and whoever else i don't um and so

Just because one thing was wrong doesn't mean this is right or this isn't right.

I I just like having the having Iran have a nuclear weapon like their ballistic missile technology, it's worth saying this too.

Their ballistic missile technology is so

was so

sophisticated.

They were building missiles that could go farther and farther and farther, not just to hit Israel.

What were they going to do with those ballistic missiles that could travel so, so far.

They were targeting us or eventually.

So um it was in our national interest to make sure that they never got a nuclear weapon and i think if israel had had the technology to do it themselves i think we would have let them and we wouldn't have gotten involved but unfortunately we are the only ones that have that technology we have the b2 we have these bunker bunker busters maybe we'll start selling those to israel great

um but It's in our interest too.

Like they are coming for us too.

So I'm not, I mean, mean, I know they're coming for us.

You know, I'm not, I'm not saying that at all, but you know, there was a couple other things that came out.

I mean, I know you have a lot of friends and acquaintances still in intelligence, and probably a lot more than I do.

I still have a couple, but you know, I talked to one person, they said not one of our 18 intelligence agencies reported that

Iran had nuclear capabilities.

In fact, you know, March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard,

this is her, the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader

Khomeini, sorry, I'm butchering his name, has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that

he suspended in 2003.

And then in June of 25,

quoted, America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months.

If they decide to finalize the assembly, President Trump has been clear that can't happen, and I agree.

And so, I mean, how does that

all change just within a couple of months?

They had no capability.

Now, all of a sudden, I mean, after years and years of intel,

all of a sudden, in a couple of months, oh shit, they've got nuclear capabilities.

We need to take care of this.

That didn't come from us.

That came from Assad.

Why wouldn't we trust our 18 intelligence agencies more than we trust the foreign governments?

Well, that foreign government had completely penetrated Iran and we had it.

I mean, we see their operations potentially ongoing even now.

So targeted, so

specific.

We weren't where they were, and they saw things that we didn't.

And

I love a good conspiracy as much as the next person.

But like,

they have to get this right.

I mean, we

we did not have we did not have, in my opinion, um, based on what I saw previously, we did not have that level of penetration that they did.

And uh, and that's that was a game changer.

Okay.

Well, that's good to know.

It's just things that I don't understand because I don't have a full picture.

And, and, you know, with the, with a lot of the stuff that you could read on the internet, I mean, it just gets you real.

No, but it's like, it's tough, Sean, because people hear that and they're like, oh, the Israelis told us, so we just believe them, and then we're going to go take out their biggest enemy.

You know, I get that.

And it, like, it sucks.

Um,

it also happens to be true.

So I don't know.

Uh, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean, it, it is, um,

I wish that we had better collection inside of Iran, that we had had better collection.

Um, now

things are changing, but not in terms of us, but what's going to happen with the regime.

I don't know anymore because they're totally defenseless right now.

I mean, do you just going back on our earlier conversation when we were talking about analysts and intelligence folks?

I mean,

not knowing what they're doing because of where they came from, from the Ivy League schools.

I mean, do you think that played into why we didn't have that type of intelligence?

I think that's part of it.

Yeah.

I think that's part of it.

I think just our general risk aversion is overwhelming.

And you, you know, you were in the CIA.

You saw like institutionally their risk averse.

Hopefully now things are changing there.

But I don't know.

And I know I was extremely frustrated by

how little was going on.

I'm like,

four years ago, you know, we could see the trajectory of this whole thing with Iran, right?

With them building the nukes, whether you want to parse that they're this close or that close.

The intelligence community started playing these games where they're like, well, they can make a new, if they decided to make a nuclear weapon, they could do it within, you know, a very short period of time.

But it's like with medium, I think at the time it was like medium,

what do you call it?

Sorry.

They had medium confidence of that assessment.

I'm like, so you don't know anything basically.

Like, I'm supposed to make decisions off of this or I'm supposed to advise my boss's boss about like based on that.

That's not that helpful.

And of course, having been an intelligence analyst before, I know, like,

I get it.

And

I don't want to like beat the dead horse too much.

I mean, sometimes you have what you have to work with, unfortunately.

And, and, um, but I think at the end of the day,

the president in his first term, President Trump made it clear, no new wars.

He didn't want to go to war with Iran.

He wanted a deal.

There were things that we could have done back then, like beneath the level of armed conflict, we have authorities that we can use to do certain things that are,

you know, in the gray zone, Sean.

You know, you know about all that.

We could have done that.

And

I didn't really see anyone who could have done it,

do it.

And unfortunately, it led to a scenario where there was no other option.

The only option was this big kinetic public thing.

Could we have potentially avoided that earlier with a little more risk-taking?

I think so.

And again, no accountability for any of that at all.

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Yeah.

Is it, is it?

Is it true that in Trump's first term, he took the inspectors of the nuclear facilities out?

I don't know.

I don't know about that.

In Iran.

Okay.

That's something I've been wanting to dive into.

But anyways, let's move on.

So I want to do, we have a lot of stuff to discuss, and I really am excited to get into the Iraq war with you.

But I thought it would be good to do somewhat of a life story and then we can go down rabbit holes along the way.

Great.

So where did you grow up?

Well, I

my parents are American, but they met and married in Italy.

So I spent my, I was born in the U.S., but I spent my early years in Rome.

And actually, Italian is my first language.

Is it really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

It's beautiful, but not that helpful

outside of like restaurants and you know going on on nice trips but um but yeah i uh so we moved to dc when i was when i was like four

um

my father was a uh a university professor at the time um and

he started getting death threats from the

uh communists there was a

the Red Brigades very active in left-wing terrorists, communist terrorists, very active in Italy, And they had killed a bunch of people there.

And

he got a death threat.

And

I was very young.

And he was like, we out.

So

we came to the U.S.

He got a job at

a think tank at Georgetown University.

And

so I grew up in DC, in the DC area, swamp creature.

Swamp creature.

I,

yeah,

my mother worked, my parents ended up both working in the Reagan administration.

My father went to the State Department and eventually to the National Security Council.

And my mother was working at the Pentagon doing technology transfer, like trying to keep the Soviets from getting our,

you know, our best technology.

Interesting.

So, yeah,

that's where I grew up.

And then I ended up,

my father, unfortunately, at the National Security Council ended up working in the same office with Oliver North and Bud McFarlane

and was swept up in the Iran-Contra affair.

I was 12 when all that happened and I had a pretty uncomfortable exchange with the principal of the school that I was in

who asked me if my father was guilty.

And I went home that day and told my mother and she was like, well, you don't have to go back to that school ever again.

And so kind of mid-year, I switched to a new school, very bougie, all-girl school, where like everyone's dad was way more important than mine and no one cared.

So, and I only learned later, you know, how how much of a struggle that was for my parents to be able to pay that tuition because it was like one of those borderline things where they didn't qualify for um

for uh any kind of scholarship.

But, and frankly, I wasn't a good enough student to get any kind of scholarship, anything.

But they,

yeah, they had to, they sacrificed a lot to pay for my education.

And I'm very grateful.

But anyway, yeah, so I went through high school

there and

then, yeah, off to college.

Where'd you go?

I went to a school called Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

And

I did not do particularly well in school, in high school.

But when I got to college, I realized that I knew more than a lot of other people just because my school was so good.

And

it all started to make sense.

Like, why did I have to go there and not just public school?

So yeah, I remained very grateful for that.

But yeah, I went to Brandeis University,

majored in European cultural studies just so that I could get credit for a full year overseas.

Pretty much always wanted to travel, live overseas, had the wanderlust.

And

so I went to Italy and did like,

in my mind, I had this eat, pray, love thing.

You know, I went to Florence and thought it would be this great adventure, but I made a critical mistake, which was I actually did a program at the University of Florence, which was like hard as shit.

So I had to do it.

It was in Italian.

And you go to like, the way they do it there is like you go to lectures, you read this whole pile of books.

They give you the reading list.

And like you have one exam at the end of the year.

And it's, it's an oral exam in front of a panel of professors.

And it's like half an hour and they can ask you anything.

And that sucked.

I had no e-pre-love situation.

I had like study, study, study.

And, but I learned a lot.

And Florence was beautiful.

And I got out of Brandeis, which I already was like crazy left, crazy left.

Coming from DC, I wanted nothing to do with politics.

I just wanted to be like normal kid, normal experiences.

I mean, when I was young, I remember in DC, we had like Gene Kirkpatrick over for dinner one night.

And she,

um, my father was like delayed at work.

So it was like me and my mom with Gene Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations.

I mean, if you ever look her up on YouTube, she was like

a serious person.

Okay.

Serious person.

And I guess our oven broke.

My mom was putting some like frozen hors d'oeuvres or whatever in the oven to warm up and the oven was broken.

So she sent me next door, like to use the next door neighbor's oven.

And I got stopped by the Secret Service because I'm running back and forth with food.

They're like, What are you doing with the food?

And um, that was my, you know, I had a weird childhood, it was not like a lot of other kids.

Um, so when I went to college, I just wanted to be normal, and um, but instead, it was just all this craziness already.

Um, and

like we had,

I forget what year it was, maybe my sophomore year, we had um

a big student event, which was Angela Davis

was invited as a speaker.

Angela Davis, former vice presidential candidate under the Communist Party.

She was

briefly on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for like busting her boyfriend out of

court.

I think some, I think a judge was killed in the process.

Wow.

So she was invited to speak at my school and she was being paid out of student funds.

And

I was like, absolutely not.

And

that was also,

I ended up kind of speaking out about that a little bit because I'm like, this is crazy.

And you're not even telling the students who this person is.

Like, she is bad news.

And

anyway, it was, it was even back then, it was a problem.

And I'm, you know, I'm 50 years old.

So this was a few years ago.

But yeah, so I,

just I went overseas for a year, just kind of did that thing and came back.

I wrote an honors thesis

and got out of there.

And I've, I don't think I've ever been back to Boston since then.

It was like way too cold for me and just not great memories.

But but I got through it and I finished, which was my goal.

And then

And then I came back to DC,

got a job briefly, like for a tech company,

just kind of feeling my way around, didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life.

And

I got this job working for a guy who had invented something

that was acquired by a company called Lucent Technologies, which doesn't exist anymore.

But he made like over a billion dollars off of it.

And he decided that he was going to start up all these related tech companies that would like be each other's customers.

And

I worked for him.

I mean, I was like basically one level above interim, but it was cool.

And

anyway,

from there, I went to business school.

And I went to business school in Italy.

But

that was right when 9-11 happened.

It kind of changed my life.

Yeah, I saw that.

How did it change your life?

Well, one of my mother's like best friends was on the plane that hit the Pentagon.

And

we, at the time, I was, I was like a few blocks away.

I was in Pentagon City.

And

so we, you know, you could feel the

apartment building shake when the plane hit.

And we already knew

We'd already heard about what had happened in New York City.

And

I didn't know till later that day that Barbara was on that plane.

Barbara Olson was her name.

And

she,

it turned out that she had switched her flight at the last minute.

She was supposed to,

she was like a political commentator.

She wrote, her last book was about Hillary Clinton, not a fan.

And she

was on her way.

I think she was supposed to go to Bill Marshall.

That's why she was on that flight.

It was going to Los Angeles.

And her husband's birthday was September 11th.

So she, at the last minute, she changed her flight so that she could be with her husband on the morning of his birthday.

And when he got to bed that night, he found that she had left him a note

as well.

But yeah, that.

That changed my life.

It changed the life of our entire family,

my two younger brothers as well.

So

I was already about to leave.

I was about to leave for business school in Milan

and everything was grounded and I had time to

think about everything, go to Barbara's Memorial Service and just kind of be with her, her widower with Ted and just think about like,

do I even give a shit about any of this anymore?

Like I had all these plans to go whatever, have more European adventures or whatever.

And I'm like,

I don't care about any of that anymore.

I came from, I was, I've been so lucky.

You know, I came from a great family.

I have a great education.

I need to serve my country now.

And

I didn't know how, but I

kind of the seed was planted.

And

as I thought about it, I realized like, what is school?

You go to school to learn a certain set of tools that you can use however you want.

So, that's when I started to get the idea: like, there's going to be somebody tracking terrorist money.

So, I'm going to go to a business school, I'm going to learn about international finance, and then I'm going to figure out how to help do that.

Um, and that's what I, that's what I ended up doing.

Wow, and you deployed to you deployed to Iraq, I did 2003, yep, how was it early days?

Um,

well, uh, it was a shit show.

It was.

You were there for the invasion?

No, no.

They trucked us into Kuwait in September, and

we were in Kuwait, or was it late August?

I can't remember.

We were in Kuwait for like a week, and they had started up this like bizarre week-long training in a classroom

for civilians who had never done anything like this before.

And it was kind of like,

mop gear, it's important, but you're not going to have any.

Flack vest, also important, yours doesn't have any plates.

So it was like, cool.

But at the time when we got there,

I think it was sometime in September that we got to Baghdad.

It was still, it was before, right before

things started blowing up, like right before the UN the UN thing was like a big turning point when the the head of the UN mission there got blown up

so when I first got there you could still they had like government suburbans at the Four Heads Palace is what what they called it because it had four heads like of Saddam Hussein on top of the palace the presidential palace as it's now known

We could just sign out a car and like drive into the city, like go buy some pistachios.

And

that it was like that for about five minutes after I got there.

And then things started going boom pretty fast.

But we, you know, we were housed in the palace.

They just put cots in, I don't know if it was like a ballroom.

So it's one of the huge rooms.

They just put all these cots out and the lights were on 24-7.

I saw a baby being made

right there in front of like a lot of people.

They eventually, the mother and father eventually got married, but it was, there was a lot going on there.

Um,

a lot going on.

Um, yeah.

So,

um, but we, you know, we worked, we were trying to do the work that we were given.

So, I was an advisor in the Coalition Provisional Authority.

I was an advisor to the Ministry of Finance.

Okay.

What does that mean?

They basically,

what they told me my job was going to be was

Excel spreadsheets.

And like, having just finished my MBA, I was like, I know how to do that.

They, at the time, there were a lot of countries that were, that wanted to donate to the

rebuilding of Iraq.

And a lot of people forget this now, but in the early days, there were also a lot of other countries that were there, not in combat, but in like, they wanted to show up and give and lend support.

Now, this, like, fast forward to Afghanistan and you see all these,

there were foreign nations that were there who fought with us and bled with us and died with us.

In Iraq,

people showed up,

but then pretty quickly, this war became very unpopular in their countries, and we were kind of on our own.

And I saw a lot of these foreign troops kind of, you know, peace out.

But

yeah, so we were, we were,

we were specifically, my my team was on a what they called a budget execution team which was basically like

executing the budget paying out the money um

in an environment like that it's really hard because everything was cash and um

the

old

they also decided the powers that be decided the old dinars that had saddam's face on them had to be you know there they needed to be phased out and there needed to be new dinars made, and they were being made in England.

And this was after a few months.

They were trucked in, and we had to,

you know, trade out the old ones for the new ones.

And we had to make sure, like, the teachers got paid.

But,

you know, I remember when

I mean, I have, there's so many things to say about this.

I don't, I really don't even know where to begin.

But

I remember

when Bremer

announced that they were disbanding the Iraqi army.

And

at the time, they said that

the Iraqi army soldiers were going to be given three months' pay, and

that's it.

Like, go figure out your new life.

I mean, I've read books where people tracked, like, when did the insurgency really start?

And I remember

there were riots.

I mean,

when they would show up to get their payments and people,

like CPA people, not me, but others, had to tell them, like, we're done.

You're not getting paid anymore.

They would riot.

And then they started making threats.

And then they started following through with those threats.

It wasn't hard to see.

It's just, you know,

there was a very...

concerted political effort to ignore it.

So, for example, I learned later that

going back to our intelligence assessment discussion, intelligence analysts were not allowed to use the term insurgency until Donald Rumsfeld left as Secretary of Defense.

What?

Unrest.

They had to call it unrest.

They couldn't call it insurgency.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

So

that happened.

There were new ministers for all the different Iraqi ministries that were installed.

And, you know, there was this idea of like trying to be fair because obviously the Baath party was all Sunni and they wanted to put in Shia and kind of make it fair.

Well,

a lot of the Shia

were

turned out to either become problematic or Iran related or just weak and not popular with the people.

So they didn't hang around for that long.

But

I mean, I remember working with the Iraqi Minister of Finance.

So our team, we were out of the green zone like every day.

We would travel to the Ministry of Finance.

For anyone who knows about security, let me paint this insane picture for you.

So we were in a soft vehicle in a suburban with a Humvee of soldiers in front of us and and behind us you were in a soft armored vehicle yeah no armored vehicle uh for many many many months there were no armored vehicles available for us because we were like gs9 what year is this 04 oh 03 04.

holy

yeah and no no we had flak vests with no plates in them um

So, and we, but we were out like every day.

And I felt badly personally.

And we, we felt badly.

I know my, teammates did because these soldiers were there like protecting us.

I'm like, my life isn't worth more than his life.

Like, why?

Like, it just didn't make sense to me.

How, why are we doing this?

Like, why can't we all just get in like a Toyota?

you know, and drive over there.

No one will know who we are.

Like, why are we doing this?

It just seemed crazy.

And then we'd be stuck in traffic and there'd be all these like apartment buildings all around us.

And, you know, I'm like,

so

none of that, nothing ever, none of that ever made sense to me.

But we would have,

we would have, over time, a decision was made because these

ministers, the Iraqi ministers, would, they requested security.

They'd say, I'm unsafe.

Our ministry is not safe.

There's no Iraqi army anymore.

The American military is not guarding, you know, had no interest in guarding ministry of whatever.

So they wanted their own security.

So the decision was made by the CPA Bremer, I assume, to provide them with their own security force.

They could pick their own security force.

And in many cases, like, so we could train them, we could equip them, give them firearms.

And I mean, imagine this, like new Shia, I mean, these were like,

some of them became Shia militias and we started them.

When I left Iraq in 2004,

one of the people that I worked with,

he was an advisor in the Ministry of Interior.

He was working with this, it was called the Facilities Protection Service, FPS.

He gave me an armband from the FPS.

And I still have it.

I have it in my office at home just to remind me: like,

we are a big part of what is wrong.

We did it.

And a lot of

what we're seeing today is like second and third order effects of the very poor decisions that we made and the fact that we refused to acknowledge them at the time and try to address them and try to find some accountability.

Could you elaborate on how we created that problem a little bit more?

Yeah.

So, like I was saying, the FPS, in this specific case,

the FPS

became

like militias.

Like they grew.

The security forces around these different ministries grew.

And there were some ministers, the Shia ones,

that some of them were, it turned out talking to you Qasim Soleimani.

Qasim Soleimani was already

the

head of the IRGC Quds force was already like running networks inside of Iraq.

and

he influenced networks and this was like a point that he picked up on an opportunity

but it also came out

I think it's important also to talk about Ahmachalabi so Ahmed Chalabi who's that he was

he was a big figure in the run-up to the invasion he was someone he was the head of something called the Iraqi National Congress

and was one of the main people saying, when you invade Iraq, like the people will embrace you and throw flowers on you.

And

he was really embraced by,

you know, group like American, like neocons,

and of which my father was one.

My father was, you know, friends with some of those people and some of the big kind of pro-Iraq invasion people.

And I grew up around them.

And so when I got to Iraq,

you know, there were people who worked for him who were like, oh, Simone, hello.

And this was a really big like pivot point for me personally when I just started to see what was going on.

And he had,

he had

this car scheme at the Ministry of Finance, where it was basically like a money laundering scheme of like getting

cars from the coalition and then selling them and making money off of it.

And which is money laundering.

Wow.

And

the Iraqi minister of finance one day when I was there working called me into his office.

And he had like, turned out Chalabi had like someone outside of his office just sitting there watching who came in and out all day.

And he called me into his office and shut the door.

And he was like, you have to help me.

They're going to kill me.

And I'm like, who?

You know, I'm 28 years old.

Again, I told you my background.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

Who?

And

he wouldn't say the name, but he's like, you see this guy outside?

Like, they're trying to make me do all kinds of things.

Help me.

So I didn't know what to do.

I mean, I went back.

to my leadership and I was like, wrote my little report.

And,

you you know, that guy wasn't finance minister for very much longer.

But I started to see what was going on and what Chalaby in particular was doing.

And

I told my father, I was like, this is not a good guy.

This guy is not one of us.

He's not doing pro-America stuff.

And in fact, he's doing a lot of really shady.

a lot of really shady things.

And my father from day one believed me.

And,

but a lot of his friends

who I'm sure are going to see this, like they never, they always argued with me and they said he was misunderstood.

But now

a lot has come out.

And I think it's clear that he was an Iranian asset from the beginning.

And I think Soleimani was his handler.

He traveled to Iran so many times and always tried to explain it away.

Like, of course, I have to deal with them to you.

Bullshit.

So again, we like, this is our own willful blindness.

And

there's been no accountability for that either.

But so many people know about it.

So many people are angry.

You know, we've been betrayed.

And

like

we're just sitting here with our anger.

You know what I mean?

And yet the region and Iraq is not our friend.

Syria is doing Syria.

I mean, it's still a cauldron.

Although things have changed, but not because of us.

Not really.

Do you think we should have been in Iraq to begin with?

No.

What makes you say that?

I agree with you.

I'm just curious.

I think

Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.

And

I...

was I was totally radicalized by 9-11.

We lost Barbara.

I was like, let's go.

I recently actually went to the

Bush, George W.

Bush Museum at SMU in Dallas.

I don't know if you've ever been.

I actually,

I don't know if I would recommend it to like GWAT veterans.

It's strange.

It made me really angry

because there's a whole like GWAT

exhibition there or whatever.

And it has all these speeches, all the speeches that they gave, like leading up to the invasion.

And I got so angry.

I'm like, I was, but I was mad at myself.

I'm like, how did I ever believe this?

How did I ever believe there was any connection between 9-11 and Iraq?

There was none.

What were we even doing?

KBR.

You know,

do you think that's what it was?

Dick Cheney's?

I think it was bigger than that.

You think it was bigger than that?

What do you think it was?

I think it was, I think that might have been part of it because the years of like waste, fraud, and abuse through KBR was just like so egregious and no one really ever did anything about that.

Maybe that was part of it.

But, you know, I also think like

there was this,

you know, hanging like.

George Bush Sr.

didn't really finish the job in Iraq.

Like, you know, he fine, he got Iraq out of Kuwait.

Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

He launched the Gulf War to get Iraq out of Kuwait, which was successful.

But a lot of people wanted him to go the step further and regime change Saddam Hussein, and he didn't.

But a lot of people in the George W.

Bush administration thought now's the opportunity where we can finish that, where we can right that wrong.

I think that's very real.

And

so I think both of those reasons.

But it's also important to say that

there was a belief that Saddam was trying to

was building some

weapons of mass destruction.

I don't think, I think a lot of people did believe that.

And like, in retrospect, kind of good for him because there had been this long, you know, Iran-Iraq war.

They were mortal enemies.

And he wanted the Iranian regime to think that he was holding on to this like huge store of weapons of mass destruction.

You know,

it got him in the end.

But

at least it was enough of a thread to pull that they built this whole narrative around it.

And, and I know, I mean,

of course, he didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

He had a large amount of yellow cake uranium

that they eventually put on a ship and sent to Canada.

But that was not weapons of mass destruction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, when you talk about some of the waste, fraud, and abuse of KBR, what are you talking about?

Oh, man.

I mean,

I saw this in a lot more detail in Afghanistan than I did in Iraq.

But just like, I remember

just because I was in Iraq in the early days and all that stuff was just getting going, where, like I said, initially we were housed in the

presidential palace, and then eventually they started, you know, bringing in these

trailers.

And the first trailers didn't have bathrooms.

So then those trailers were moved out, and they got the new trailers that had bathrooms.

And then I personally knew a couple of soldiers that were somehow had gotten vehicles through KBR and were like sending them back to CONUS.

Yeah, I mean, obviously breaking the law.

And

I didn't like, I found out about it much later when I didn't even know where anybody was.

But it was like, it was stuff like that.

There was a lot of deal making, a lot of like people kind of,

I don't even know.

I mean, and then.

Can you, can you talk about the connection between Dick Cheney and and KBR?

Well, he was the CEO

before he was vice president.

Well, he was the CEO of Halliburton,

of which KBR was part of Halliburton.

And then they spun it off because it looked really bad, didn't it?

Yeah, it looked bad.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's so hard to paint a picture of how much money was wasted.

I mean, when you're talking about the trailers,

you're talking about basically a mobile home, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of mobile homes that were put out with no bathroom.

And then all of a sudden, they're replaced with ones that have a bathroom.

I mean, we're

the amount of money.

That was just,

and it's the biggest.

I mean, they ran, from what I know, they ran all logistics,

all logistics in Iraq and and in Afghanistan.

And he was the fucking CEO of it, who's now the vice president, who obviously has major poll.

Correct.

Yeah, correct.

I mean,

I remember at BIAP, Baghdad International Airport, we used to go,

we used to go there once a week on Fridays when we didn't work.

And we used to literally insane to think about today, risk our lives to go there to to get like Burger King so we wouldn't have to eat whatever, just to get out and try to feel like we were doing something normal.

But yeah, there was a Burger King there.

There was, they were building all kinds of stuff there.

And there was still

also the duty-free.

So

we were not under General Order 1.

We were civilians assigned to the CPA, which was like basically,

it was was a DOD entity.

But anyway, whatever

people bought booze at the at the airport.

But

even just in the eight months that I was there, I mean, there was such a huge change in terms of like building things out.

And the only thing that I saw during that time that was completely egregious was the trailers.

And of course, they weren't like we started getting mortar and rocketed pretty quickly after I got there.

And so there was no protection for for that at all.

Like over time, they started putting sandbags.

So at least like if someone got hit, the shrapnel wouldn't hit someone else.

But I mean, it was,

that's, that's how it was in those early days.

Pretty crazy to think about today.

When I, when I finally got home from that deployment, um, I didn't realize that I was a little rattled, but I remember I was at my parents' house for dinner one night and there was like a window that was up and it kind of of fell down behind me and I was like under the table and I didn't even before

everyone's like where's Simone

I

so it you know being going through all that I it wasn't like I was in combat or anything like that but we got we got a lot of incoming over time it just kept getting worse and worse and a couple of my friends

We had a couple of terrible experiences.

We had, we worked very closely with awesome translators.

We had these two girls who were, we became good friends of ours.

And I remember one day they were coming on base

for work and there was the security was so bad.

Like no one really cared about the local nationals that were working with us.

It was really sad.

And there was a huge line of cars, of their cars waiting to get in through security into the green zone every morning.

So one day,

some terrorists, like, you know, in an SV bid, just placed himself in the middle of that line of cars and detonated himself.

And

all the cars caught on fire and people were burned to death,

including one of our interpreters.

And

her friend who was in the car with her, like made it out.

We tried to go to the hospital later to just like pay our respects and visit.

And the families were like,

get out of here.

Like, we don't want to see you here get out of here and um

that was like

you know that was a pretty low pretty low moment um

we had

we had uh oh i know this is kind of a

this is another kind of sad story i guess but when i was leaving i'm i'm not uh always a rules follower and um you were when we were

in order to leave uh iraq as a cpa person you're supposed to take the rotator out to Kuwait and then back home.

But I knew this guy who,

also an American, who was working on the kind of political

side of CPA.

And he had lived in the Kurdish region for a long time before the war and had friends up there and was leaving around the same time that I was.

So he offered me to go with him.

And basically, his buddies were just going gonna come pick him up outside the green zone and he was gonna they were gonna drive around you know spend like a week uh in iraqi kurdistan and then like leave through turkey um you know uh on the border like just by by foot so i thought that sounded awesome um idiot and uh and so i did that and we got stopped

first of all i got in so much trouble for that because um it was actually really sad this woman fern Fern Holland, who was doing,

she was doing,

she was trying to help Iraqi women

who were victims of domestic violence.

That's, that's a lot to unpack there.

Okay.

But she was there doing that.

And God bless her.

She was killed.

And she was killed right when I kind of like wasn't, when I had left.

And so for a while, there was this Marine colonel who was kind of in charge of me.

He had, he didn't know, he thought that might have been me, basically.

I didn't give him a lot of information.

I think I just left.

I'm very sorry about that.

But

yeah, we drove.

So we get to Bakuba and we got pulled over by

police, maybe, or just random criminals wearing Iraqi police uniforms.

And we had to,

they asked us for our IDs, and my friend just gave them his like library card from the school that he had gone to because we were not going to show them our CPA or any U.S.

stuff.

And they got really mad.

Anyway, long story short, I think the Kurds who were our kind of driver shooters kind of passed them some money and we went on our way.

But it was,

we went all over Erbiel,

Dahuk.

We went to Suleimania

and just had an amazing, did picnics with some of his Kurdish friends and met a lot of people.

I actually learned a lot on that trip.

And then as we were exiting, we were going into Turkey,

I

forgot that I had had one spent round in

my bag.

It was

a shell casing that fell into my trailer the night that everyone was celebrating in baghdad when we caught when we caught saddam and um you know what goes up must come down a lot some of it came down into our uh housing and uh and when i i was sleeping in the palace that night when i came back there was this like one spent round and and so i thought it was cool i'll keep it and the turks uh at the border crossing were like not stoked about that and i had I had a little bit of a problem getting in.

But anyway,

that was my Iraq experience.

And I will say, I did not,

it's taken me years to, to, I think, properly understand

my role, but also what I witnessed.

There were some really also just sad things that happened there.

Like, in addition to what I said, there was a colonel that I had worked with a lot.

He was getting ready to rip out.

And his last day, he brought this woman, this Iraqi woman, beautiful, beautiful young woman.

And I understood pretty quickly that they had had something going on.

And he was trying to find a job for her because he was leaving and he was abandoning her.

And,

you know, it was just, it was a terrible.

He's like, well, maybe, you know, you guys have space for an interpreter or something.

And I'm like, no, we don't.

You know, piece of shit.

And this woman, probably her whole family knows what you've been up to.

And now what's her life going to be?

You know,

stuff like that just made me really angry because I'm like, we're leaving.

You know, we're not going to stay here.

And

anyway, yeah.

Yeah.

What are some lessons that you think

what are some lessons you learned from that war?

I think I'm still learning lessons from that war.

But

the important,

the most important one for me was

how easily, like how you can get your blood heated,

how I can, and how easily, in a way, I was,

I believed something so strongly that was wrong.

And

that that is something that I hope like has guided me in the rest of my life

because

I so believe that was the right thing and it's so clear now that it wasn't.

And

I also want to help to

teach people that

about that.

Because it's not just we have so many bad feelings about the specifics of what happened and how it happened, but

in the broader strategic context, what a huge mistake it was for us.

And we're living with the consequences today.

We're suffering from what that did to us as a country today.

Would we be where we are with China

if we

knew what the threat from China was going to be back then even,

but maybe not to this extent, but

there were smart people who understood where China was headed.

Maybe it wasn't clear that they would achieve their goals, but it was clear where they wanted to go.

But

yeah, this was

this, that was the most important lesson of all of that.

But there are many like micro lessons too.

Do you think that war was all for nothing?

I mean,

I want to say no.

I want to say no.

I'm with you.

And I'm sure maybe if we sit here long enough, we can come up with

reasons why it might not have been.

Can you think of any positives?

Well, I think

it's, it's always,

I don't like being totally negative about anything.

I think there's always good in everything.

You can always find it if you look hard enough.

But this was so bad.

It was so bad.

And I'm thinking in particular of

a friend of mine who died by suicide last year, who was a two-time Iraq veteran.

And I was in his wedding and he was a mentor to my brothers.

Both of my brothers served in the Marine Corps, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

And,

you know, that

I know that he was very angry about everything

and about the war.

And

I think in his later years, he actually, he was a Naval Academy graduate.

I think he

regretted joining the Naval Academy, regretted his entire military career.

And,

you know, that was really, that was really tough.

He was struggling for a long time.

And I know there are a lot of other people who are going through that too.

Unfortunately, he was also an addict.

And I think the addiction really got a hold of him.

And he wasn't someone who

really sought help easily.

So,

but yeah, I mean,

it's,

we have a lot of, hey, my brother who served in Iraq, he went through a lot too.

And thank God he got help.

He's doing amazing now.

But he lost Marines.

And I, you know, I just, I have a lot of like compassion and love for veterans.

And I kind of feel like all of you are my brothers.

And

I, that's why I love

kind of staying in the mix, you know, and why when I had the opportunity to go back into government in a role where I could potentially take these lessons that I've learned and like maybe try to turn it into something good.

That was what I wanted to do.

I don't know if I did, if I managed to, but that was kind of my thought process.

And that's, that's, uh, it kind of guides me today.

So

I don't know.

I mean, everything bad we go through, we're supposed to learn from it, right?

If it doesn't kill you.

Um, so hopefully it's made us wiser as a nation.

I love to see

all these, I love to see all these people commenting now about like no no war no um and i like i agree but i also think not every military action is a full-blown war um

i think it's important to make that that um

i think that that difference is important and i also think uh we live like the united states is in the world you know we can't just totally bury our heads in the sand and when we do things get worse and then in the end we end up having to do something Like I was telling you with the Iran stuff.

Then we end up being trapped into actually having to take some action if we're not kind of like managing things early on.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, Simone, let's take a quick break.

Great.

We come back.

We'll get into Afghanistan.

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All right, Simone, we're back from the break.

We're getting ready to get into some Afghanistan stuff.

So

you get home from Iraq and then

you roll back to Afghanistan.

Yeah,

a little bit of a funny story.

So when I was in Iraq, I met

I met

the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Special Operations, ASD solek uh who was tom o'connell at the time and um

he was

like a let he's just a legendary guy um in all respects and became a mentor of mine but anyway he

he asked me what i was doing after iraq and i had no idea and so he offered me a job at the pentagon um and so that's what i did when i came back but funny story you know it takes a long time to get a security clearance if you've never had one before and um and i'd spent some time in you know in europe and whatever so um i was not able to do any work in that office until i got uh like a a high uh ts clearance and i only had a secret clearance so they put me in another office which was the office of iraq reconstruction or something like that and i ended up getting stuck

i mean it was that job was so bad I ended up getting stuck responding to congressional inquiries about like just hostile congressional inquiries.

I was like, you lost $8 billion

of Iraqi money.

Where did it go?

And

so I just spent my entire day, every day, responding to really aggressive congressional inquiries.

So I volunteered to go to Afghanistan.

I was like, that's got to be better than this.

Wow.

I've never heard that comparison.

Afghanistan's got to be better than this.

Interesting state, was it?

Yes.

Good.

It was.

Good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

I

went

in 2004 to Afghanistan.

I was there almost the entire year

working with

At the time, the U.S.

command was CFC Alpha Combined Forces Command Afghanistan.

And

the commander was Carl Eikenberry, who later became our ambassador to Afghanistan.

He was a three-star at the time.

And so I went there.

I was embedded in the plans shop.

And

the reason I was there was because

there was someone, it might have been Doug Fife, I don't know who, someone in the Pentagon

who was important had this idea about, so they were at the time trying to solve this problem, which never got solved.

How does,

how do we leave Afghanistan with some money?

Like, what's their revenue going to be?

Because with Iraq, that wasn't going to be a problem.

Their revenue is oil.

But what does Afghanistan have?

They have like heroin.

Yeah, they have opium.

So what's an, what are the alternatives?

And

lithium.

Well, at the time, that's right.

But at the time, the thought was customs revenue.

Afghanistan is kind of the waypoint between East and West historically, like the old Silk Route.

And what if we could actually, so there was no real customs revenue being collected at the border for the country.

It was just like all the Afghan border police, you know, taking bribes and bakshish and like putting it in their own pockets.

But what if, what if we were able to change that up and actually collect revenue for the country?

Could that work?

Could that cover the budget of the country?

So

the plan shop built this pilot project and I got embedded into that to basically

do the numbers and kind of see like what were we collecting before what were they collecting before what are they collecting now and I was working with

you know the some military guys from the plan shot Marines and a ranger who had a whole they did a whole thing I mean they

picked a border crossing point which was Islam Kala which is at the border in the west with Iran near Herat and

they replaced the border police commander with a border police commander from the east.

So he wasn't part of the western tribal network.

So it would, it was harder for him to be corrupt was the whole idea behind it.

And then,

you know, his, he brought a new force with him that was also from the east.

They were better trained.

They were better equipped.

They had more fuel.

They had, you know, more money for food and stuff.

And so the idea was, like, let's see if if we do all this,

will they, will they bring back customs revenue in a meaningful way?

And so I was the one who kind of like documented it and did all the numbers and the budgets and everything.

And

the answer after three months was yes.

And then General Eichenberry.

And by the way, it took a long time to get this up and running, but we did get it up and running three months later.

And there's a lot of stories to tell in between like the trip that the guys took.

I didn't go on that trip for obvious reasons, but they drove from Kabul to harat on the ring road um with these afghans the afghan border police and um that was kind of you know they they like to talk about

well there were a lot there were a lot of stories from that but they you know they were really part of um

i mean they they uh

i don't know what i'm trying to say here anyway um the bottom line is it worked and so you so basically what you were doing is you you were replacing afghanistan's income with with

borders with uh with customs issues we were you're you're replacing the opium trade with

customs the opium trade the the revenue from the opium trade went to like the drug traffickers and the problem that we were trying to solve was like how is the government of afghanistan going to make money that's not ours that's not like the u.s taxpayer money you know like they need to be self-sufficient, like fast.

So how are we going to,

somehow that became our problem.

That's a different conversation.

I just got there when someone was trying to figure out the answer to that question.

So,

you know, again, I was like, GS, whatever.

But that was the job.

So trying to document.

How much money

did the government collect at the border crossing points when they were, you know, when things, we were really focused on them and we trained them and all this stuff.

And

so

within a three-month period, which was the period of the pilot project,

it seemed like at least, you know, the initial numbers were pretty good.

And the old guys had been moved away.

They'd been fired and kind of moved off the border because they weren't effective.

They were just corrupt, like everybody else.

And that was, that

worked.

It did.

How many people are coming in and out of there?

I mean, so many.

It was unbelievable.

So many.

Day and night, mostly day.

But I mean, we also would have people come up to us because

the Marines that I was with, obviously they took off their jackets that had their name tape on it and stuff.

And these people would come up to us and be like, are you guys going to invade Iran?

And

probably Iranian collectors, for all I know.

And they're like, yeah, tomorrow, get ready.

Marines.

But

yeah, I mean, it was,

there was a lot of money.

And

it was, it was, you know, was for that period of time, we made

an effort to actually capture the amounts and

and look over their shoulders a bit.

And it, I think at least the concept was proven.

But

one of many kind of tragic things that happened was that the commander, we briefed him on the program and how it was successful.

And he was like, is this Doug Fythe?

Is this Doug Fythe's idea?

And I'm like, I don't know.

I don't know who, you know, we didn't know whose idea it was.

It was like, we were told to do this.

So we're doing it.

But he immediately got political, which was to me kind of like a red flag.

I'm like, so what?

It works.

And then he, you know, he decided that this wasn't a security mission, that it was,

it was a board, well,

it was customs, and therefore it was a,

we needed to transition it over to the embassy.

This was not appropriate for the military command to be, to be doing.

Even though border security, I don't know.

classic secure i mean security is literally in the name but okay so um so we had to transition it to the embassy, um,

which meant that the

uh the guy that was assigned to it, nice guy, I guess, like older gentleman, um,

not part of having trained this guy, the the commander, um, whose name was General Ayub,

wasn't part of that.

You know, they, they pulled all of the, all of our military assets that we kind of had just as a show of force, kind of around the border police facility.

all of that was gone his um

his partner like uh this guy tony who was his kind of trainer and partner also pulled back so

uh predictably within a pretty short period of time he was killed um the commander was killed and you know over there was reporting that he was like he'd started to take a little on the side and do all that but it's like man we abandoned him we totally abandoned him And all of the people that

from that region and the drug traffic curves that he was going after, they did some really significant drug busts during that time.

They, I mean, they, everyone knew what was going on.

They all knew.

And that was, that was the end for him.

And

really, I went back.

I went back to, so I came home like in November of 04 and I went back to Herat in like 20, 2009.

My next employment.

I just went out there.

I was based in Kabul.

I was at ISAF headquarters that time.

You couldn't travel outside the base without an MRAP.

Like you had to be in an MRAP then because the security situation had changed so much.

But in 2004,

you know, we would, we had our like Hyluxes.

We just drive into Herat.

We did like tourism one day.

We saw Alexander the Great had a, there were still remnants of,

yeah.

and uh, we, we went and visited that.

We did like some carpet shopping, um, you know, drank, had some tea, and um, it was just a totally different experience.

And I, I do think the two are related.

Um, I don't think,

of course, when I got back there, the Iranians had built all this, they, they built electricity, they built a lot of new Shia mosques.

Herat was beautiful by far the most like outside of Kabul.

And it might have been even more beautiful than Kabul.

You think Kabul?

You think Kabul was beautiful?

Compared to the rest of the country,

was built up.

Let me put it that way.

It was built up.

I mean, parts of Kabul were beautiful.

Yes.

I didn't say those parts.

I spent a lot of time in Kabul.

I mean,

I guess

it is what you make it in a way, but I just, there were so, the the things that I thought were beautiful there were, um,

I mean, I, I, I liked,

they have all these fruit trees and, you know, there was a lot of flowering things there that I thought were, made it, made it nice.

Um, but obviously,

you know, I'm sure you did too.

We were testing the air quality

when we were living there, and it was like

30% fecal matter or something.

I remember the air, especially especially in the wintertime when everybody was burning tires and shit.

Literal shit, you're building

burning shit.

Yeah, I remember spitting in the sink and my spit was gray and I could barely open my eyes if I went outside, especially at night in the winter because that's, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm probably romanticizing it a little bit.

Maybe just a tap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

But so

what were you doing?

How does this fit in with special ops?

What you were doing?

Well, that was,

here's how it fits in with special ops.

Great question.

So I traveled around the country to as many border crossing points as I could doing my assessment.

And I went with teammates when they could go, but a lot of times it was just me.

And

so a lot of the border crossings around the country at the time were like I had to go meet up with like

ODA, ODB, whatever.

They were the ones that were controlling that territory.

So

they, I was not allowed to go south.

They would, they would not, they said it was too dangerous.

And I never, I never got to see, um

I never got to see the border crossing points in the south.

But yeah, I went out east in particular.

I spent some time with our special forces out there, Green Berets.

And

there's one instance I remember.

I think it was Assadabad.

Not Abbottabad, which is Pakistan, but Assadabad.

I went out there and had the opportunity to meet up with

this ODA and the ODB commander as well, the major.

And they took me to,

we went to the AFPAC border, just

pretty barren, pretty, pretty crazy.

I don't really know why I was, I should probably shouldn't have been out there in retrospect.

I was going to say, that's a pretty dangerous area.

It was.

It was.

And

we drove through, we drove across this road that was,

it was not paved.

It was like pebbles.

And they,

they were telling me the story about how they lost their buddy for Sergeant Jeremy Wright.

He had been blown up by an IED

there.

And that like, there's no way, just because of the way the road was, there was really no way to tell if there was like,

you couldn't tell if the, if it had been disturbed or not.

And they were, I mean, I could see they were

still in mourning and that he had been like a great dude and it was awful.

And the thing that was really bothering them, aside from just losing their friend, was that

that road was a USAID project.

Paving that road was a project that had already been like approved and paid for by USAID.

But the contractor was a Turkish company, and they hadn't

they hadn't shown up yet to do the work.

And so these guys, like every time they wanted to go to the border, which they had to go there a lot, had to drive over the same like patch of earth.

So

I feel like this might have been the only actual good thing that I did my entire deployment.

But when I got back to Kabul, one of my, one of my friends there, she was a USAID

rep or whatever, and I told her about it.

And I actually truly don't know if there was a connection, but I heard from them like pretty soon after that the construction company came and paved the road.

But I was like,

why aren't they here?

Like, why haven't they done this?

Someone got killed here already.

Like, why wasn't this moved up in the priority?

And they're like, oh, everyone's late on everything.

It's all late.

Everything's late.

And then I came to find out one of my trips to Herat, the USAID guy,

who was the USAID rep in Herat.

He

someone showed me some reporting that he had accepted like gifts of 40 carpets from these

from these

fuel, were they, like oil and gas traffickers.

Basically, they'd built like an underground pipeline, which was not legal and not approved.

So they could move fuel from Iran into Afghanistan.

And this guy just let it happen.

No, I had no idea that was going on.

Yeah.

And

so that, I mean, it was small.

It wasn't like a huge operation, but it was still enough.

Anyway,

all that, I mean, we, I, I saw that, but that was the work that I did with, with special operations was they supported me

when I was, you know, when I was going to do my assessments and collection for this border crossing project and trying to understand, like, so if someone comes across, like, how do you assess a customs duty?

Like, who is the one who assesses that?

No one who's literate, like, no one who's, I mean, obviously, you know, the kind of people they had manning those border crossing points was like anyone who would agree to put on a uniform

and

his tri-boy.

So, like, yeah, I mean, that was, that was, uh, that was my experience.

But,

you know,

I

had met some of their

colleagues in Iraq because in Iraq, we started getting calls from military units that,

you know, the money, the money movement, like we were moving in U.S.

dollars as well as these new dinars.

And

they were finding pallets of U.S.

dollars that were still shrink-wrapped from the Fed in insurgent raids.

And the different military units would call us at the CPA and be like, what do we do with this?

We found this.

It says it's like half a million USD.

Like, what should we do with it?

And

yeah, it's like, we have no idea what we're doing.

We have no idea.

Wow.

Where was this money supposed to go?

It had a barcode on it, too.

All of those things that came from the Fed, those pallets of cash, they they all had barcodes on them.

But anyway,

yeah, so I, you know, I ran into some of the people that I knew from those days.

I ran into some of them in Afghanistan and then just kind of kicking around, like there's not a lot of meas out in places like that.

And,

you know, Firebase Torque, I remember that place.

That was on the old Silk Route, actually, kind of a cool place

because,

like off in the distance you could see an old English outpost.

And again, I'm like,

here we are again.

You know, we hope it's going to go better this time, I guess.

But there was so much traffic coming.

I mean, so much traffic and learning about, we basically had no idea who was coming.

There could have been like WMD for all we knew being trucked in and the roads were just were we're completely packed all the time so but my focus at the time again was like

how do we how can how can how can a tax be collected against this it's it's absurd to think about today that we were actually trying to do that absolutely absurd but that was that was the mission interesting so you left Afghanistan was this 2004 and then went back again in 2009.

Yeah.

What did you do in between there?

So I did, my clearance did finally come through.

So then I did go to

Solick, ASD Solik.

And that was when

I started working on counter-threat finance.

So

Tom O'Connell,

he was ASD Solik at the time,

former Green Beret, Vietnam veteran, served in CIA as well, just a legend.

And

he believed strongly that,

you know, Klauswitz and his centers of gravity, you know, his enemy centers of gravity, he felt strongly that money was an enemy center of gravity and we should be focusing on disrupting their financial flows.

And that was like, I'd always wanted to do that, right?

That was my original, this is what I'm going to figure out how to do.

So

very cool opportunity.

And when I finally got clear to know everything, I I learned that it was a big interagency effort that had already gotten started.

And there was an Iraq threat finance cell that was underway that was like a Treasury Department thing.

But

there were a lot of Rice Bowl issues because the commander on the ground was like, no, I'm not going to have the Treasury Department leading an effort in my battlefield.

Like, I'm in charge.

It's like, cool.

You don't actually know anything about how to do this, but like, awesome.

Good, good job.

So there was a lot of, there was just a lot of drama over those kind of things, but it was really amazing effort.

Both

you had not just like treasury and DOD, but you had like intel people, you had law enforcement people, there was,

you know, when things really got going,

they had like FBI and IRS criminal investigators like going inside the booth, like interrogation booth, when military units would roll up,

like financial people, they would help with the interrogation

and really get amazing information.

Turned out that the money guys didn't get the same kind of training to withstand interrogation that the operational guys did.

No kidding.

And so they...

they talked.

And it turned out a lot of them kept two sets of books too, because they were also skimming.

And

so then we had leverage.

And so

it was a really cool and very successful effort.

I would say the kind of pinnacle of that in Iraq was

this operation.

It led to this big operation at the Beijing oil refinery where months of work determined that

AQI was making a ton of money off of fuel smuggling from the Beijing oil refinery, which is like the big oil refinery in Iraq.

And they were like, the trucking company was AQI and like this dude and that dude were being paid off by AQI.

And anyway,

you know, the team did a phenomenal job of doing a whole network analysis and being like, here are the key nodes.

And the military came and rolled them up and stopped it.

It was amazing.

Of course, they AQI,

you know, being AQI, they found new and exciting ways to get money.

But that was...

What were some of those ways?

Kidnapping for ransom,

drug smuggling.

I mean, that's just a few.

I mean, anything you can think of, anything and everything.

But fuel smuggling was by far for them, like that was the real winner.

That was when they were making big money.

But they still like they would

tap into the pipeline, you know, break, break open the pipeline and just siphon, siphon off some gas

and sell that.

So yeah, I mean, they're incredibly, incredibly creative.

Basically all kinds of criminal activities that you could imagine.

That's what they did.

And that's what most of these terrorist groups do.

They're criminals, but they have this ideological component.

They're engaging in criminal activity

for some of them for ideological purposes, although a lot of them are just straight up criminals and they're just like acting as if they're some kind of religious,

you know,

some type of like high, highly moral religious figure.

But

so we, yeah, so I started working on that.

And that was, that was amazing.

I was doing that out of the Pentagon, but I got to go back to Iraq and kind of see what everyone was doing and just advocate for it.

And at the time, there was the ASD wanted to kind of codify it because it seemed like such an important part of the effort.

And everyone was so complimentary.

And the commanders were really happy about what we were turning out.

Yeah, I got tasked with, this is going to be boring for a lot of people, but writing the counter-threat finance policy for the DOD.

So that took forever

because the DOD is such a huge bureaucratic monster.

And when you're writing a new policy, you have to get everything coordinated with everyone who changes every word and everyone gets in fights.

And it was a huge, it was a huge thing and it took a couple years.

But there were so many successes behind it.

It was undeniable.

So in the end,

I think today it's been through a lot of revision since my time, but I think there still is a counter-threat finance policy.

And we called it that because originally it was just, it was going to be counter-terrorism

finance, but

terrorism, like the legal definition,

like basically requires, like you're talking about designated terrorist groups.

And in Iraq, there were all kinds of different

terrorist groups, but also insurgent groups that hadn't necessarily been named and designated in that way.

But they were also included

because they were still killing people and killing Americans in some cases, and definitely the enemy.

So,

counter-threat finance was the term that we ended up with.

Did you work directly with General McChrystal and General Thwin?

I did.

How was that experience?

I worked for them in Afghanistan,

2009, 2010.

That was

spicy.

Spicy.

Why do you say that?

Well, I,

you know, I loved working for General McChrystal.

And

I learned a lot working from General Flynn, working for General Flynn.

I learned a lot from him as well.

But I'll tell you, you know, it was,

there was a lot of drama always

with Flynn.

I mean, he was he was a great boss to me.

He understood what I was doing.

He supported me.

And, you know, I'm not like

just understanding what we were trying to do myself and like our whole team of kind of counter threat finance people.

He was very much on board with that.

And so was McCrystal.

But, you know,

there were.

There are things that like either you're comfortable with or you're not.

So these are guys that, you know, from JSOC, like they operated in a certain way and you either had to be comfortable with that or not.

Personally, I was.

The thing that I remember Flynn always saying was like, this is war.

Like we're in a war.

So we have to do everything that we can to win the war.

And that included sometimes sharing information, sharing intelligence that was like RHEL.

a very small group or sometimes not even RHEL, sharing that with a foreign partner on the battlefield.

And by the way, that's a like legally, that's a decision that they're entitled to make.

Like they're legally allowed to do that.

But there were some people

on the J-2 staff who were uncomfortable with that.

And I remember one of them actually going home.

And I think.

Who were you guys sharing intelligence with?

Other

countries that were fighting with us.

Why would they be opposed to that?

Because it was like,

you know, not, oh, it's not RHEL their country.

So we shouldn't be sharing it with them.

Like, well, they're going downrange with us tomorrow.

So they should probably know that this thing is happening.

Yeah.

Was it, was it major pushback about?

I mean, I guess so.

They sent somebody home.

No, someone like voluntarily asked to leave.

He has to leave.

But so it was kind of like, this is how we're prosecuting this war.

Either you're on board or you're not.

It was very clear from the beginning that like this was this was what I believed.

And again, I was wrong because we, we were, we were still there 10 years later, but I felt at the time like this is either going to change the tide and work or like we're done here.

And

I felt that was kind of the sense that I got from the command was like, we got to turn the ship around right away.

But then

things started happening like that email, and I regret I don't remember his name now, but there was an email like halfway through

that year from

a soldier to General McChrystal.

So McChrystal and Flynn and the

J3, the CJ3,

they would...

They would do like battlefield circulation all the time.

So they would travel to different parts of the country

kind of talk to people and see what was going on.

And this was after the whole counterinsurgency strategy was implemented, which meant

a change to the

LOE, the ROE, excuse me.

And

that change to the ROE was like

meant that our people were taking more risk and in some cases getting killed because they couldn't respond to something unless, you know, all of these conditions were met.

And

I know a lot of people were very, I had nothing to do with that.

A lot of people were very concerned about that, very angry, and felt it was the wrong thing to do.

And

I don't know enough about combat to be, like, I wouldn't presume to have an opinion, but I'm sympathetic to that point of view just because of what I saw.

So I remember there was an email that came through to like everyone on in the

crystal's team who saw his email saw this note and it made its way around.

I think it got leaked in the media somewhere where there was a soldier who was like,

you know, your ROE is a piece of shit, basically.

And like, here, here's like the 50 reasons why.

Like, this is terrible.

You know, we can't win like this.

Do you remember what the ROE was?

I think I was in the country when this came out.

I would have to look at it specifically.

I mean, I remember this is, if I remember correctly, this is when there was going to be a major push in Marsha.

Am I correct?

Do you remember that?

I do remember that.

Lashgar Gahamen province was really hot at the time.

And I remember, and it was right after the coast bombing at the CIA base.

Yeah.

And the ROE suddenly changed to

basically you can kill an enemy combatant to if you're shot at and the enemy drops his weapon, then you're not allowed to fire.

And that came out right before

the Marines were going to do that big offensive push into Marja.

I believe it was Marja.

Yeah.

And

they said that that would be the second biggest offensive that the military had done since Fallujah.

That was huge.

I mean,

detrimental.

And not only that, I mean, demoralizing your troops.

It Was demoralizing.

Demoralizing them.

Like, we don't have your back.

We don't care what happens.

They drop that weapon.

You can't shoot.

So to have that going on playing in your head,

you know, if I take this shot, am I going to prison for the rest of my life?

On top of all the other decisions that you have to make in combat, I mean, who was

so pissed off about that?

And I wasn't even in the military anymore.

I was contracting for CIA, so it didn't really affect me but

man i felt for those guys when that came out

i mean i i didn't truly understand until i read that email

what it meant um

and i i also felt for i felt for them and

I didn't understand why

that feedback was received loud and clear.

It was discussed and it was,

it didn't change anything.

Didn't change anything.

They were going to proceed.

But when...

That didn't come from McCrystal and Flynn, correct?

That ROE?

I think it came from McCrystal.

I thought that came straight down from Obama.

It might have come from Obama.

He absolutely micromanaged every aspect of that war.

He did.

He absolutely did.

Yes.

Through the NSC, which grew to like an astronomical size because they were micromanaging everything.

I mean,

I,

you know, I was working in counterterrorism in the Pentagon before I, before I went, I went back to Afghanistan.

And so I started to

understand because I was

Like part of my job was just like briefing all my seniors every week about new things.

And this was like at the height of we were designating terrorists and we were targeting terrorists based on financial intelligence.

And

so there was, you know, these weekly briefings to the joint staff and our political bosses.

I was in the room for all those things and I heard and so I learned a lot about how the chain of command is supposed to work.

And

when Obama came in, they just added so many layers.

And it was like commanders couldn't make decisions anymore.

They had to ask permission from the White House.

And it screwed up a lot of things.

It

made a lot of operations impossible, just ended them before they started and just made them so much more dangerous as well.

Because,

I mean, you know, like sometimes you're dealing with a fleeting target.

You got to take the opportunity when you have it.

And

there was just no appreciation for that.

But I will say something that happened that

might be interesting.

So while I was there

during that tour, General McChrystal was at a certain point very interested.

There had been a lot of rumors about

someone named Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was the brother of President Karzai.

And there was a lot of rumors,

pretty factually based, that he was a narcotics trafficker

and was involved in a lot of really bad things and also tied to the Taliban.

And

so McChrystal set us on a deep dive, like the entire, like all of his kind of Intel team,

you guys go out into,

you know, go out into the wild and see who has what on AWK.

And, you know, come back.

I think I forget how much time we were given, like a month or something and like let's everyone get together and let's figure out like is this guy is is he really bad what are we gonna do about it let's do this deep dive

so

no one there was nothing

like no smoking gun tying AWK to anything

but also I will say there was so much circumstantial evidence that it was obvious that he was all of those things.

But

because the

ceiling, like you had to meet an impossible level of certainty

that we weren't able to meet, we weren't able, like, no, he never got up on a call and said,

I'm going to traffic some drugs today.

Hello, my Taliban friends.

Like, that, yeah, I mean, that, that never happened.

And he did, I mean, all of his activities were through lieutenants and sub-commanders and stuff.

So, um,

so I remember a huge effort to get everything together.

And then it just like,

and he was assassinated shortly after that.

Uh,

so the problem went away anyway, but um, that was at the time really disappointing because I'm like, it's obvious this is a super bad dude, and it's a problem for the United States.

Um, and he might have also been working with us in some way.

I don't know.

But

the other.

Who assassinated him?

One of his rivals, I guess.

Do you think it was us?

I have no information that it was us.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

But

I think that

well,

yeah,

I have no information on that one way or the other, but I know it solved a problem.

With respect to, you mentioned Marja.

So one of the other things that I really, that I remember from that deployment was

another kind of directive that came down from McChrystal where he wanted, he wanted a deep dive on Taliban finance.

And he said, look, there are all these rumors that people have been seeing for years, you know, Gulf, like they're getting all their money from the Gulf.

And there's a whole,

I mean, there's a whole

rabbit hole that we can dive down in that, but that's interesting to like 10 people.

But like, he wanted a deep dive on Taliban finance.

He's like, is there money still really coming from the Gulf or are there other sources of how would it become how's it coming from the Gulf?

Well, they would go to the Gulf.

The Taliban and Al-Qaeda would would go and other terrorist organizations as well

would go to the Gulf, different Gulf countries and individuals who supported what they were doing.

And they would go specifically during Ramadan was like a big fundraising period

where Muslims are encouraged to give to charity.

And so they would collect, they would raise a lot of money as a charity towards these, like,

towards their terrorist causes.

And, you know, they frame it as

they're advancing, you know, radical Islam and they're they're fighting you know the great Satan or whatever.

And

so, yeah, they raised a lot of money that way.

They also, I mean, they were in the early days, there were, these were groups that were later designated by the Treasury Department, the State Department, but they were like humanitarian.

They were, they, they were masquerading as humanitarian,

like Islamic relief or stuff like that,

but

they were terrorist fronts and they were raising money

through those avenues.

And they raised a lot of money.

And it also became a political hot potato because, you know,

the U.S.

government's designating Islamic relief, like, oh, are you Islamophobic?

Like, no, I'm terroristophobic.

But that's, you know, that's

there was not a lot.

There was enough political will for a period of time to do that, and then it went away.

But

fast forward, so,

you know, as JSOC commander, obviously McChrystal was focused elsewhere, but I'm sure like he had enough information to know that when he was JSOC commander, a lot of this.

a lot of these funds were coming in that way.

So he wanted to know, like, here I am, commander at ISAF.

how is the Taliban today making its money?

And

so we got, and there were some colleagues of mine from the Treasury Department.

And by that point, there was an Afghanistan threat finance sell.

And so there were all these interagency folks that were there doing amazing things and put together a really compelling assessment that

The Taliban is actually getting its money from us.

They're making its money.

They are making their money from us.

If you consider our logistic supply chain into Afghanistan, they were extorting money on every single link in that supply chain.

So we were paying the Taliban.

Are you serious?

Can you be a little more descriptive how that was happening?

So

you have supply trucks coming in for Supreme, for the,

you know, our food, our fuel, our sustainment, anything for sustainment.

It all went through Pakistan

because it couldn't go.

I mean, if you look at a map, there are only a few ways that that stuff can enter into Afghanistan.

So it all came in through Pakistan.

And the Taliban are in Pakistan.

And they were not just there, but also in Afghanistan.

They had locked down these trucking companies and also in not just the trucking companies, but also the individual drivers.

And sometimes the like

subcontractors to big American primes

that were like not necessarily American, they were also being extorted.

Wow.

All this came to light in 2010.

And you uncovered that.

Not me personally, like I was part of a team.

But yes, we did, we did uncover that.

Yes.

What happened after that?

Well,

not relatedly.

McChristo got fired.

So

he did.

Oh, his other question, by the way, that I failed to mention was, is the Taliban making its money off of the narcotics trade?

Is that like a key part of

their finance?

And we did find that it was a lot less than everyone thought, that this extortion racket was really, that was the key

method of how the Taliban was raising its money.

And but he did, it did give him, this whole analysis and like link chart that the team did really gave him a lot of insight into like where the the key narcotics trafficking nodes were and so those were included in this marga operation um it was part of it so to disrupt taliban financing that was part of the end goal of the that operation

how did they i mean how did they

How did they act when you got the information to them?

I mean, I was in the room when he was briefed on it it and he was shocked.

Did they take action?

Yeah.

He, um, so in addition to this,

you know, kinetic targeting, there was also, like, he put his, um,

his logistics chief, the CJ4,

um, he put him, like, in charge of

doing this whole,

you know, deep dive into the subcontractors and how do we, how do we do a better job of vetting and, and all that?

And

I'm sure like I helped him with it for a bit, but then McChrystal got fired and I went home.

And

I know when Petraeus came on board,

he brought General McMaster, who stood up like a very public anti-corruption task force.

That was because of what we had found.

But I will say that when,

and I'm grateful to him, when McChrystal got fired, General Flynn kind of took me aside and he, and he was like, you should go home now.

And

he was like, nothing good's going to happen now.

You should just get out of here, just go home.

And I heard later that, you know, it wasn't pleasant for the...

all the McChrystal, you know, those who remained.

I think Petraeus had a not good view of that team and

made sure everyone knew it.

So I was kind of grateful that I got rescued from that.

But

I was so like, I just felt when McChrystal got fired, I was like, well, it's over.

You know, it's over.

I mean, I knew Petraeus from Iraq days and I was like,

what are we going to do in this country anymore?

Like, it's the only, to me, the only hope was McChrystal because he also was dealing with Pakistan.

And you can't, you, there was no hope in really changing anything in Afghanistan without addressing the real problem,

which it seemed to me was Pakistan.

So

and the ISI specifically.

So

anyway, I

was pretty

I was, I never at that time would have imagined that we would have been there another 10 years after that.

And we never really addressed any of those problems.

And we kept paying like, in a way, secondarily, the Taliban who kept killing us 10 years after that.

And we knew.

This is the thing that astounds me.

And I'm like, we still have no accountability.

Like all these people knew and did nothing.

Oh, man.

Every time I dive into this, I just start getting more and more angry.

I mean, especially we were just talking offline about the $40 to $87 million in cash that

we would send Taliban every single week.

Thank God Tim Burchett got it passed through the House.

Thank God.

And Senator Sheehi is supposed to be introducing it to the Senate.

Hopefully that happens soon.

But,

oh, man, I just,

I don't even know what to think anymore.

It's hard to know what to think because at a certain point,

you have to ask like

this is all like too many coincidences of us helping our

sworn enemy like are we are we really

are we trying to do that do you think it was

that's actually what i was just gonna ask

not that trying to prolong the war i mean what

what was that i wonder too i wonder too I don't, I wish I had answers.

I don't.

But you have to ask yourself when you see what I saw

and everything just kept going.

Like, it was like nothing.

What else do you need to know?

I mean,

just putting things together, because this is all in the 2009 timeframe, you know?

Yeah.

Slash the ROEs.

Cut our troops' legs out from under them, continue to finance them.

i mean it is

then everything that happens later i mean it's

and this was obama years and so obama um

you know was very publicly like

you know should should we surge or should we just you know leave and this was very public and and obviously

decided wanted the public to know that he decided that he was going to surge.

And this, the whole catastrophic withdrawal under Biden was Biden being like,

you know, finally getting his, he always wanted us to pull out.

This was, again, the narrative.

He had always wanted us to pull out.

And now that he was president, it was going to happen.

And regardless of,

you know, we had.

all the things that happened that could have been prevented didn't matter.

We're out.

And that's a victory because that's what he had always wanted.

But yeah, that's that's been the whole narrative that's been provided to us.

I don't have any more insight than that.

I have the same questions that you do.

Let's move into the Swift program.

What was the Swift program?

Well,

Swift is a

Swift is a

way to move money, to move funds, and banks use it today all the time.

You're basically

electronically transferring funds from one bank to another.

And

it's an international system that's used by many, many countries.

This was a very highly classified program.

for many years that was part of the Patriot Act, but part of the classified part of the Patriot Act.

And

it got blown in the New York Times years ago.

It was very successful

because you could track, you know, if you knew who had which bank account number and which bank, you could see who was doing what, who was sending.

what what they were sending, where they were sending it.

But it was specifically only for counterterrorism could not be used for anything else and once the program got blown a lot of our international partners

especially in Europe were

you know they have very different privacy laws in Europe than we do in the United States and

they were

very upset and

but you know we over the years it's been

a very successful program like when i was when i was at treasury managing this program we were able to i don't know if you remember this um horrible child killer in norway this guy anders breivik who just like went to

just psycho you know went to an island of like a kids summer camp oh i do remember just like murdered all these kids i do remember that and um there was a big question about like is this a lone wolf guy or like what's his motivation motivation?

Um,

we were able to look at his bank accounts and tell the Norwegians for sure: this man was saved money for 10 years to be able to fund this operation.

Um, there was no one else involved, it was just him.

Um, but so that program is

like again, purely for counter-terrorism purposes, very misunderstood.

Um,

but you know, um, but how was it misunderstood?

Well, a lot of a lot of

because it was secret and then it got blown and like it's not like our it's not like our government is gonna

come out and explain everything that it was doing.

Um,

I think people assign kind of their own

They make up stories and obviously a lot of people are are

like to think of the United States as kind of this big bad entity and sometimes I feel i feel the same but no

the the sometimes i feel the same sometimes i wonder no but but the reality is you know in in europe in particular

if like if you're european and you've never been here you don't really understand america you know you just read the news you could think that like Someone accused us, for example, from a European government of like trying to track who is gay in Europe.

And I'm like, I can promise you, first of all, when you fill out your form to open a bank account, that's not part of it.

So that information doesn't exist, number one, tied to a bank account.

And two, like, this is for counterterrorism purposes only.

And the, the company,

um,

the Swift, the company, um,

you know, has very strict controls over that.

And they actually oversee a lot of that as well to make sure that every request is for meets a meets a threshold.

How does it work?

I don't know how much I'm allowed to go into that anymore, but

I think

it's very safe to say there's a very

formal coordination process where there are multiple layers of approval and oversight.

And again, you can't

you can't

introduce other targets that don't

don't have a direct connection to counterterrorism.

But when you see new entities designated as terrorists, for example, the cartels,

that's one of the authorities that is now available.

Interesting.

So basically

use the SWIFT code.

Correct?

And

you can breach into any bank account, see where money's coming, where it's going to.

Is that it?

Am I on there?

It's way more specific than that.

Like you basically, if you have a target,

you need to figure out what bank account they're attached to.

And then

you request any swift transactions from that bank account.

And then you see what comes up.

Okay.

So you can't just say like, I want to look at all transactions from Iraq to Iran or vice versa.

No, you have to, you have, and then, and you have to write a whole, and again, my information is very, very old now.

This is many, many years ago that I was doing this, but you have to write a whole justification for like why.

And you have to include, you know, reporting as part of your justification.

This is who this person is.

This is what their bank account is.

Here's why I know this.

This is why they're a terrorist.

Here's the, here's the justification for that.

I'm trying to find out this.

This is why I'm trying to find this out.

Do you have anything?

Gotcha.

It's very, very controlled.

You know, while we're on the subject of Afghanistan, I've got

a Patreon.

It's a subscription account, and we've turned it into quite the community here.

And one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

And so this is from Jim Harmon.

Why does it appear that our government intel agencies appear to ignore obvious threats to national security?

For instance, the fact that Hamza bin Laden is alive is disputed by officials.

So we wanted to go into this.

And,

you know, we were talking off camera about my friend Sarah Adams, who says that Hansa bin Laden is still alive, that he is the leader.

He's basically over all of these terrorist organizations, which have united.

Then she went on to say that the,

I believe it was the UK government,

also reported through their intelligent agencies that he was alive.

Now, I know you have a different opinion on this.

Yes.

I

Hamza bin Laden actual is not alive.

He is dead.

However, I do not dispute the fact that someone calling himself Hamza bin Laden, perhaps even a bin Laden cousin,

is doing all of that.

But

Hamza Actual is not alive.

How do you know that?

He is dead.

Because I have asked multiple people who would know that I trust, and they have told me unequivocally, he is dead.

Do they tell you where he was killed?

Yes, and I don't remember right now.

I know that's a cop-out, but it's real.

When was he killed?

Man,

2019, is that right?

Why do you think the UK government is saying that he's alive?

I mean, there is clearly someone calling himself Hamza bin Laden that is like organizing a lot of bad stuff.

And

I I don't dispute that.

I just think, like, do you remember in that the Princess Bride, the Dredge Pirate Roberts, that there were like multiple, when one guy would retire, there'd be another guy that came up, and now he was the Dredge Pirate Roberts.

And you're just kind of like living off of that infamy.

That name is so powerful and is a brand in and of itself.

And

therefore,

someone's using it to rally,

you know, rally the terrorist troops.

But

no,

I will say like he's dead.

But yes, there are serious concerns about a person calling himself Hamza bin Laden, who's organizing some very problematic and troubling things.

Well, that's an interesting twist that seems like a very realistic scenario.

I mean, both things could be right.

How do you think the Afghan withdrawal went?

Not well.

Not well.

It was a catastrophe, and we are still living with the repercussions of that today.

Very much so.

I got pulled into one of these kind of civilian groups, like veterans and former DOD civilians and

I found out later also active duty folks in special operations who were coordinating with us when they were not supposed to be but God bless them

you know

I someone reached out to me right when things started to get chaotic and a lawyer friend of mine and she had a client who was just trying to you know trying to get into the airport trying to get out could I help so i i i don't even remember who i reached out to someone

and uh someone i thought might know something and they added me to the signal chat group that took over my life for weeks and i know a lot of people had those kind of experiences where

um all of a sudden i just dropped everything that i was doing and i do I do know people and I have my own network and actually

was able to help a couple of families that

DIA families actually, Afghans that were working for DIA that have worked for DIA for a long time and

we're being abandoned.

And

amazingly, because of the people on the ground and their, what they, their heroic efforts, their willingness to work with us.

They saved a lot of lives.

So, but the things, even

sitting in my living room, you know, on signal, just being part of this, I mean, it was so weird because you do, I did feel like I was there sometimes.

There was one,

one, one family we were trying to help.

I want to be careful because I don't know what happened to them, but they didn't make it out.

I know that.

It was a father and some kids.

And

they were,

you know, it was so hot those days and people were waiting outside for days and days, like passing out, babies dying.

And this, there was this particular man who had worked for us and was trying to get out with his kids.

And

there was someone on the wall, like a PJ on the wall looking for him.

And we had already, you know, given everyone,

you say this, he'll say this, you know, hold up, he had a sign that had a word on it.

He was holding up the sign.

And, and

he was right outside.

They were right outside of Abby Gate.

And

I have a picture of the man and his two beautiful children

right before the explosion happened.

And

we found out later one of the, one of the boys was killed.

Oh man.

And

that wrecked me.

That wrecked me like for a while.

Just looking at that little boy's face, you know, and like, it was so close.

They were so close.

And we couldn't get anyone to open the gates.

You know, there were all these, we're like, oh, send them to the black gate.

Oh, send them to this gate.

And they would get there and

there was no gate open.

There was no one there to open the gate.

It was so much chaos.

And

then the civilians, there were Americans trying to get out.

They were also being given this bad information.

No one was, people were supposed to help them and they weren't.

So they were getting information information from, you know, people in my group.

And

they were getting beaten by the Taliban

badly.

They were getting their U.S.

like blue passports taken from them.

And,

you know, I was so, I thought.

Your interview of Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews was so powerful.

And I want to thank you for that and to thank him because

there are so many of us who were like at home that day just trying to trying to help.

And that feeling when that explosion went off, when that guy clacked himself off and

13 Marine or 13 service members, like it breaks my heart to this day.

You know, I had the opportunity to meet some of the family members and I can't imagine, you know, again,

my two brothers served in the Marine Corps.

there but for the grace of God, like, I just,

it was so pointless.

It was so unnecessary.

And that's how we, that was how we left.

And that's how the world saw us leave after 20 years of blood and treasure.

And

so it also was

such an encouragement to like global jihadists, jihadis globally.

Like

we lost the jiwat.

And they know it.

And we just haven't admitted it to ourselves.

That's the accountability that we still need.

We need to be able to say that we lost and we need to understand why.

But

it's just like, there's still, I think in the early, like the year or two after the withdrawal, there were still some people who were,

you know, a lot of us know a lot of Afghans.

who like really competent,

really competent fighters who served in the Afghan military, like

either the SAF units or like the Zira units.

I mean, they're just

incredibly competent.

And some of them

really wanted to organize and go back.

I mean, I don't really see that happening anymore.

And especially when our own relationship with the Taliban is

sort of unclear.

But I just want to point out that we gave up Bagram.

Like we could have pulled out and kept Bagram, but Bagram we needed for China.

And China knows it.

And for China to have people talk about China and Afghanistan, like

they get control over all these rare earth minerals and stuff.

That's not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is the geography.

And how are we...

look at a map like how are we going to do this when we don't have bagram bagram was would be a great bagram would have been the place.

And it just,

it just, again, makes no sense.

It makes no sense.

And all of the after action stuff where like

people at the embassy were drunk and not wanting to leave.

I don't know if you saw that.

There was

one of the interviews that was done later.

One of our, I think one of our service members was like just knocking on doors at the embassy at the end, just like making sure everyone was evacuating to HKIA.

And someone opened the door.

It's an account.

It's in, you can find it online.

Someone opened the door and was like wasted off their ass.

Like,

this is, okay, you know, and

when you learn more about kind of the, the, who had, who was in control or who was in charge of that effort,

it was the State Department.

It was the civilians, not the military.

So anyway, I have a lot of questions.

There's a lot of blame to go around.

And,

you know, I'm complaining about a lot.

I,

someone, someone said to me a while ago,

a response to one of the, one of these like op-eds that I wrote was like, well, what about you?

You know, what about your own involvement in this stuff?

You know, I, I think we can all stand to

look at what we were part of and what we were,

what our activities were.

And I think accountability should be spread far and wide.

And I'm not afraid of it.

But

at the same time, like,

I don't, I wasn't part of that.

What I do know is at the end of the Trump administration, the first term, the first Trump administration, we were in a very different place.

And we were not, Trump did not order withdrawal.

Trump was comfortable with a small force there

that was really doing like advise and assist.

And we were doing intel support for the Afghan special operations units who were extremely capable and were conducting operations very successfully.

So if we had just, you know, part of me feels if we had just continued that, I mean, if you look at when was the last casualty prior to Abbey Gate, it was like a couple years because we weren't doing what we were doing before.

We were transitioning.

So,

yeah, the whole thing is just like,

you know, mental health crisis, really.

I mean, there's just so many, I just, man, it just seemed like no thought at all went into that.

I mean, we have.

All these jihadist groups that want to kill us.

We have zero intelligence intelligence on the ground over there anymore.

We gave up a strategic air base, which not only for China, but also Iran, you know, because they did use or still do, you know, use terrorist organizations as proxies.

The rare minerals.

I mean, the fact that we abandoned another ally, or I guess I can't say an ally, but abandoned another, just like Vietnam.

We just, we, we

trained them up, we were turning it over, over.

They fought alongside us for what, 20, 21 years?

21 years.

And then we're just mic drop.

We're out.

Done.

That's it.

I mean,

and what?

To add insult to injury, we trucked all these random Afghans here, some of whom turned out to be like watch listed.

And

people who actually

like earned the right to be here, who worked with us, worked for us, were abandoned.

And we have, we still have a lot of people here that we don't even know who they are.

How do you think that should have gone?

They knew,

this is where I start to get, you know, they knew months in advance that they were going to leave.

They knew they are government.

They knew that we were going to leave through HKIA and not through Bagram.

So in that moment, like they knew we weren't going to bring anyone out except for us.

You know,

they never had any intention of rescuing, of like saving our partners,

even though they said they did.

I mean, those factors, like, look at the,

HKIA is in the middle of the city.

You know, and in order to have airlifts for the number of people who needed to

be brought out, and then also the, like, the immigration kind of requirements, like all of the paperwork and stuff and vetting and all that should have begun months and months and months before.

The fact that they didn't do that meant that they never, they were never going to save anybody.

And no one ever, I mean, there were lies during the entire

six months from when they announced the withdrawal to when it happened.

Just lie after lie.

And yeah, that's just no one's,

you can point it out and it doesn't matter.

It doesn't change a thing.

Sim raging.

Yes.

You know, back to the Swift thing.

Were you able, I mean,

was that instrumental in changing how we target these guys?

In some cases,

by the time I was working on it,

it had already been blown.

So I think the enemy had, like, they'd already changed their TTPs a lot.

But,

you know, for example,

bank accounts are

one, we're one way to move money, but they have this whole underground system.

It's not underground, but we don't.

it's not part of our Western culture called Hawai where

it's a

value transfer system.

It's like the easiest way to explain it.

And like you can,

you can go

to

a hawala is not a bank and not even necessarily,

it's not a licensed financial institution in many countries.

But if you can go to

like a corner store somewhere and the guy is a hawala, a hawaladar and you can say, well, I want to send, you know, $5,000 to

my boy in Islamabad.

So that guy will

call up like some hawala in Islamabad, and they basically arrange between the two of them.

Because

I pay the guy here $5,000.

They arrange between the two of them how the money is going to be transferred.

But again, it's not necessarily money.

It can be carpets, it can be gemstones, it can be other items of value.

And

then

my buddy in Islamabad will go to the place in Islamabad and get $5,000.

So

you can't track that through like the formal financial system.

So it's like a Western Union of commodities.

Yes.

Yes.

Exactly.

So

that's been a challenge for the intelligence community for many years and law enforcement to try to understand

the Hawala network, global Hawai network, how it works.

I was working in banking in UAE for several years and I worked for a big bank

and we had a relationship with several hawalas that were like banks.

They were huge and they had their own

They had their own compliance people that were working on doing stuff that bankers all know, KYC, know your customer, kind of

trying to understand, like, oh, you're,

this is your name.

Your name does not come up on any watch list.

This is your address.

Your address doesn't come up on any as any like known bad person on the OFAC list.

I mean, there's a whole process.

It's very involved.

But the bottom line is,

some of these hualas are very big and

they're used like they're across the Middle East and the Islamic world.

So they're used very,

they're in places where banks don't really operate because for a variety of reasons.

And

from an enforcement perspective, it's a challenge to figure out like,

well, these guys are clearly running.

like bad money through their hawala, but that's also the only way that this entire region, you know, of this country can get access to money.

So

interesting.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Well, Simone, let's take a quick break.

And when we come back, we'll get into DIA.

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All right, Simone, we're back from the break.

We're going to move into your career over at Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA.

So, how did you, how did you fall into that?

Well, I

was,

I moved over there.

Basically, General Flynn became the

director of DIA.

And I went over there with him.

I had been at Treasury, obviously, before that,

on the Intel side, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis.

And

General Flynn was standing up.

A lot of commanders have their kind of director's advisory group or whatever they call it.

And so he was standing his up.

And

I had the opportunity to go and be part of that.

So yeah, so I'm that's that's how I got over to you to DIA.

Right on.

What kind of stuff were you doing?

Well, his big push was when he got over there was the reorganization of DIA.

But I think it's It's not a surprise to anyone who knew him to say that he was like on a kind of revenge tour after his experience in Afghanistan.

He wrote Fixing Intel talking about how

the

intelligence assessments that were being produced or the information that was being collected even

and shared was not helpful to the to people on the battlefield.

That,

you know, it was

they weren't collecting things that we needed to fight the war and to win the war.

And

he wrote this very controversial.

I mean, everyone agreed with it, but the way that it was released, I think Gates,

Secretary Gates, he was the SecDef at the time and others were critical of how it was released,

i.e.

it was released publicly through a think tank.

And but that was that was how General Flynn operated.

So he didn't really care.

I think he wanted to just get it to the widest audience possible because he wanted to make sure that people understood

how broken it was.

It was really like he could only jump up and down for so long yelling about the same problem.

So,

you know, people have a variety of opinions on that.

And I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not, but it certainly got a lot of attention.

And it did get things to change.

So when he came back and took over DIA,

he wanted to move a lot of people out who had kind of stood in his way and was and were really were not helpful in prosecuting the war.

So there were these announcements that would come out pretty regularly about like senior DIA employees who were like moving to different jobs and other agencies kind of thing, like, oh, they're going to be the liaison at DHS

and things like that.

And it was,

I mean, he was moving people out that he did not view as kind of teammates, people who were going to be helpful in what he wanted to do with DIA.

So there was a lot of kind of like rearranging personnel stuff.

But the really big effort during that time was

reorganizing the agency and putting the collectors and the analysts together

in one.

So like the

collection operations for, let's say, Russia and the analysts for Russia were

not like they didn't even know each other.

They were in different parts of of bowling.

They were different parts of the world sometimes.

And they weren't working together in a coordinated way.

So he reorganized DIA to have like Russia House, to have like China House.

And so

the, you know, the Americas was another one where you have, again, the people working together so that they can coordinate effectively.

So collectors are actually

you know, going after intelligence that

that is

that the analysts really need to answer the key questions.

So, I mean, for people who don't know, it's the

you know, our senior leadership in our government puts out the collection priorities.

They put out, like, here are the main things that we want to know.

And then the intelligence community kind of does an assessment of, like, well, what, what can we answer and what, where are the gaps?

And the gaps are really what the intelligence collectors, you know, go after.

And

they need to be working closely with the analysts

who are going to really fill those gaps with that information and that intelligence.

So it was pretty revolutionary at the time.

No one had ever thought about it like that before.

CIA reorganized itself in a similar manner not long after that.

So I think it was clearly a great idea.

And

so, but to be part of that, you know, DIA is kind of notoriously bureaucratic.

And a lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about DIA.

And,

but

I worked with a lot of people who spent a long time deployed and who really are patriots and,

you know, put everything out there, like left it all on the field, did their best.

So

I was there there for pretty, not for that long, like two years.

But I learned a lot during my time there.

I worked with some great analysts.

I finished out my time.

So I did that.

I was working on the reorg for a while under under General Flynn.

And then I moved to

running a small,

like a small unit.

of analysts really and we were focused on something that no one at the time cared about at all transnational organized crime in the Americas,

cartels.

And no one paid attention to us.

No one cared.

Had a great group of analysts who knew a lot about the subject matter.

Nobody paid any attention to that or cared?

No, no, not at that time.

No, not at that time.

I mean, it was like.

checking the box, you know, but we were all focused.

Everyone was focused on the Middle East.

And

we had,

I was there.

This is really what led me to quit government completely was

Syria, the Obama's Syria red line.

So first I was, after all my experiences, Iraq, Afghanistan, I was pretty disgusted by everything, but

I still wanted to serve and I loved what I was doing like on a micro level.

I loved the people I got to work with.

I thought we were working on important things.

The fact that I had this kind of financial intelligence background made me a little bit unusual, which I like too, kind of niche.

But,

you know, I remember, I mean, I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Obama gave that famous speech about red lines and Assad not, you know, if Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, like that's a red line and we will act.

So

I think it was on a Friday when Assad for the first time used chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

He did it many, many times after, but the first was I think on a Friday because we all showed up to work on Saturday.

Like no one, no one said, you know, come in,

but we just showed up because that's, you know, you know how it is.

That's like what you do.

Okay, it's going to kick off.

We'll just.

be here to be helpful.

And we sat there for hours.

And finally, one of the bosses came out of his office and was like, y'all should just go home.

Nothing's going to happen.

And I really had a, like a crisis at that time and just

realized I was, I was like nearing 40.

And I just thought, what am I doing with my life?

You know, I've been

so focused.

It wasn't just a job for me.

It was like a life.

It was my life.

And

I just felt like,

what am I doing?

I don't know what, what am I doing this for?

This is crazy.

And

I just, I knew I had to leave.

I knew

I started paying attention to,

I don't know if they still do this, but at the time, DIA would have these like, email announcements when someone dies and they tell you like so-and-so passed passed away people were i don't know if this is true but it seemed like people were dying at their desks and i was like no way no way what do you mean people were dying at their desks like you know how it is in in the bureaucracy where people just like they're gonna hang on till retirement no matter what like got to get those last years in before you hit retirement like that's such a thing so you get all your benefits people were dying at their desks waiting to hit that retirement it's not funny but it's not funny, but it's real.

And

when I remember telling people that I was out, I was leaving and no one could believe it because I had all my tickets.

You know, I had like,

you know, polygraphs and everything.

I had it all.

And they're like, you know, your clearance is worth over $200,000.

And I'm like,

there's more to life.

There's just more to life.

I'm not going to do this anymore.

So yeah, that was.

So, you didn't believe in the mission anymore, and your values weren't aligned with what was happening.

What was the mission, Sean?

You're asking the wrong person that

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

I mean, I didn't see it.

I didn't see it.

And,

you know, I just felt I've given years of my life

to this.

And, you know, I

wasn't married, didn't have kids.

And I was like, there's more to life.

So,

yeah, so I had, I had no job to go to, but I just, I did have, they were offering early outs, you know, they called it Vera VSIP, basically the, they pay you a lump sum for your retirement.

And that's it.

You're done.

And your billet is gone.

So I was expensive.

By that time, I was like a GS 15 step five, which in the DC area is a lot of money.

Relatively for the government, it was like 100-something, like 100, I don't remember, maybe in the 190s.

Yeah, so I just,

but the VR VSIP was like a lump sum payment.

And I just, after tax, took the money and left.

I went to Italy.

I had a friend that I had reconnected with.

One of my brothers got married in Italy, and I had reconnected with this friend of mine there.

And he was a friend from business school days.

I went to business school in Milan.

And

he had

this

luxury villa on the Amalfi Coast.

And he's like, you want to help me?

And

I just thought, I mean, are you serious?

Because I seriously, yes, I would.

So I ended up doing that.

I just went, I went to Sorrento, Italy.

And

it was, it's funny in retrospect, but it was really what I needed.

And I just helped him run his like luxury villa.

We started this boat tour company where we would take like guests to Capri on day trips.

And I was like the first mate on the boat and worked for tips.

It was

awesome.

Quite the change, huh?

I needed it.

Yeah.

I needed to like swim in the ocean every day, be outside the skiff, just be experience life.

You know what I mean?

So it was good until I ran out of money

around later in the year.

And I got,

had to have, had to actually go back to a real job in real life.

But yeah, it was amazing.

And

I think in retrospect, seeing how a lot of my friends kind of have flamed out

when they've had the kind of similar realization that I had.

Were a lot of people leaving?

Like you?

In different ways.

Yeah.

In different ways.

What were the discussions like?

I mean,

when I was telling my friends in the intelligence community that I was leaving or and why,

I mean, maybe people I worked with didn't fully, like on my team didn't understand, but my friends understood 100%.

And some of them had already left.

Yeah,

people, people got it.

I mean, if you look back now at

our like on the analytics side, the analysts, like senior analysts that we have

who served in GWAT, very, very few.

Most everyone's got, everyone's gone.

Like there was on Iraq specifically, everyone cleared out.

Everyone.

Man.

There's no, but how sad is that too?

Because there's very, very limited institutional memory of so many things, things that are important for the institution to remember.

That's, you know, one of the big, one of the big challenges, I think.

And sure, the Army did, you know, Iraq, like the after action kind of deep dive into Iraq, what went wrong.

And I've heard there's one on Afghanistan, but it's classified.

Go figure.

But like,

that's still, it's still,

you know, that's great for the army, but who's gonna, it's so specific to the military.

And

there's a lot more to it than that.

I mean, there have been so many people have written books and they've covered different

sides of this.

And, but yeah, no, the basic fact is

the people who are like mentally healthy enough.

Um, and I, I feel like I was borderline at that point.

And I don't, I don't, I was not mentally healthy at that point.

I knew it enough to not even try to find another job, just to like clear my head, you know, and and um try to just get myself back a little bit.

And then

also the reality was I was doing really well.

I would have advanced to an SAS, but I had to do another deployment probably to Djibouti.

And I just had zero.

I was like, I'm going to burn my sleeping bag.

I am not doing that again.

It was done.

I'm going to burn my sleeping bag.

I was, that thing smelled so bad, but it was, yeah, it was just time.

You know, it was just enough.

It was enough.

You know, you and I both know people who

that's all they can do now with their lives.

They can only exist in places and situations like that.

And they can't live in the normal world.

And I kind of recognized that

I was like slapping up against that.

And I didn't want to become that.

So, and

talking to other people that I had served with.

Everyone kind of understood that because the adrenaline is real.

And the feeling that you're working on something important and you're, you know,

the mission and all that.

And so it had to get really bad for me to understand

that I had to just pull the ripcord and save myself.

And that's what I did.

And where did you go from Italy?

I went to the UAE

and I got a job working for a big bank that had gotten itself in trouble violating Iran sanctions.

And

it was,

I mean, they egregiously violated Iran's sanctions.

Like,

they created a manual for their clients on how to like hide

details about transactions.

Like, holy shit.

Yeah.

Um, and you were working for that bank afterwards.

So, I guess they forgot about the NSA can, like, find that sort of thing.

And,

and so, so, um, they got in, they got in very serious trouble

with OFAC and the DOJ.

So they had to pay over a billion dollars in fines.

They almost lost their U.S.

dollar access, and they had to create a whole new compliance program focused on our laws, the Bank Secrecy Act.

And so how to like the controls around

US dollars, US dollar transactions.

And so

my job, I covered Africa, Middle East, and Pakistan from Dubai.

I was based in Dubai.

And

so

I was like all over the region for years doing my job, which was basically conducting investigations,

doing train, like training thousands and thousands of bank employees and then interacting a lot with our regulators as well.

just kind of like letting them know what was going on, answering questions, stuff like that.

So you're living in Dubai?

Yeah.

Okay.

how was that we just went there about a month ago i think-ish

i've been there several times yeah all it's like all expats it is it is did you what did you think did you like it

i love it there yeah i think the architecture is amazing it's it's i think it's one of the most impressive cities in the world um

I don't know what I would do there if I lived there other than shop,

but because I got some great shopping.

They do.

They do.

But yeah, what's it like living there?

I mean, I loved it.

It, it was, I was on the road a lot.

So I can see what you're saying, but,

but I like, I just, I loved it.

I just thought the people were so nice.

I made a lot of friends.

It was beautiful.

It's safe.

And it's just incredibly impressive.

The first time that I was was there was like

early days, like maybe 2004.

Oh, okay.

And so to see what it became so quick, quickly, what they built there, what they made, is just really, it's, it's like got a vibe, you know, it's, and it's, um,

now that I'm older, you know, I kind of like Abu Dhabi.

It's a little more chill.

Um, you know, I'm like a, in, in bed at nine o'clock person now.

So Dubai's can be a a lot, but

it's amazing.

It truly is amazing.

And I really enjoyed my time there.

My job was super interesting too.

I mean, I got to do, we were in Zimbabwe when the Mugabe regime was falling.

Like we were there.

Myself and some of my colleagues from New York City, because at the time we were the only bank that were, that was still, still had access to US dollars but because

the Mugabe regime was sanctioned by the by OFAC by the treasury department we had to like wall off

wall them off from any US dollar anything so we were just anyway we were there doing like kind of a crazy time for the country and

I had never been there before.

And so it was, it was really interesting.

We found out, I think the secret police were like on the two floors above us in our our hotel.

And

yeah, it was just,

thank God, you know, nothing bad happened to anybody, but it definitely could have.

It was, you could tell it was one of those situations where things could pop off in a second.

And I was the only one that had my sort of background there.

So

I brought a ton of cash with me.

Also, because I knew I saw that, you know, there were lines for the ATMs and like, you can't rely on an ATM in a situation like that.

So I brought a significant amount of cash and it turned out that all my all my banker colleagues from New York City had like zero cash.

So

but

how do you wall how do you wall a bank off from US dollars?

Well, you know, there's it's all electronic.

But

So the bank itself wasn't, obviously our bank was not walled off, but like a certain set of of bank customers who could have access to other uh denomination not denominations but other currencies uh but just not us dollars so you can mark like it's it's you know inside the system i haven't been in the in a bank system in a long time but you can say like this account is for this currency and that currency and this account is for that currency and that currency and then these accounts are us dollar accounts.

Gotcha.

So you can, for example, have multiple accounts in the same bank for different currencies or one account that has multiple currencies.

Interesting.

And then

you get appointed to the Pentagon.

Yes.

In 2019.

Yes.

How did that happen?

Well, General Flynn called me.

And, you know, we had been in touch since I left.

I mean, kind of the big communication that he and I had had was when I was in Italy, I got contacted by a reporter friend, one of the few,

who called me to

tell me that Flynn was going to Russia.

and going to this RT dinner and I should talk to him about that because it was a bad idea.

And

I was like,

no, he's not.

There's no way he's doing that.

Like, shut up.

Yeah, he did that.

And I did call him

or text him.

I don't remember anymore.

And

he told me that it was, thank you very much for your concern.

I know what I'm doing.

It's all under control.

So,

and I really pleaded with him.

And I just said, you know.

You're

you're a retired, you know, I know you're probably excited to, you're free and you can do what you want, but like you're a retired three-star, like you still have those three stars, like mean something.

And like, by the way, don't F all the rest of us that, you know, had in some way like were tied to you.

I mean, I worked for him for like five years in different capacities.

So

I was kind of like trying to save myself at the same time.

But

yeah, he did him and

he did that.

And

but anyway, fast forward, he put me up for an assistant secretary job at Treasury at the time.

He, here's what happened.

He called me.

I was in Dubai.

And he's like, I need you.

Like,

what jobs do you want?

And

in the past, I'd been like, you know, salute, like, yes, sir.

But this time, the way that banking, you know, salaries and stuff work is you get your salary payment, but then you get a bonus.

And the bonus, if you're lucky, is like a lot of money.

And because I was living overseas,

you know, tax, your taxes aren't like taken out automatically like they are here.

So my bonus was going to pay for all my taxes.

And the bonus is paid out in March.

So the election was in November.

And

so I was like,

can I,

can I come a little later this time?

Like, I'm not going to be there day one.

Thank God.

And

so that's what happened.

So the treasury job went away because Flynn went away and all the treasury deciding people were like, I basically was,

you know, I was, I was like stray.

kind of stray voltage on the Flynn thing,

which was fine, which was fine.

So I just continued on doing what I was doing.

About a year later, I got this opportunity at the Pentagon.

I guess my name was kind of still on lists, still, my resume was still in there.

So I got contacted by the DOD liaison to the White House.

And

he said this opportunity, they were looking for someone for the office where I had started

back in Solik, in ASD Solik, that they needed a deputy like under the DASD to run that special operations and combating terrorism.

So I thought, how cool.

And I didn't, you know, I had been overseas during the whole election.

So I didn't really, I didn't know anything really about Trump.

I got my information from, you know, overseas news, and I just assumed that Hillary would win.

And when she didn't win, I was like, whoa.

great.

Matt was

like, cool.

Um, but yeah, so and then when, when, uh,

you know, everything got crazy really fast, obviously.

And, and that's a pretty damn important position.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At SOCT.

Yeah.

It was, um, I got there.

There was, um, the Dasdie was still there.

He, he moved on a little bit later.

But yeah,

we were in the thick of it.

And it was really,

I mean, it was the greatest privilege of my life to work with that group of warriors.

I mean, what kind of stuff were you doing?

So,

SOCT, special operations and combating terrorism during Baghdadi and Soleimani operations.

I mean, that's like.

Yeah, Impressive impressive to the men and women who executed those operations.

You know, I

got to see the video of Baghdad, the Baghdadi op.

Like afterwards, you know, they had this whole,

those guys are very good at, you know, their marketing, marketing themselves to the right people.

So they, they made a video of their operation.

It's classified, but,

you know, you get to go down.

They even had really cool music.

And so

that was, but, but being part of it

really meant planning process lose.

No, no, I wasn't, I wasn't, that's all the military.

The military does the planning.

You know, if there's any like approvals that

sometimes there's ancillary things that need to be approved, like they need to go up a chain.

But the big thing that I had to do with the Baghdadi operation was briefing Congress after the fact and briefing members and

the staffs.

And what was really awesome, I mean, this was my favorite part of it.

And I sound like a fangirl because I am, was,

you know, going, it was myself, my joint staff counterpart,

who's,

you know, a very highly decorated ranger and the director of CTC at the agency.

And it was really, for the most part, the two of them explaining in detail what happened.

So

I really can't say very much, but the CTC guy,

the CIA Counterterrorism Center's director, I mean, that's some movie shit, what happened there.

And the first time that I learned it, just being real, was like when I heard him briefing on the Hill.

And that's right.

I had zero need to know about how they got to Baghdadi and how they figured out it was him and

how they

got eyes on.

But I did.

Is there any of that or is that all sealed up?

I mean,

I wouldn't want to be the one to tell that story.

That's someone else's story.

Okay.

But God bless them.

And

what was amazing,

one of the many, many amazing things about that operation was

they had,

I mean, it was boots on the ground and no one was even injured.

The dog.

Oh, super funny story about the dog.

Okay, I can tell that.

So

Conan, Conan, the dog.

So there's a huge...

public interest in Conan, the dog, that was part of the operation, got injured in the operation, but was fine mostly.

um

so

when

the time came to give the unit an award there was some kind of there was something i don't even remember what exactly but there's some type of ceremony at the white house um

but you know that that unit that's a special mission unit so none of those guys can be identified so oh but they they wanted to showcase the dog.

So the dog had a different handler for that event because the real handler you know couldn't be on camera and we were watching in the office and

he was standing the dog was the vice president was standing next to the dog and the vice president started moving his hand like to pet this thing this is not a dog that you pet.

Do you know what I'm saying?

This dog has titanium teeth and is like,

like

probably like definitely ripped like many throats out.

And the vice president's like, we just watch his hand, like,

we were all like, no.

Um, but and and not with his regular handler either.

So, like, oh my God, but it all worked out.

And

Pence has both his hands still, but, um, but that was, that was, uh, just to be,

just to be part of that in a small way

and help like tell this the story of what these guys did was truly amazing and and um

you know

we all knew the story of kayla mueller and what she had endured and what he had done to her turning it her into

just so not let's not even say it but just so horrific was so meaningful to be able to

you know we couldn't save her but we did like bring justice for her family at the end of the day.

And like, I believe in that.

I was really proud to be,

even just be the explainer at

the, like at the end of that, explain

to our lawmakers what happened.

That was awesome.

And then Solimani, well, I would just say there were a lot of people in the first Trump administration who said a lot of things about being involved and they're on a lot of lists now.

And,

you know, I

was not involved other than that.

I was in that office when it, when it happened.

And so, like, yeah, we knew, we knew about it.

I knew about it.

My, I don't think my team did until I told them.

But, you know, it was, it was a task force operation.

And so, like,

you know, we were,

we were apprised of it.

and we we had to deal with a lot of stuff after the fact.

But

I remember

this, like how stressful it was with all the different operational details as we were learning them.

Like

there was

just so many,

so many things that could have gone wrong as usual on an operation like that.

And

to see at the end his hand on social media, his hand with his famous ring.

And

knowing the story of Qasim Solimani and how much American blood he had on his hands,

how many Americans he'd been involved in killing over the years, and of him really being like this evil mastermind and removing him from the battlefield.

was really profound.

And I had nothing to do with it other than to be in that job at that time, but was very, very proud.

And I just,

I know a lot of the folks who were involved and will never take credit or talk about it.

And

they're amazing.

Yeah.

But yeah, that also, not my story to tell, but just an amazing, amazing operation.

And we got a bonus too.

We got

Why, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name.

He also was responsible for a lot of Mohandas.

Mohandis was in the vehicle with Soleimani, which wasn't, we didn't know in advance, but, you know,

that was his day too.

Who is he?

He was, he was a terrorist leader, an Iraqi.

So, you know, Qasem Soleimani basically ruled Iraq after we left in 2011.

from the the politicians really answered to him in many ways but he also had had stood up.

So there were a lot of different Shia militia groups.

Some were directly like Quds force affiliated.

And then there were some that were more like

Iraqi Shia, but still funded and aligned with Iran and the Quds Force.

And they became the PMF, the popular military front, which still to this day, I believe, gets paid through the Iraqi budget.

They're part of Iraq's military force now.

Iraq became a satellite of Iran after we pulled out.

I don't know if you know that, but after we pulled out in 2011, that's what happened.

And that was really in large part thanks to Qasim Soleimani.

But he was the mastermind from the beginning.

These EFPs, the explosively

formed projectiles that killed a lot of people, a lot of our people that that was like that was his you know that was his mastermind so and mohandis was one of his lieutenants in iraq and so to see them both taken out was just um

you know no yeah it felt great and and knowing everything that they had done to to so many so many of our friends you know it's just it felt good there was a lot of backlash over that if i remember correctly wasn't there and yeah people freaked out and were like, World War III is like 2020.

Yeah.

Yeah, 20, 2020.

They freaked out and said it's going to be World War III.

It was definitely a ballsy move.

And it definitely, look, the president, when the president asked for options, there are a lot of options that are provided to the president.

But on that particular day, that was the option that he picked.

And like, was everyone shocked?

Pretty much.

Yeah.

And

because,

yeah, because

no one had ever,

I mean,

no president before Trump would have made a decision like that.

How, how would that have

back then?

I kind of lived in an echo chamber, so I didn't really

explore any of the other ideas.

How how would that have triggered World War III?

In my mind, it wasn't going to.

But there are a lot of a lot of people, a lot of people in Washington who are always advocating for a diplomatic approach, which, by the way, I don't don't discount the

efficacy of diplomacy in the right situation.

But,

you know, Iran had just killed an American.

That was the, that was the backdrop for this.

Like, right?

There was, I think it was a U.S.

contractor that was killed

on a base that Iran, a U.S.

base in Iraq that Iran attacked.

If I'm, if I recall correctly, drone.

I don't know.

I'm sorry.

My memory is

not great.

But what I do remember is an American contractor was killed and President Trump was going to do something about it because enough was enough.

And you can't just get away with killing Americans,

which is right, by the way.

Thank you.

So he's presented with a list of different options.

The military puts that together.

At the time, it was, I guess, Millie and

we went through a bunch of sec deaths at that time.

Esper.

But yeah, I believe it was Esper.

So they put together these options, probably mostly Millie,

but together presented them to the president.

And the president decided to go with a strike on Soleimani.

Not all of them, by the way, are necessarily like individual, you know, take this guy out or take that guy out.

Some of them are like more strategic.

But

yeah, that was that he want he went with that one.

And for

you know, there were people in our government who had been tracking Soleimani for years, like many, many years.

And the Israelis were tracking him for many, many years as well,

and shared a lot of really vital intelligence with us at that time.

So

they did not, to my knowledge,

take part in that

strike other than perhaps providing some intelligence.

But we can see today how deeply they penetrated into

Iran, into Quds Force, into their multiple terror proxies.

It's pretty extraordinary.

I'm super jealous.

I just like,

I wish that we were, you know, that could really.

How many terrorist organizations is Iran using as proxies?

Do you have any idea?

Well, there's

Iraq.

I mean, you want to call all these little groups in Iraq like one.

There's a couple, like kind of key ones, but they've they've changed, merged, et cetera, over time.

But you've got the Houthis in Yemen, you've got Hezbollah in Lebanon, you've got

Gaza, you've got Hamas, which is funny because not funny, but a lot of people were saying, oh, well, they're Muslim Brotherhood, i.e., Sunni, so therefore

they can't be aligned with Iran.

They can't be accepting like money and training and stuff from Iran because they're Sunni.

Well, go back to what we were talking about, al-Qaeda leadership being in Iran, like those guys work with each other.

And

this was another example where Hamas was clearly taking,

they were clearly partners with Iran, and Iran was clearly providing funding and training and equipment um so anyway

those are those are like the main ones but you know hezbollah is a global organization obviously they're based in lebanon but you have hezboll operating venezuela um they're operating in the um

in that tri-border region and and historically they have been for a long time and then of course you have the Quds force which is the only Iranian-Iranian one.

And they're,

oh, and I'm sorry, Hezbollah also operating in Syria.

They had a big operation in Syria.

So, yeah, I mean, they're, they've been wreaking havoc globally for such a long time.

And this is the same organization, Hezbollah, killed Marines in Beirut in the 80s,

you know, held a station chief hostage and

tortured him and murdered him.

I mean, this is the same.

Anyway, all that to say,

they built,

and Qasim Suleimani was the mastermind behind this.

They had Israel essentially surrounded.

They built this huge terror network, but it wasn't only for Israel because they used it to attack us a lot.

And

there was no real successor to him.

There was no, there's no, there was no one else like him.

So taking him out was, was quite significant.

But yeah, a lot of people,

a lot of people freaked out and said it was going to be World War III.

And

that never happened.

And there's like very little reflection I've seen from those people who said that about why that didn't happen.

And what does that mean about their own assumptions?

And maybe I should revise what I think.

Because when we attacked Ford recently, it was like the same thing all over again.

Oh, World War III.

I mean, obviously.

When we attacked, who?

Sorry.

Fordow, the Iranian nuclear program,

when we bombed their nuclear,

when we bombed Ford,

that was,

there was like another round of people freaking out about World War III.

Well, I mean, I can, so I can,

if you don't mind, I'd like to share my opinion on that.

But, I mean, I think it was just a different, you know, the Solomane days,

the

geopolitics was a lot different.

And, you know, today we have,

I think a lot of people know about BRICS.

You know about BRICS, you know, throwing the U.S.

dollar off the world reserve currency.

And we have Russia-Ukraine going on.

We have China.

We have the China problem.

Also, China-Taiwan.

Then we have all the shit going on in the Middle East.

And if you look at the BRICS alliance, I mean, it's Russia,

it's Brazil, Russia, India,

China, South Africa.

And the last time I checked, there were like 22 other countries that had joined that.

And,

you know, and so right there, Russia, China, Iran, I believe is part of that.

You know what I mean?

So China, Russia, Iran.

It's,

I think the,

at least for me, you know, when I look at it, I'm like, oh shit.

Like,

we're not just messing with Iran right now.

We're also messing with China, with Russia, with India, with

all these other players, you know, that are also nuclear powers.

And

so it's not just...

But I wasn't as tuned in back then either with Soleimani as

I am now.

And so that's my fear is

it's

maybe a little bit of a bold statement here but i mean it's it seems like the counter to nato you know what i mean and and

what do you think how close are we to world war three

uh

i i don't know i mean hopefully very far away i

what do i think of bricks i mean I think they're trying to make bricks a thing.

I don't think it's yet.

It's still developing.

I think there are a few,

if I recall correctly, there are a couple of countries that have actually pulled out of BRICS recently.

I think they have,

which is great.

So BRICS is TBD.

I mean, we're still the United States.

We're definitely weaker.

We're definitely in a, we've been headed in a bad direction.

But when an American president says this country cannot ever have a nuclear weapon,

you kind of put yourself in a situation where the American president has to, if they're about to get that, the country is about to get a nuclear weapon and the American president has said they can't get a nuclear weapon.

You kind of put yourself in a box.

And again, I'm glad he did for all the reasons that we discussed.

But BRICS doesn't mean that any one of those countries is going to be like, how dare you attack our great partner?

They don't have a, it's an economic partnership right now.

There's no real like military alliance behind it.

Like there is with Article 5 in NATO, where like if you attack, if anyone attacks a NATO partner, then all NATO partners are supposed to like come to their aid, which, in my opinion, I don't actually know if that would ever happen.

Sorry.

I mean,

I'm not going to disagree with you there, but do you think that China, Russia could have used,

let's say that

I'm kind of eluding the fact that Iran would have blown up a little bigger than it would, you know, that situation would have blown up a little bit bigger than it would.

I mean, do you think that China and Russia would have used Iran as a proxy to get, you know, to smuggle weapons in there, to aid them, to train them, to outfit them, you know, if that would have turned into something bigger than what actually happened.

I mean,

they have proven themselves to not be allies.

They just, they're like, it's a cynical partnership.

How have they proven not to be allies?

Well, they didn't come to their aid, did they?

Israel was hammering them for like months and months and

achieved air superiority over a period of days.

And like China and Russia didn't come and help that help Iran.

So if they were real allies, then

they would have come to their aid, right?

That's what an ally does.

So I think it also showed that the fear that a lot of people have of this, like they signed this 100-year agreement or something, didn't they?

Iran and China

and Russia,

I believe they signed 50 years, maybe.

I I don't know about that.

They signed an agreement.

They made a, that was like very public that they were going to cooperate on all kinds of things and they were, now they're real partners.

But it's, it's turned out so far to be economic in nature and nothing else.

I mean, even China, so China, what does China get from a partnership with Iran?

It gets a proxy against us.

It gets a proxy against us.

yes and but it it gets like directly it gets energy it gets like you know oil um but it doesn't get the majority of it from iran i mean china has enormous energy needs it gets the majority it gets its energy from iran but mostly saudi arabia um so even if they lost completely iran's like access to iran's uh oil and gas, they still would be okay.

So that's also a calculation for them.

It's like, is it worth it for you to go into like a full-on kinetic situation with the United States right now?

Like they want to do that at a time and place of their choosing.

And like, this ain't it.

They have their grand plans.

And

so, but they would love to see us dragged down into the Middle East again because that was so beneficial for them the last time.

But that's why we can never do that again.

And everybody, how was it beneficial for them?

We drained our blood and treasure.

We're very demoralized.

A lot of the infighting that

is occurring here in the U.S.

is all beneficial to them.

We're fighting ourselves.

You know, like, have you noticed that X is so crazy recently?

Have I noticed?

It's so crazy.

But how many, there's so many foreign bot operations and they're they're focused on like dividing us.

And

I wish, like, Elon, please put like, I, I think there's a way of identifying, even if they use VPN, like of identifying where these accounts are coming from.

Um, it would be so helpful if they could start being flagged, and at least we would know, like, MAGA America, American flag, American flag is actually based in China, you know, super helpful.

Um, But anyway,

I think

it's not,

I'm not saying that these countries are not in a real partnership,

but so far it hasn't extended to anything

military.

And they're certainly not going to risk their own positions for Iran.

You know, also very helpful to highlight the fact that Russia's air defense system completely failed against our stuff, which the Israelis have.

And I mean, the Israelis obviously have their own stuff, but against like our F-35,

we won.

Good to know.

I mean, I don't know.

I'm not even saying a kinetic

operation, but I mean, you know, China sends all the precursors to fentanyl into Mexico, and that comes up.

I think all of this stuff

plays into some type of a, you know, some type of a master plan.

I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

I mean, China is really focused on these gray zone operations and they're killing, I mean,

I guess bad analogy, appropriate analogy, they're killing it.

I mean, look at all of these people folded over all over our cities.

You know, that's, that's China.

Yeah.

And

they're, they're very effective at what they do.

And they've been partnering with the cartels.

And not only are they providing precursor chemicals, but they're also the money launderers for the cartels.

How so?

The cartels launder their money through these Chinese gangs.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, and sanctioned by the CCP.

Yep.

And now.

Did you know?

You mentioned you were,

was it DIA you were doing the Americas?

Is that, did you know this all the way back then?

I didn't.

No, I've learned that in the last couple years.

I don't know if they were doing that back then, honestly, but they are now, big time.

I mean,

I don't.

It's hard to think like them because we're so reactionary and immediate and they appear to be

very good at a longer game.

What they've been doing is very deliberate.

And

that's why it's important.

That's another reason why I really support what Israel's been doing against Iran, because we need to not have to worry about that anymore.

And just like willing it away doesn't change the fact that there is a real threat there and they have been killing Americans and we can't take our eye off the ball.

We have another bigger problem.

And

I don't disagree.

I mean,

there's so many especially like veterans of our era are like enough no more like no more Middle East

I feel you you know

and I I would like I would like for this to be resolved and I see a way that it can be resolved so uh hopefully soon hopefully soon um but yes we need to be as deliberate as as China is being.

But there's a number of things that we still have to do that we were not doing yet, unfortunately.

You know, Beck, I'm sorry, I'm switching gears.

I just have all these things popping in my head.

But we talk about with Sarah, you know, she says that there are at least a thousand sleeper cells, terrorist organizations within the U.S.

borders right now.

Do you have any insight into that or opinions?

I mean, I don't know.

Anything's possible, but even in at their height, Al-Qaeda and ISIS didn't have those numbers.

So

I'm skeptical.

Do you think they're strengthening again?

They absolutely are.

They absolutely are.

Why do you think so many GWAT veterans are,

they don't want to go back to war.

They don't want to go back over there.

They're done with the Middle East.

Why do you think that is?

Do you think it's because of all the shit that we just talked about with Iraq?

It was all for nothing

in Afghanistan, which

was a loss.

Yeah.

100%.

I mean,

I think that the GWAT generation is just so frustrated with, you know, we talked about stricter ROEs.

We talked about all kinds of stuff.

And then when you do that, it's like, now you want me to go over there and do this fucking?

We funded the Taliban.

Yeah.

I mean,

and apparently we still are.

I don't know.

But I think.

No, I think Rubio stopped it, but it's temporary.

but it has to get through the Senate.

So, Tim Sheehy,

please

hurry up and get that damn thing pushed through.

Amen.

Amen.

But yeah,

I do think ultimately that

they're not wrong.

I mean, I agree with that sentiment that we

can't do that again.

And it was

in in many ways a huge waste and created bigger problems.

But that doesn't mean

that

we can't address,

like we can't, we we now should stop addressing any threat.

You know, there's a balance and we just can't we can't send big armies to do to address threats.

It doesn't, first of all, it doesn't work.

We're not good at it.

And

second of all,

we have bigger, you know, we have bigger fish to fry.

But again, maybe I'm like trying to thread the needle too much, but what I'm trying to say is

I'm not isolationist.

I'm just, I look at where we've come from, what we've done, all the things that I personally saw and learned.

I agree.

I agree with you and with everyone else who's been speaking out about

no new wars, but I don't think that's what this is.

I think taking like a targeted strike is different from that.

And

the fact that Israel is doing all this other, like, that's what partners are for.

Like, they're helping us.

Like,

let's let them finish what they're doing.

Now,

doing that in the most humanitarian way possible means finishing it as quickly as possible.

The more this drags on, the more people suffer, the more people die.

You know, you have this horrible, tragic situation unfolding in Gaza.

People are doing their best.

We have, you know, U.S.

humanitarian workers there now, which,

you know,

it's...

hard to see the way things are organized right now, how that's going to be successful and not like a PR disaster ultimately for us.

But I hope for the best.

You know what I mean?

Like I'm rooting for us.

It's just, it's just fucking crazy, man.

I mean, here we, I mean, I'm all these other terrorist organizations have ties to Iran.

I'm sure the Taliban has ties to Iran some one way or another as well.

We're funding them.

who are funded probably by Iran, but we're bombing Iran.

And it's like, dude, pick what, what fucking, what are we doing here?

Like, we're fucking funding the people that killed us for 20 fucking fucking years.

Like,

who are who are tied to Iran?

And then we go and bomb our...

It's...

I just...

You said it.

Like,

what the fuck are we doing?

Like, what the fuck are we doing, man?

It's just, it just makes no sense.

Like,

how about you stop the fucking funding?

And

like.

It's asinine.

Why don't you tell the American people why you're continuing it?

Why don't you justify it?

You know, that's the other thing.

Like, I would love to hear from people, like, we're doing X, here's Y.

No one does that anymore.

Remember when we used to have like

the, you know, our leaders address the American people and explain, I'm doing this.

Here's why.

I would love for that to.

Not that anyone would probably believe in anymore because we all have like zero, we have problems with authority now, given everything that's happened to us.

But, you know, I still think at least give it a try.

It's hard to know who to believe these days.

It really is.

I'm challenged by that as well.

I just, we got to keep going.

And this, this, it's still worth fighting for.

As messed up as things have gotten, you know, our way of life is

really important to continue.

And we're still a beacon.

That doesn't mean we're defending everyone or paying for everything but we have to we have to you know retain that we are the beacon yes or the beacon yes the only fucking beacon amen

so

doesn't mean everyone can move here though

oh man so then you got promoted yeah to dadsdee i did what is that

uh deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East.

So it's just like what it sounds like, basically the DOD is kind of policy lead for the region, for the Middle East.

So

in reality,

just a staff officer job at a higher level.

But I still had many, many people in my chain of command that I had to prep for meetings and I had to send them memos explaining things and ask them to do things.

So

there was a lot of that in that job.

And, but it was, it was an amazing job, amazing opportunity, amazing time to be there during the Abraham Accords.

So,

yeah, but I was there during COVID.

So it was also a little bit crazy.

You know, we had coming from special operations where COVID didn't change anything.

You know, we all went to work every day.

Everyone showed up.

No one wore masks.

We just, it was the same.

But when I I moved over to like the traditional policy world, I had

many,

most of my office was not there.

Oh, and they started this campaign.

I ended up kind of, I think, making peace with a lot of the staff.

But, you know, they're like traditional government bureaucrats.

And a lot of them had gone to these schools that I referred to

and were very concerned about me coming to be their boss.

And so they actually, there was a story in Politico about me before I even got into the job.

And it was, it was kind of sad because it wasn't even about me.

It was about my parents.

And

it was just like, oh,

you know, we're just really scared about what this means.

Okay.

So I show up there.

There was a guy wearing this mat, literally like a, I think it was a rebreather mask or something, like just the most insane.

Okay, hi.

And he, I think he wrote me up at one point because I had my own office and I would go in my office.

I would not wear a mask.

And

I would just do my work.

And that apparently was like an unsafe.

unsafe work environment thing.

And even though I was alone in my office, I had to wear a mask.

No.

And also, I had a buddy on the COVID task force who told me like early days, masks are bullshit.

Like, they don't do anything.

So I'm like, this whole thing is a, it's like a performance.

It's not real.

So I did my best to kind of like refuse to take part in it, but it was impossible, you know, because people, they'll tell you like, you have to, where's your mask?

Put your mask on.

And,

you know, it was, it was, it was tough maybe i should have pushed back more i have a lot of respect for people who did in that environment it was really really hard um

but you know i

uh so it it limited what i was able to do you know the travel usually a lot of travel in that job uh my travel was limited and when i did travel it was there was like

you know, tests every minute and

quarantine.

So it was a huge pain in the butt.

But the job itself was amazing.

We still had a lot of visitors, and

you know, I was there during the Abraham Accords.

How was that?

I mean, and then so, my understanding of the Abraham Accords is it's it's some type of a treaty in between Middle Eastern countries and Israel, basically a peace deal, correct?

Can you elaborate on that a little bit for people that don't know?

Sure.

So, essentially, they don't

since the formation and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948,

all the countries in the Arab League never

recognized

the state of Israel.

It was never formally recognized.

And in fact, there are two different wars where Israel's neighbors attacked it and Israel won.

But there's never been peace.

There's been individual peace with like Egypt and Jordan,

who have benefited, like they've benefited greatly from Jordan in particular from Israel's kind of like security

assurances, whatever.

They share a lot of intelligence with Jordan.

They do a lot quietly, a lot of stuff together.

And in Egypt,

I don't want to, I think things have gotten a little more challenged since October 7th, and since it was revealed that the

number and size of tunnels going between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, where Egypt was supposed to be maintaining security

there.

Anyway,

but

the Abraham Accords were

when several countries,

UAE,

Bahrain, Morocco,

Sudan, I think the Sudan,

all

formally acknowledged the state of Israel and as such established diplomatic relations,

economic ties, military ties.

So it was such a huge, momentous, like

earth-shattering event, truly.

We had the opportunity after that to move Israel into CENTCOM.

Israel, because its neighbors were always like either fighting it or at minimum hated it and wouldn't acknowledge its existence.

Israel was always part of UCOM.

But during the first Trump administration, after the Abraham Accords, Israel joined CENTCOM.

And so that's also been a huge change that a lot of people don't realize, where they're doing so many joint exercises now that they were never able to do before.

And

Israel hopefully can become like the premier security guarantor in the region.

And that is a great thing for us.

So you were a part of that.

I was, I was part of the, so I just want to be careful.

This was another thing where like many people have written books and have claimed

that they've, you know, I'm not,

I was part of the arms deal afterwards.

So,

yes, I definitely was involved in the like second and third order things that happened after the agreement was signed.

Um, but no, I wasn't part of the diplomatic effort.

That was, there were only really a few people who were.

And

just a just a monumental, game-changing thing.

It's It's truly extraordinary to see the changes in the region even

since then, just a few years ago.

Really amazing and

hopeful.

And I'm hoping, you know, things are a little crazy right now, but

we were on track.

I think Syria was on track to joining the Abraham Accords.

And I know Israel bombed it this morning, but

I know this sounds weird to say, but I'm still kind of hopeful that they will.

Um,

Jalani has, has uh, condemned what

his

people ostensibly did.

So, um,

and and they, they've made some kind of ceasefire.

So, I hope it holds.

And I hope long term that, I mean, that's

that's how this is solved.

Like, there, there needs to be a broader peace.

A lot of people have questions about what happened in the last few days against the druze and if it was somehow orchestrated by iran i've seen people on x kind of raise that as as a potential um

you know something that could potentially be the case

iran is known for doing stuff like that so it's possible um they they don't have a lot of cards at this time so instigating this kind of unrest like obviously abraham accords is the worst possible thing that could happen to them And

October 7th was a direct

result of Saudi Arabia being very, very close to joining the Abraham Accords.

And Iran obviously scuttled that with the Hamas attack against Israel.

So we'll see what happens.

But,

man, these people have been in war for so long.

There's just so much suffering.

But we need to keep a very clear-eyed view into like what is in our U.S.

interests, where do our interests lie, what do we want to influence, and how,

while understanding that at a base level, it's not going to involve troops on the ground.

Like, that's off the table.

That's just not

real.

What I do think is possible, though, is, you know, we have authorities for other things.

You know, we have surrogates, we have partner units.

Like

maybe,

not in this case, but maybe in the future in other instances, that's something that our government could think about.

But I don't really see that playing out right now.

Well, I hope you're right.

But, Simone, we're wrapping up the interview.

I know you got a flight to catch, so I don't want to keep you too long.

So, one last question.

Yes.

There's three people you could see on this show.

Who would they be?

Great question.

I need to think about that.

I don't have an immediate answer.

Do you need one right now?

Rattle one-off.

I really, I'm sorry.

I'm drawing a blank.

All right.

I apologize.

I left it all on the field.

That was the toughest question of the interview.

You got nothing left.

Well, Simone,

I just really appreciate you coming here.

And I loved chatting with you and getting to know you and going down all those different rabbit holes.

And

I don't think you give yourself enough credit, but

very impressive career.

I want to be careful because

you and I both know that community.

And, you know, God forbid, I would never want to take any like they did the real work.

You know what I mean?

I think it's important to acknowledge that.

But thank you very much.

Thank you.

This has been fun.

All right.

Cheers.

Yeah.

Cheers.

I am Michael Rosenbaum.

I am Tom Welling.

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