Inside Iran's Covert Operations | Jon Hackett | Ep. 368 - The Team House

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, everybody, welcome to episode three hundred and sixty eight.
I am Dave. Here with me tonight is d Our Fearless,
producer and sometimes hosts and the host of Ayzon. Our
guest tonight again is Jonathan Hackett. If you didn't see
his first episode, it was three point fifty one. Tonight,
we're going to talk a little bit more about his
Marine Corps background, and we're also going to talk about

(00:35):
his book, which I oh have right here. Phenomenal book,
Iran's Shadow Weapons. I'm used to being able to just
hold it up in the cameras here Iran Shadow. So
welcome back, Jonathan. We really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to see you guys.
Not in the studio this time, but still good see it.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, we're having some technical issues at the studio, so
we're doing this old school.

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Speaker 2 (03:01):
So, Jonathan, can you give us kind of a brief
summary of your Marine Corps history? And then there are
a couple of things that we'd like to talk about
that we didn't get an opportunity to last time before
we get into the book.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
Sure, I'll just give you guys wavetops. So I was
in the Marine Corps for twenty years. I started out
doing signals intelligence, which is collecting on foreign signals, you know,
communications and things like that, went into cryptography, which is
a little bit a more niche area of SIGAN, moved
over to the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade.
I worked there for a couple of years on some

(03:34):
special projects, kind of like tailored access operations and things
for very specific outcomes. After that, I realized I was
kind of getting too deep into the skiff sometimes a
skiff within a skiff, and I needed to get outside,
and so I moved into the kind of intelligence human
intelligence world and went to training for that in Damn Neck, Virginia,

(03:54):
and went over immediately to Afghanistan after that for over
a year doing human first, and then as the mission change,
we moved into CI a lot more and then came
back and I went right over to Marsac twenty thirteen
and I was there for five years because we were
only allowed to stay for five years, so I stayed
for it was four months or four years, eleven months,

(04:16):
and I think it was like twenty nine days that
I was there, And then had to go, so I
went over to Dia and I did three years there
at the US Embassy in Jordan. I'm on Jordan, where
I worked on not only Jordan issues in the overt capacity,
but we also worked on a lot of other clandestine
things going on around the region, most importantly was Syria,
because Syria doesn't have a US embassy in it, so

(04:38):
there were a lot of the Syria activities we had
to handle from Jordan and from Turkey also in some
other places, so I had some things to do with that.
And then after that ended, I went to go be
an instructor in dan Nek, teaching the Marine Corps how
to do special activities on the counterintelligence human intelligence side,
all the way up from starting from like very basic,
you know, debriefing things, through interrogations, through handling, through surveils,

(05:01):
detection routes, all the way up to principal Asian operations
where the students do run full phase tonight area activities
and get certified on that and become kind of children's
human intelligence specialists for the Marine Corps. And then I
retired and just started up as an unemployed student at
Yale Law School now where I'm just getting inundated with
stuff to read, so I took a little break to

(05:22):
come talk to you guys.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Well, I mean I can tell you read a lot,
because about a fifth of your book is references. It's amazing.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yeah, that's something left behind from like the human side,
where you have to source everything. You should never claim
anything without something backing it up, because your opinion is
kind of worthless without something backing it up. And as
you saw probably there's like multiple citations on each piece,
you know, kind of converging to show like, hey, this
isn't my opinion, this is what's actually happening, right right, So.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Can you tell us some of the things that we
didn't get a chance to get to about your career
while you're in there was a strike, there were a
couple of things that you know, we didn't have an opportunity.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, we talked a lot about my kind of SIG
background and just a little bit about MARSOK. But there
were some parts we didn't get to, especially the Iraq
deployment twenty sixteen, when ISIS was really entrenched and the
US and coalition partners are about to retake Western Iraq
from ISIS. This is after all the masacers going on
all that stuff, and I was on a Special Operations
Task Force eighty one out there, and our job was

(06:27):
to do in part work with the tribes in Syria
Eastern Syria and the Kurds in Northeastyria and other groups
in Western Iraq to start building this kind of ring
around Mosul, which was the heart of ISIS or dish
in Western Iraq and actually Iraq generally. And we were
doing that because the plan was for the counter terrorism forces,
which was the Kurdish and Iraqi forces, they would come

(06:50):
in later and actually retake Moscil with conventional strike gigantic operation.
He was the eighty second airborne came in there. He
was a huge thing. That was after we left. So
my mission there was to prepare the environment by doing
air strikes or controlling air strikes, running really intense human
source network. I had, For example, I had one principal agent.
A principle agient is basically a source that works for you,

(07:11):
that has a subsource network under him doing things for you.
So basically there's a level of separation between you and
the actual people doing the thing, and that's for safety reasons.
That's also to protect the operational security of the mission
and things. And we had a very intense network like
that throughout Western Iraq, and one of my principal agents
had fifty two sub sources working for me, which is

(07:32):
a lot to keep track of, especially during combat operations.
A lot of validation going on to make sure that
what those people were saying was true and all that.
And at the same time, that particular task force that
I was on hadn't done any human triggered strikes yet.
And the human triggered strike is when basically you have
a human being sitting across the street is typically how
it works watching a building saying, hey, that building has

(07:55):
got one bad guy in it or eighty bad guys
in it. These are their names. We go and monitor
that facility for up to eight hours, because that's the
requirement at the time that we had to have eight
hours of what do you call soak on the target
before we could strike it, to make sure women and
children don't come in are out, so that we understand
the risk profile of the strike. And I'd have one
of my subsources sitting across the street and he'd be

(08:16):
giving me information. I'd be passing information along. I would
get B fifty two s or F eighteen's up in
the sky, and whenever the moment was right, I'd be
the one coordinating that bomb hitting that building, and I
would hear it right through the phone because my source
would be watching it happen. And the interesting thing is
to make sure the asset validation was going correctly. We
would never tell them that we were planning to strike.

(08:37):
We always had to kind of string them along, so
they weren't quite sure what was about to happen or
when was it going to happen. You've got kind of
an idea, especially after they see their first one, they
know this will probably happen, but they're always shocked in
surprise the moment that bombs drop on the building. And
one that stands out to me was Abu Omar al Shashani,
who was the equivalent of like the Minister of Defense

(08:57):
for ISIS. All of ISIS, and we have been tracking
some lower level guys, especially my source network, have been
monitoring some like finance guys and some other things. And
we're doing some smaller strikes, you know, killing twenty people
thirty people at a time. And we got this new
piece of technology called Gorgon Stare. Gorgon Stare is like
it's a series of pieces of equipment that are able

(09:19):
to monitor almost everything happening based on a single target.
And what I mean by that is, let's say you
have a funeral for one of the bad guys we killed. Well,
isis the way they do their funerals, especially during Ramadan.
They don't bring the women and children. It's only the fighters,
you know, like the guys that were there that knew him.
So what you can do is start tracking all those
individuals at that funeral, and when they go home, you

(09:40):
can turn Gorgon Stare on and it will monitor each
of those individuals where they go and on a heat
map and you can basically see these like little legs
coming out and it will continue monitoring all of them,
building this gigantic pattern of life. Well, that's a new
stack of targets to start looking at, and we really
started maximizing the use of that, and as we did that,
we started getting way more careful about which targets we picked.

(10:02):
There were a lot of targets at the time. There
was something like thirty thousand isis spiders active like with
weapons strapped to their bodies at any time at that time,
so we really could have hit you know, you could
have throw a rock and hit an Isis guy across
the four line of troops. They were everywhere. But we
don't want to waste time and resources and mission momentum
by just striking whoever, So what I started to do
was trace particular activities. One in particular was when we

(10:26):
hit a certain building. The way that people reacted to
that strike started telling me something. And there was one
strike in particular. We blew the building up, killed like
forty guys, and instead of coming to recover bodies, we
saw them clear everybody out from the street away from
the building, and they started sending guys in with plastic
garbage bags, black garbage bags and coming out with them
over their shoulder like Santa Claus carrying out whatever. It

(10:48):
was very heavy, and we figured out that that was
actually gold because we had struck the bank. And then
they took a lot of that gold to another place
that was very important to them, and we began tracking
that place. It was a lot of these like thing
after thing, with the domino effect of them kind of
revealing to us. Based on a very early instigation toward them.

(11:08):
That sets off all these patterns that we can follow.
And I'm leaving out a lot of details obviously to
protect operational security, but this is kind of the gist
of it. And it turns out that one night in Ramadan,
one of my subsources told me that, hey, there's an
ID factory in this place. And you know, back during
the Iraq War, like the early years, you think ID factory,
it's a couple of guys with some cans and you know,
some explosives. This was like an industrial factory. I mean

(11:31):
it was actually a factory converted, like it had conveyor
belts and everything converted to produce IDs on an industrial scale.
It was insane and I was able to figure out
who ran that facility, and there's some other buildings around there,
and the way that they had set up the security
around this place, only there was only one way out.
I was actually able to get a B fifty two
from Syria to fly into Iraq and blow this place up.

(11:53):
And there was something like three thousand rocket tails that
we were able to count from the footage afterwards. I mean,
this thing was insane, and the way it blew up,
I mean you could for miles around. People thought that
it was our strike that made the explosion.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
It was just it was not.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
It was the explosives in the building that cooked off
after the smaller, relatively smaller bombs. But then the guys
exited that one way out and we followed that and
come to find out, they went over to go notify
Abu Omar al Shashani's deputy that we had been kind
of moving up the food chain because he doesn't use
a cell phone. That's very important. The smart guys don't
use his cell phone. But we still could get him anyway.

(12:27):
And there was another night during Ramadan, like three days later,
we've been watching this location that we thought it was
actually Abu Bakrel Baghdadi's summer house, which was where this
other gentleman was at Abu Omar, who's chechen by the way,
al Shashani, and we were able to start monitoring the
location and we counted eighty six guys going in there

(12:47):
throughout the evening and none of them coming out. And
one of my subsources contacts me through my principal Asian
and lets me know that this is in fact one
of those meetings, and it wasn't in just one building.
It was like multiple compounds around and as we're going
through the eight hours required soak of the target, the
sub sources reporting to me on who's in which building,
So I've got multiple high level names of who's in

(13:09):
what building, and then eventually we're able to get aircraft
up there. And then the one star general in charge
of authorizing these strikes had to wake up a bunch
of other generals that sit around a table basically and
make decisions. Because the building that Shani was in was
a religious building. In order to strike one of these buildings,
we have to get certain level of concurrence that's different

(13:30):
than even striking a house, which also requires its own concurrence.
It's called a Category one removal, which means there's this
list called Category one targets that we're not allowed to
touch and we have to get the target removed off
category one to be able to strike it. And so
it was something like four o'clock or three o'clock in
the morning we were able to finally get approval from
four or five generals that had to all give their

(13:50):
cut on it. And there were other wrinkles in this.
For example, there was a US person in one of
these buildings who was a legal permanent resident States, but
he was a naturalized US person, which required even higher
level approval to continue moving forward to strike. So there's
a lot of risk analysis going on, but also the
optics were being analyzed throughout this strike process. And I

(14:13):
was under a lot of pressure because we knew that
those guys would vacate around six am as soon as
the sun came up, because they were there for Sohor dinner,
which is the meal you eat during Ramadan to break
right before you break your fast in the morning. It's
that smaller meal right before if Tar, and minutes were
taken away. It was almost it was almost sunrise, and
I'm getting worried, you know, And finally we get to
go ahead and we blew it up and turned out

(14:35):
it was eighty seven guys in they're dead, and one
of them was Shashani.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
It's amazing, And how did you guys verify that? I mean,
so you can't send a team to do bda?

Speaker 3 (14:47):
Right? Yeah, So at the time, there were actually civilian
hospitals and there were ISIS hospitals. These ISIS hospitals were
for IIS fighters only they had like their own separation
between you know, they don't want their fighters being exposed
to the regular people. And we had sources inside of
all these hospitals, and I had two particular sources that
were very good that were in one of the hospitals
that they usually took the higher level guys to. And

(15:08):
every time a bodybag went in, that person was there
verifying with everybody and letting me know. And the thing is,
they don't know who I'm looking for. I'm only asking
them for the names of every single person that comes
in there. And nobody on the ground knew what targets
we were after at any time. And we never gave
him feedback like, oh, yeah, we did kill that guy,
you know, Jim Bob, we don't do that because we

(15:29):
don't want it to muddy up the process, right, And
so sure enough, next morning we got confirmation from that
person that it in fact was him.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
It's amazing any other like kind of big stories from
that part of your career that you want to talk
about that we didn't get a chance to touch.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
On, nothing like that. That's that's such a longer thing.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Really, Yeah, what what was it like going from you know,
singing into human For you?

Speaker 3 (16:02):
It was an interesting transition because working at the National
Security Agency, we are told that we have you know,
the highest clearances and the most access and all this,
and you know, to some measure that's true. But going
into the human intelligence world, I didn't. I didn't know
that there were a completely separate connection of control systems
and ways of handling information. And that was a big

(16:24):
learning curve for me because of the way intelligence information
is handled from san derived information is very different than
how it's from human controlled systems and from from source
handling of human beings very different, and the trade craft
is obviously completely different. With sigent you're kind of protecting
the instruments and the methods of using those instruments, whereas
with human beings you're trying to protect them and the mission.

(16:46):
It's more it's obviously more human like, which requires a
lot more security considerations. It's much more difficult, it's much
more in some cases more expensive, especially if you're working
with cover. If you've got you know, cover Marcial cover,
for example, it's extremely expensive and it may never get
you anything depending on how you set it up. And

(17:08):
that's part of the game, is that some of this
never produces anything. Some of it produces gold mines, whereas
with set you kind of know, like that's that guy's phone,
that's what he said the end. You know, where a
human you've got to because the human elements there. These
guys might not be telling the truth, they might not
know that what they said was wrong. Want money, ideology
they might have, they might be under coercion, they might

(17:30):
be doing it for excitement. You know, there's a lot
of things you have to control. Sometimes you're like a
therapist with them and you have to learn a lot
of this stuff that might be frustrating to some people
at times, like well why do I have to listen
to this how this guy feels about his spouse. It's like, well,
that's really important because you're going to use those things
as buttons to push in the future when you really
need them. And that's kind of simplifying it. But that
is a little bit difficult, especially from a singant background,

(17:52):
but it's true from any background that doesn't deal with people.
You know, you could be an infantry guy and still
have and have to learn those same things in the
same difficult way because that doesn't makes sense for where
you came from.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
You know, Yeah, it's interesting. Well, you know, with your
background and you know your operational experience, your experience both
in you know, SIG and cyber and in human that
you seem like the perfect person to write this book
because you you already had your experience in different fields

(18:22):
that you covered. So I think I imagine it probably
gave you a better depth of understanding when you were
you know, reading the reports and and and all the
various sources and stuff.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
It is.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
It's an incredible book. It I mean, I'm surprised how
much information is in this book, especially considering, uh, you know,
how closed off Iran is, you know, and and I
imagine that it's a very hard country to penetrate and
get information on.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Well, it's interesting because all that that is true, but
there is so much resistance to the regime, which you
see in the book. M h. Just like those those
buttons we were talking about earlier with human sources, there
are plenty of buttons on Iranian targets to push to
get information about what's going on behind that walled garden,
you know. Yeah, And it's because of what the regime

(19:17):
does to its people. It's not because of what Israel
does to Iran. It's not because of what the US does.
It's because the regime oppressing their own people so extremely
that suddenly there are a lot of people that are
willing to do things they never would do before because
of this pressure.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
And that's one of the things that I found interesting
is you mentioned that the populace is act. The Iranian
populace is actually the number one target of Iranian intelligence and.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
It has been since nineteen eighty. Yeah. Yeah, there's never changed,
It's never been a moment.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
How did you get interested in Iran?

Speaker 3 (19:53):
Well, my very first interaction with Iran in intelligence context
was in Afghanistan and I was doing some counterintelligence activities
there to protect some of our aircraft that we had.
And I didn't really know much about Iran and a
tactical level at that time, or like they're what they
were doing. I knew a lot of the higher level
things because when I was work at the National Security Agency,

(20:15):
I worked on strategic issues like Russia nuclear stuff, the
North Korea stuff, China stuff, all in the nuclear level,
and then with Iran and on some other things related
to that, so I knew that big picture, you know,
this was a threat, but I'd never seen them in action.
And I don't think most people actually have. And I
was there in the desert at a very remote base

(20:36):
down by the Iran Pakistan Afghanistan Triborder area which is
called Baluchistan, and suddenly I look up and there's this
thing that looks like a skateboard flying around in the
sky and kind of up ahead of us. And actually
a pilot came running over to me and he pointed
out to me too. He's liked, you see that thing.
I'm like, yeah, what is that? And we started taking
photos of it and sent it over to some of

(20:58):
the CIA guys that we were connected to, and there said,
you know, that's a that's an Iranian mohadre for UAV.
But what was happening It was going in like a
square holding pattern because whoever was controlling it it had
gotten too far outside of their control because at the
time they didn't have one way attack and all this stuff.
It was very much more rudimentary, and it had lost

(21:19):
control and went to a holding pattern over the GPS
grid of where it was supposed to be monitoring. So
we're just watching it go in a square over the
base and somebody knocked it down and we took it,
But that was my first introduction to like an actual
Iranian threat happening in front of me, which, as I said,
it's kind of unusual to see because usually people think
of it like behind the scenes and the shadows and
all that. Maybe not so much today now, but for

(21:42):
much of the time, that's how it was viewed. And
that kind of like piqued my interest a little bit.
And then when I went to places like Senegal, for example,
I found out that two streets over from our diplomatic
facility or our team house in Dakar was a Hesbala
teamhouse in Dakar that was working with cocaine shipments from

(22:02):
South America into Dakar, which is the largest The port
of Dakar is the largest import point for cocaine in
all of Africa. It's fifty four countries in Africa and
that's the biggest important location. Wow. And it was just
kind of interesting because like, we weren't fighting with each other.
We were both there for different things, which is kind
of interesting, like, well, why are we here like this,
Why aren't we fighting each other? You know, So there's
there's a lot more going too, So I was trying
to like figure out what's going on here, like higher

(22:24):
level it's not just it's not just war, you know,
there's more to it. It's politics involved. Are those politics?
And those are the kind of questions I started asking
That kind of got me down that pathway, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
And so going starting into the book, because you talk
about the politics, you talk about the three talentisms, you know,
and a lot of misconceptions people have about Iran's motives

(22:54):
and how that colors the intelligence that they collect and
how they perceive that intelligence. Can you kind of go
into those ideas.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, And actually I call them sacred talismans because that's
actually borrowed from Klauswitz, who was kind of talking down
on other military theorists like Jominy at the time, which
was a French Napoleonic theorist who had these like grand
ideas about the world that were all based on what
they thought the world was and it was like a
thing that could never be questioned and it can only
be this way. And he was saying, like, that's not true.

(23:24):
I mean, you go to war over here, it's different
than going to war over here. You can't just say
that the same thing. And so he called those ways
of thinking sacred talismans. And that's why I call these
things sacred talismans, because in my opinion, they're flawed at best,
perhaps mistaken, it's better way to describe it. The first
one is Israel versus Iran, and I mean, even looking today,

(23:45):
like everyone's like, oh, yeah, obviously that's what's going on.
But if you start peeling it back in which I
do in the book, it's not so clear cut that
it's Israel versus Iran. I mean, who's the one doing
the bombings, who's the one killing people? Who's like I mean,
I could just go on and on about the facts
and how lopsided one side is versus the other, and
also about the reaction to those things. It's not what

(24:07):
you would expect if it was actually a conflict between
two states as it's described. And a lot of times
that particular talisman's described as an ideology against ideology, which
again I think is naive. It's political, especially if you
look at political realism. You know, states are black boxes
operating to survive against other states and to keep their
interests alive. And the regime doesn't care about the state

(24:30):
of Iran. The regime cares about the regime. So that's
like a black box within a black box making decisions
about securing itself, and then an Israel same thing. I mean,
you have the Likud party keeping itself alive as strongly
as we can, as long as it can, you know.
So there's these political decisions that look like ideology, but
to someone who's actually if you removed the names off

(24:52):
of the parties, it would be hard to actually make
the same judgments we might make if the names are
on the parties. That's the what I call the blue talisman.
Then there's the red talisman, which is exporting the revolution.
That idea came up and you hear it in discourse
A lot people say, like, oh, Iran's exporting the revolution.
There's this crime terror nexus in Bolivia, or like whatever.

(25:14):
But really, I mean those are those are drug trafficking
operations that generate income the end. I mean, they're not
over there with guns shooting people. They're over there with
dollar counters and bubble wrap wrapping up bales of cocaine
to ship it to Africa to make money so they
can survive because they're heavily sanctioned and they can't access
the banking system and they're cut off from the swift system,
so how else are they kind to move their money

(25:36):
around and make more money? Yeah, it's illegal, but I
mean that is that a terror nexus? I don't know.
Maybe if they're actually doing terror, what does that mean?
And these might be like off putting questions to people,
But you have to be able to question anything because
if you cannot question an idea, this is no longer
a fact based idea now it's an emotion based idea.

(25:58):
We have to be factual about how we appro stuff,
especially things that bring up as many emotions as Iran
and Israel as we just talked about. Then I get
down to something called the Black Talisman, which is realism,
which I kind of alluded to, where these actors are
generally rational and when I say rational, actually Mahre de Gan,
who is one of the Masad directors, said Iran is rational.

(26:21):
They may not be our rational, but they are rational,
which I think is a great way to describe it,
because it doesn't matter how we see the world. It
matters how the actor sees the world. And if it's
in their interest to do what they think is right,
they're going to do it, even if it's crazy. And
hurts people, They're still going to do it because that's
what they think they need to do to survive, especially
when they feel like they've been backed up against the wall.
So that's my perspective. When I look at this book,

(26:43):
I look at it from a realist perspective, asking, you know,
there's this thing. John Rawls is a philosopher that wrote
a lot in the seventies and eighties, and he said
that there's this thing called the veil of ignorance where
if someone dropped you down in the society and didn't
tell you where in that society you fell high class,
middle class, low class, labor, or rich person. If you
didn't know which of those things you fell into, how
would you make the laws. You'd make them much differently

(27:05):
than you would if you knew where you were, you know.
And that's kind of the approach that I take with
this is instead of like labeling everything, let me just
look at the facts and see what the facts say.
And when I talk about facts, I don't just mean
like looking at the news and things like that. As
you said in the back of the book, there are
hundreds of declassified American intelligence documents that were top secret,
secret noebeign and a whole trove of Iraqi documents that

(27:29):
were top secret and secret that had never been seen before.
These things are not for the public. These are internal
political documents, basically our intelligence process feeding political decisions of
facts that were collect on the ground through human intelligence
SIGAN and other collection methodologies, with some other information to
help back it up to put into context for people

(27:50):
to understand. So that's kind of a long way of
saying what these talismans are. But it's important to question
all of them, including my own assertions. People should question
what I say to and not in a combative way,
but instead questioning, well, where did you get that, What
does that mean? What does that mean to me? Because
I think people don't ask those kind of questions, and
that's how we end up twenty years in Afghanistan, fighting
the same war, one year at a time for twenty years.

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Speaker 2 (30:44):
So, uh, can you tell us a little a little
bit about them the about the intelligence apparatus of Iran,
we have the vaja uh theurgy see codes and then
well you go ahead and tell us please.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Yeah. So a lot of people, even in the intelligence
community in the United States, and I've seen this, they
don't know what vaja is. This is a new term
for a lot of Westerners. This is what Iran calls
their intelligence service, the equivalent of the CIA, their human
intelligence service. In the West, we call it the Ministry
of Intelligence. It's not called the Ministry of Intelligence. Why

(31:23):
are we calling it that? So that's something I start
out with, like, why are we using these things that
we think are true that are not true? So let's
start with what they call themselves va ja vaja, and
that is their actual human element that started out as
their strongest component or their entity. In two thousand and nine,
there was something called the Green Revolution in Iran when
the country was almost overthrown. It was the most serious

(31:45):
moment of overthrow since nineteen seventy nine in the country,
and the way the regime saw this was as a
failure of VAJA to suppress the people enough to force
them not to rebel. This is how it was viewed.
What they did was they basically reduced the power of VOJA,
subordinated it to the IERGC. And this is where the
IRGC Intelligence Organization came out to become a thing. Before that,

(32:09):
it was a department. An agency is a smaller thing
with less remit. It was not meant to be inside
the country doing things. But from that moment forward until today,
it became this massive intelligence apparatus that now is the
premier intelligence apparatus in Iran and outside of Iran. And
VAJA has been relegated to kind of this political intelligence
gatherer for looking at whatever, what are foreign diplomats doing?

(32:32):
You know, like nothing that you would expect today's CIA,
for example, to be doing. All the cover activity is IERGC.
Now there's very small components that VAJA still does, but
it's minuscule. It's mostly the IERGC and underneath that, and
in the book I have a pretty good diagram of
that there are many different things underneath that. There's like
forty different departments underneath that. It's it's extremely complex and

(32:54):
part of what the regime And when I say the regime,
I don't mean the entire Irunnan government, although they're all complicit.
I mean that small kernel of decision makers who have
absolute control over what happens, which is a very tiny
number of people. The rest of the people in the government,
which is about one percent of the ninety two million
people in the country, are just following along because it's
in their interest to follow along, you know. But there's

(33:15):
maybe between one hundred to one thousand named individuals that
are that are the regime that's actually doing this stuff.
And the IRGC is not designed to protect i running
of people. It's designed to protect that small group of people,
that small kernel of people. And you can see it
because the Iotola's son, for example, can go freely outside
the country. He can go to Washington, d C. If

(33:37):
he wants to. Why because he has a black diplomatic passport.
Why does he have that? Why does he need that?
And if you look at who in the regime are
these named individuals that are the powerholders, they all have
black diplomatic passports. Cost some sole money had two diplomatic passports. Smelgani,
the current Good Sports Commander, has four black passports. I mean,
these guys are able to come and go as they please.

(33:58):
The Iran Central Bank Director, who's the sanctioned bank, you know,
that is the bank target of the West, has a
black passport and he's come and gone to Washington, DC
to World Bank meetings. I mean, these people are heavily protected,
and they know how to use the system. They know
how to use the Vienna Convention, which is the thing
that grants diplomatic community. And they initially relied on VAJA

(34:19):
to ensure that. And now it's the IERGC that is
providing that, and it's providing it so that the Iranian
people remain shut down while these small elites are able
to have the maximum freedom. They're basically monopolizing freedom at
the cost of everybody else.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Right, And I mean there's there's a lot of wealth
at the top there too, isn't.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
There There is? Actually, when the Shaw fled Iran in
nineteen seventy nine, he had something like six billion dollars
in today's dollars, not in nineteen seventy nine dollars, a
very small amount of money. It's about the same as
Donald Trump claims to have. And he had that much money.
That was the Shaw that was run out of the
country for having too much wealth, for being too opulent. Right, well,

(35:00):
now the Iatola, today's Iotola, how many he has as
much money as Jeff Bezos, but his assets are liquid.
Jeff bezos assets are not liquid. They're tied up in
equity in his businesses. Elon Musk's something like ninety percent
of his money is tied up in equity in his businesses.
If he pulled it out, his businesses would collapse. Not
so for the Iatola. And actually that wealth grew dramatically

(35:23):
after two thousand and seven, which is when the IRGC
was first sanctioned by the United States, and there were
these series of sanctions that grew from that period forward.
And that if you took a graph and showed the
sanctions increasing and put it right next to wealth of
these top elites increasing, they're positively correlated, which means they
grow together. And especially after twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, when
we put the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, there's a

(35:45):
dramatic spike and growth of wealth in these top leaders
in Iran, and a dramatic decrease in general wealth for
the population of the people in Iran. In fact, that
same year that the Iatola's money exponentially grew is the
same year that there were lines outside of grocery stores
because there were chicken rations in Iran because there was
not enough chicken to feed people. There were gas rations

(36:05):
in a country that's petroleum rich at the same time
that the Ayatola was one of the richest human beings
on earth. And that just kind of illustrates to you
that this is not a democracy. It's not a country.
It's not a capitalist country that reacts to capitalist measures
like sanctions, right ins said, it's just it's enriching elites
handover fist.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
It's amazing. And you know later in the book you
go into like the sanctions and the effects, and we'll
get into that. So with the IURGC, we have the
IGCCI their cyber space, their EW and cyber defense. And then,
like you said, underneath that, there's just tons and tons
of like different departments. Is there a lot of competition

(36:48):
between IRGC and VAJA, and then within the IRGC itself.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
There was between VUDGE and IRGC before two thousand and nine.
After that no more. But when IRGC grew, the regime
actually forced it to get so large that it would
be too large to be controlled by a single individual
besides the Iatola kind of like a check and balance
in an authoritarian way, because the IOGC is extremely powerful.
I mean, even if you took the Iotola out, the

(37:13):
IRGC could run the country. Right now, they control something
like forty percent of the entire black market or the
entire economy, which is mostly a black market thing. Like
if you want an iPhone in Iran, it has to
be purchased from an IRGC supplier, and there are many
iPhones in Iran. There are many Western products in Iran
that you would think like, oh, there's sanctioned. They can't
get that. Now you can get it. It's just four
thousand dollars, you know. And the IRGC was designed that

(37:34):
way where there isn't one person cost some soul money.
For example, even when he was, you know, the big guy,
he couldn't run all of the IRGC. He was in
the Kods force. He was a lower relatively lower in
stature compared to the others. Even though he had some
direct line to the Iotola and was able to get
tasking from him directly, and a lot he'd get away
with a lot more than the other two star generals.
There's only like fifteen two star generals in the entire

(37:56):
country of Iran, very few, and they're designed that way.
And actually the Ministry of Defense is actually it's separated
from the IRGC and it's subordinate to the IRGC. So
the IRGC has a two star general commander. The Ministry
of Defense is led by a one star So if
the Ministry Defense, which you would think would be able
to upset defense policy, sets a policy, the urgency can
ignore it, and they do ignore it. They have ignored it,

(38:17):
which is kind of an interesting tension that it was
designed that way. And there's a lot of these designs
where there's these tensions built throughout this system, which is
again not a democracy, but was created from an authoritarian
mind of how do how do we keep that authoritarian
in power? And they're doing a pretty good job of it,
yeah for sure.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
So you know, in about keeping them in power. Who
are the top targets for Iranian intelligence operations?

Speaker 3 (38:47):
The number one target is the Mujahadi and ihalk m
Ek or the People's Mujahideen, which has been a thorn
in their side since nineteen seventy nine. That Mujahidin has
existed for a long time before nineteen sixties. It's some
would argue that it's a Marxist organization. Some would vehemently
argue against that. There was a divide between them in
the eighties, but in any case, they were the main

(39:08):
target and they remained the main target. In fact, when
in June when Israel's war on Iran started, most if
not all of the action at the actual action, people
in Iran doing the stuff that we were seeing like
lasing targets and doing target reconnaissance and actually setting off
devices were not Israeli operatives. Those were Iranians that most

(39:29):
of them worked for Mujahadini Cup, the NEK. If you
remember back in the early two thousands when it was
released that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that was
released through the Mujahidini Cup. And there's another set of
targets which is the Aziris, not Azerbaijan in the country,
but Azerbaijan province in section of your on northwest iron

(39:51):
those nuclear documents that were taken a few years ago
that Benjaminuttyaw who held up and said, look, we have
all the proof. Now we stole it was something like
I think it was a ton of paper from this
bunker that was a ZII assisted theft out of the country,
and actually they gave Israel overflight out of Azerbaijan the
country to take those documents to Israel. And there's a

(40:11):
lot of these groups that they've been against the government,
any Iranian government for a very long time. So before
there was the regime, there was the Shah, and before
the Shah there was his father, and before that there
was the Kajars, so it is a long history. But
the Kurds, for example, the Aziris, the Baluchis, the Ahvazis,
which are an Arab arab iised group of Iranians in
the southwest of the country and the border of Iraq.

(40:32):
These are all separatists aligned people, not all of them are,
but they're typically an area you can go to if
you want to do something in Iran. These are the
people you work with as an outsider to do things
against the regime, which means these are the people the
regime wants to get rid of for control, severely controlled,
and in some cases that's what they do. They just

(40:53):
go and you know, reduce the amount of resources they have,
they reduce the freedom of action. In other cases they
go round them up and kill them, like they did
the Mujahideen in nineteen eighty eight. If you remember President Rayisi,
who died mysteriously in a helicopter last year, he was
considered the hanging judge. He signed off on something like
three thousand execution orders that Mujahdini Kak were most of

(41:14):
the people that were executed under his basically by decree
saying like, yeah, that guy's guilty, no trial, needed to
go kill him. And he did that in nineteen eighty eight,
three thousand people again, Mujahidin people. And so there's this
tension between these groups that don't feel like they are.
They don't feel Persian, they don't feel Iranian. Sometimes they do,
sometimes they don't, but they certainly feel I'm Asiri, I

(41:37):
am Ahbasi, I am Baluchi, I am Kurdish, you know,
and especially when you look at the Curds. There's thirty
five million Kurds. That's the largest stateless group, stateless ethnic
group in the world period, and they're split up between Turkey, Syria, Iraq,
and Iran. And Iran has one called the p Jack Pjak,
which is a Kurdish separatist group in Iran that has

(41:58):
been a constant thorn in their side that they've been
blowing up, you know, routinely, sometimes the Turkey's help. And
these are just a summary of some of them, but
there are smaller groups too, and the thing they all
have in common is that they disagree with the regime,
but there's no democratic mechanism for them to change anything
with the regime, so instead of having that democratic mechanism,
they have to resort to violence.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
The other target you mentioned that we've seen is the
Salafi the Salafis, the you know, Salafi Jihadis. And what
I thought was interesting as you mentioned that in the
nineties that Iran actually notified Western intelligence about the cooperation
between the Taliban and AH.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
Yes, they were actually helping us quite a bit. And
that relationship was built in Bosnia because during the wars
in Bosnia and Albania and Kosovo, the Coastal Liberation Army
and some of the Bosniac groups which are Muslim Bosnians,
we're working with the IRGC and actually that was the
QUDS force first overseas deployment to do un conventional warfare

(43:02):
was in Bosnia and we were there also the I
four and later on the KFO were there. Then Operation
Allied Force was there continuously. There was US Western presence
there with Yukon, and we built relationships with them at
the time. And actually you can read some of the
stuff in the book about Clinton. Clinton did a green
light and actually allowed Iran to ship weapons in there

(43:22):
to arm the KLA through Croatia. And that was a
very interesting revelation that most people probably don't know, is
that the US was not necessarily working hand in hand,
but we weren't holding the back. And because we were
diging that relationship, they took it upon themselves to share
with us something they knew about what was going on
in Afghanistan, and that was the Taliban housing al Qaida.
And if you look at some of those targets that

(43:44):
we struck when Bill Clinton authorized strikes in the late nineties,
some of those targets were alerted to us by Iran.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
So, you know, you break the book down into the
official well, I mean into the three different sections, but
under this talk about like the official cover, the non
official cover, and then the UW aspects. Can we talk
about the official cover because you've already mentioned the Black
passports and the diplomatic community. How effective is that and

(44:13):
what are some of their greatest abuses of that system.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah, official cover is very interesting because it's something that
every country does and no one likes to talk about.
And there are some obviously good uses of it, and
then there are some abuses of the diplomatic passport. Is
what I mean, diplomatic community. This stuff all comes from
the Vienna Convention of nineteen sixty one that basically says
that you're allowed to do things in a country as

(44:40):
an agent of that sovereign power, and that means you're immune,
you're inviolable, which means you cannot be searched. If you
have a pouch which could be a backpack, a box,
a cargo container with a sticker on it that says
this is a diplomatic pouch that is unvilable. It cannot
be searched. And as I said, every country does this.
So when we are wagging our finger at Iran, we
should remember all the times that we've done the exact

(45:02):
same thing and every other country does. I mean, this
is part of what diplomatic status is for. Without getting
into all the details of what the West does with it.
Iran has stations overseas, and that doesn't necessarily mean VAJA stations.
They have VAJA stations and they have IERGC stations, and
sometimes those IRGC stations are huge. And actually one of

(45:24):
the very first IRGC stations that we have evidence of
on the intel side was in Vienna before the Soviet
Union collapsed, and they had a small little Kods Force
element and there it wasn't called Kuods Force yet, it
was called the Office of Liberation Movements. They had a
little typist in there that was sending codes out, you know.
But they were there on diplomatic cover. They were there
as a foreign ministry representative, not as an intelligence officer. Again,

(45:49):
this is what many countries do, but Iran has certainly
abused it. At Dubai is a common location where they
do abuse this, where they'll move cargo containers, gigantic containers
like off of a ship with a little stick on
it that says this is a diplomatic pouch. You can't
touch it, and inside of that our weapons and money
and whatever you need to put in there to escape scrutiny. Right. Actually,
just side note, we had a Saudi prince in Lebanon

(46:10):
when I was deployed there that tried to do the
diplomatic pouch thing with his jet. He actually pouched his
jet and it was full of ecstasy. It had like
two million ecstasy pills in it. But when he landed,
the door open and they kind of all came out
and it became like a now we see it thing.
So he kind of messed that up. But that was
a little side note. But of it, for sure, Yeah,

(46:30):
for sure. But they use it for other reasons too.
So in New York, for example, there's something like twenty
five accredited Iranian diplomats living there right now that are
allowed to live there, and they're on a range restriction.
They're not allowed to leave a certain area of the city.
But the area that they're in, it's a good part
of the city. You can do a lot of things there,
which means you can meet with other people, perhaps sources

(46:50):
or perhaps handlers if you're being handled. You know, that's
a place where everybody gets to go together. So it
could be Israel. He's talking to Iranians, it could be
Iranians talking to who knows what it is. It's happening
all the time. They also had an office in Washington,
d C outside run out of the Pakistani embassy. So
that let's say you're an Iranian citizen studying in the

(47:11):
United States and you lose your passport, Well you need
to get a new one. But how are you need
to get that if you don't have an Iranian embassy
in the United States. Well there's a guy in the
Pakistani embassy whose job it is and he is he
is an Iranian diplomat in the Washington d C. That
will get you a new passport. This is this is
the way, you know, this is the good way that
this works. This is how it's helpful. Right, And that's

(47:33):
not cover, that's that's declared on the cover side. Especially
with commercial cover, it's a whole other animal because think
about all their shipping lines are sanctioned, all the port
entries are sanctioned, all their goods are sanctioned. Like I
just said, the iPhone. How do you get that into
the country on industrial scale, Well you have to have
commercial cover, and you have to have companies all over

(47:53):
the world that look like one thing, but there's something else.
And that is what they mostly make their money off
of of how they they enrich the regime and how
they move people and goods and equipment around the world
very easily and with very little notice.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, you went into that quite a bit in your book,
The The Banyan Banyans Banyard's Bonyards. Yeah. So you know,
when we talk about things that Iran is doing under
you know, diplomatic cover, we're talking about a lot of
known bad actors. Like we know that these people are

(48:30):
bad actors, how can they just don't get P and
GT from everyone?

Speaker 3 (48:34):
So that's something called reciprocity. If you start kicking out
person from country X, person from country X will start
kicking you out. And we saw this a lot during
the Obama administration when we were having some escalatory actions
with Russia where we kicked some Russian diplomats out of
the United States. Well, the next day Russia kicked the
exact same number of diplomats out of Russia. And you know,
we close a Chinese diplomatic facility in Texas. Well, the

(48:55):
next week there's a US diplomatic facility closed in China.
So there's a huge risk of if we interrupt this
process that we all know is going on, the costs
are higher than the benefits. So sometimes it might be
better to actually, rather than neutralize, it might be better
to exploit that thing, Which is exactly the confluence of
human intelligence and counterintelligence where you get to make the choice,

(49:17):
do I want to just cut this thing off and
stop it. You know, if there's a drug vessel full
of drugs and we see it off the coast of Venezuela,
do we want to blow it up? Or do we
want to capture the guys and interrogate them and find
out where they came from, where they're going and all
this other stuff. Well, that's a choice between exploiting and neutralizing.
And neutralizing has a lot of immediate shock value that
looks good politically and in the news. But exploiting typically

(49:39):
doesn't get known to anybody. It's a secret, and it
goes on for a long long time, and it can
have a huge payoff if you're smart about it. And
of course that's my bias because I did those things
and I know how they work, But I will advocate
for the high value and high impact that they have
over a very long time that if rather than just
shutting these things down or kicking these diplomats out, wouldn't

(49:59):
it be a better to recruit that diplomat as a
double agent, and then have him work for you for
thirty years and then recruit his own assets for you
as a principal agent that you could then further gather
defectors to keep them defectors in place. I mean, the
possibilities are endless, the value is endless. Rather than just
kicking that one guy out and making the country kick
one of your people out, you know, to me, it's

(50:19):
a no brainer.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
When we talk about some of the things that you know,
Iran does in foreign countries and in particularly the United States,
and they do a lot of this stuff everywhere. Can
we talk about ms see Elena Jodd.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Yeah, Masulia Nojod is actually very interesting person. She wrote
her own book called The Wind in My Hair, which
I recommend if anyone's interested in Iran, Like what it's
like to be a person in jail in Iran, political jail,
Evan prison, getting tortured. She wrote a book about it.
The regime has been trying to kill her for a
very long time. They've tried multiple times the first time.
She lives in New York actually, and she's under FBI

(50:58):
protection now. But when she came to the US, she
started talking way more than she used to talk when
she was in Iran, because now she had some distance.
But the regime caught up to her. They tried to
assassinate her once by recruiting some Chechen guys who were
kind of this high jinks group of guys that were
pretty sloppy. They did a lot of physical surveillance on
her home. They were looking at the way that she

(51:19):
was walking to understand her behavior, and so they're doing
a lot of early collection activity to see how this
target looked. And they were interdicted. One of them had
an AK forty seven in his car. They were using
their phones way too much. In fact, most of the
reason we able to catch them is because of what
they said on their phones. It was very obvious what
they were doing. So we neutralized them. And a few

(51:42):
years later the regime still wanted to kill her, but
they had a more elaborate plan this time. This time
they wanted to kidnap her in New York, bring her
to a port in New York, put her on a speedboat,
take the speedboat to Venezuela, and then take her to
Iran so they could do a show trial and execute
her or torture her so that she would recamp and
make this negative message about what she was saying on

(52:03):
the media. We were able to catch that as well.
But there have been some others as well. R. Bob
cr who's Iranian living in Texas, who is a used
car salesman. He was recruited by the IRGC to assassinate
the Saudi ambassador who was in DC at the time,
eating at a very nice restaurant, and he got very
close to actually doing it. But there was a confidential

(52:25):
informant that we had in the drug cartels because he
was actually buying his weapons from the Zeta's cartel. And
we actually had a recruited guy in the Zetas cartel
recruited for something else obviously, who was like, hey, there's
this Iranian stuff going on. You guys should look into this,
and so DEA and FBI looked into it. Sure enough, yes,
he had done quite a few things. He was ready
to go, and we were able to capture him too.
But a lot of these are very interesting when you

(52:47):
look at them, because it's not an Iranian case officer
or IERGC guy doing this, it's whoever they can get
their hands on to do it. Because they have such
few resources available to do these things in States and
in other countries that they're just kind of grasping at
straws to see what sticks. They've recruited Hell's Angels guys
before to organize some assassination attempts more recently. You know,

(53:10):
they're a very interesting thing to look at about how
they recruit these guys in Canada and then they have
illegally entered the United States and then go do their
target reconstants that they're going to do and then go
figure out when the time is right. But again, confidential
informant helps with that and we're able to capture those
people too. So it's very interesting to see how they're
doing things in the United States because they're very different
than how they do them in other countries where they

(53:31):
have more ability to move. And that goes back to
the diplomatic thing. So if you look at Iran, which
countries can Iran go to Iranians without a visa? This
is an important question to ask. You should away if
you're an intelligence analysts should always ask, you know, my
target country, what countries can they go to without a visa?
Because that means those are countries they can go to
into a source meeting without being easily noticed. Countries might

(53:54):
surprise you. For example, Ecuador and say Sheelles and Singapore,
they can go there without a VA Thailand, Georgia, Armenia.
So there's a lot of countries that are not Muslim
countries that they can go to and do the activities
need to do their third country meetings so that way
they're not meeting the source and the sources home country
or in Ron, they're doing it in a kind of

(54:14):
safer area. This is how they kind of do things
outside of the United States. In the United States, they're
using a lot of cyber activity where they're and also
in Israel where they're recruiting their assets through Facebook, sometimes
posing as lovers and other kind of things. And when
we see these things exposed, we kind of chuckle at it,
but I also have to ask, like, why aren't they
throwing more resources at this stuff? You know, But it's

(54:35):
because they're more concerned about their survival at home than
they are about anything else outside the country.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
Something you mentioned like that was surprising to me because
most people I think of an age are aware of
Solomon Rushdi and the fetway against him. I did not
know you mentioned that that over three dozen people have
been killed trying to kill him and it's still going on. Yeah, yeah,
just got and there's basically there's basically a fund for

(55:05):
his death. There was just an increase.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
Yep, it was adjusted for inflation, you know, because it's
been around for.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
A while, so right right, three point three million. And
it's crazy to me that that there's just basically like this, Hey,
if you if you get himmering these people like you
get a piece of this.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
Yeah, it's basically a beef that the original Ayatola had
and he is now dead and a beef has survived him.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Can we also talk a little bit about Merchant, because
that's pretty recent that it was an assef Merchant.

Speaker 4 (55:40):
Who was that Uh the wasn't he?

Speaker 2 (55:43):
The Pakistani? The gentleman who was uh gonna who is
gonna try and the Pakistani who's gonna try and kill Trump?

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, there's been a few of those.
I don't know how much stock I put into that.
I have an I have a theory that these are
not like coming from high level ERGYC people. Even the
r BOBSI are one that I mentioned, the Saudi into
twenty thirteen assassination project. I think these are lower level
ergyc This is my theory is I'd had no fact
to back this up, but I think these are lower

(56:13):
level ways of trying to do what they can with
what they can. If the same thing with John Bolton
and Pompeo and Trump, these are like really low level,
amateur hour type things that have almost no resources attached
to them, something like that coming from If it was
coming from the top levels of the government, I feel
like there would be more risk analysis in there, some

(56:34):
more thought about how it looks and how to do it.
You know, these things and if you compare them to
other assassination operations that the regime has done, especially against Iranians,
those are far more advanced methodical. They put a lot
more thought into it. They still failed a lot, but
they succeeded a lot. And it wasn't this kind of
like pie in the sky, like oh, let's just go
after that guy and go kill them. You know, they

(56:56):
really thought through how do they do it, where's the
right place to do it, what resources do we need,
what country should it be, and who should we recruit.
In Denmark there were a few of these where they
killed some MUJA hitting guys and some as MLA guys
with very methodical ways of doing it even recently. So
I question, you know, where are these orders coming from?
And I don't know if those are officially sanctioned things

(57:17):
like even again back to the r Bob Ziar case,
when you look at the Treasury sanctions that detail, you
know what was going on with that case. They implicate
cost some solo money and two high level IRGC guys
in addition to the one guy that was on the
phone with ar BOBZR. But there's no there's no link
between that low level basically a lieutenant colonel and the

(57:37):
IRGC and cost some solo money like that doesn't really
make sense to me, you know. I again, theorizing that
it's probably someone lowered down the ranks who's like, I'm
going to make a name for myself and get this
big hit and then I'm going to be important, that's
probably more likely.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Makes sense. So you know, then you go into COVID action.
Can we talk about the Iran Experts Initiative.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
Yeah, it's very interesting, more recent actually since the Biden administration.
This is kind of a classic example of and many
countries do this Russia does this, China does this with
their Confucius institutes, where countries will use their academic credentials
to do intelligence things. And again this is not a
new surprising thing. This is very common in countries, but

(58:27):
it was kind of surprising because of how close these
individuals were to the Biden administration, specifically to the Iran
team working for President Biden and the Syria team working
for President Biden. And there was in fact one individual
on the Iran team, the envoys team, that was telling
the envoy advice. That advice was coming directly from Sarif

(58:47):
through emails to that person, which is kind of interesting
that emails are now in the public domain, so if
people want to go research them, they can. And all
the people that were involved in this Iran Experts initiative
claimed to be the one that we're providing. They said
that the access they had to the regime was only
for academic purposes, so that they could help inform the
US government on the JCPOA. My thought, as an intelligence

(59:10):
collector and a handler, well that's probably how it started
out for you, and that the regime kept pushing down
that button and kept you on and now you're working
for them, even if you don't know that you are.
So sometimes you know, ignorance is not an excuse for
intelligence collection, and we've seen that many times with how
people believe they're providing something to one country and it's
a false flag and they're providing it to somebody else,

(59:30):
or they think is something completely separate, And if you
look at what they collected and what they did and
what they said, this is a very clear cut influence
operation that actually affected how are Iran envoy operated in
the world. And when you're doing negotiations with a country,
let's say you're on you have a limited information so
the information you do have is extremely valuable and you're
using it to reduce uncertainty and increase your decision advantage. Well,

(59:53):
the other side wants to take control of that process
to their own advantage, and we would be ignorant to
think that they were not, And unfortunately at the time,
we were ignorant to think that they were not, and
they did do it. So again, I go in a
lot of detail on it. I have the actual names
of the people in there and everything, but it is
kind of interesting to think about how many other times
does this happen? You know, that's a question mark this
should come up that people for future research should be

(01:00:15):
looking into, and in the intelligence community should be looking
at what other things that look benign are not benign
because that's a that's a great intelligence operation when it
looks benign. That's what Clandesta's activity is. The activity looks
like it's something else, you know, right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:30):
And then you know there's So we're briefly going over
all this stuff. There are so many great examples in
this book. I highly highly recommend everybody read this. It's
Iran's shadow weapons. But let's move into cyber because cyber
has been Oh the link is going to be in
the description. Let's move into cyber because cyber has been

(01:00:53):
something that you know, Iran was nothing and then we
hit him or they were hit with stucksnet stucknet, and
then they became something. And it's been a real evolution
for them, hasn't it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
It's really fascinating. Actually, I'm not aware of another country
having this similar evolution. As you said, they were nothing
before like two thousand and seven, at a maximum, they
were defacing websites. Fast forward ten years and they are
overturning billions of dollars of ransomware and banks and destroying
giant pieces of infrastructure and SCATA systems, which are industrial

(01:01:31):
control systems, like they just they accelerate. Well, how do
they do that where they get information? Well, as you mentioned,
stucksnet happened, and they ran immediately reverse engineered stucksnet and
saw how it was made, and they made their own
piece of malware that they used that now they knew
this new information. Well, then they said, well, what if
we're under threat by other things, let's start investing a

(01:01:53):
ton of money in this. And they started recruiting these
civilian entities, which is actually not unlike the US. The US,
a lot of our cyber expertise is not uniform service
members or gs civilians at cybercom. It's contractors, companies that
have experts in them that the government hires to produce
tailored items Collard malware. This is the way it actually works.

(01:02:15):
There's a couple of really interesting books on it, like
Countdown to Zero Day, which I recommend by Kim Zetter,
which goes into how stocks and that was actually made.
It was not made by the government, It was made
by other companies that were sold to the government and
same thing with Israel, Like they have Pegasus that's made
by a civilian company that's not made by Unit eighty
two hundred, their second organization. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Wait, are you saying that the government is not on
the leading edge of development and conception of of skin,
they're on.

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
The leading edge of anything money to give to those people, Yeah, right,
because they'll pay a lot of money, a lot of money,
you know. And the regime does the same thing. And
they did the same thing. And actually, when Israel wiped
a bunch of servers in Iran using a white or malware,
Iran reverse engineered that and turned it into something called Shammoun,
which they then put on Saudi Aramco and erased all

(01:03:07):
of Saudi Aramco's data, which is incredible because, as I said,
even two years before that, the regime could only deface
a website. And now they're wiping out the entire oil
infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, not all of it, but almost
all of the huge, huge amount. And it wasn't just
a one hit thing. They had carefully planned it. They
chose a day during Ramadan when they knew no on
would be at the place, like everything was carefully thought through.

(01:03:28):
It was very deliberate, which is a huge change before
when they looked like this ragtag group of little hackers
which they call Sabiri's that were just hired off the
street to go do forum blasts and you know, take
websites down with didas attacks. So you see this evolution
not as their innovation at the beginning, more their reaction,
but as they reacted to it. They just took everything
that hit them and then they turned it into their

(01:03:49):
own weapon and they use it against us, which is
the West, Israel, European countries especially like Denmark, Netherlands, other
countries as well to their advantage. And for that first
few years, then they rapidly accelerated producing their own things
that are now novel that would never have existed if
things hadn't happened before to them that pushed them in

(01:04:11):
that direction, which is kind of fascinating, you know, revisionist
history of like what would have happened if we didn't
do stuck net or if they didn't discover stuck net.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
Right, And you also mentioned that when Israel used Wiper
that they uncovered a much more valuable and essay loitering
tool that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
Yeah, that wasn't like for the NSAY. Yeah, so the
NSA tool was hidden and had been hidden and was
totally unknown, and that tool was extremely advanced and was
capable of pretty much destroying the entire nuclear program and
a lot of other infrastructure, including much of their non
nuclear defense infrastructure. And when Israel did that wiper activity,

(01:04:49):
it did it in the same kind of area of
the memory of system that this other malware was. And
when the regime went to go look, they found both
and the US unfortunately lost this extremely advanced tool that
now is no longer functional.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
Yeah, I have a question.

Speaker 4 (01:05:07):
Can I ask a question see their cyber operations, what
is like the percentage between like them going out there
trying to make money for the regime to like offensive
operations against state actors and stuff like that, whether it's Israel,
the US, or any Denmark.

Speaker 3 (01:05:24):
The money part was earlier and it has really dramatically decreased.
And in fact, the last time they did a major
financial operation, they did two that were like really huge.
One was against a Las Vegas company because the owner
of the company was Jewish and made a statement about Iran,
and to retaliate they caused him several one hundreds of
millions of dollars of damage to his infrastructure. They didn't

(01:05:47):
get any money from that though. Then in Georgia, the
state in the United States or Georgia, they attacked a
municipal infrastructure and were able to do some ransomware attack
there After that, which is like more than ten years ago.
They have drifted away from that and they're mostly focusing
on offensive cyberactivity.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Yeah, it's wild that they now have like five advanced
persistent threats, at least five that are associated with them.
Can you talk a little bit about the twenty twenty
three attacks on US ships?

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
Do you recall that which ones are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
The ballast they are relutely yes.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
This is from a group called Shahid Kave, which is
a very elite cyber unit inside of one of their
elite cyber units. So you can think of it as
you know, inside a cybercom there is an elite national
mission Force, the Cyber Mission Force. You can think of
Shahid Kaves as a team inside of that cyber mission Force.
It's kind of analogous. And what Shahid Kave did was

(01:06:44):
they were able to actually steal through malware activity. They
use these things called remote access trojans or rats to
get this stuff. So they create a rat inside of
a computer system, trafted the designs for these ballasts, and
if they wanted to, they could have basic hit a
button and turn these ballasts off, which would have caused
these cargo vessels to eventually sink after their machinery broke

(01:07:06):
down and things. But the interesting part about that is
that these were not operations they were going to do. Instead,
this was a menu of options that they presented to
the IATOLA, and this was their job, was to basically
come up with all kinds of ways that if the
IATOLA wanted to, they could attack the US with cyber tools. Interestingly,
they haven't used them to our knowledge, not just this tool,

(01:07:29):
but other tools. And that kind of goes along with
what they do, not just in cyber but in intelligence generally,
where they take a lot of things and put them
on the shelf and they wait till there's a time
when they really want to use the thing. That's kind
of interesting because there's been a lot of opportunities that
you might think would be a good reason for them
to use those things. You could think of like June

(01:07:51):
for example, as one of those times and they didn't
do it, And that's kind of an interesting question of
like why didn't they destroy the ballasts on all of
the ships in the golf in June? You know, but
it probably goes toward the more political question of well,
if they did that, what would happen next? And what
would that mean for me? You know. So they're probably
they probably have a lot of things on the shelf

(01:08:11):
that they'll never ever use that are probably very powerful.
But it would mean that their own destruction may be
invited from using these things.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
Right, Yeah, where where it turns into basically an act
of war. Yes, and let's talk about you know, we
talk about these capabilities, but let's talk about like they're internal,
like they have they're pretty devious with their own population,
you know, in terms of like the the apps that

(01:08:39):
they create, the software you know that they create where well,
they they'll put out, hey, here's a censorship. Here's a
way to circumvent censorship. But it's actually put out by
the government.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
Yeah, and actually this is all because their internet. It's
not like our internet. You know, we think like, oh
I can put a VPN on and I can I
can use proton whatever. Well, the problem in Iran is
that they don't have an open Internet. They have something
called the National Information Network, which is given to them
by China. This is a Chinese technology about how to
create a you know, China's Great Firewall, which is pretty successful.

(01:09:16):
They gave that to Iran and Iran implemented it, which
means that people in Iran cannot access the Internet like
we do. There are entire sections of the Internet that
they can never reach. There are some VPNs that do
work there, but they're not always working, and they kind
of come up and down, and there's a lot of
volatility there. But within that special ecosystem that they've created,
as you said, they've got all kinds of little things

(01:09:37):
in there that are ready to hook you. And especially
during times of protest or unrest, there's a lot of
things that are designed to trick you, track you, or
catch you or figure out where you are, you know,
because what their goal is to stop protests that they
don't want them happening, and they'll go to any length
to do it. They were at the time during the
masa Amini protests few years ago, they were throwing girls

(01:09:59):
off for roofs because the girls were posting on Instagram
and were at the actual protests. They were shooting girls
walking home from school that had no part in the
protest just because they were there. Lots and lots of
people were killed during this protest with live rounds. And
at the heart of it was the Internet, because how
else can you in a country so oppressed and so controlled,
how else can you communicate that this protest is going

(01:10:21):
down right now at this location. And they have to
use the Internet. And the problem is they can't access Instagram,
They can't access a lot of social media that we
can unless you're a regime person. They have special access
in the network to be able to go onto Instagram
and post their pictures and things. But that means that
people have to use all these little tools and software.
And if you remember, like back in the nineties when
you were trying to download music, I wasn't doing it

(01:10:43):
because it was illegal, of course, but for those who
were doing it, you sometimes would download a movie or
a song and it was actually full of viruses, right
because they have no way of like verifying like what
am I downloading? Because it's all nothing's official, and in
Iran it's like that, and the regime puts a lot
of stuff out there, like, oh, this is the VPN
that you can use to get outside the country, But
it turns out it's actually a government controlled BPM that's

(01:11:04):
accessing your entire phone. And that's one small example, but
that's how the entire system is designed, is to have
total knowledge of what is every person this country doing
so we can stop them from rebelling against us.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
It's insane.

Speaker 3 (01:11:18):
And actually, during during the June War, they shut the
entire Internet off for two days, not because it wasn't
Israel that did that, it was the Iranian government because
they recognize how weak they were during that conflict, like
that was a great moment if the people wanted to
stand up and take the country over, that was if
ever it was then. And so the regime noticed that
and they turned the entire Internet off. Zero Internet that

(01:11:40):
you couldn't make, you couldn't call on WhatsApp, you couldn't
do anything. And that was a very scary time because
imagine there's bombs falling all around in big cut cities,
Israeli bombs and US bombs, and you don't know what
they're going to hit next, because you don't even know.
They can't even see the news. You don't know if
this is the start of an invasion, right, I mean,
you have no idea. So these people are like living
in complete fear and darkness, and that's what the regime

(01:12:01):
wanted them to feel, which is crazy because their own
country was under attack and they were trying to increase
the fear of their own people during that time.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
We talked a little bit about sanctions earlier and how
their wealth continues to shoot up even with the sanctions.
Can and you know, and and you know, you have
some great graphs in there detailing like the vineyards and
the shipping lanes or you know, all the interest, but

(01:12:30):
can you kind of talk about how they circumvent these
sanctions and why they continue gaining more and more wealth.

Speaker 3 (01:12:38):
There's a couple of different ways. One of the most
tried and true methods is something called the huala, which
is an unofficial mechanism for moving money that doesn't actually
physically move. So basically, I have a ledger and you
have a ledger, and on my ledger I say minus
one hundred dollars, and I sent a note to you
that says hey, on your ledger, right, plus one hundred dollars.
One hundred dollars never existed. This money is moving theoretically,

(01:13:01):
but this is a very common it's illegal system. It's
not illegal, it's legal in many countries in the world
because this is how they've traditionally used done bankings for
several thousand years. The regime relies quite a bit on jualas,
especially for some of the earlier steps in their money
movement process. So that because there's no trace from my
book to your book except from the person who said

(01:13:21):
that that money moved. So let's say I want to
move some money to Dubai, Well, I can do the
juala to Dubai. Then in Dubai there is money. Well,
there's a lot of banks in Dubai, and in fact,
something like a third of the Dubai permanent population are
actually Iranians. And that's because of the banking system in Dubai,
which is hugely designed to facilitate money movement, not just
for Iran but for many countries. That's one of the

(01:13:43):
things that Dubai kind of uses a selling point is
that hey, you can do banking here and we don't
care what you do. And a lot of the banking
is based out of those banks there's also a lot
of banks in Switzerland and banks in South America, and
in China. There's also a lot of goods for cash
or good for services activity where for example, if Iran

(01:14:03):
brings a cargo boat with millions of barrels of oil
on it, they can do a ship to ship transfer
to China, and China does something very similar to the
whola system where they give them goods in kind for
that oil, and there's a lot of other ways they
can do it too.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Yeah, it was, like I said, you go into great depth.
So let's talk about you know, and you mentioned Solomoni.
Let's talk about what Iran got up to after the
invasion of Iraq. You mentioned that there were thirty one
transactions between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight,

(01:14:42):
and those were large transactions for weapons systems or ied systems.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
You know, we saw the the EFPs out there that
were Iranian generated. Can you go into that a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
Yeah. So, the kind of the shocking part of that
is many of those actuators hearts were either made in
the United States or made in the United Kingdom. So
like the radios, the Harris radios made in the United Kingdom.
The actuators were made in the United States, those companies
had no clue that that's what was happening. But the
way that the regime does its movement of money and material,
you're not going to know that you're selling your actuators

(01:15:16):
to an Iranian agent, you know. And so what they
would do is they'd have a guy in the United
States that would purchase it as a legitimate company, usually
a cover organization commercial cover, shift that stuff to Dubai
or to another country. There's a couple of countries that
I've listed in there, like Malaysia as another example. Then
move it to another location in that same country, and
then mark the goods as something else, which is kind
of tried and true method to do it. Just slap

(01:15:37):
a new paper on there that says grain and then
ship it over to the Straits of Horror Moves or
to wherever you want to bring it, and then take
it out of the packages and start making IDs with it.
It sounds crazy and like super easy, but you have
to think about these shipping lanes we're talking about are
some of the busiest places on the planet, especially the
bab Al mundav Straight, the Persian Gulf, and if you

(01:15:58):
go further east in Indonesia the Straights at Malacca. Something
like sixty percent of the world's goods pass through the
Straits of Malacca on ships. So there's no way that
you could stop every ship and look in every cargo container,
especially if you're paying off people at the ports in
name your country in Singapore for example, to just not
even look at what the document says, like they're not
they don't know what's in the thing. They don't care

(01:16:18):
what's in the thing. It's kind of like you know
the New York Port Authority in the nineteen seventies, right,
like they don't care what's going over there. They they
just want the cargo to move and put the money
in their pocket. Right, It's business, and that's what was
happening where the regime was clandesseminly moving these Western produced
pieces of equipment over to the Middle East and then
killing our own soldiers with these US produced pieces of equipment.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's you know, I regards to what people's
political opinions about Solomony or the effectiveness of the strike,
I know a lot of veterans saw it as as
you know, come up and you know, so let's talk
a little bit about their unconventioned warfare capabilities. You have

(01:17:02):
the is it the sabourine, the patient ones.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
Yep, that's kind of the white soft unit. And then
there's the more black soft type units as well that
they have.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
And so what are some of the white soft and
then some of the BLACKSAFT up to these days or
you know, in the last say fifteen to twenty years.

Speaker 3 (01:17:21):
It's a really important distinction with Iran's military is that
they don't have one military they have two. They have
the Arteesh, which is the like our DoD. Then they
have the IRGC, which is a completely separate military organization,
which is larger than the ARTEESH. They're about similar in size,
but the IRGC is roughly larger. The IRGC's mission is
to protect the Ayatola and the regime around him. The

(01:17:44):
rteche mission is to protect the sovereignty of Iran like
any other army would be. And a lot of outsiders
don't understand that distinction. There's a lot of Arteesh people
that if there was a rebellion right now, they would
turn their weapons on the regime. They don't want to
be in this situation. They're just kind of regular people.
I largely see people are different, right, and that's a
huge distinction that needs to be made. The Sabaregn you

(01:18:05):
mentioned are on the Artes side, and there's a lot
of Artes whitesft that do the traditional like visit board
search and seizure of a vessel for example. They'll you know,
train foreign partners across a border another example. The biggest
deployment of the Artes though, was in the nineteen eighty
nineteen eighty eight Iran Iraq War. Since eighty eight, the
Artes never deployed more than a company size element outside

(01:18:28):
of Iraq, which is crazy because you think like those
units need real experience at least not just with the combat,
but with like perception staging armored movement integration, like moving
to another country physically. It takes a lot of practice
and training. They didn't have that from nineteen eighty eight
until twenty sixteen. The reason they got that in twenty
sixteen is because of ISIS in Syria. That was the
first time the regime deployed Artesh as a military force

(01:18:51):
outside of Iran since the Iran Iraq War, which is
kind of interesting because we had the whole conflict in Iraq.
The US did. There was many other conflicts between nineteen
eighty eight in twenty sixteen that could have invited the army.
They didn't send them, which is just to me, it's
kind of interesting, like why wouldn't you send your army
to go do something, but didn't until twenty sixteen, and
they actually had brigades, entire brigades deployed to Syria. Then

(01:19:13):
the iurgyc what they're up to. They focus a lot
on unconventional warfare. Are in the ring of countries around Iran.
But the way that they do unconventional warfare rit large.
They separate it by portfolio or file. So there's like
an Africa file, there's a South America file, there's a
Middle East file specifically focused on Afghanistan. There's another file
spoke specifically on Iraq. There's one for Turkey, there's one

(01:19:36):
for the Balkans. Like the Bosnia deployment I mentioned, it
is part of one element of the KODS force going there.
It's not the whole CUDS force going, it's a group
that specializes it, kind of like in the US we
have Fifth Group of Special Forces. They focus on the
Middle East. They're not deployed to South America, right, And
that's the IERGC and CUDS Force has a very similar
mindset and actually cost some solo Moni was the architect

(01:19:57):
of that because before he took over in the late nineties,
there was only one file and that was the Balkans
because that was their only deployment. But as the US
started moving and saber rattling about the Middle East and
then we invaded nine to eleven, happened like, hey, we
need to do something around this country and separate it
by task, organization of specialty. The Afghanistan guys, you guys
are only going to be Afghanistan. And actually smel Gani,

(01:20:20):
the current Coulds Force commander, was an Afghanistan file guy,
Like he only did Afghanistan his entire career, and then
when Solimani was killed, Ghani was elevated to that position.
So he's kind of an interesting example of that that
file mentality.

Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
Something that you mentioned in the book that did I
forgot to mention earlier. I didn't know that Iran almost
invaded Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 (01:20:48):
Yeah, forgotten moment of history. Yeah, yeah, that was actually
Masari Sharif. There were some Iranian diplomats there and a
journalist and then some other Iranians that weren't affiliated with
the government, and the Taliban killed them. And this was
a huge problem inside of Iran because they had just
come out of the Aaron Iraq War. They were bloodied
and beaten. Their only deployment overseas in the last decade

(01:21:09):
before this happened, which I think was ninety seven, was
to Bosnia. Like I mentioned, that was a very tiny thing.
They didn't want to be involved with anything outside of
the country at the time. They were licking their wounds
and trying to focus and clamp down the country and
just like get back to normal. And then this thing
happens with these diplomats in Masuri Sharif, and there's an
element of the IRGC that wants to invade Afghanistan. Immediately

(01:21:31):
they had a whole brigade ready to go and they
headed division also getting spun up. They went all the
way up to the border, and there's this National Security
Council like element in the Iranian government that includes Ayatola,
and they kind of were sitting around thinking like, well,
what happens if we do this, what's next? And the
reason they did not invade Afghanistan is interesting. It's because
Ahmed Shah Masud, who was part of the Northern Alliance

(01:21:53):
that we were allied with, would be in danger if
Iran invaded Afghanistan. Well why is that important? Well, because
Ron was also helping the Northern Alliance because inside the
Northern Alliance were a lot of Hazara Shia folks who
were threatened by Taliban and still are threatened by the
Taliban now, and Iran didn't want to damage that those
people that they saw as people they wanted to protect,

(01:22:15):
and that went into their calculus of why they didn't invade. Again,
another revisionist history question, like what would have happened if
they had invaded because this was again like nineteen ninety
seven ish, we hadn't bombed Camp Feruk yet, which was
the assamb Bin Laden, one of the training camps, Like
we hadn't done any of that stuff yet. How different
would things be if if they had invaded? Wow? What
a different world?

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
Yeah, Yeah, it's fascinating and it's interesting to you where
you know, you talked about the intelligence quartet, you know,
sharing intelligence with other countries about Daish, you know, isis
Daish and and I'm curious. You know, Isis was a

(01:22:55):
you know, they were the enemy of everybody, but the
teams still formed to fight them, you know, separate teams
still formed. Like this wasn't this global war on Isis.
You know, it was you know, individual efforts, I take it,
or not individual, but kind of group efforts. But we
didn't want to get too chumming with Iran or Russia

(01:23:16):
or anybody else. During the year.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
I'll tell you, we were actually doing a strike in
Iraq and we had the target was soaked for a
few hours. We had aircraft getting ready to go, like
we were going to blow this target up. And as
we're watching it through ISR this team that looks highly
trained and like clearly a special forces team, not our team.
And we have the test force, like we know who's here,

(01:23:38):
and we see this team coming up out in the
infrared and we're like, who is that? And we were
making calls, making calls, trying to figure this out. It
turns out it was the Germans. Because the Germans didn't
want to say they were deployed there and they didn't
want to be part of our coalition, and they were
doing a raid on a compound and didn't tell anyone,
or at least didn't tell us, and we were about
to blow that compound up like minutes, like as they

(01:23:59):
were going in there, we would have killed them. And
it was crazy to me, like how how even on
the western side we were not fully integrated like you
were saying like it was, it wasn't a coalition by
any means.

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Yeah, that's crazy. So, you know, there's so much to
the book, and I hope I haven't left out any
Have I left out anything major in our discussion?

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
I mean, there's so much stuff about the different countries
that the IRGC works in, but I don't want to
spoil it because it's that was one of my favorite
parts to research because it's so interesting to see, like
in Yemen for example, like how did they get to
where they are today? And do the who thies even
care about Iran which is a big question because I don't.
I would argue that they don't care as much as
we think they do. Yeah, same with Hesbola, which I

(01:24:43):
also go into a lot of detail about where Hasbola
came from and how it formed and Iran came in later.
It wasn't you know, like it's a very interesting kind
of thing that we just take for granted. And as
we talked about the beginning of the show, there's a
lot of these things that we just say, like, oh,
that's the way it is. We should ask is that
really how it is? Is that? How would have got
that way? Because if we're using the wrong information and
we're making decisions with the wrong information, we're gonna end

(01:25:05):
up with really bad results that keep ending with failures
over and over again because we keep using these biases
every time we try to make a decision.

Speaker 2 (01:25:13):
Yeah, no, it's it is. I don't want to say
it's a dense book because that, you know, makes it
sound dry. It's not dry. It's just packed with information.
I mean packed with information. And I said earlier about
a fifth of this book is references and sources. It
is exceptionally well I'll show I'll show everybody. So the

(01:25:38):
sources start here. If you guys can the sources, can
you guys see this all right? Start here?

Speaker 3 (01:25:45):
Like it's massive.

Speaker 2 (01:25:46):
It's uh. I was shocked by the amount of information
you had.

Speaker 4 (01:25:50):
In this book.

Speaker 3 (01:25:51):
I wanted to write it like an Intel report, where
if you want to get more info on that thing,
you can get it instead of like, well how did
he come to that conclusion? You know, which is on
Intel report. You don't do that, and Intel report reports
are facts, they're not opinions.

Speaker 2 (01:26:06):
Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Well if that's if that's it,
as long as we haven't left anything out DP.

Speaker 4 (01:26:13):
So when Israel hit Iran with the that wipe program
and Iran came across the NSA program that we had there,
I mean, what's it like when we find out that
a big important program that we have had there for
a long time gets exposed.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
I'll tell you what. The guys in the watch floor
were pissed. So this program is called Flame and it
was like a multi tool you could call it, where
it doesn't just do one thing. It's like a launch
pad two that's clandestimly there that you can put a
bunch of things inside of and then we'll do a
ton of different functions. Right, And these different functions can
do pretty much anything to a system. Offensively, defensively. They

(01:26:59):
can manipulate to make things look real that aren't real. Like,
it's incredible what I could do. If you're talking about
the bureaucrats, they cared about the dollars because the programs
like Flame are worth millions of dollars. Like I said,
they weren't developed by people in the Remote Operation Center,
which is where this came out of at NSA. These
were developed by civilian companies that are hired for the
specific purpose, like I need you to make me this

(01:27:21):
thing that can do these things. And then you'll get
multiple companies that are like, oh, I can do that
and this other companies like I can do that too.
Here's better, but I'll charge you three million dollars for that,
you know, And this is how this game works, right, Well,
we just dumped a bunch of money in this program,
and this program is extremely expensive, and now it's gone.
And the problem is if you take Flame apart and

(01:27:42):
see how it's made, you can figure out how we
might access other things with similar analogous methods, which means
if we had other stuff like in Russia, for example,
or in China or North Korea, all those are done too.
So you're talking about like worldwide ramifications. And this was
because Israel went in there and wanted to delete data. Again,
this is this is the conflict between exploit versus neutralized.

(01:28:04):
When wanted to exploit. Israel wanted to neutralize, which they
frequently do. That's their frequent approach is to just destroy
the thing. How much more value can you get if
you exploit instead? I mean it's immeasurable.

Speaker 2 (01:28:18):
Yeah, And it's not as if, you know, the different signals,
intelligence apparati apparatus are checking in with each other to say, hey,
we're getting ready to attack these guys. You got anything
hanging out there that you don't want exposed?

Speaker 3 (01:28:36):
Yeah, And actually with stucks net, it's unique because there
were five different countries involved with stucks net that were
coordinating with each other about it, and they weren't the
five BY partners, you know, it was it was the
US was the five I partner in that partnership. And
it was kind of like an interesting collection of people
working together on this singular purpose, which was timed to
happen right before the twenty fifteen nuclear agreement, so that way,

(01:28:59):
if the nuclear agreement didn't work out, we had this
covert operation that would destroy the nuclear program anyway. But
it was discovered right Typically it doesn't happen like that,
typic were the other countries, so it was Denmark, Netherlands, Israel,
United States and Germany, which is interesting because the US
and Germany were two of the countries that were part

(01:29:20):
of the original P five countries that were negotiating with
Israel on Earth with Iran on the twenty fifteen JCPOA, and.

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
Germany has a history of helping Iran at times, training
them in you know, in different things.

Speaker 3 (01:29:35):
Yeah, in the early nineties too. Yeah. Actually, all the
the things that were destroyed, the parts of the centrifuges
that were exploited by stuck Stent were Semens produced components.
And how did we know how those Semens components work. Well,
they're made in Germany, and the German government was able
to obtain access to all that material, you know. But

(01:29:57):
in the nineties they were training them on regular espionage,
like human espionage, teach them how to use cameras, take
clandestine photography, do surroualitsy detection routes. Russia was also training
them too, but Germany actually gifted them a bunch of
computers and cameras to do espionage and with the knowledge.
And it's interesting because France also with Germany in this
time period the early nineties, they knew that Iran was

(01:30:18):
going to use this stuff to assassinate Iranians in Europe, right,
Like Bond Station was being used as a platform for
assassinations and Paris Station was being used for the same thing.
But the agreement was as long as you don't kill Frenchmen,
as long as you don't kill Germans, you can use
those locations to do that stuff. And here's some cameras
and computers to help you do it.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
Wow, Wow, Jesus, it's crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:30:43):
And again that's all in the intel reports, that's not
in the media. So like that goes to the sourcing
of like this is stuff people have never seen or
heard of before probably or like that's not possible. They're
not friends. Well guess what in the intelligence community, there's
no friends. There's only interests, right right, Well, Jonathan, is
a great book.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
We really appreciate you. Thanks for coming back.

Speaker 4 (01:31:04):
Got to questions actually on questions, Yeah from JJ Can
mister Hackett share anything about the US funneling arms through
the Iranians during the Civil war in Bosnia?

Speaker 3 (01:31:15):
That's super interesting. Actually, there's a whole section in the
book about that, and some of it is public and
some of it I have in there from intelligence reports
and what the Iranians were doing. They were supporting the Bosniacs,
which Bosniact with a K is the Muslim group that
was being targeted by still bit On Melosovich and other
genocidal leaders there and the regime at the time. Remember

(01:31:38):
this was like late eighties, early nineties, when the regime
was trying to help Muslims worldwide, like that was kind
of their banner, like, let's help these oppressed, that was
what they were doing. And they saw the Bosniacs as
oppressed because they were They're being massacred, I mean like it.
It was horrific, and so the regime went there and
brought weapons there, trained them. They also taught the intelligence
service of the Bosniaks how to do intelligence collection. And

(01:32:00):
this is where the clash came between US helping Bosnias
and Iran helping Bosniaks, because there was a group of
them that we both were helping, and there was a
group of them that Iran was helping that was harming us.
And there was actually an ID factory that was discovered
later on in the war that IF discovered, which is
the international force there that was IDs to attack IF.

(01:32:22):
Which is interesting because at the exact same time we
were allowing the regime to provide weapons to people in
Bosnia that were fighting against the Serbs. So there was
this like overlaying of friend and enemy in the same space.
Because similar to Isis, where everybody was against the serves
what they were doing at the time, and some of
them were against them in different ways, some of those

(01:32:43):
ways overlapped. It wasn't clear cut like oh that's my enemy,
that's my friend. Sometimes it doesn't work like that. Even
in Iraq, Like again back when I was talking about ISIS.
When I was there, we actually were careful not to
strike targets where we knew IRGC people were meeting in
Iraq because we knew that the sources they were working
with were fighting against ISIS. So those are kind of

(01:33:04):
like off limits places. We never sent them letters or
anything and told them like, hey, guys, we're not going
to touch you, but it was like an understood thing,
like we're going to leave these people alone over here,
because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and
we care more about ISIS right now than we do
about killing a couple of RGC guys that who knows
what they're doing.

Speaker 4 (01:33:19):
We got a couple more from Dunk and Idaho. As
far as I know, there have been ops on US
soil sponsored directly by Iran, and there have been proxy
group ops in a few other Western countries, but there
haven't been proxy group ops on US soil. Is that correct?
If so?

Speaker 3 (01:33:37):
Why so? This is an intelligence thing where we don't
know the answer completely. And actually the FBI has come
out with competing reports from their own organization at some
times saying there's like two thousand Hesibla fighters in America
ready to go at any time. Other reports coming out
and saying no, the greatest threat in the United States
is you know, other groups. I won't get into that.

(01:33:58):
But then they say, but the hesible threats not that big,
or they'll say, well, the connections here are tenuous. They're
actually like relatives of hesbal of people that Hesbola could
push a button to, like push on them emotionally and
force them to do something. There's not a lot of
consensus about exactly what is going on here. And actually
I was reading a report recently about in the United
States Iran and Hesbela, how many of them actually came

(01:34:20):
across the border during the Biden administration, which is an
interesting question. I saw one report that said it was like,
I don't know, six hundred guys or something. That's a tiny,
tiny percentage of the total people that came across. How
do we even know it was six hundred? What were
they doing? Are they doing money laundering? Are they doing
drug stuff? Are they actually doing plots? Because a lot
of times when you look at pre attack planning, it

(01:34:41):
looks a lot like other types of attack or other
types of planning. Surveillance, for example, if you don't know
why they're doing the surveillance, it could look like pre
attack surveillance. It could also look like surveillance, so you
could go do an intelligence activity like a source meeting.
It could also look like a drug deal, like surveillance
for to find a location that's good for a drug deal.
You don't really know until the thing actually happens, unless

(01:35:02):
you've got recruitment of someone involved in that network, or
you've got sigan or something else like that. So that's
kind of a challenge where like with the FBI, for example,
how are they without doing source operations or having it's
very tough to know exactly what is the threat. Like
we might be able to say, like hey, that guy
I know he is a member of HESBLA. Okay, what

(01:35:23):
else do you know? Well, it's hard to know, you know,
So it's kind of an ambiguous answer to that. But
it's important to kind of take it with a measured
approach of like what exactly is this guy doing? That
way you can ask the right questions and do the
right intelligence collection to actually figure it out instead of
just assuming like, oh, he's a drug dealer. Well, if
we make the assumption that he's a drug dealer but
he's actually a bad guy terrorist, we've made a bad assumption.

(01:35:44):
Same vice versa. If we say like, oh, he's here
to do terror attacks and we're ignoring all the drug
dealing he's doing, that's another problem. Right, So we need
to come at this question objectively, which I trust that
counter intelligence FBI kind of intelligence is probably doing it
really well. It has been doing it really well. But
it's tough. It's really tough, not just in the United
States but any country. Even when you have a lot
more ability to do stuff, it's really hard to figure

(01:36:04):
out what is that guy doing because you can't see
inside their brain.

Speaker 4 (01:36:07):
One more from v how much or any of the
operations that they have overseas have been self funded, and
he wrote IRGC sexy car Watch fundraiser.

Speaker 3 (01:36:19):
Well, the thing is they have a lot of money.
They can put a lot of money at it. But
what they typically do to fund the overseas stuff is
use money that's not from Iran, so that means drug money,
black market stuff, other criminal activity financing that generates income
from those activities. Especially in Europe for example, a lot
of illegal immigration fund things that they'll help do human

(01:36:42):
trafficking and move people and get money from that, or
they'll move drugs like Captagon out of Syria into the
Gulf Arab countries and make a ton of money off that.
A lot of that money is used to finance these
activities because again it's really tough to move the money
out of Iran physically, like take dollars out of Iran
and bring them outside the country. You can do it,
but you want to do it for what matters, And
if an attack has a risk of being discovered, you

(01:37:04):
don't want to use your dollars for that. You want
to use your drug money for that, because that's something
that you can stand to lose. You know.

Speaker 4 (01:37:12):
I have one more question about something you mentioned before,
about your career specifically, when you mentioned you were in
damn neck training, most people think of damn Neck as
like we're sealed Team six is. Want to just clarify
a little bit of what that, you know, I don't
want people to be as so as your shield Team
six in the comments and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:37:30):
It's funny because people are upset that that you're calling
me an operator the other day, even though that's the
of my job. But yeah, it was. It was the
counter intelligence human intelligence course, which is the Marine Corps
Intelligence Plandestine Intelligence Activity Training pipeline. So we are a
validated CIA training organization that CIA comes down there every

(01:37:51):
six months to valuate our training, and we also issue
a counter intelligence credential. So it's the only the Marine
Corps is the only one that does this. The other
DTY branches do not combine intelligence human intelligence, and they
also don't train up to Category one intelligence collection, which
is the highest level of intelligence collection that clandestine intelligence
collection that exists. So it's kind of we chose that

(01:38:11):
place because it's a good place to do it, obviously
because the base has a lot of you know, got
a good fence, and we also transform the area around it.
The Damn Neck area, the Norfolk and Virginia Beach area
into a training zone where it's it's a foreign country essentially,
very similar to how the farm does it, and the
guys have to go out there and operate as if
they're in a foreign country and do other ops out

(01:38:32):
in downtown Norfolk, you know, in the middle of the night,
which is sometimes more dangerous than doing it in a
foreign country.

Speaker 4 (01:38:41):
No more questions from Patreon, All set, All.

Speaker 2 (01:38:45):
Right, Hey Jonathan, thank you once again. Thanks for you know,
thanks for the book, thanks for you know, taking the
time to write that, and thanks for joining us tonight.

Speaker 3 (01:38:55):
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to talk about it.
I think it's super important.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
Topic and ever thank you for joining us and we
will see you soon.

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

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Inside Iran's Covert Operations | Jon Hackett | Ep. 368