Why This Iranian-American Supports Trump's War

0:00One hundred years ago, my grandfather started our family law firm. I remember him saying, if we're gonna get full justice for our clients, we have got to go to trial. Ninety-five percent of the other law firms will not go to trial. For a hundred years we've been taking cases to trial and winning record verdicts. I'm Cliff Horowitz, a third-generation trial lawyer. Let me do for you what our family has been doing for one hundred years, getting you the full justice you deserve. Hello again, everybody from Newsweek headquarters here at the top of the World Trade Center in beautiful spring like New York City.

0:35I'm Carlo Versano. And this, of course, is the 1600. This country was stone cold dead. So we're coming on the air today. This is Monday afternoon. We're back on the war beat here where the U.S. and Iran have entered, I guess you could say, a new phase of economic warfare now. President Trump this week instituting a naval blockade of the Strait of Ormuz, which was, if we're keeping track here, already blockaded by Iran. So we're essentially blockading the blockade. This, of course, coming on the heels of the collapse over the weekend of negotiations between Vice President J.D. Vance and an Iranian delegation they were meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan.

1:12Those talks lasted about 21 hours. They did not result in any sort of deal or at least any sort of assumption of a deal. They fell apart, at least according to J.D. Vance, over Iran's insistence on keeping its nuclear program going. So my guest today to talk about all of this is Iranian-American author. He is a former U.S. Special Operations soldier, Nick Berg. Nick was born in Tehran to an Iranian mother and an American father. He fled the country at the age of 19. So he's got a very unique viewpoint, one that we haven't heard a lot from in this war, not just one of these sort of talking head military analysts that you see on TV.

1:48Nick knows this country like the back of his hand. So that's what we want to talk about with him today. So, Nick, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Carlo. Glad to be here. I'm glad to have you. So your book, by the way, we should mention his book. It's called Shadows of Tehran. It's a memoir. Well, it's not really a memoir. It's fiction. It's an auto fiction. It's auto fiction. Okay. So we're going to talk about the book. But before we get to the book, talk to me a little bit about just your life growing up in Iran, both before the 79 revolution and after? So before the 79 revolution, Iran was a beautiful country.

2:22I mean, it was - Under the Shah. Under the Shah, yeah. I wouldn't call it a democratic country by any stretch of imagination, but it was a beautiful country. There was a lot of freedom, social freedoms for people. And it was a country that was moving forward pretty rapidly during that time. And it became a really nice, The problem that happened in Iran, it was the middle class was just starting to become a middle class. But there was still a rich factor and a very poor factor, especially in rural cities and rural areas, the farmers and all of that stuff. It was a big difference between the income and the lifestyle of the people.

3:07And then there's a religious factor and that was kind of like underneath all of this that are deeply Shiite Islamic religious factor. But just to understand, Iran was never an Islamic country. Islam was forced on them during the Arab invasion and the Islamic invasion that took over most of the Middle East and all the way to North Africa, all the way to Spain. But Islam was forced on them, and it kind of got embedded into that culture. But Iran is the only country that kept its own language that didn't convert to Arabic. If you look at Egypt, Jordan, all of these guys are speaking Arabic. But Iran keeps it in the room.

3:48It's Farsi, yeah. And the only reason it's called Farsi is because in Arabic language, there's no P. So it was usually called Parsi. But because in Arabic language, there's no letter P, they translate it into Farsi. So if you go to Saudi Arabia, they call Pepsi Bipsy because they don't have the letter P. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, tell me, I want to hear like what do you remember? So how old were you in 79? I was probably eight, nine years old. Do you have any recollections of the revolution? Oh, yeah. I remember all of the gunfire outside of our door all night. There was martial law. There were people in the streets screaming.

4:27And the people of Iran wanted really a democratic country. And Carter was the U.S. president at that time. And he was trying to turn Iran into more of a democratic country in the Middle East. We were a big ally of the U.S. at the time. But I think what the Shah was trying to do was too soon and too fast of the changes that he was trying to make. So the book, as we said, is called Shadow of Tehran. Again, not really a memoir, but a novel centered around a protagonist named Ricardo. Right. More or less you. Yes. Do you know anything we can say? Yeah, more or less. So his father was a CIA operative who sort of used the family as cover.

5:10Can you talk a little bit about your parents and your dad in particular? Yeah, so my mom was Iranian, as we mentioned. My dad was a naval intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy. And his ship docked from, and he was coming back from Vietnam, and his ship docked in Iran. And he met my mom and they got married, which was a really big thing back then because my mom was kind of a rebel in the family. She must have been married in America. Yeah, she married American. She was the first woman that started smoking in the family. She was the first woman that had a driver's license and driving in the street.

5:44So bought her own car and all of that. So it was a she was a bit of a rebel. But eventually they got married, and my dad worked with the Iranian Air Force at the time teaching English. So that's so what we thought. That was his job. That was the front. That was the front, right. He was doing that. So in 1975, he left Iran, and he said, I'm going to come back and get you guys, and we're going to move to America and all of that stuff. And then he disappeared at that point. What year was that? 1975. Okay. Yeah, before the revolution. Yeah. Do you have any, what happened to him? So I met him 35 years later in Las Vegas.

6:28He was living in Las Vegas, and he kind of told me that whole story that he worked for the CIA. He passed away about three years ago, so I can talk a lot more about him. Yeah, so he lived in Las Vegas, and I met him, and I asked him. Did you reach that, did you go looking for him? I looked for him a number of times. My mom actually looked for him. And we came to the United States in 76 looking for him. And we hired a private investigator. And the private investigator, after about six months, came back to us and said, you guys shouldn't look for this. I got approached by the State Department to stop looking for this guy.

7:04And you guys should go back to Iran and never look for this guy again. That would make me want to find him even more, right? Yeah, think about it. Yeah, that's true. So we went back to Iran. And we lived there. And so when I met my dad in Vegas 35 years ago, this is in 2009, 2010 timeframe, I asked him, I said, so why did you get married and have kids and all of this? He said, well, having a family was the best cover. Wow. Do you have brothers and sisters? I have a sister that lives in Copenhagen in Denmark. And that was his dad. My sister is really mad at him. I mean, she. How could you not? She's really mad.

7:49But, you know, being in special operations, I kind of get him in certain ways. And my sister's mad at me for that. But I kind of get him because he's a patriot. He was a true patriot, really wanted the best for this country, for America. And that's what he did. That's what he spent his whole life doing. So before he passed away, I recorded all of his story for about six weeks. I spent with him. We recorded his story. So that's going to be a prequel to these books. I was going to say, that's got a book written all over it. That's going to be another book all by itself. I'm just curious, Nick. I'm just fascinated by these sorts of family dynamic things.

8:31What did he say when you said, why did you leave your, why did you abandon your family, your children? He said it was required. It was part of his job as a spouse. He did part of his job as a spy, and he went to Egypt from Iran. Actually, we thought he came to America. He did and then went to Egypt. I have a half-Egyptian sister that I have never met. He told me about it. I have a half-brother that was born somewhere in Germany, and I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So he was—wow. Okay. No, it's just incredible. I can imagine what kind of emotions that must have been like when you caught up with him in Vegas.

9:12The interesting part out of all of that is when I found out that he actually knew about me leaving Iran and getting into the Army. And he directed a lot of the places that I was from behind the curtain. And I had no idea. So he was keeping tabs on you the whole time. He was keeping tabs. He was actually telling what mission should I go on and I shouldn't go on and where to go. But he never reached out. But he never reached out. Wow. Okay, well, I mean, it's a tough little turn there, but I want to ask you about the war as it stands now, just given your history. Given what you know about how the Iranian regime operates or what remains of the regime today, have you been surprised at how resilient it has been since this war began?

10:04Not at all. You saw this. I saw this coming because, see, the thing about it is American people and the West don't really understand Iran and its culture. They compare to Afghanistan, to Iraq. So Iraq, we took out Saddam Hussein and the whole thing just crumpled. Right. And Iran was very different. Iran saw that. But Iran, when the Shah was in power, after the Shah left the country, the whole regime crumbled underneath it because he was the one man directing it. Iranian government, the Islamic government, when they put that government in place, they did a really good job of democratizing power across different areas.

10:49Diffusing it. Diffusing it so that it's not dependent on one or two people that you take those out and the system falls. Right. And the IRGC is actually the one in power. It's the Revolutionary Guard. It's essentially the paramilitary. Well, I guess, is it a paramilitary unit? Well, there's two different groups. There's the IRGC and then there's kind of like a section of it called the Basij. Yeah, and the Basij is kind of like the paramilitary part of it. It's mostly younger people. And usually the people that go into the Basij, they go into IRGC once they get older. So there's kids as young as 10, 11, 12 years old that are part of the Basij.

11:30I used to call them like the Hitler Youth process. That's how it was modeled, actually, after that process. The IRGC was created after the revolution as the guardians. Literally, their name means the guardians of the revolution. And their job is to keep the government standing. And they're not just a military organization. their economic power in Iran. Political organizations. After the revolution, a lot of the industry that was in Iran, they got taken by the government because all of the people that owned the private industries, they all left Iran and they had money, they left Iran. Most of them live in Los Angeles now.

12:12And so all of that industry was taken over by the government and then they democratized it across IRGCs, different groups and different power sources. So IRGC is not one person. It's a number of people that kind of run the country. The best way I can describe it is like Al-Qaeda taking over a country and running the country. That's the best way to describe it. I think it's useful for Americans. I mean, look, speaking as one of many ignorant Americans, like we just, first of all, we have historical amnesia if we don't have historical ignorance. We just don't think in these sorts of nuanced terms about some of these countries.

12:52that we often invade. And I think a lot of people, a lot of Americans thought, look, Iran is going to be like, to your point, it's going to be like Iraq or it's going to be like Afghanistan, not understanding that this is a culture and an empire and a civilization that's been around way longer than we have. Right? And they, so can you just speak a little bit to that if you could? Sure. Yeah. So the Persian Empire, Persia is, used to be, Iran used to be called Persia until 1948, 47, 48, when Shah's father changed the name to Iran. The Persian Empire goes way back 2 ,500 years from when Cyrus the Great started the empire and all of that.

13:36The culture is very different than the rest of the Middle East. Iran is the only non-Arab country in the Middle East when you look at it unless you count Afghanistan as Middle East but we don't count that really as part of the Middle East but Iran, other than Israel is the only non-Arab country the culture is very different it's kind of a contradictory to Islam actually because it's a paternal culture Cyrus the Great, some of his the commander of his navy was a woman. There was a, women have a big place in Iranian culture. Right. I mean, I remember, I've seen the photos from before the revolution of, you know, honestly, it looks like it could be a college campus in America.

14:22Right. Women wearing miniskirts and reading books. Right. Exactly. And women, just culturally in the house, when you go to people's houses and stuff, Women have a very high regard. Women are—it's completely the opposite of the cultures that you see. It's maternal versus paternal. Right. Exactly, exactly. It's very different. That's one thing that's very different. The other thing is they're very proud people. Yeah. They're very proud of their culture. They're very proud of their—and Shaw was trying to play that in 1974, 75, when he had the White Revolution. and had the 2 ,500 years of kingdom by the Cyrus's tomb in Persepolis and all of that stuff, he was trying to play on that.

15:14And people were buying it, but it was a little too fast. Changes were a little too fast in that process. Atlanta, imagine trading traffic for turquoise waters and turning your next long weekend into an unforgettable adventure. In Belize, you can soar through lush rainforests, explore ancient Maya temples or just unwind on a Caribbean beach that feels like your own secret escape. And getting there is easier than ever. Delta offers nonstop flights from Atlanta straight to Belize City with a quick journey of just about three hours. Start planning your getaway now at travelbelize.org. That's travelbelize.org, your closest faraway paradise.

15:51I just said in the intro, right, that we're in the middle of a ceasefire, in theory at least. We're doing this blockade and the straight now. What do you suspect is happening behind the scenes with the negotiations? Because so Vance comes out, he says, you know, there's no deal over the weekend, which I think pretty much everybody knew. I mean, the Obama deal, regardless of what you think about it, like that took years to negotiate. It's not like you can just walk in there and be like, okay, especially because we didn't beat them in any sense of the war. The war itself is, I would argue, in some sort of stalemate.

16:22It is. At the moment, right? You would agree. So all that said, what do you suspect is happening behind the scenes in these negotiations? Because you can't trust Trump. You can't trust the Iranians necessarily. Everything is sort of being, you know, there's some element of kayfabe to all of this, right? Which is always going to be the case in high stakes negotiations. What do you think is actually happening behind the scenes? I think behind the scenes, the Iranians, so the Islamic government, their sole purpose is survival right now. More than anything. Yeah. And before the war started, The Iranian government was very weak because of what happened in January, the uprisings.

17:02They killed 40 ,000 people. Some people say it's more than that in two days. Do you believe it's that high, 40 ,000? Oh, yeah. I believe it's that. I believe it's higher than that, actually, because I saw a lot of the things that friends of mine from Iran that were able to get through and send in to me, bodies laying out everywhere in body bags in and people had to go and look for their loved ones and and all of that and the IRGC were actually standing at the door if you wanted to take the body you had to pay for the bullets that killed them before yeah you can take them um one of my cousins died in that I'm so sorry in that process and uh it's a distant cousin that that died in that process.

17:45And when we went, when they went to get her body, the mother that went to get her son's body, her son's body, uh, talk, said, can I go and look for my son? And the IRGC guard started laughing. He said, you need to go get us some sweets first and bring us sweets before we can let you in. And it's just really, really brutal, uh, environment. So after that, the government is the economics over there is 47 % inflation right now. The money is worth nothing pretty much around the world. And they have very limited options. Well, they're sanctioned basically everywhere. Everywhere, right. Except for Russia and China.

18:26Exactly, exactly. So the government was really, really weak until this war started. Which is, again, let me just stop you there because I think the thought from Trump at least was it was so weak, we were going to be able to just sort of push it over the edge. Push it over the edge. Sort of like what we did as well. Take out the head of the snake and the rest of the body dies, which of course is not what happens. But it doesn't work that way in Iran because they don't understand the structure of how Iran works. And so people are now scared. They're truly scared. And they're hoping that the government would change.

19:01They wanted the war, actually. They wanted some of the elements of the RGC dead and taken out. They saw it as a revenge to what happened in January more than anything else. But what is going to drive this, actually, I think the blockade is a smart thing, if you ask me. I want to hear about that. Yeah, because I think what the blockade is doing is, yes, it's a blockade against the blockade. But the blockade that the Iranians had was for all of the ships that don't belong to them. Right. And Iran has been selling oil to China and to a couple other countries, even with the sanctions and all of that.

19:40So they were letting their own ships through, but they weren't letting everybody else through. So this blockade is actually - We're saying if you're not letting anyone else's ships through, you're not coming through. You're not coming either. Right. Exactly. So what this blockade is doing is stopping Iranians from selling the oil, which is going to hurt their economy even more. That's the play, I guess, right? That's the play. vice that we're trying to turn on them. Trying to turn on them, right. And what's going to happen is that we took out a lot of their military, a lot of their heads, but there is still more people in power that are trying to brutally run that country the way they did.

20:16What this economic blockade is going to do, it's going to cut off them paying the foot soldiers. Right. What is going to it's going to it's going to cause a lot of disruptions in their economic system and their black market economic system that they have built. Right. Since the sanctions and all of this come in place. So the hope is right now is that if we keep that up for a while, it's going to help topple the government because people are going to start turning over, turning on the government. Because if you don't have food to eat, you're going to turn some way. You're going to have to do something.

20:53Right. Where does China fit into this? Because the first thing that I thought when I heard that we were going to do this was just, well, what happens if there's some sort – I mean, are we essentially in a proxy war with China at this point? Because they're going to want that oil, right? Right. And so what happens if they try and go get it? I think the Chinese are too smart for that. They are. They are. I don't think they want an open naval conflict with the United States right now. No. But it's a little bit scary. Like, where do the Chinese sort of fit into all of this? So Chinese have been getting a lot of the Iranian oil really cheap, really, really cheap because nobody else was going to buy it and they were the only ones buying it.

21:28But at the same time, I think China won a piece out of because of this war. And that's because of the AI pact that Trump made when he made his trip last year to the Middle East. Two trillion dollars of investment from all the Persian Gulf nations and all of that in AI. And they start building data centers over there and all of that stuff. And AI needs a lot of energy. AI needs a lot of energy. So that's why they were building it there. But with all these attacks of Iran on the Gulf states, now they're rethinking that AI packs that they made and how all of this is going to work. And so China is trying to win the AI war right now.

22:13And so they're using this as kind of a, hey, you guys are not going to have the investment. Let us start building. So China has been diversifying its energy for a long time to more green energy. solar, wind, coal, a lot of, that's why the EV, they're pushing their EV markets so high so they can reduce their oil consumption. And it's not because they care about the world, it's because they don't want to buy oil. And if they have other alternatives to use, it would be much better. Something that we apparently don't, which is that the less they can be involved in the Middle East, the better for them, I think.

22:52Right, exactly. And the key part was, is that China really doesn't want to get involved in this process is because when Khamenei, when we first killed Khamenei, the condolences that were sent from China was from a low-level diplomat. It wasn't from the president or it wasn't from Xi Jinping or anybody at that rank level. Which does everything. Right. That tells you a lot that this is... Right. They weren't exactly mourning his death. His death. Right. Exactly. Yeah. But the Chinese must have seen this coming in terms of uranium's not folding immediately to us, right? Right, right. Okay, so what is the state of the resistance today, such that it exists, from what you can tell?

23:35I mean, I know you told me your mother's still there. God bless her. What did you say, 85 years old? 85 years old, yes. How's she doing? She's doing okay. She's doing okay, yeah. So from what you can hear from inside the country, is the resistance such that it exists, are they waiting for something? Are they just scared at this point? Is there a place for them to, you know, a moment in which this popular uprising that Trump has sort of promised or at least hoped for could come? It seems like it's dead right now, but you're saying maybe it isn't. It isn't. It's still underground right now. And the biggest problem that the resistance is not just picking up is because of leadership.

24:13Right. The resistance doesn't really have a solid leadership. Now, there's Reza Pahlavi, the Shah's son. He lives in Maryland. He lives in Maryland. Right, exactly. Can you really run a resistance movement from thousands of miles away? You really can't. And the thing is, he has a lot of backing. And if you ask me personally, I would love to see him come back and lead the democratic movement that he's talking about because he really doesn't want the throne again. He doesn't really want a monarchy. He wants to be the leader and let the Iranian people decide what the next government is going to look like in that process.

24:50Do you think there's any chance of that happening? Slim. Yeah. There's a slim chance of that happening, but there's still a chance that way. And so until somebody within the power structure of the resistance comes up and become the soul. So 79 revolution, Khomeini was that one person, even though that he was in Iraq and then he went to Paris and then back into Iran. He was that one unifying figure. Right now, we don't really have that. Even though that the people of Iran during the January protests will keep calling the crown princess name and all of that. I think they're looking for more from him.

25:31And if he can't step up a lot more than what he has so far, that's going to make a difference. You have to assume that right now Mossad and CIA are in Iran trying to find that person. Absolutely. Yeah. The United States, as well as our allies, particularly Britain, we have a long history of sort of meddling in Iranian domestic affairs, I think you could say, including, you know, like you said, the Shah was not a democratic leader. We propped him up. But we also have a long history of just sort of throwing Iranian dissidents and resistance fighters under the bus. Do you why would it be any different this time?

26:06Do you think that the Americans could come to the rescue here? I don't think Iranians are looking for a rescue. What Iranians are looking is support. Yeah. And that support could be in weapons. It could be in. So most people that I spoke with before, they keep saying, well, if we give the resistant weapons and things, it's going to become another Syria. Right. And but Syria, again, it's not Iran. Right. Very different. And a lot of analysts that I've been reading about talking about, oh, it's going to become a sectarian war between the Kurds. the Persians, the Lors, the Uzharis, because Iran is a multi-ethnic country.