How Iran Shapes Global Politics : Behind the enemy lines with Ken Timmerman

29:11Why is it that Donald Trump has basically taken the Democrat base and brought it into the Republican Party? It's because the Democrat Party is run by coastal elites who basically want to get rid of the United States Constitution. They don't want you to keep and bear arms. They don't want you to have free speech. They want to be able to control your free speech through these government-slash-university organizations that monitor, quote-unquote, disinformation. This is the end of the U.S. Constitution. this party and those leaders have become united with Iranian leaders in wishing to destroy America as we know it.

29:49So they want to get rid of the America that we have known traditionally for 250 some years. And the Iranian leaders would like to get rid of America as well. That's not a very nice thing to say. It's not a very palatable thing to say, but it's the only explanation I can come up with. They are united on the goal of destroying that America that we have revered for generations and generations. And they now detest and despise. And they say so openly. But like, okay, let's say you hated America, but then you found yourself as president of the United States of America. And like, I would just think rationally, like regardless of party, I would think rationally, look, just like in the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed and there was this massive what's called peace dividend, like the economy boom for the next decade.

30:42And if Iran was removed as a problem in the Middle East, I think we would see that peace dividend times 10 because this is really the hottest spot in the world for a potential World War III. It's just chaos over there, but only because of Iran. and wouldn't you want to do that for like and it would be great for your presidency oh i took down iran or i i there was there really was liberation in iran the people are in charge now and and we have trade and we have peace and and the economy is booming politically wouldn't you want to do that you'd think so uh but let's look at what actually happened barack obama 2009 takes office and what is the first thing he does.

31:28He gives a speech in Cairo University in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, where he essentially ignites the Arab Spring against pro-American leaders at that time in Egypt, Mubarak. And he had the Muslim Brotherhood, who were outlawed in Egypt, sitting behind him at Cairo University, and he did not invite Mubarak, the president of the country, to his speech. Why would he do something like that? Well, because he wanted to remake America's alliances around the world. He wanted to fundamentally transform the United States. That's what he said during his campaign. And that's what he aspired to, I believe, during his eight years as a president.

32:13And so what happens next now? We've done all this appeasement with Iran. We've returned money to them. We've not really allowed Israel to, you know, Israel could probably take Iran down in one day for all we know. They have the equipment, they have the missiles, they have the reach. I mean, they're already taking out the Houthis, which are even further away from them than Iran. And we've kind of held Israel on a leash. You know, even with the, you know, despite October 7th, you know, we've tried desperately to hold Israel back. and I'm not saying anything about Gaza. This has been going on for decades where we know that every city in Israel gets bombed and the U.S.

33:03tells Israel, look, just bear with it. We're going to solve this diplomatically. How easy would it be for the U.S. to take care of Iran right now? I don't think it would be very easy at all. And by the way, we don't solve anything diplomatically with Israel. One of the stories in the Iran house is of the 2006 war. I was there as a war correspondent for Newsmax up on the front lines with Lebanon. And, you know, they called a ceasefire. And then the marching bands came out onto the field, just like at halftime at a football game. And the marching bands were UN officials and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

33:43And they all said, ceasefire, ceasefire, We have to continue this because it's just horrible. We can't have war. And so they stopped the fighting for a while. Hezbollah continued to rearm. And now, you know, at the start of this war last year, Hezbollah had 100 ,000, 150 ,000 missiles instead of three or 4 ,000, which they had shot off in 2006. So, you know, Israel has to win the war. They actually have to win the war and to destroy the threat. Look at what happened in 1945 when the Allies destroyed Nazi Germany. We destroyed Nazism for generations, if not forever. We destroyed it for generations.

34:27The German people, just as the Japanese later on, understood that there was no future for them in opposing the United States. The Israelis have to make the Palestinians understand there's no future for them, thinking that they can oppose Israel and wipe Israel off the map, because that's what it's all about. The Palestinians still, and you can see this in opinion polls, you can see this in the way that Hamas has behaved, and even the way that the Palestinian authorities behave, they want to wipe Israel off the map. When those protesters say, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, that's exactly what they're saying.

35:06They're talking about genocide, and the Israelis have to beat that. And just to underline that just a little bit, and this is where I do get a little bit angry at people politically, like people just don't know basic facts. Arabs and Muslims are welcome in Israel. Arabs and Muslims are members of the Israeli parliament. About 20 % of Israel is Arab outside of Gaza and the West Bank, like in Israel itself is Muslim and Arab. Israel has no problems with the Arabs. It's just the people who constantly try to bomb them and kill them that Israel has problems with. Well, that's true. And you see that on the ground when you go there.

35:50I mean, I wrote about this quite a bit. I've written about this in both books, and the rest is history. And the new book, The Iran House. The Iran House has several chapters where I go to Gaza, and I talk to Muslim clerics, senior Muslim clerics. And at one point, I actually meet, I didn't realize it, but a future suicide bomber. And the ideology, the mindset of these people is just unbelievable. There's no way they're going to live with their Jewish neighbors. Are you kidding? They just want to kill them. They just want to kill them. And Israel cannot live side by side with a state whose sole goal, whose sole motive for existence is to wipe out the Jews.

36:35We wouldn't do that. And so, okay, so in terms of dealing with Iran, what, okay, we have a new president coming into power. I mean, he was an old president and you worked with him, Donald Trump. What should the new president do to kind of, let's just say, I personally want this peace dividend. I want to make money these next four years. And I think this is the best way to do it, which sounds callous. Of course, I don't have a callous beginning to it. Like I really care about the situation. But let's just end all this BS now. How do we do it? Well, I think that's what Donald Trump is saying as well.

37:12He wants to end war in the Middle East. But you don't end war in the Middle East by papering it over. You end war with victory. So the Israelis have to be victorious in their war against Hamas and Hezbollah. And the people of Iran need to be victorious against this horrible, barbaric regime. I wrote a policy paper for the America First Policy Institute about the strategy that I think that we should take. And I call it maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for the Iranian people. So I think President Trump, when he comes back into office, is going to go immediately for the maximum pressure piece of this.

37:57because he was already doing it in his first term. You limit the oil resources, the oil revenues to the regime. By the time he left office the first time in January of 2021, they were only exporting in Iran 400 ,000 barrels a day. That was down from over two, two and a half million before. Today, because Biden has refused to enforce those sanctions on the books, the Iranians are back up to two and a half million barrels a day of exports, even though it's in violation of congressional sanctions, not just presidential executive orders, but congressional sanctions. So I think Trump - Okay, so, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but if Joe Biden was asked about this, let's assume he's being asked about this, what would he say?

38:45I don't have a clue what he would say. You know, he'd probably forget that he had done it, but his administration did not enforce the sanctions. Look, if you look at their first couple of days in office, every single executive order was to countermand whatever Trump did. If Trump went to the right, they went to the left. If Trump went to the left, they went to the right. If Trump went up, they went down. Whatever it was. If he said red, they said blue. And the first couple of days in office, whether it's the XL pipeline, whether it was offshore drilling, whether it was Anwar, whether it was sanctions on Iran, preventing Iranian oil exports, whether it was the Abraham Accords.

39:26They systematically went out to destroy everything that President Trump had achieved during his first four years. And I think it will now be easier for him to put those things back in place. But it's really a shame politically for us in the United States that an administration should think that way about its predecessor. Do you see any role the military plays in taking down Iran, or is it more just kind of economic sanctions and kind of cutting them off from the rest of the world that will do it? Well, it's primarily economic sanctions. It's also support for the pro-freedom movement inside Iran, which is civil society, right?

40:07How do you do that? Well, communications in particular. So you allow people when they're protesting and to be able to communicate with direct messages, direct messaging apps that cannot be intercepted by the regime. It's very, very important. Their activists tell us that all the time. That's one of the things that they want. The military plays an important role because you have to reestablish deterrence. I think that's what the Israelis have done over the past couple of months, these two strikes, airstrikes on Iran. You have to establish deterrence and make the Iranian regime understand that if they actually take military action against us, launching cruise missiles against shipping in the Red Sea, for example, or hitting our bases in Iraq or in Syria, we will make them pay a price for that.

40:54They have to pay a price for that. That's a kind of direct military deterrence. But the big piece of it, in my view, is not military at all. This is not Iraq 2003. This is something we've never seen before. This is actually empowering the Iranian people to do what they desperately are yearning to do. Accomplish their freedom, achieve their freedom from this regime. And, you know, they outnumber, obviously, the regime. But is it too difficult to take down a government that's armed to the hilt, that has money? You know, it seems like you can't really empower the people to have that much power. Well, I think you can.

41:36And we constantly mistake this. The Iranian regime has a monopoly of guns. Okay? So don't give guns to the pro-freedom people. They will be outgunned. It's a futile exercise. This is not a military exercise. This is nonviolent political warfare. And when you say nonviolent political warfare, most people emphasize the first two words, nonviolent. They forget that it's also warfare. And in warfare, you need generals, you need captains, you need colonels, you need privates, you need all kinds of people because it is war against the regime through nonviolent means. And that's something I think we can help them with quite a bit.

42:22And what are warfare tactics that one can use in this sense. Well, like I could, I think of when I think of nonviolent, I think of Gandhi, I think of MLK, but Gandhi, you know, there was a lot of cost to the Indians who were behind him. Like it was a hard 20 years of him doing that. Well, it's been a hard 40 years of the Iranian people waging civil unrest against this regime. It's been a very difficult, you know, there's been tens of thousands of political prisoners who've been murdered and they understand that. And that's why what they need, what the Iranian people need is a visible sign of support from the United States government and hopefully from other governments as well in the West, that they are not alone, that we hear them, that we are with them, and that we will support them.

43:05And we will, especially, this is what's critical, this is what has not been done before, we will delegitimize the regime. You know, today, if you're an Iranian political leader, you can travel anywhere you want in Europe. You can go to Russia, you can go to China, that's just fine, even though you maybe want it for war crimes or maybe on a terrorism list here in the United States. You can go anywhere else you want in the world. We have to delegitimize the regime and make it impossible for their leaders to travel, to be taken as leaders of a normal country. They should not be coming to the United Nations.

43:43They should not be coming to international forum. You bring up the United Nations, and I've actually heard you talk about this before how what part of our deal of hosting the un is to let all these you know evil leaders come into the u.s and have parties and then go back to their religious countries but uh why is the un hate israel so much and like never sanctions iran and and october 7th they never said anything you know like you know everybody even even college students deny that October 7th happened. And yet on October 8th, we all watched the YouTube videos of Palestinians driving around these women that they killed and raped.

44:23And we all saw them. And people going up to the women and the dead bodies and spitting on them. Like I saw the videos. They weren't fictional videos. They were proudly displaying these videos. That's right. That's right. Well, look, the United... But the UN does nothing. In fact, the UN helped them. It turns out the UN helped them. Right. And UNRWA, the UN agency that's supposed to help Palestinian refugees has been, in fact, a refuge for Palestinian terrorists. Hamas has built a number of their command and control facilities beneath Palestinian, excuse me, beneath UNRWA schools or headquarters in Gaza, and they have used the UNRWA schools to indoctrinate children.

45:08And that's perhaps really the saddest part of this whole story. When you think of what's really needed for peace between the Palestinians and Israel, you need two people who are ready for peace. And remember Golda Meir, who said, we will have peace when the Palestinians want, when the Palestinians love life more than they love death. and when they want life for their children instead of death for their children. Today, you have mothers who want to martyr their sons, their young sons. They want them to become martyrs, killing Jews. The real sad part of this is that you have to wait for that generation to die away.

45:57And that generation today is three years old, the ones being indoctrinated in the United Nations schools in Gaza and the West Bank.

46:21so what happens like what do you what do you predict will happen over the next few years you mean my crystal ball well yes look i think we we saw immediately after Trump's triumphant election, unequivocal election. By the way, I think it was so healthy for the United States that it was unequivocal on election night, that we did not have a long drawn out election as we did in 2020 with all of the questions that were raised and many of them that have not been resolved yet. But you saw immediately the day after on the stock market, the stock market roared up 3 % in one day. And it's still going up.

47:03And it's going up because people realize, lots of people realize, not just Trump supporters, lots of people realize that Trump is going to bring back an era of economic dominance of the United States, of fundamental fairness in the economy for the American people. He's going to stop the elite capture of our government and of our intelligence agencies. And basically, it's going to be, we're going to be, the country is going to be a nicer place to live over the next four years. Let me, let me ask you, like, I just, I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to just play the devil's advocate. Like I'm genuinely curious.

47:47Like, why did he do that in his first term, 2016, you know, 2017 to 2021? I mean, he tried to do it, I guess, a lot of these things. Well, gee, let me see. How many intelligence organizations are there in the United States, 16 or 17? Yeah. Every now and then there's a new one in there. Maybe it's 18 by now. But anyway, there used to be just 16 of them. All of them were dead set against Donald Trump and all of them worked to subvert him. First, we had the Russia hoax. Then we had the Ukraine hoax. and and i cannot my wife and i talk about this sometimes and and she says it's just astonishing that he could even stand up to all of the assaults on him as president the assaults on his family the assaults on his person on his integrity calling him a a stooge of putin how many how many politicians, American politicians, could have stood up to that and continued to govern.

48:49So it's remarkable that he got anything done at all, and yet he got a lot done up until COVID hit. You know, the First Step Act in the United States, just domestically, in allowing nonviolent criminals to be able to get out instead of serving horrible, long, lengthy sentences, the Abraham Accords overseas, the talks with North Korea, and he was ridiculed for that, the talks with Putin. Guess what? Putin did not invade Ukraine while Donald Trump was president. Putin did not seize Crimea when Donald Trump was president. That was in 2014 when Obama was president. So none of these bad things happened when Trump was president, but COVID hit, and COVID really taught us things that we will, I hope, never allow government to do to us ever again.

49:47Yeah, I mean, and this is also where I have to, you know, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. I always felt, and people who listen to my podcast remember, I was doing podcasts every day during the first part of COVID. I don't think the economy should have been locked down. I think that was a horrible mistake. Now we realize just in terms of the number of deaths, in terms of the economy, it seems pretty easy to say that the economy should not have been shut down, or at least the way it was. And he was the president then when it was shut down. Like he kind of let them, now I know it wasn't his idea, but he did let them do it.

50:25And the buck does stop there with the presidency. I think that's the big weak point of Donald Trump's presidency. And that's So one reason he started out when he started to campaign this season, he started out talking about his successes in COVID. And you'll notice he quickly dropped talking about them because I think he was getting pushback from a lot of people. His response to COVID was not a success. The vaccine, you know, developing the vaccine so quickly was not a success. Those things were mistaken. And he was profoundly misled by experts he was told he should believe in, like Anthony Fauci.

51:09Fauci is a serial liar, a serial fabricator, and somebody who has enabled the Chinese communist regime and their bioweapons programs with U .S. government dollars. Fauci should be in jail, in my opinion. and and but that's another subject you've written books about everything by the way so i encourage people to check out all your stuff but um did after you know after you were helped you just starting out in this this whole career in the middle east and you right away you're kept prisoner by terrorists you're tortured we forgot to talk about that uh did did you have ptsd like why'd you go right back to Israel and Palestine and the Middle East?

51:56Like, did you have PTSD? Did you say, you know what, maybe I'm going to be a birdwatcher and live in the woods for a while? Well, you know, it's, I guess it's the way I was brought up. When you, when we fall, we gets up and you go back to the place where bad things happened. And, uh, there's a, there's actually a very funny passage in my earlier book and the rest is history. Just one year after I'd been liberated, after I got out from being a hostage from the PLO in Beirut, I go to visit another Palestinian faction in the Bekaa Valley and spend a night with them on a farm not far from the Israeli border where they're telling me all their stories of how their valiant attacks on the Israeli military.

52:42And I'm sitting there scratching my head as we're getting ready to go to sleep. And I say, well, how different is this from when I was in Beirut just a year ago? A year ago, I couldn't leave. Tonight, I suppose I could leave if I wanted, but where can I go? It's dark. There's no vehicles around. And if they wanted to do anything with me, I guess they could. But the whole difference is the sky is over your head and there's air out there that you can breathe instead of being underground and being bombed day in and day out. And it's not the season for hostages. It is not the season for kidnapping.

53:18Gosh, man. And then you mentioned earlier you manage subnets of agents. What does that mean? Well, so the U.S. intelligence community came to me, as I said, on multiple occasions, and they said, we need your help on the Iran target. We need your help with terrorism because we know that you have debriefed defectors from Iranian intelligence. We know that you have sources and contacts and can you activate them for us? And so that became a network of sub-agents. So I was the agent, if you wish, of the intelligence community. I was their co-op team, somebody working as a, officially working as a consultant.

54:04And then I would run these sub-agents that they could not talked to. They were not allowed to talk to by their hierarchy. And so I had to talk to these people and try to vet their information and make sure that it was credible and double source things if we could. And so they would come back. I had guys who could get information out of the Supreme Leader's office in Tehran. That's how we knew about it. That's how we knew about the attacks that were pending or being planned against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad over the Christmas holiday, the New Year's holiday of 2019, 2020. I actually had a sub-agent, a guy, who had guys or people inside the Supreme Leader's office in Tehran.

54:56And we were funneling. And the U.S. intelligence had nobody like that. And they told me that. We don't have that access, Ken. You've got that access. We love you. Now, you saying this, could you get, could they now identify and could you get that person in trouble who's in the Supreme Leader's office? Now, now, now, now. Come on now. I'm not a young guy any longer and I'm pretty good at figuring out how to lay my breadcrumb trails away from the folks. I've been very careful, obviously. I have never burned a source in my entire career as an investigative reporter, as a newsman, and I've never burned a source even working with the intelligence community.

55:42And do you think in this next administration you'll do some work with the intelligence community and Trump again? I don't know. It depends what they want to do. I have my ideas and I've expressed them quite publicly. and I'm sure the president-elect is very well aware of them. He knows that Iran is going to be a big problem for his administration. I think his natural tendency is to see if he can make a deal, but there's no deal that you can make with these people. They might want to lure him into a deal, but it won't be a deal. It'll be worse than Little Rocket Man. And, you know, Trump might get he might get a meeting or two, although I doubt that that will happen because the Iranians can't allow themselves to meet with the American president.

56:33And that's something that that most Americans don't understand and cannot understand. And I don't think President Trump understands it. If an Iranian leader, a senior Iranian leader publicly met with the president of the United States or his secretary of state or his secretary of defense, whatever, they'd be toast. inside Iran. They would be toast politically inside Iran. They cannot do it. And because of that simple fact, there's not going to be a deal, not a deal with this regime. There will be some strategy, which I have laid out and I'm sure others will improve upon, of helping the Iranian people to get rid of the regime.

57:18So then you can have a deal. You can have a deal with a new regime. Absolutely. And then what you've mentioned a lot about and you've written a lot about arms dealers in the in the Middle East, like what's the role of money in all of this? Because there was one point in I forgot which war they were talking about, but a senior administration official a year or so ago said, hey, all these wars is good for the U.S. economy because they're buying our bullets and they have to spend the dollars back here. And so that struck me as a very weird comment. And what's the role of money in all this? And how much do arms dealers in the Middle East, these kind of shady brokers in the middle of all these weapons deals, how much money do they make?

58:00Well, look, the shady brokers make money for themselves, okay? They're helping governments make money as well on the side, but they basically make money for themselves. They are not the cause of conflict. They're merely the profiteers of conflict. And some of them say, well, I would be stupid not to take advantage of this situation, right? They see an opportunity to make a lot of money. Look, I'm very happy that we have Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and our Raytheon and our big defense contractors to innovate and make new weapons systems that will protect Americans, that will protect American lives, that will protect our troops.

58:45And they need to make more of them. And I think you're going to see a lot of new funding at the Pentagon. That's just my personal opinion. But our reserves are depleted. We've sent so much stuff to Ukraine. We don't have enough to fight a war that would last for two months with our own reserves. So we need to build up our own reserves. We don't have enough weapons in the stockpiles right now. Submarines, nuclear submarines, you know, the Chinese are going to surpass us by 2030 in the number of nuclear submarines. They'll have 76. We'll have 66. And that's just six years away from now, because we only have, if I'm not mistaken, we have one nuclear submarine manufacturing facility, one shipyard left the United States.

59:32We used to have two. We only have one left. We don't make destroyers. We don't make cruisers. We don't make frigates any longer the way that we used to. We make these horrible, literal control ships that don't work and don't serve any purpose. We waste money on programs, which everybody, every person involved in the procurement process will tell you will never work, where we should be investing in things like drones. Drones are really cheap. You know what's causing the most problem in Ukraine is drones. Even the Israelis are getting hit by drones from Hezbollah. And, you know, we should be mass producing drones, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, and we're not doing it.

1:00:13So there's lots of things that a new Secretary of Defense, I think, who comes with a spirit of innovation to the job will think about. But we really need that that innovation in our defense establishment well ken tererman i mean you gave me so much to think about and you know i still have to wrap my head around the fact that i don't it's really hard to believe that a president would really would be as firm as you say in terms of like love iran and hate the u.s like i can't just my brain just can't even though i i've seen all all the same historical events that that you've seen that everyone's reads in the newspapers it's just hard to believe that their motive was was bad even whether i like them or not politically um and i i don't have to really think about this because i can't argue with anything you've said You have all the facts.

1:01:20But this is like the one issue in the world that really scares me. I've literally been up at night thinking about this probably more than any other issue in the world politically. Well, let me just issue a challenge to you. Come up with another explanation for the behavior of Barack Obama and the behavior of Joe Biden towards the Iranian regime. the appeasement, the rank, the obvious, the clear appeasement of the Mueller. Find me another explanation. I'm open to it. I've looked at all of them that I could find, all of them that I've seen. I find no other explanation that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I can think is just that maybe they think, like, oh, if you treat the bully nicely, if you let him cheat off your test in school, maybe he won't bully you anymore, which is a strategy that doesn't work even in elementary school.

1:02:12It probably doesn't work on the international playing field either. But that's the only thing I could think is that maybe they think, hey, let's just be nice to everyone and everyone will be nice back to us. So Carter does it, Clinton does it, Obama does it, Biden does it, four times wrong. They haven't learned the lesson yet. Yeah, like you said, it's a lot of things too are decisions made politically and maybe they become so, or their advisors say, become so addicted to power behind the scenes that that's the only real thing that they think about. And I don't know, it's disturbing. It's disturbing to think about it any other way.

1:02:50But I really hope the next four years, like I said, I'm optimistic for that peace dividend again. And maybe Iran is shut down. And I have met a lot of people, you know the citizens of iran secular people who hate their the regime that rules over them they're good smart intelligent educated people and i really hope they succeed and and you know there's a saying you either either trade bullets or dollars and i'm hoping that we get back to trading dollars with with with a country like iran you know without their religious regime in charge of them well there you go i i i couldn't agree with you more i mean i think that's a It is a hopeful future, but it's one that will take a lot of hard work from the United States, as well as the people of Iran.

1:03:40But we have to help them. I believe, again, it's in our national security interest as Americans to help the people of Iran to get rid of this regime, because the regime is the source of instability, violence, and mayhem, not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Oh, you know, last question on this. What's the status, and you write about this in the book, but what's the status of Iran's nuclear? Like, what's the status of Iran and nuclear? Well, gee, and why should we be so happy to see the mullahs in power when the International Atomic Energy Agency has told us that they have now the capability, thanks to the Iran nuclear deal from Obama, they now have the capability of building five nuclear weapons worth of fuel, nuclear fuel in five weeks.

1:04:36They can make 15 bombs in five months. They couldn't do that when, you know, just five or six years ago is because they've been installing these new generation centrifuges secretly under the Iran nuclear deal that Obama negotiated, and they were able to break out. And so now they have such quantities. Look, there are two main components of nuclear weapons. There's the nuclear fuel that I've just been talking about, and then there are all these non-nuclear components. They mastered the non-nuclear components 20 years ago. They had the nuclear weapons design 20 years ago. So it's really only been the fissile material, the highly enriched uranium, that's been the blockage for them in having a nuclear arsenal.

1:05:22I believe that unchecked, the regime will have an arsenal of 20, 30, 40 weapons within a year. And if it would take them five weeks, how come they haven't done it yet? Well, because I don't think they want to have one weapon, two weapons, or five weapons. I think they want to come out all of a sudden with an arsenal. So you can't attack us because we've got plenty of bombs that we can launch back at you. We don't have just one or two. We've got plenty. Kind of like North Korea today. right so they're afraid if they make one israel will just take it out or the u.s will take it out and then they have nothing right and then we also know that they had one right and plus their missiles their missiles have not had a great success rate at penetrating israel's missile defenses so if they put it on a missile against israel they have a probably a a 10 chance that would actually get through and hit Israel.

1:06:19Less than that. Yeah. Well, I don't know whether to be scared to death after talking to you or hopeful. I'm going to stick with hopeful, but I'm still scared at the same time. Stick with hopeful, yeah. Be apprehensive, but be hopeful. And I'm definitely going to read your other books. So this one's The Iran House, Tales of Revolution, persecution, war, and intrigue. And the rest is history. Tales of hostages, arms dealers, dirty tricks, and spies. And spies. That is next on my list. And spies. By the way, I can't tell if you're a spy or an arms dealer or a hostage. Well, I had been a hostage. Or a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, which you were in 2006.

1:07:09Right. The New York Times called me an arms dealer. and I have been a spy, both for the United States and for Israel. But it was a very gentlemanly sort of spying I did for Israel, and honorable, trying to help them make contact with people in Lebanon who are holding one of their citizens hostage. I guess I think of like Cold War spying, like, oh, it was the CIA versus the KGB, and then later they would go for drinks and swap war stories. I feel like that doesn't exist anymore. that kind of almost collegial atmosphere between spies. You know, the difference is in the Cold War, the KGB and the CIA weren't trying to kill each other all the time.

1:07:51They were just trying to figure out what the other was, were doing. In today's spy world with the Iranians in particular, they're trying to kill you. They're trying to kill you. Yeah, well, it's, that's scary too. So look, good luck, Ken. I hope you stay safe. and I hope you're able to give good advice and stop these wars. Ultimately, people who are listening to this, forget your politics. This man wants to stop wars and bring peace, and we all benefit. It doesn't matter who's president. We all benefit if there's this peace dividend. I don't care who is president if we can kind of find peace in this area of the world.

1:08:32So thanks a lot, Ken, and thanks for also sharing all the information and stories you do. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be with you. I've had fun. Thank you.