100. Putin's Secret Army: Fighting With Assad In Syria (Ep 3)

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24:21Gordon:Welcome back. It's September of 2015, and a new business opportunity is beginning to emerge for Yevgeny Purgosian and the Wagner Group. And it's not in Ukraine.

24:33David:No. It's in Syria. Yeah, most restaurateurs would be like, where can I open my new restaurant? We're here with our Gordon Ramsay of the Russian warlord going, new market. You know, Syria looks good for an opening.

24:47Gordon:I also like how essentially a map of the other parts of the world where Wagner will expand is essentially inversely related to how well off that part of the world happens to be doing at any point in time.

25:02David:Because normally if you're a restaurateur, you'd be like, where's a nice place where lots of rich people are going to pay lots of money for my fancy food? Here he's thinking, where is there death and destruction, chaos, disorder, and a desire for mercenaries? So it's slightly opposite.

25:17Gordon:And we should, I will say, and this will probably be the only time in the series that I defend Yevgeny Pregosian. But you put on your mercenary hat. Yeah. Yeah. The whole value he's providing is, you know, essentially as an antidote to that. He's going to provide the security court. That's so horribly lacking. Yeah. In some of these countries. In eastern Syria. And then order, peace and stability. Yeah. Order, peace and stability.

25:45David:Because here we've talked about he's worked in Ukraine, but there's been a peace deal. But now, Syria, country you know well. The civil war, I guess, has been raging. President Assad is struggling in Syria against the opposition forces, rebels and ISIS. At this point, September 2015, it's reached a critical juncture. And of course, Russia has a lot of interest, doesn't it, in Syria?

26:07Gordon:I guess at the face of it, you think, well, why in the world would that be? So, I mean, Syria at that point has got maybe 20 million people. From an oil and gas standpoint, it really has no impact on the international market. Those will see there are resources there. No nuclear weapons. It's just why? And I think a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that the timing matters. We're at a period in 2015 where much of the Arab world is in sort of turmoil. I mean, you have real sort of protest movements, insurgencies, civil wars that have grown out of the Arab awakening in 2010 and 2011. Yeah, I think from the mindset of Vladimir Putin and the Russian sort of leadership, there's a sense that the U.S., and in particular in places like Libya, the U.S.

26:54Gordon:has sort of attempted to intervene or intervened to suit its own geopolitical lens. And so I think there's a sense here that the Russian state to project power and influence in the region to be a global power needs to intervene to prop up its own sort of friends and allies in the region in the same way that the US has done. I mean, more tactically, I guess, the Russians have a naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. They've had that since they've had that concession, I think, since the 67 war. There's an opportunity in Putin's mind to sort of extend Russian influence in the Mediterranean, as we'll see over the course of the Civil War.

27:35Gordon:That naval base is hugely expanded and modernized. There's an airfield at Hameim in the northwest of Syria that gets built, Russian airfield. So there's a lot of Russian linkages, not to mention, of course, that the Russians have been a massive arms supplier to the Assad regime going back into the days of the Cold War. So there's a lot of connection there. And at this point in 2015, you know, we would have thought that Assad had probably lost control of maybe three quarters of the country. And I think there was a feeling in Moscow that in the fall of 15, Assad's days are maybe numbered. And so Putin, there's a whole bunch of reasons that coincide to get the Russians involved.

28:19David:Yeah. And of course, Moscow wants to support Assad. But a bit like Western governments, it doesn't want to do the full scale intervention. It doesn't want to put boots on the ground, does it? So I guess what it's going to do is use air power to bomb the rebels, and then give some support on the ground through mercenaries, through Wagner and others.

28:41Gordon:Now, there eventually will be a Russian military intervention. That's pretty extensive. But why use Russian special forces, troops, soldiers, when you can use mercenaries? Yeah.

28:53David:By 2016, you're going to have about 2 ,500 Wagner mercenaries stationed in Syria. Interesting enough, directed to some extent by the GRU, by Russian military intelligence. You can see that they're not out there on their own, and they get loads of equipment from the Russian military. I think this is really interesting. You've got T-90 tanks, helicopters, anti-aircraft batteries, howitzers, artillery, all from the Russian military, which is going to help them. And technically, it's training and equipment. and it's going to get flown on military transport. Interesting enough, the salary for a mercenary then is about$4 ,000 to$5 ,000 a month.

29:29David:Pretty good. It's not bad. It's not bad. Nearly four times what a normal Russian soldier earns. So Wagner's now got some kind of, tends to be experienced commanders, you know, your Utkins and his people who are kind of running the show. And then you get all of these recruits who are coming in to kind of be the guys on the ground, doing it basically for the money. You know, often only for six months or so. Sometimes they're people who are ex-soldiers themselves, but you read about them. And, you know, they're sometimes like taxi drivers, you know, or mechanics who are just like, it's good money.

29:58David:It's good money. I'll do this for six months, big payday, then go back home.

30:02Gordon:It's hard to go back a little bit in the chronology, but I think it's an important point because it speaks to the nature of Pregosian. We're talking about the sort of official wrapping of this intervention. And it is true that Wagner has, you know, connections, deep connections, and in some cases, I think, is being subordinated to the GRU and Russian intelligence and the military. But Pregosian, the entrepreneur, as soon as he sees sort of the Russian state tilting towards Syria, he starts interacting with Syrians, senior Syrians in the government. There's a couple of alouis close to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, known as the Jabber brothers.

30:46Gordon:And Pregosian cuts a deal with them initially. And these guys ran these kind of pro-regime militias in Syria. So you can kind of see how Pregosian, he gets himself almost ingratiated or woven into these situations to create facts on the ground that then the Russian state has to kind of respond to. Making himself useful.

31:10David:Making himself useful. Yeah, Wagner are going to kind of train alongside and work alongside some of these Syrian soldiers. But there's going to be tension, I think, with the Syrian military. as you'd expect. Both sides think the other's a bit inept. There's all these reports that at times Wagner try and get Syrian troops to join a battle by shooting at their feet to try and get them moving. And at other times, the Syrians shoot at the backsides of the Wagner men. But I think one of the other things that comes to that is the reputation for brutality really starts to emerge here in Syria. And there's one particular set of videos which come out in June 2017, which I think we should say, if you're listening to this with your kids, shame on you.

31:52Gordon:Shame on you. You've opened up a six-part podcast series on a mercenary warlord with your young children. Yeah. But if you have, if you've made this life decision, you may want to skip just the next couple minutes.

32:05David:Because these videos, June 2017, which emerge, there's some of a man being beaten with a sledgehammer. Also, of a body being set alight, there's a beheading. There are people kicking the guy's head around who's been beheaded. And these videos start to circulate amongst Russian military veterans. And you can hear someone. It's clearly in the desert, so it looks like Syria. Someone speaking Russian in the video. And it gets geolocated to a gas facility in Syria. And this is a kind of big moment, actually, in Wagner in its story. because it's going to cement this idea that Wagner are a kind of nasty bunch, capable of brutality, but also create a kind of cult around them amongst people who kind of like that in Russia, I think, which is a bit wild.

32:57Gordon:Alex, now I think you could picture as kind of your mental model for this. if Gordon Ramsay was running Gastown in the Mad Max movies, you know? Out in the desert, he's wearing like a medieval dungeon master outfit. There's sort of an apocalyptic, you know, there's gas flares going off. Guys driving around in gigantic trucks with skulls mounted on the front. This is what's going on in Eastern Syria right now. It is Mad Max.

33:29David:So the man who's kind of getting sledgehammered, it was supposedly a deserter from the Syrian army who'd been captured by Wagner. There's an investigation by Wagner's internal security, not into killing the man, but how the film got out of killing the man. I love that. And it turned out it had been shared and it kind of creates this weird, dark fan culture online as it goes viral, part of the kind of brand. And Prigoshan will say, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, but it's going to help recruitment. That's what's kind of crazy, particularly amongst military veterans, nationalists, and others who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer.

34:08David:Who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer. Because the sledgehammer is going to become associated as the kind of unofficial logo brand thing of the Wagner group. So that's the kind of brutality also important for later in the story that Pogoshin will get to know the new Russian military commander on the ground, a brutal general called General Suravikin, who was known as General Armageddon because of his preference for flattening cities from the air. The two will become allies, and the general, interestingly enough, becomes an honorary member of Wagner. Wagner plays a role in the Palmyra operations, 2016, then the Syrian force.

34:50David:This is a fight against the Islamic State

34:52Gordon:in this city in central Syria, Palmyra, ancient set of ruins, actually lovely, beautiful place I visited. It had been a kind of hotbed of Islamic State activity during the Civil

35:06David:War. When Wagner wins some battles there, who gets the credit? Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu tells Putin, we took Palmyra. And then Pogoshin says, no, no, no, we did. And Shoigu reportedly stated that the Gopniks cannot go down in history. Now, Gopnik is like a low-level, it's a thug. Thug. Thug, or also has the kind of connotation of being trashy, working class. It says something already about the way in which Wagner is seen as these kind of rough guys, the military-like. Can't let them have credit. You see this also, this kind of view of some of the elite, which is Purgotian's getting a little bit above his station.

35:46David:He's a bit of a thug. The other thing which is going to be important for Purgotian, I think, is that he starts to see, doesn't he, that how do you make money? And one of the answers is in Palmyra, I think there's some oil and gas.

35:58Gordon:Yeah.

35:59David:And he's going to work out. Gas town. It's a gas town. Yeah. There's a way of funding this through the resources which are on the ground.

36:06Gordon:Which would suggest to me that these contracts that he's on are lucrative but not staggeringly so. From the military, yeah. From the Gremlin, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it makes a ton of sense that if you're going to provide security to a regime, a great way to ensure that you're paid well is to get access to some amount of the cash flow that comes out of an asset, right? and it could be a mine, could be a gas plant. It's a change to his business model here.

36:41David:It's the next evolution. That's right. Which is, you know, you can sign a contract with the Syrian government saying, if we bring a gas facility back under Syrian control, we get a quarter of the profits. And it's kind of good business for both sides, isn't it? Because you create an incentive for yourself to get it back. And for the Syrians, yeah, we have to give up a quarter of the profits. But if these guys can take back some of these facilities from ISIS, then it kind of, you know. We get 75 % of something we had nothing of before. Yeah. I think what's interesting as well is you start to get the ambiguity of, is he doing this for the Russian state?

37:14David:Is he doing it for himself? It feels like much more for himself. You know, the overall policy of help the Syrians is for the Russian state. But the, I'm going to do a deal to get this gas facility is about enriching himself and Wagner, basically, and funding their activities.

37:29Gordon:Here you could say he might not be doing this at the exact direction of the Russian state, but he's operating with overall sort of protection and cover from the big boss. And so he knows there's a set of rules and there's sort of some guardrails to his behavior and I'm sure how much he can take and how much needs to be kicked up the chain money-wise to the powers that be. So I think he knows the rules. Yeah. He's doing this because, you know, Putin and the people above him in the Kremlin, they want this to happen. Yeah.

38:01David:That also explains this one absolutely fascinating story, which we'll just look into. So this incident happens in February 2018 in Deir Ezzor, am I pronouncing that? Yeah.

38:14Gordon:Largest city in Eastern Syria. At this point, it's a really complicated place because we have a small contingent, as we'll see, of U.S. troops on the ground. We have the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces that are there. we have of course the russians operating in syria and it you know the russians have been really on the ground in force in syria since 2015 so three years at this point the u.s and the russians are trying desperately to avoid accidents killing each other there's a deconfliction mechanism that's been set up to make sure that we don't get into a shooting war with the russians

38:56David:And now we've got Wagner out there. Yeah, and Wagner forces at this point in February 2018 are going to, along with Syrians, it's a bit unclear which Syrians, you know, militia or government or even how many Syrians there are. But Wagner forces are heading for a particular gas facility, the Conoco gas facility. Gastown. Gastown, yeah. Which had, you know, traded hands a number of times in the Civil War. It's a kind of pretty valuable gas facility in the country, potentially offering hundreds of millions of dollars a year revenue. But it is right over that deconfliction line, you know, with the other forces just on the other side of it.

39:34David:And right next to the Conoco gas facility is a small observation post containing about 30 US special forces, you know, Delta Force Rangers and some Kurdish allies. now they watch a kind of build-up of these wagner forces you know maybe with some syrian forces near their base over a period of days and then they see them getting closer and closer they cross the euphrates river they cross what would normally be the line of separation the americans have a support base about 20 miles away which is looking at drone feeds and they can see what looks like a force assembling to take the plant so at about 3 p.m one afternoon they see the forces include which is about 500 troops nearly 30 vehicles edging towards the plant and of course at the plant is this outpost you know special force u.s special forces and curts by early evening they're getting very close to the base and this gets escalated upwards as you'd expect to the kind of u.s air operations base in kata base in kuwait and to the pentagons it's going all the way up, aircraft are placed on alert, everyone's watching drone feeds.

40:43David:At 8.30pm, three Russian T-72 tanks are moving within a mile of the plant. The mission support base, 20 miles away, the Green Berets and Marines are thinking we might have to go fight. And as you said, there's this contact, isn't there, for Russian and US forces to communicate and deconflict. So as you'd expect, the Americans are on the phone, you know, and kind of every day they're talking to each other. And the Americans ask the Russians, are the troops approaching the base yours? And the Russian high command says, no, they're not ours. Now, that's what is later testified by the Secretary of Defense to a Senate committee.

41:23David:And yet the people on the ground are listening to radio transmissions with the people speaking Russian.

41:29Gordon:You're going to see how it would not be immediately believable that you don't know who they are. And yet, go to the Russian side of this, it's easy to see why the Russian military may have thought that'd be kind of great if the US killed these guys. Because there's no love lost between the military and Wagner.

41:49David:So in the outpost by the gas facility, they see the tanks, these T-72 tanks turn out of a kind of neighborhood, and then they start to fire. and they're firing tank artillery mortar rounds at the base. The Americans dive into foxholes. For another 15 minutes, they're trying to call the Russians and tell them to stop. You know, nothing back. The US fire warning shot still advancing. Now, having been told the Russians denied all knowledge, the Secretary of Defense directs, you know, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the force to be annihilated, the attacking force. So the US launches this staggeringly, overwhelmingly ferocious attack on the forces attacking the outpost.

42:34David:I love the just alphabet soup of weapons platforms that were brought to bear.

42:40Gordon:F-15 fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones, Firequel fire missiles, AC-130 attack aircraft. AC-130, that's a weapon system that's a friend of the pod. If you remember back to our early Afghanistan episodes. They get called up. They were called up to absolutely wreck Al-Qaeda prisoners during that prison rebellion. AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, B-52 strategic bombers. Strategic bombers? It's just everybody's in the game. I wonder what the U.S. taxpayer paid for this. It's pretty big.

43:13David:It's pretty significant. It's overkill. I mean, it's literally overkill. And then you also have the kind of special forces team from the kind of support base kind of arrives and they get there about 1130. It's dark. They've driven 20 miles using thermal imaging cameras. And they actually have to stop because there's just so much kind of fire going into this. And eventually they engage the fighters as well with machine guns from the roof of their vehicles. So now there's about 40 Americans on site. The Russians don't seem to have night vision, which I think is also a disadvantage. And so there's just this massive wave of air power, which goes on for, you know, about an hour.

43:47David:And it's kind of total annihilation.

43:49Gordon:You have Gennady Prigogian like that Homer Simpson meme where he's just slowly backing into the hedge after this happens.

43:56David:That didn't go very well. Retreat, I think, is the goal. So at the end, there's no US casualties. One Syrian ally to the US is wounded. How many of the attackers are killed? I mean, the truth is no one knows. I mean, dozens, best guess, around 80. Some people thought 200, 300. It's a kind of crazy story because, as you said, what is going on? Prigozhin will say, this was an authorized operation. I had permission, you know, I discussed it with the head of the military. Others, though, will suggest that this is Prigozhin freelancing. That also, I have to say, seems entirely plausible to me. And then the question is, why does the Russian military say he's not ours and kind of, you know, go for it?

44:35Gordon:I mean, it has a lot of just sort of Prigozhin, maybe pushing the limits of what's acceptable and finding, you know, sort of, he's seeing what's possible. And he found the limit. And he might have thought, or he might have thought he had agreement from the Ministry of Defense, or he might have thought that if we really get into it, we'll get some backup. And it didn't happen. So I'm not sure if it's some elaborate, you know, Ministry of Defense or Russian military setup of Purgosian, it could be more that he thought he would get some help and he didn't get it.

45:14David:Purgosian will claim that the Russian Ministry of Defense never passed on the warnings that the Americans would attack to him. That seems entirely believable. Which also seems kind of believable. It's possible the Russian military thought at first, yeah, let him take that. And then when they see the Americans pile in, they're like, oh, actually, we don't want to start a war. We're not going to go defend Wagner. So let's pretend it's all Wagner's fault. But, you know, it's very ambiguous. But I guess the crucial point is it leaves Prigozhin furious with the Russian Ministry of Defense. And so, you know, there's been a bit of tension before, but this is already the start of a kind of story which will plot, not with the Kremlin, but with the Ministry of Defense in Moscow.

45:56David:Sergei Shoigu, the Defense Minister, you know, General Gerasimov, who's the kind of professional head of the military. General Armageddon. Yeah, General Armageddon, who is Suravikin. Oh, is that Suravikin? Oh, dear. You've got your generals mixed up.

46:10Gordon:I've got my generals all messed up.

46:12David:I've got Gordon Ramsay on the brain. And he feels betrayed and angry, Pagosian. He's kind of on his own path to some extent now, still allied to the Kremlin. Just eight days after this big battle is the moment he gets indicted publicly by the US in 2018 for election interference for the 2016 election. So he's now, I guess you have a picture of a guy who's growing in power, but he was also getting more angry and more high profile, but he's also got a kind of business model, which he thinks works.

46:49Gordon:I think there with the business model working, Pregosian, extremely angry with the Ministry of defense and with some other terrible places in the world where he can expand that business model. Let's end it. When we come back, we will see how he moves out from the Syrian foothold into Africa. But if you don't want to wait, you don't have to. If you want to see how Yevgeny Pregosian marches around the world, join the Declassified Club. Go to the rest is classified dot com. Sign up. Become a member. Binge listen to the episodes. We'll see you next time. See you next time.

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