146. How the CIA Rescued a Pilot Inside Iran (Ep 1)

18:21David:I haven't. I was thinking that perhaps we'd spend like a good half hour looking at the quantum magnetometry. Have I actually said that right? You have said it right, I believe. I have. So quantum magnetometers are real. He says, reading an article, they're ultra precise, for instance, at detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields via quantum properties produced by the cardiac muscle. Now, I'm reading this from a kind of scientific American article, which is very interesting because what the claim is, we should say, is that this is a way of, I guess, spotting someone's heartbeat, isolating it, and perhaps even uniquely identifying it as a particular person from distance.

19:13David:that is the claim and there is a kind of wild claim which is which is in some of the reports about it it's like hearing a voice in a stadium except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert a source briefed on the program has told reporters in the right conditions if your heart is beating we will find you it is wild and i mean on the one hand the science you know this thing

19:40Gordon:does exist on the other hand not this piece of gear right we know we know that you can detect you can detect the human the sort of electromagnetic imprint of a human heart if you for example uh are like a half an inch away from a human exactly right yeah or like or you have a device pressed against someone's chest but to do it from a helicopter above a desert is is ambitious because

20:08David:Because this is, again, using my deep knowledge of quantum magnetometry, I can tell you the signal becomes dramatically weaker at a kilometre. And I could tell you more. But it would have to contend with not just the Earth's magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents, but also you'd have to contend with the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits, whatever else is running around there.

20:37Gordon:So it's very interesting because they get up to the top of the cliff and there's just a sheep sitting there looking surprised.

20:46David:Weirdly, you have the same heartbeat as this US weapons officer. So what's interesting is if you look into the science of this, on the one level, it is theoretically possible. But the scientists who are the kind of experts of this have said it's fascinating, but it seems, well, they are suggesting it seems almost unbelievable that you could do this over a long range. Because the president and John Ratcliffe, CIA director, were very careful not to describe the technology. And then it's since been kind of reported out. Because they didn't say ghost murmur, right? They were sort of wink and nod. No, they never said ghost murmur or gave any details of it.

21:26David:So I think it is possible that Ghost Murmur exists and the US and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, which do these kind of extraordinary tech developments, have managed to find this way of doing it. Maybe not at the range of miles, but maybe from a helicopter flying just above. Maybe they've got that range. Or maybe this is a bit of disinformation to avoid the real story coming out. I think we should just leave that question open. but clearly there is some very fancy technology which was used to pick up this guy's signature and potentially his heartbeat and to know that it's him and that he's alone which i guess is

22:06Gordon:crucial yeah him being alone is crucial because again you you want to be sure you're not walking into a trap right so you need to confirm you want to confirm that he is alive where he is and that he's alone. And I just have to say, I think it would be striking to me if it were just totally false, the tech. Why even mention it? The raid is impressive enough.

22:31David:Yeah. I think there's definitely some special tech there. Exactly what it is. Maybe this kind of stuff. Yeah.

22:37Gordon:Right. So they got the location. He's alive. The Wizzo's alive and he's alone. And the US military begins spooling up a rescue mission. Now, this, Gordon, I think is where we start to see some potential parallels with the operation that we'll talk about, the theoretical conceptual operation we'll talk about in the next episode to go after the highly enriched uranium. Because this plan, the rescue mission, calls for using over 100 operators, primarily from SEAL Team 6. There are Delta Force and Army Rangers on standby if needed. And I think this is interesting because these special mission units were already in the region for another mission unspecified.

23:22Gordon:And I think it's possible, at least, that they are present in the Persian Gulf for the highly enriched uranium operation, that they're getting ready for that.

23:34David:Which is why this mission is such an interesting guide as to that.

23:38Gordon:Yeah, definitely.

23:38David:Exactly.

23:39Gordon:So they wait until darkness on Saturday. Again, this kind of, you know, you want to do these kind of operations in one period of darkness, right? So they wait until darkness on Saturday. Now, the WIZO has been on the ground for almost two days at this point, hiding. Rescue commences. Now, there is a huge aerial support package of surveillance, planes and drones, fighters, refueling tankers, helicopters. More than 150 air assets are used. And I think it's actually that number is getting close to the number of air assets used in the Maduro raid back in January. The large number here seems to be driven in part by the need to deceive the Iranians about where they're actually headed.

24:25Gordon:And it seems like a bunch of these, they kind of broke off into groups and flew to at least seven different locations to confuse Iranian searchers. It gives you a sense of how much leverage the Iranians would have if they captured a downed US airman. Now, while this is going on, US and Israeli planes basically drop preparatory fires. So they're blowing up almost everything they can around the site where the airman is or sort of in the area where the airman is. They jam Iranian transmissions, destroy communications towers, bomb key roads to prevent Iranian forces from getting close. It seems like the Iranians shot down a second Reaper drone during this period.

25:08Gordon:the operators again primarily seal team six that are headed to the airman's real location are brought in on variants of the c-130 it's military transport aircraft they land on a flat airstrip and establish basically a forward kind of operating base to support the rescue itself i parts fascinating because we have a pre-planned and potentially prepared rough airstrip in southwestern Iran that is being used as the staging point for the rescue.

25:48David:Which again is perhaps when we come back to a potential rate to go off the highly enriched uranium, that is the kind of thing you'd need to do, but on a longer and larger scale, lasting much longer. But the idea is you've got these big C-130s coming in, and then they've got smaller helicopters, haven't they? Four of these Little Bird helicopters, which we talked a bit about in our Black Hawk Down series, which are the small helicopters which are going to be able to try and get to or get close to the weapons officer himself.

26:19Gordon:And those Little Bird helicopters are taken out of the C-130s, take off in darkness with SEAL Team 6 and these Air Force para-jumpers, which we also, you know, guys from that unit were present in Mochadishu back in 1993. They're basically kind of daredevil combat medics that are riding on benches outside of these little bird helicopters. Now, it does seem like members of the Basij militia, which is this kind of, I guess, paramilitary volunteer militia connected to the Revolutionary Guards, are closing in on the airman's location at this point maybe but there's a bit of ambiguity about whether

27:02David:there is actually a firefight and what happens i mean it definitely seems as if the u.s is going to strike from the air positions of of you know people coming into this area but whether there's actually a firefight or not is a little bit unclear but those little bird helicopters they're the ones which are now going to go out to the location where they think the the the airman is faced.

27:26Gordon:There seems to have been a number of Iranian casualties during the operation, but I think the exact number, extent, and how they occurred very much ambiguous at this point. This, I think, is one of the best parts of the story, Gordon, because as those little bird helicopters with the seals are approaching the reports suggest that the wizzo used his american eagle u.s flag patterned underpants boxer shorts to signal his position to the rescue party i should say if you're you know if you are watching this on video uh or not watching this on video rather uh you're missing out because this is exactly the pair of underpants that gordon Carrera is wearing at this very moment in time.

28:20Gordon:My Union Jack underpants, not American Eagle ones. No, no.

28:24David:Popped to shorts.

28:25Gordon:You're showing off the sort of transatlantic, the special relationship, the partnership between our two great countries.

28:32David:Union Jack ones for me. I mean, this detail almost feels like it was the cliche of being written for Hollywood or written for a movie. Feels like it has been because it is almost too wild. If a script writer put it in, you'd be like, that's a bit too much. But the reason why it does seem plausible is it's supposedly these boxer shorts are later recovered by the Iranian militiamen. And is that right? And you kind of there are pictures of them. So there is actually some photographic evidence that this may be true. Oh, yeah.

29:04Gordon:Have you seen the picture on social media?

29:06David:We'll have to get that up somewhere.

29:08Gordon:Yeah, they're holding up. They're holding up these underpants. And then, I mean, Trump has actually commented on it saying, you know, congratulations, all you got out of this was a pair of underpants. Becky is asking if are these underpants standard issue? And no, I do not think they are part of the standard. you do not have to wear I don't think you have to wear these if you're a US fighter pilot operating over Ron but I think you know it's a nod it's a patriotic nod to be wearing some American flag pattern underpants so anyway you can find the trophy photo on social media of this guy's underpants so they've got him and they've got him so they go back to the airstrip okay and the plan is to load the airmen and the operators onto the 2C-130 variants that they have there, and they'll load the helicopters back up, they'll go to Kuwait, probably.

30:02Gordon:But the nose gear of at least one of those C-130s, and maybe both, get stuck in the kind of sandy dirt of the airstrip scare quotes, because this is not a runway, proper runway. Yeah.

30:20David:I mean, Trump himself, I think, says this was a farm, not a runway. And it's a kind of sandy, muddy soil surface area. I mean, it reminds me, just shows how small things go wrong. It was like the kind of backdraft, wasn't it, on the Bin Laden raid, which they hadn't quite predicted when they go into the compound, leads to one of the helicopters crashing here. I mean, this is the bit I found extraordinary from the story. They spend hours trying to work out if they can get them out. I mean, hours that they're here stuck basically in the sand with the airmen they've rescued, but with this massive team and with Iranian forces around them who are getting hit, I think, by US forces, you know, are kind of striking any Iranian forces which come near.

31:04David:But they're going to need a new plan to get the whole team out.

31:08Gordon:So basically the rescue force now needs to get rescued. Needs to get rescued. So three replacement aircraft are called in. Now these seem to be smaller turboprop aircraft, which are lighter, capable of landing on smaller, more fragile, I guess, airstrips. these planes come in they also have with them a quick reaction force of operators from delta force because again you'd have to assume that at some point there could be a firefight with an iranian force yeah that is attempting to stop this team from taking off they arrive at intervals because they can't land simultaneously so it's kind of one goes in and loads leaves the next one comes in and the operators and the injured airmen are taken out, right?

31:54Gordon:And around sunrise, so they've been there for most of the night, they take off in waves from this remote airstrip. Now, then you have the problem, you know, as you're getting ready to go of, well, we've got these two disabled C-130s. And my understanding is that there's not enough room in the new planes that they were bringing in, which I think are an Airbus variant, kind of a transport plane, to take out all of those little bird helicopters they used to actually go and retrieve the airmen. They might have only had room for two of those. So they have to destroy everything. So what probably happens is the Delta Force guys who've come in along with the SEALs destroy all of the avionics on the ground, all the sensitive stuff.

32:37Gordon:And then after they've left, and we've seen the pictures of the wreckage since, there are bombs dropped on the planes and on the remaining helicopters to totally destroy them so the Iranians can't use them. Now, by the time he's rescued, the airman has been in Iran, again, for nearly two days, hiding. Now seems that he's been taken to Landstuhl in Germany for treatment, big medical hospital that the US military uses in Germany. And again, some sources, I think a lot of ambiguity on how many Iranian casualties there might have been during the rescue. No US casualties. And President Trump, as he was describing this, said, we had great talent and we got a little luck too, I would say.

33:24Gordon:So a little luck never hurts in a rescue operation.

33:27David:No, that's right. And I think you get a sense there just how unpredictable these operations are, how difficult they are, how things happen, which no one expected. With the planes getting stuck in the sands. And I guess that gives a flavour really of what an operation on the ground, a special forces operation might look like. With that in mind, you can imagine that one going after nuclear material, as we're going to look at later on in our discussion, is going to be even more challenging and potentially more dangerous than that operation. So to set that up, I think we need to have a look at exactly what constitutes Iran's nuclear programme.

34:08David:but before we get to that let's take a quick break

34:15Gordon:hi there alistair campbell here from the rest is politics and i'm here to tell you about a really

34:20David:important interview that's out now on our podcast channel the rest is politics leading this week i spoke to one of the defining political figures of our time president vladimir zelinski of ukraine it is a fascinating interview reflects on his upbringing reflects on his political rise reflects on how he stayed in Kyiv during Russia's invasion, redefining leadership in wartime. And he warns us very much against anyone, not least Donald Trump, falling for Vladimir Putin's lies. Warns that ceasefires may serve as a strategic pause rather than a sign of genuine peace. He offers a very blunt assessment to Putin, looks at his enemy's strength, strategy, and crucially, his weaknesses in a war he is convinced Russia cannot win.

35:03David:And he doesn't hold back on the international response, at times, particularly from the US. If you'd like to hear more, and I hope you do, search The Rest Is Politics Leading wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to the show.

35:22Gordon:Hi there, Alistair Campbell here from The Rest Is Politics,

35:25David:and I'm here to tell you about a really important interview that's out now on our podcast channel, The Rest Is Politics Leading. This week I spoke to one of the defining political figures of our time, President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine. It is a fascinating interview, reflects on his upbringing, reflects on his political rise, reflects on how he stayed in Kiev during Russia's invasion, redefining leadership in wartime. And he warns us very much against anyone, not least Donald Trump, falling for Vladimir Putin's lies. Warns that ceasefires may serve as a strategic pause rather than a sign of genuine peace.

36:01David:He offers a very blunt assessment to Putin, looks at his enemy's strength, strategy, and crucially, his weaknesses in a war he is convinced Russia cannot win. And he doesn't hold back on the international response at times, particularly from the US. If you'd like to hear more, and I hope you do, search The Rest is Politics Leading wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to your show.

36:25Gordon:Well, welcome back. we are talking about what it would take to destroy Iran's nuclear program. And Gordon, we love talking about a nuclear program on The Rest is Classified, don't we? And the Iranian one actually predates the Islamic Republic.

36:41David:Yeah, we've done a lot on it, but it's worth a brief refresher, isn't it? That it goes back to the time of the Shah. So pre the 79 revolution, he was looking at nuclear power reactors, but perhaps also thinking about a weapon. After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini initially sees nuclear weapons as the work of the devil, un-Islamic. But then you get the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq uses chemical weapons. We'll look at this more later. Iraq is also looking at a bomb. And so from around 1984, Iranian interest in nuclear weapons picks up. Now, crucially, and this is important, is two routes to a bomb. You need the nuclear material to make a bomb.

37:17David:That's the first crucial bit, both of which can come out of civil energy. nuclear energy programs you can either get plutonium from a nuclear power plant a reactor or you can enrich uranium and that enrich uranium at lower levels can be fuel for nuclear power higher levels you can use it for a bomb so the iranians are fundamentally going down the enrichment path they're going to build an enrichment facility in the tans around the end of the 90s gets public 2002 so at that moment the world goes hang on a sec the Iranians look like they are developing something which has been secret, maybe they want a bomb.

37:58David:Worth saying, though, as well, that the Iranians are not racing for a bomb, and they never have been. They want the potential for a bomb. They're looking to have the ability to build one quickly if there's a political decision made to go for it. So they're trying to shorten what's called the breakout time, the gap between deciding to go for one and actually having one. So I guess from 2002, which is where we're now looking at, there is this question, which which is what can you do about that, particularly if the US and Israel want to stop them? What could you do about it? Are there options to prevent Iran developing this nuclear program?

38:35Gordon:And there is precedent for preventing a state from having a nuclear program with a bomb, isn't there, Gordon? In particular, there's precedent for the Israelis to do this. And there's, I think, two historical examples, one in Iraq and the other from Syria, in which the Israelis have bombed a nuclear program and either slowed it down or taken it entirely out of existence.

39:02David:Iraq is the first one, maybe we'll look at briefly. Just to flag, we're actually going to be doing a big series on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, what Western intelligence knew and what they got wrong, featuring also, I should say, some very interesting bonus interviews for club members. That's going to be coming actually just in a few weeks. So we'll do the real detail for that.

39:19Gordon:At the end of that series, we're going to find WMD finally, right, Gordon? Yes. I don't want to get too much away.

39:25David:I'm going to tell you where it really is.

39:26Gordon:We're going to unveil it. Solve the mystery at last. Yeah.

39:29David:Looking forward to that. But back to Iraq. It also has been looking at nuclear power from the 70s under Saddam. Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, gets a reactor from the French called Osirak. a mixture of OSIRIS, the reactor model, and Iraq, which Israel is worried about. This is in the mid-70s. Israel is very worried about and goes through these interesting stages. So there are two stages. One is it tries covert action first to slow down the program. So Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, recruits scientists in France, gathers intelligence on the layout. they actually blow up some of the components in a French warehouse.

40:13David:It's thought, suspected, never proved. An Egyptian nuclear scientist working on the Iraqi program gets assassinated. It's all going to sound familiar if you've been following the Iranian story. But by the time you get to 1981, the Israelis are worried the reactor is about to be fuelled. And so at that point, they decide they are going to go for an airstrike on the reactor to take it out.

40:35Gordon:And so on June 7th, 1981, eight Israeli F-16s, which each carry these 2 ,000-pound bombs, take off and they're escorted by six F-15s as part of the support package. The reactor is over 1 ,000 kilometers from Israel. So at the time, this is the absolute outer edge of the F-16s range. package that strike package flies a southern route across Saudi Arabian airspace at an extremely low altitude to avoid radar detection pilots navigating by visual landmarks across the desert now they have no external fuel tanks since all that capacity is needed for the munitions so the margin on fuel here is razor thin but they approaching the target in formation climb to attack altitude dive on the reactor dome in pairs destroy the dome and the reactor core it takes 90 seconds and it is the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.

41:32Gordon:And I think this raises a big question, which is, did it accomplish what the Israelis wanted it to accomplish?

41:38David:On one level, yes. On another one, no. On the yes front, it destroys the reactor, which was the main route the Iraqis could have taken to getting nuclear material quickly. But it really does cripple that reactor, so it's out. But that is a single building. but what we'll see when we do our Iraq WMD series, when we find the WMD, is it actually increases Saddam's desire for a bomb and it pushes Saddam Hussein actually to look for different routes, more clandestine routes, including enrichment, to try and get a bomb with quite serious consequences, you know, which will flow out in the years to come and eventually, you know, play a part in a war the US and the UK get involved in in 2003.

42:24David:So I think it's an interesting case where short-term military success, but medium-term, more complicated results. What about the Syria case? I mean, this is a subject you know well. You were a CIA analyst working on Syria. I mean, there is a particular raid the Israelis do on a Syrian program as well, isn't there, in the 2000s?

42:44Gordon:Yeah, the Israelis have a very similar situation to Osirak in the mid-2000s right next door in Syria. And I think we're setting up just a bit of the Syrian desire for a bomb. I mean, very similar to Iraq. The Syrians had harbored nuclear ambitions for years. Now former President Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, had tried to buy research reactors. Deals had fallen through. There'd also been some hints in the intelligence picture in the early 2000s that there are these strange visits from North Koreans, trucks heading out to the eastern desert, shipments coming in from Asia with no apparent purpose.

43:21Gordon:But there is a suspicion in particular on the part of the Israelis, that the Syrians have nuclear ambitions and might be doing something, but there's no real hard intel on what is going on. Now, in the summer of 2006, Israeli intelligence identifies this kind of isolated building under construction in the Syrian desert at a place called Al-Kibar. It is labeled by the geospatial analysts an enigmatic facility, which I find to be a wonderful term for a facility. A subsequent review of the imagery shows that it's been under construction since 2002. And it's fascinating because the site is really kind of hidden out in the open.

44:03Gordon:It kind of looks like an old Ottoman fort that you would find in the region. There's no significant air defenses around it, and it's hidden kind of down in this wadi, so it's not visible to the civilians who might be passing by on the road. So what is it? The Israelis think it's interesting, but they don't exactly know what it is. Breakthrough comes in March of 2007, when the director of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission is traveling to Vienna. He's attending an IAEA board of governors meeting there, and Mossad officers break into an apartment that this guy maintained in Vienna and extract information from his laptop, or in some accounts, install software that allows Mossad to access the advice remotely, the Israeli analysts hit the jackpot because they end up with three dozen color photographs taken from inside this Al-Khibar facility.

44:55Gordon:That's pretty good evidence, isn't it? Pretty good evidence. Showing it in various stages of construction, they get the architectural plans, they've got correspondence back and forth. And there's a, I mean, it's just, it's insane. There's a photo showing the head of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission in a meeting with a senior North Korean nuclear official. I'm not sure if they're shaking hands, but that's essentially the point. And the interior photographs of the facility make it unmistakably clear that it's a plutonium reactor because it looks exactly like the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon.

45:30Gordon:And it's a model that only the North Koreans build. So it's like it's a North Korean plutonium reactor out in the eastern desert.

45:36David:Just transplanted into Syria. Exactly. Just transplanted into Syria. It's wild, isn't it? So I guess then the question becomes, what do they do about it? And there's some discussions, aren't there, between the US and Israel about what to do? And I think the Americans are a lot more cautious. But given the cooperation we've seen between Israel and the US over Iran, in this case, it is much more of an Israeli decision in the end that once again, a bit like the Iraqi nuclear reactor, they're going to strike it before it gets hot. before it basically can be fueled.

46:11Gordon:There is a really interesting back and forth between kind of the intelligence and the policymakers here and the dynamics inside the US-Israel relationship that will probably do this as its own story at some point down the line.

46:23David:Yeah, and we can get deeper into it.

46:25Gordon:But essentially what happens is, you know, the CIA can't find, and the Israelis can't find the other essentials of a weapons program in Syria. Where's the work on a warhead? Where's the reprocessing plant to extract the plutonium from the reactor spent fuel rods. That's a big piece of the weaponization structure. Where is it? And there's no signs of these things, right? And essentially what happens is the Israelis come to the US and say, will you please blow this thing up? At the time, President Bush is dealing with a war ostensibly fought over a weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq that didn't exist, right?

46:59Gordon:And so Bush says, essentially to the Israeli, the then, you know, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, we're not going to do it, but we're also not going to get in the way if you want to do it. And one of the very interesting pieces of the Israeli response here is, and this is where it's very different from Iraq, because with the Osirak reactor, the Israelis essentially bragged immediately that they had destroyed Saddam's program. And in this case, the Israeli analysts, and I would say much to their credit, believed that if they gave President Assad what they called a zone of denial and essentially said nothing, that there would be no response because they figured -

47:44David:He doesn't want to admit to it.

47:46Gordon:He doesn't want to admit to it. It's way out in the Eastern desert. No one will know it. It's very remote. And the nuclear program isn't really integrated into Syria's military industrial establishment. This is a North Korean transplant. And they were exactly right because Because when on the night of September 5th and 6th, 2007, they send warplanes out to the eastern desert of Al-Khibar, which is they were skipping a lot of parts of the story where the Israelis get more and more confidence that this is actually, you know, this reactor is about to go operational. And they go out and drop 17 tons of munitions on the reactor and destroy it.

48:23Gordon:And reports of a strike leak very quickly. I actually remember, Gordon, I had been a summer intern at the CIA in the summer of 2007. There were people on my team that were doing things that I wasn't read into and that most of the other members of the team weren't read into. And it was very unclear the whole summer where these analysts were headed, what they had, who they were talking to. It was all very squirrely. And I remember going back to school and actually waking up on the morning of September 6, 2007 in my college dorm and seeing a report in the New York Times about the strike out in the eastern desert of Syria.

49:02Gordon:And going, now I know. Now I know what those guys were doing. Now I know what those guys were up to. Now I know what they were up to. But again, it's the total opposite of Iraq because the Israelis don't acknowledge the strike until 2018. Yeah.

49:15David:And in a way, this is a successful strike on a program. The Syrian capacity, whatever it would have been, is destroyed. It doesn't come back. There's no sign of him restarting it. There are other cases as well in which countries try and develop nuclear programs and they are disarmed through negotiations. So you think of Libya, which is a very interesting story to do with A.Q. Khan, but I think we'll look at that again separately at a later point where, you know, intelligence, the pressure of the Iraq war leads Gaddafi to decide to give up his weapons. But North Korea develops the weapons and is never struck.

49:53David:I think one of the interesting questions, though, that comes out of this is if you're trying to stop countries developing nuclear weapons. One of the lessons people take from all of these incidents is the dangerous bit is when you're on the way to a bomb. Once you get the bomb, like the North Koreans, you're kind of in a more secure position, aren't you? Because you've got this kind of guarantee that we can mute you if you attack us. But the dangerous point is en route, because that is where you can get hit.

50:18Gordon:And again, it makes the Iranian approach of doing this very, very slowly. Now, in retrospect, look like a strategic error, doesn't it? Because there was never a race. And now look what's happened, right? I mean, and in the case of the North Koreans where they raced to get one, nothing has happened. But if you're Gaddafi and you disarm, look what happened.

50:42David:You still end up dead if you're Gaddafi. Right. You still end up dead.

50:44Gordon:I mean, Gaddafi, Saddam, and the house of Assad are all gone. And the Kim family is still running its prison colony in North Korea. So, I mean, I guess that takes us back to Iran. And again, if we go back to this point in kind of the mid-2000s when that enrichment facility at Natanz is first discovered by Israeli and Western intelligence, I mean, it raises this question of at the time, why wasn't the military option used?

51:15David:Yeah, why didn't they bomb it? And I think the truth would be that it's partly circumstance. I mean, particularly on the US side, because it's revealed, I remember this quite vividly in Washington, the program by an Iranian opposition group, summer of 2002. But that is exactly the moment the US is preparing for war with Iraq over WMD. And it's also always one of the great ironies that the US went to war with Iraq over WMD, which didn't turn out to exist, when next door in Iran, it had just been shown they were developing a clandestine enrichment facility. But the US was focused on Iraq, of course, then doesn't find the WMD Iraq, gets bogged down in Iraq.

51:54David:And that reduces the US will at that point, I think, to do anything. Plus, on the Israeli side, we know Benjamin Netanyahu is obsessed with Iran. He always has been. At this point, he's not always Prime Minister. Ayer Sharron is in those early 2000s. They're very focused on the West Bank and the Palestinian issue. So there are political reasons why at that point, You don't get a kind of bombing raid that you might do later, I think. And I think it's worth saying as well, the nature of the Iranian program, we're going to come back to this. It is different, isn't it? It is not just one reactor like Al-Kibar or Sirak, the Iraqi and Syrian reactors.

52:32David:There are multiple sites, including particularly Natanz, which just does make it more difficult, doesn't it?

52:38Gordon:So the dispersion makes it more difficult. The Iranians have also learned, I think, from the Iraqi example, right? And they have started to bury these facilities underground, right? And I mean, Natanz has these hardened underground centrifuge halls, as we'll see, and we go forward in time, and there are more facilities. the Iranians understand that the way to harden them is to put them as deep as you possibly can underground, which makes it very difficult for the Israelis who don't have some of these kind of bunker-busting munitions to do the raid on, you know, or do these kind of attacks on their own.

53:16Gordon:You have an Iranian program that's also, I mean, it's institutionalized, right? It's indigenous. So it's different in some ways from the Iraqi program and the Syrian program. It's dispersed. and all of that means that you have harder targets to hit you have more targets to hit and a lot of the the capability is is the ip that exists in the heads of iranians

53:41David:yeah and i think one of the important points there is as you said the israelis probably couldn't do it themselves because of the nature of the target so they need the u.s to come on board and as we'll see it takes many years before they get the u.s on board so what you get instead is the covert program. We've talked about this in previous episodes, we won't go through it again, but you get Stuxnet, the cyber sabotage of Iran's nuclear program to undermine its ability to do enrichment, and you get the assassination of nuclear scientists, all trying to buy time to slow down the moment when Iran could possibly get a bomb.

54:17David:Iran, of course, maintains it doesn't want a bomb, and of course it's being careful, as we said, not to race for a bomb, but what it is doing is kind of enriching more and more uranium. So at that point, you then get the shift to a diplomatic move, which is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, so-called Iran nuclear deal in 2015.

54:37Gordon:I always like my plans of action to be joint and comprehensive. I'll be head-sick. I'm a stickler for that.

54:44David:A singular partial plan of action. That would not be such a good plan. No, no. But we should say that comes in 2015, the result of lots of negotiations. The key thing there is it apparently puts a lid on Iran's enrichment. So it doesn't get rid of the material it's enriched, and this is important, but it puts a lid on its ability to do more in return for sanctions relief. And that, we should say, does appear to at least, as I said, put a lid on the program, but it's not destroyed it.

55:17Gordon:There were additional constraints too, right? I mean, so they had to reduce their centrifuge inventory, more stringent inspections, reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium. That said, the JCPOA, despite the fact that it was both joint and comprehensive, was always contentious, I think it's fair to say, at least in American politics.

55:40David:Yeah, it was politically contentious in Washington. I think a lot of other countries, he says, thinking about Europe, would say, this is the best you can get. Whereas I think Donald Trump described it as the worst deal ever negotiated. So bringing us up to, you could see strong man of strong views. We get up to closer to today because he exits. So there have been this deal, as I said, if you want to see it positively, which put a lid at least on the Iranian program, but didn't destroy it, didn't eliminate it.

56:10Gordon:And didn't deal with other aspects of, I think this is one of the major issues was it didn't deal with other aspects of Iran's behavior, its support for terrorist groups in the region.

56:18David:No, I think that's important. Yeah.

56:20Gordon:And there was sanctions relief too that was contentious, right? Because it put money back in the pockets of the regime.

56:26David:But yeah, but Trump exits in his first term, the JCPOA, and nothing basically comes to replace it either during his term or during the Biden term that comes after. And this is really to bring us up to today. Because after the withdrawal, Iran then does what, I guess, there's no longer a deal constraining it. So it starts to enrich the uranium to higher levels and start stockpiling more of it. And remind it, enriching uranium is hard, but it gets easier the more enriched it gets, the quicker it is to get it to the higher levels. And eventually you'd need to get up to the 90s to get a bomb. It's never reached that level, but it's enriched more and more.

57:09David:It's building up this By 2021, I think it's reached 60 % highly enriched uranium. And at this point, you've got this stockpile growing of highly enriched uranium. And the question, what do you do about it?

57:23Gordon:Oh, that's a good cliffhanger, Gordon. I think we should end there. And next time, come back, we will look at the first military strike on Iran's nuclear program, Operation Midnight Hammer, what it accomplished, and what can realistically be done, if anything, to eliminate Iran's nuclear program once and for all as part of Operation Epic Fury. But of course, if you don't want to wait to see, to listen to us describe in immense detail how the program could be destroyed, you don't have to wait. Go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Get early access to series, a bunch of other goodies.

58:04Gordon:I think we should also say, Gordon, we have a live show coming up, don't we? 4th to 5th of September at the South Bank Centre in London.

58:14David:So do get your tickets for that. We're really looking forward to it. It's going to be a great show. Do sign up for the newsletter as well, in which we're looking a bit more detail at the pilot rescue mission as well. But otherwise, we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.

58:34Thank you.