348. Syria, Afghanistan, and The Rest Is Classified

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0:20Welcome to a special edition of The Restless Politics and Be Roryseured. And me, Anastagambo. And the reason it's special is because we've got a guest who is a special guest because he's doing a new Rest is podcast called The Rest is Classified, which is going to tell amazing stories from the world of espionage. And it's a very good thing because unlike Roryseured, this guy is actually an ex -spoke. Exactly. Welcome, David McLossoky. Thanks for having me on, guys. I'm really excited to have you. David, one of the reasons why people were of heard of you is that you wrote this extraordinary novel, Damascus Station.

1:01But I'm not sure that everybody's aware that that draws directly on your own experience in the CIA working at she in Damascus, right? Yeah, that's right. I spent pretty much my entire CIA career as an analyst working on Syria and had the opportunity to actually live and work in Damascus just prior to the start of the uprising in 2011. And David, you picked up, I think, very clearly there because it's right there in the beginning of the book, just how brutal and unpleasant the Bashar al -Assad regime was. I mean, given that Syria's back in the news at the moment, give us a bit of a reminder of what that regime was like, what it was capable of, what it's done over the last few years.

1:44Yeah, the astounding thing just in looking at what's happened over the past few days in Syria is to think that we're now, I mean, 15 years into this conflict. I mean, this regime over that period of time has killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of its own people. I believe the UN actually just stopped counting deaths in the civil war a number of years ago. I mean, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, disappeared with essentially a massive amount of evidence to support these kind of claims that the Syrian government's been running detention and interrogation centers and disappearing its own people.

2:25You've got a country that's 90 percent probably living below the poverty line. Most of the infrastructure destroyed, I mean, this place has been entirely shattered under the decision of Bashar al -Assad and most of the people around him. Ruhi and I on, I mean, podcasts this week, we talked about Syria and the recent events that you referred to where these rebels and surgeons call them what you will have kind of taken Aleppo and are now on the way to Hamar. We didn't have a sense of this coming. It seems genuinely to have taken the world by surprise. Is that a failure of intelligence or is that just that people have taken their eye off the Syrian ball?

3:01To be honest, Alistair, I think it's a little bit of both contributing to that. I think we certainly, I mean, you could scan the pages of any major international section of a newspaper over the past, you know, five years and you'll probably see Syria in there as it relates to some foreign government bombing it, right? Or being bombed inside its borders. So the actual conflict itself in the sort of very local dynamics to it, I think, have, you know, escaped us. It's also, I think, just a tremendous failure of our ability to even structure a coherent policy as it relates to Syria across the Western world.

3:41But I think there were signs that the Syrian regime and its military in particular were increasingly hollow. And so while we probably could not have predicted how effective this attack would be, I think the kind of slow moving trends around the suffocation of this Northwest province of Idlib, which is where this main opposition group has essentially governed over the past decade. And frankly, the just complete wreck that is the Syrian military. Those were known dynamics, I think. We might not have been able to foresee exactly how quickly this would happen. But I think the tendency to call this conflict sort of frozen or even worse, to say that Bashar al -Assad had won, you know, those were lines you'd hear in Western capitals and papers.

4:28They're just apparently not true. The episode that's just come out on the rest is classified focuses on the extraordinary story of how Afghanistan was taken in 2001. So this incredible moment where the CIA working with warlords managed to topple the Taliban government in a matter of weeks. And it's this very weird story because the Taliban took the country in the mid -90s in a matter of weeks, lost the country in a matter of weeks, recaptured it just now in a matter of weeks. And that seems to echo a little bit was what we've just seen with the collapse of Bashar al -Assad's forces. And indeed the collapse of Iraqi forces are most sort when Daesh advanced them.

5:04And what is going on in these worlds where suddenly people make hundreds of miles of advances overnight and divisions of militaries flee and small groups manage to capture things? Yeah, I think the collapse of the Iraqi army and security forces in 2014 is a great analogy for what we're seeing in Syria right now because I think what we're seeing are essentially the result of you have a number of kind of slow -moving dynamics that are visible, but perhaps over time, everybody including the people living through them, like the sort of proverbial frog being boiled are not aware of how corrosive they are.

5:40And then all of the sudden the people on the other side decide to act and you realize very quickly how all of these structures are. I mean, you know, to take the Iraq example, the Iraqi army had essentially been hollowed out by its own sectarianism and corruption. And I think we're seeing a similar dynamic right now in Syria where it is kind of a paper tiger, right? Someone just sort of pushes after, you know, a decade plus of these dynamics playing out and all of a sudden we have a new reality on the ground, which if you three weeks ago just took a look at it, you'd say, oh, the Syrian regime is doing great, look at how much territory they control.

6:18Well, did they really control it? No, they just had weak military units sitting there and another side decided to come in and push and look what happened. So David, just give us a quick rundown of what this week's episode is all about. Yeah, so this week we're going to talk about one of the very first CIA teams inserted into Afghanistan in quite literally the weeks after September 11th. And it was a very small detachment of CIA, paramilitary officers and case officers and linguists and medics. And they essentially had been put in with bags of cash to link up with Afghan warlords who were fighting the Taliban.

6:59And the really interesting piece about this story among many is that this was a period of time in Afghanistan where effectively we were the insurgents against the Taliban government and really linking up with these groups in an attempt to find Osama bin Laden and to decapitate Al Qaeda. So it's got this kind of wild west element to it as well, which is quite fascinating. There's a lot of time on horseback. There's literally a massive gun battle in a gigantic Afghan star fort for its climax. So it is really a thrilling story about these very first CIA officers dropped on the ground after September 11th.

7:42Yeah, and I'm in one of the things that struck me about it was very much the figure of Mike Span who was a guy that had turned up in Afghanistan in Yakolay, Central Afghanistan, just before I got there. And when I remember turning up at the airport and Mike had managed to name the airport after his son, but he was like a figure out of Britain's great game. I mean, the stuff they were doing the way they would dress the way they were moving around in 19th century British iconography. These people would have been legendary heroes. Perms would have been written about them. Great, films would have been made about them.

8:11But tell us about the difference between somebody like that, someone like Mike and an analyst, which is what you were. The team was stacked, unfortunately, not with analysts. I got to say definitely needed that analytic firepower in those early days in Afghanistan. But Mike Span, he's a CIA paramilitary officer. That team had folks like him who essentially had history working in, they'd served in the Army. Mike, I think it being in the Marine Corps, hadn't he? He'd been a Marine, exactly. And who were not intelligence officers in the sense that their job was to go out and spot, assess, develop and recruit human sources.

8:52But it was actually in this case to provide stuff, do stuff and to support Abdel -Rushy Dostom's insurgency against the Taliban. So you had that. You had linguists, you had medics. This was a very small team that was a lot more, and it was paired up with these sort of green beret detachments as well. So this was much more of a fighting force and frankly, a way to sort of manipulate warlords on the ground to move them in the direction that we wanted to move them. Now, I was an analyst. I think the way I like to describe it is that an analyst is not unlike, you know, sort of Jack Rai and, you know, no guns, typically.

9:31We're not out there developing sources. What we're doing is actually more like clandestine journalism in a way. This is the way I would frame it is. We are looking at a whole bunch of disparate sources trying to answer a question that matters to the military, matters to policy, makers, matters to the president of the United States, and put that together in a coherent way to make sense of the world. So when we talk about Syria 10 years ago, the stuff I was writing on Syria was probably a lot simpler to what these poor analysts are working on today, which is like, what's going to happen to Assad to his military?

10:03What does it look like if the opposition takes over? Those are the kinds of questions you're answering as an analyst. I guess final thing for me, one of the continual themes in CIA's history is putting down warnings on Vietnam, warnings on Iraq, warnings on Afghanistan, warnings even on Ukraine, which are not heated. I mean, this fantastic stuff from LBJ where he says, you know, the CIA reminds him of a cow that he had at home that would, its tail would flick the shit into the milk pale. So LBJ didn't want to hear what CIA had to say about Vietnam. There is a big problem there, isn't it, which is that you can produce very high quality information.

10:39You might even be on the nail. You might even be right that Vietnam's not going well, Iraq's not going well, Afghanistan's not going to work. But there are all series of bureaucratic incentives for optimism bias group think, which means that actually the best analysis in the world just doesn't make it through. Yeah, that is exactly right. I think from the outside, you can have a tendency to think of the CIA as a policy making entity, right? I mean, the CIA is out there sort of making things happen. The reality is, the CIA is feeding a policy process and it is not the one actually making those decisions.

11:15So, frankly, the Afghanistan example comes to mind, which is there were district level assessments of control that CIA put together throughout the war. And as that picture sort of darkened, the administration, various administrations over time had the ability to sort of ignore them if it wanted to. And the CIA can't really do much about that. So, we can get things right, we can get things wrong, but at the end of the day, it is the president, the policymakers around them who were deciding what happens to that information. Well, David, good luck with it. Great to talk to you. You're presenting the rest is classified with a Brit, National Security Journalist Gordon Carrera who we know well.

11:58And there's a special treat for listeners. We've got a little clip here from this week's The Rest is Classified. Good luck.

12:11There is an Uzbek warlord who has been northern Afghanistan, who has just recently returned from exile in Turkey and he is a man by the name of Abdul Rashid Dost. Okay, let's talk about him because he is a really interesting character. I spoke to someone who was in Afghanistan at this time, a Brit, and who was saying, he thought he was a bit like Attila the Hun was his parallel. And his description of him was evil, but likable, evil, but likable. Yeah, that is a very fair description, I would say. So he is, I think he is a dothraki horse lord. So he is, he's a big guy, he looks sort of bearish.

12:49He's got this kind of gruff persona. He also smiles a lot. He laughs a lot. He is, he's never been allowed to visit the US because of his sort of, you know, allegations of war crimes, right? He has a reputation for being really a, he's very skilled fighter in politician. He's a brawler. He is a practitioner of the game of Buzkashi, which is a sort of polo -esque kind of right? So he's 47 in 2001. And the other thing to note about him other than a reputation for violence is that he fought for the communist regime in Afghanistan, right? He's taken money from the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Indians.

13:32He's been a partner with a lot of these Northern Alliance ethnic groups, but he's also fought them at various points. And that reputation for brutality is that there's a great story. So many of these are probably apocryphal, but we should probably share them because they become part of the lore. There's a story that Dustin had a man actually chained to the tracks of a Russian -made tank in a courtyard of one of his forts and actually drove the tank around until it, you know, smashed the guy to pieces. There were stories about him actually crushing people's skulls in his hands and that he was known to eat 12 chickens at a time and drink two quarts of vodka in one sitting.

14:10So anytime you're a warlord that's got this sort of lore around you, you know, you're probably doing something right. And this is the kind of the guy the CIA going to work with. I mean, yes, the answer is yes, right? That's not a little bit awkward, but I guess needs must, is that thinking? That's right. I mean, he's not trusted by the CIA at this point. In fact, the CIA has not been in contact with him in the 90s. The CIA is too bad. He's too. Yes, he was not seen as the most sort of trustworthy ally for very good reasons. You know, I had all the sideswitching and the war crimes to name a few.

14:49But the CIA after 9 -11, they need to get in touch with him because he is the little patch of terrain that he sort of naturally would own in northern Afghanistan and which he did own and essentially ran as a mini -state in the 1990s is really pretty. How'd you get in touch with someone like that if you haven't been in touch with them? Well, clearly you work through a friend who used to work with the national automobile dealers insurance trust in Washington, DC. Yes, because this is so Dostum again, has no direct relationship with CIA. Dostum has a friend in the states who in the 80s got sort of connected to Afghanistan because one of his colleagues at the national automobile dealers insurance trust was an Afghan politician who had left after the war.

15:34So Dostum gets in touch with this guy who puts Dostum in touch with the Pentagon. Dostum gets put in touch with the CIA and specifically with a CIA officer named David Tyson who's going to be critical for the story to come and who is the only Uzbek linguist at the CIA. He's a central Asian focused case officer who's been working in Tashkent, Uzbekistan out of the station there. And he's the one person who speaks Uzbek. He's the one person. He becomes a very important person in the CIA at this point, having probably not been the most important person previously. He's going in then with the team into to see Dostum.

16:10That's right. And he gets on the phone with Dostum and says, you know, Dostum of course is asking him, well, how many tanks will you bring? And David Tyson says, well, it'll just be me and six or seven guys, but don't worry, we'll bring our sleeping bags. And of course, Dostum in the accounts is audibly taken aback by how light this footprint's going to be. But, you know, he's used to sort of improvising and he says, well, I have no armored personnel carriers or heavy guns. I'll have got his horses, mules, and donkeys. So I suppose we're even. If you want to hear the full episode, search the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts.