372. Syria, al-Sharaa, and the future of the Middle East

27:50So said maybe more plainly, I think they're being, they're not being as sort of, you're not just cutting off all those former elements and saying you have no future, there is a potential pathway back in to a new government. Now, so those are the differences, but I think it is true that there is a massive risk that as you have a bunch of, you know, alloys with military, with combat experience who sit in the mountains for a long time without any hope of coming back into some structure where they are paid, the longer that goes on, the greater the chances that you have yet another, you know, sort of armed faction that Shara and the government need to deal with, and that I think is one of the major issues facing the country right now is just the proliferation of the number of armed groups that need to be dealt with and sort of absorb or coerced or included into a national government.

28:43I said when Roy and I had a chat after the interview that I kept sort of figgling and seeing parallels with the Northern Ireland situation and how the IRA can have moved or parts of the IRA moved at different paces to others to get to the idea that there could be kind of a peaceful approach to the problem. I mean, how, and I remember one's Tony Blair saying, you've got to understand these guys, Adams and again, Jerry Adams and Martin McGinnis, they're walking around with the not inconsiderable risk, somebody's going to pull it in the back of their head. Yeah. How big a risk is that to him right now?

29:18And I mean, the security rule will testify, the security around him was pretty intense. And what are the fears? Who will he be worried about? How will he be trying to get those people inside? Yeah. Well, he is a massive number of problems. He's got, I think, you know, he's got, I mean, you started to take the software, right? You have the Syrian National Army, basically Turkish, Janissary Group in the north of Syria. He's got the Syrian Democratic forces in the northeast Kurds, armed group that's totally separate from HDS. He has, there are, Drew's militias down in Sueda, there are other militias down south in Dara, and he's got the Islamic State, which I mean, if you look at, I think there have been probably almost 10 foiled terror attacks over the past few months, probably in part because the US has been sharing intelligence with HDS to prevent these from happening.

30:18So he's got a massive number of potential groups interested in putting a bullet in his head. I also think, or at least, you know, where you'd have elements of a group that might consider it, consider it, and really try to make it happen. I also think below the waterline, and it's something we don't see because these are not the guys who are giving interviews to British podcasters, but you have a, a harder line, sort of group inside his kind of military council who are, again, they're not the public face, but these are the people who have fought with him, blood died, and who I think probably have views about the future of Syria that most of us would, you know, they're not Jeffersonian Democrats, and he has to, he has to assuage that group and keep them on side as part of this transition.

31:14Would they be hoping, if they were to listen to the interview that Roy and I did with them, would they be hoping and sitting there thinking, oh, I kind of understand why he's saying this, but he doesn't really mean it. Maybe, maybe, but I think I think this is where I think some of the real risk is, and it's it's less on his points about sort of transnational jihad or external attacks or anything like that. I think it is more about a thought, or how closed or open the political system will be, and whether, I think the biggest risk here is really about a drift into authoritarianism, and I think what that's what those guys are looking for is, when we talk about, when Shada talks about being inclusive and kind of running a more open process to represent the different factions and groups that comprise Syria, is he talking about actually giving away power that this HTS sort of armed faction has earned over the past couple of years, you know, or not?

32:17And I think that's where the tension probably below the water line really is. To help us understand a little bit more about the ideology of the hardliners. So I guess the Syrian opposition was broadly split in two, or it felt like it was. There were people who initially the West was very excited about 2012, 13, 14, who were educated, apparently quite progressive, liberal, democrats. And then there was another group, which was very much associated with the current president. And those guys fought and died for 20 years, including losing their friends who went off as suicide bombers and got themselves blown up, fighting for quite a different vision.

33:01Can you tell us a little bit about, even if it's changed, what was the hardliners vision five, six years ago, socially? What was their vision of Israel? What was their vision of the United States? What was their vision of how countries should be run? What is this hardline view in the background that he's going to have to navigate and deal with and that may ultimately pose a threat to him if he doesn't deliver? Yeah. I mean, well, I'll say that I'll just, I kind of look at this through the lens of how he governed Idlib in the Northwest, right? Where you had a sort of technocratic government that was doing a lot of the things we would associate with the state, right?

33:44It's delivering services. It's building roads. There was a military college for defectors that actually brought in people who had left the former regime's military. They delivered emergency relief after the earthquake in 2023, right? So there were a lot of these things that, you know, you'd look at that and you'd say, that's great to have an alternative to Assad. At the same time, there was a, you know, I think it was called a Supreme Fatwa Council, which sat outside the kind of, maybe more democratic structures or the more technocratic structures of Hayat Tahrir al -Sham. There were current, you know, it's administering Quranic schools, things like that.

34:26And then in these kind of what they would call liberated areas, the minority groups, be they droos or be they Christians, were not really represented in any of the sort of political elements of HTS. And so I think the concern, and then, of course, have cases of HTS, you know, members, you know, talking about or even I think in some cases, executing women for corruption and prostitution and things like that, although I will point out that they never had a kind of promotion of virtue and prevention of vice kind of morality, police in Idlib. So it's complicated, right? Because it's not, again, I think the problem here or one of the problems is that we set our expectations in the States for what is going to happen in Syria so high that, you know, we're sort of expecting it to become this kind of, you know, wonderful flowering democratic experiment.

35:25I don't think that, you know, Hayat Tahrir al -Sham is a democratic organization. It's politically authoritarian. And I think that is, you know, in addition to some of these kind of, this kind of ideological bent of its recent past, you know, it's caused for some concern. David, we've had lots of questions in while we've been talking. And here's one from a member, Helen Dance. And this I go, I guess, goes to the heart of the intelligence agencies like to give a sense of being all knowing, which makes the point, given that nobody saw the situation we have inserted there rising with either the outcome or the pace that it did, how will today's analysts be changing the way they think about the country and what develops next?

36:08And by the way, I noticed you didn't answer my question earlier about which of the best agencies in the world? Oh, it's the CIA. Of course. No, I, uh, okay, let me take the intelligence to one first. I mean, I think, I think you're right that, you know, the SIS is a, is an exceptional service, particularly obviously what it does is human, and it's very, very, very good at that. I think that the, you know, it would be hard to tell, to answer this question without bringing up the Mossad. And I do that simply because, you know, if you look at, Mossad does not have a global mandate, really, right?

36:46They're very, very focused in their neighborhood and they're very, very good at what they do. I mean, look at what they did in Lebanon with the Pager attack. And, you know, you could argue about the sort of strategic rationale for that and certainly the morality of it. But from the standpoint of an intelligence operation, it's absolutely incredible. And the way they've penetrated Iranian society over the past 20 years is absolutely astounding. So I think some of these smaller services, frankly, you guys, the Israelis, even the French, like, that have a more targeted, you know, sort of mandate in some respects can pull off incredible operations.

37:30Okay. And Helen's question, Helen's question. So I will, I would say that, number one, I would argue that nobody saw this coming as quickly as it did. But I would argue that the kind of the weakness, the corruption, the hollowing out of the Assad regime, that was very well known. It was also well known that HTS was planning a major attack in the fall and that it was going to be doing different from what had come before. So those things were known. But I do think when we talk about the regime collapsing in the way that it did, essentially bloodlessly, not really, but close, you're sort of dealing with a psychological, a mass psychological shift on the part of the regime's soldiers and, and it's officials where everybody just sees it collapsing at once and it just goes like a domino.

38:26So I think that, you know, the point being here, I think the CIA analysts prior to this probably had written papers about how a lot of the pillars supporting the regime had weakened significantly and that they were sort of primed for problems, but they would not have predicted the collapse. That said, I think the way that the CIA is probably looking at this now, I'm not sure they're changing the way they think about the country necessarily, but they're probably now looking at a set of questions, much like we're discussing today and coming up with practical signposts that they would see in the intelligence to indicate sort of which scenario we're headed toward because it is very possible that we, you know, we head toward another phase of the civil conflict in Syria and they'll be watching that very, very closely.

39:16David, let's just sort of step back for a second and maybe develop Helen's question a little bit more. One of the big problems in intelligence is knowing when something will happen. I mean, often it feels a little bit like somebody saying, well, there are, you know, big problems and the American economy in terms of its debt. And so at some point, the market's going to collapse, but we never haven't really any idea how. And I remember this because, you know, my first posting in an embassy was in Indonesia and people for 20 years have been pointing out that Suhato's regime was corrupt and hollow and was going to collapse anytime, but officers came and went and posting after posting 20 years never really happened.

39:55And I remember in Syria that, you know, we were told by a lot of people who knew a lot about Syria that, for sure, I said, we'll be gone within six months. And, you know, I suppose what I'm trying to get at here and in Ukraine and all these things, how on earth do intelligence officers get around the problem of timing? Because it's all very well saying these regimes that hollowed out corrupt their institutions are crumbling. But if you miss call by 10 years when they actually fall, that makes a lot of difference in the real world. It does. And it drove the Obama administration absolutely nuts when we would write these assessments because we were not able to be precise about the timing.

40:37We were able to point out the sources of strength that Assad's regime had where there were weaknesses. We were able to do the same on the side of kind of the opposition in the early years of the war. But they wanted, and they being Obama's NSC, you know, they wanted an assessment of how long this guy had left. You know, can he survive in other six months or not? And we couldn't, we could never do it. And it made them very, very angry at us to the point where, you know, I think oftentimes they would just ignore the analysis because they would look at, you know, they ask a direct question and that you don't give them a direct answer.

41:18And that makes, you know, that tends to make policy makers very angry. I do think the reality of it though is that, and the comparison I would make here is the way that communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989. You, you would have looked at that, and you would have been able to say, you would have been able to write assessments in the late 80s about the different weaknesses that these regimes had, that the Soviet regime had. You would have been able to paint a very negative picture like you could have of Assad's regime in military four months ago. But when you're dealing with a mass psychological shift that happens all at once, I think you were pushing up against the limits of human cognition and forecasting.

42:00And all you can do at that moment is put together a set of scenarios for what could happen, put some weight on them and explain what you would expect to see if you're moving down one of these three or four pads. And that kind of thing, you know, to a policy maker though is not what you want. You want an answer to the question. And, and as an intelligence analyst, you oftentimes just cannot give it. David, would you, would your successes be that interested in where Assad is now and what he's doing and how he's living? Does he remain somebody that the CIA are interested in and want to know about?

42:39Probably not. I think, I mean, well, let me put it this way. As an analyst, as a, as a former analyst working on Syria and having spent a decent amount of my youth thinking about Bashar al -Assad, God help me. I am immensely curious, just from the standpoint of, of, I mean, look, I in my book, Damascus Station, I have a scene where I almost kill Bashar al -Assad. There's a bomb that gets put into a big, you know, sort of security meeting and he's, he's nearly killed. And I, that did not, that actual event happened more or less as I wrote it, but Bashar wasn't there. And I put him in that scene because I wish him ill and despised the man and, and wanted to sort of give him a good scare, right, in the novel.

43:24I am deeply interested in, you know, him, what he's doing, moping around one of his luxury apartments or his dacha, his new dacha in Moscow. Like, I'm interested in that. But I think from the standpoint of sort of where are the intelligence, where are the foreign intelligence collection priorities right now? I would have to think he's pretty low on the list. In less, in less, we start to see members of HTS or Shada starting to, you know, engage with the Russians around this idea of him being, you know, maybe a return to Syria or something like that, which I think is very unlikely. I mean, he'd be more, sorry, sorry.

44:08So Dylan from Solihub coming in, what's the stop Syria going the same way as Libya? And I wonder whether you could use that as a route in to talk a little bit about what this regime was like. What, what was the difference between Bashar al -Assad regime? You were living there on the ground in Damascus. You were a CIA analyst operating out of the embassy, and you would have had a sense of what it was. And how was it different from Gaddafi's Libya or Putin's Russia or other forms of autocratic gangster regime? Give us a sense of how it worked. Yeah. Well, in many respects, it was similar to the way those, I think there was kind of an autocratic model for how you run one of these places.

44:49And there are some similarities between Libya and between Russia and pretty much any other authoritarian country on Earth, where essentially the way they ran it was, and again, it had been prior to Assad's father taking power in 1970. There had been something on the order of like a dozen coups between independence from the French in 1946 and Assad taking power in 70. So, you know, it was very politically unstable. When Assad took power, what he did, and this is the system that Bashar more or less continued up until the eve of the civil war, is they could prove the place. And what that meant was they took they built a system of, you know, four main security agencies that were responsible for internal security that all had overlapping mandates and similar capabilities that all spied on each other.

45:43And that were sort of managed by Assad at the top so that you never let one get too powerful. And they could report on each other so you could understand where threats came from. You also build a set of sort of Praetorian military units that are loyal to you, typically by blood, and that are capable of destroying in urban combat any other formation of, you know, sort of your regular military that might conspire against you in a coup. And they had actually multiple bullies Praetorian units because it was the same sort of hub and spoke thing with them, where if you had one that got too big for its bridges, the other one could destroy it.

46:28Now, you then, you basically had a state that was being run as a, you know, it was, it was a repressive apparatus masquerading as a state. The state itself had become quite hollow. The security institutions, the repressive institutions were the most powerful and effective ones. They were deeply predatory. And, you know, the Syrians had a word for this, was you could get pulled or taken behind the sun. You could just be plucked off the streets and taken away by these, you know, by these groups and put into these horrible prisons, which you've seen so much of over the past few months, and be gone.

47:02And so there was this kind of wall of fear that developed. There was no, I think, by the end, and this is a big part of Bashar's downfall, whatever social contract had existed, largely between his father and Syrians, which obviously had these elements of repression mixed in, but was based on some promise of stability and some measure of sort of economic output. All of that was gone. There was no social contract anymore between the government and between society. It was kind of a slave society in some ways. You could think about that mentality as the one that destroyed the regime. So, I think, of course, let's jump in there.

47:42What can you tell us about the, what seems like a rather remarkable journey of the wife, this sort of seeming fairly ordinary, quite good -looking middle -class British woman, who becomes, I'll listen to your discussion with Gordon Carrera on the rest is classified by this, who becomes a kind of complete monster, but a very powerful one. And also, would the wife of something like, I'll share an out, be somebody that the CIA will be trying to find out about, were you interested in asthma at the time? Yeah, very much interested in asthma, because she played a role. I mean, even before she took on more of a formal kind of economic role in recent years, she was a kind of informal advisor to Bashar, and was obviously a very helpful way for him to really portray the regime in kind of this soft and, you know, comforting glow.

48:47I mean, there's the famous, you know, article that came out about a month before the protest started called a rose in the desert. I don't have it in here in my office, but I have one in my house. I retained the hard copy because Vogue tried to eliminate all references to it. So, asthma was a very, it was always of interest to us from an intelligence collection standpoint, and I would imagine that Shada's wife right now, there'd be a similar sort of interest in understanding who she is, what she believes, what level of influence might she have over his decision making? Absolutely. But yeah, I think that, you know, the journey is something that is, you know, it's sort of, it's a very interesting story to think about asthma going from.

49:31I think she was, she raised an act in or something. I mean, she's like, yeah, her, her father was a cardiologist, is a cardiologist, and, you know, to go from that to overseeing in many respects the system of sort of industrial -level slaughter and repression, I don't know. It says something about humanity that I think we don't, you know, and just the way all of us can be pulled into systems that become bigger than us and, and, and where we, you know, sort of can lose ourselves. It's just really a profound human story, I think. David, as we sort of come towards the end, we're getting a number of comments, and so Steve has come in and said, how about Ukraine?

50:16Surely that matters more to the world than Syria. And I guess what, what that's an invitation to do is to give you a, a chance to think a little bit more about the bigger world picture, you know, lift your head from Syria and give us a sense of what's going on, what you're worried about, and, and whether Syria does or doesn't fit into that. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, as I alluded to up front, I do think that from a, you know, if you zoom all the way out, you kind of look at the world from, I don't know, geostrategic standpoint, does Syria matter all that much? I'm not certainly does. I think it is intensely interesting.

50:54And the reason I, you know, have written about it in novels is because I'm very interested in the place and it's people, right? And so I think from just a human standpoint, it matters deeply, right? But yes, if you zoom all the way out and you look at the, you know, sort of menu of challenges that we have in front of us, I mean, I think, I guess the way you could think about it would be we've got sort of the, you know, absolute nasty revenge of geopolitics ongoing right now. You could look at Russia, Ukraine, you could look at, you know, China's military build up in Asia, you could look at realizing there's sort of been been, you know, diminished over the past six months, but you could look at Iran and its position in the Middle East.

51:36You would look at this sort of really, I think, frightening implications of a wave of technologization of life and intelligence that are now before us and create all kinds of, you know, scenarios in which the marginal cost of violence and chaos are going way down, which is, you know, disturbing. And then lastly, you look at kind of the global information landscape, how fragmented it is. I mean, even in states now, where do you get your information about what's true and what's what's what's false? It's very hard to make sense of basic facts. So you put all of those things together, serious a piece of all of them.

52:16I'm sure to some degree, but yeah, it's it's not the, it's not the headline. David, when we interviewed John Soars, who was my former colleague in Downey Street, went on to become the head of a MI6, he said that you were novel Damascus Station was one of the best things ever written about espionage. But and I was surprised by that because actually not because it's not a great novel, but because a lot of people in the special forces, in the intelligence agencies, they kind of have a bit of a thing about insiders writing when they're outside, even if it's presented as fiction. And I just wondered how conscious you are of that and whether you're whether even as a novelist, you're you're actually quite careful about about what you write.

53:00Yeah. Well, I really did appreciate that comment he made to you guys. That was that was wonderful to hear. I mean, you know, I think, look, I have to be I do have to be careful. I have to send everything I write to our publication review board. They review it. They determine if, you know, I've put anything that's classified in there. I have a pretty good self -sensor at this point to understand where it's inappropriate. If I were to, you'll boot your boots get cleared. Hey, you cleared. Yeah, they get cleared. They get cleared. But, you know, I think I am trying and I really do think there's space for this as evidenced by the fact that all the books have been cleared and I, you know, they're out there.

53:37But I think there's space for writing in an authentic way about the espionage business, not just the trade craft and the operations, but they, you know, but like the culture of these institutions, what it's actually like to work there. I mean, even even the fact that if you look at the Hollywood rendition of the CIA or SIS, like it, it's like the superhero spy construct where you have someone who's always very attractive running around with a weapon in a car chase, you know, killing somebody and the reality of the work, I think is actually far more interesting than that. It's far more about human drama and I think the books, you know, they've been a way to sort of tell that story about the actual.

54:22Have you seen, have you seen slow horses? I have. Yes. Yeah. And so we talk about, are we talking James Bond or slow horses? Where is the reality? Yeah, I think the reality is that it is more slow horses, right? I mean, there's obviously stuff in there that's, you know, crazy too, but it is more like that. I mean, it is the way I have kind of described CIA to people and I think it's true of almost any intelligence service is that these are really bipolar institutions, right? On one hand, you have this very sort of high stakes mission, which is to go out and convince, you know, people in Syria or Russia or China wherever to sell you or give you state secrets.

55:10I mean, and then on the other hand, you have these massive government bureaucracies, like at CIA, there's a, you know, there's a gift shop. Like, so you have, you have a kind of weird, like, and I think you have weird bureaucratic stuff that would be similar to the way anyone who's worked on a big corporation, they look at that and say, yeah, that's like what it, you know, it's what it's like to work at British Airways or AT &T, you know? So both of those things are happening all at once. And I think the best kind of spy fiction melds those together to some degree to show you the reality of that world.

55:43And David, tell us why you left. I mean, you obviously have enough love of it to be writing novels about it, but not enough love of it to want to have put 40 years of your life into becoming a senior person, doing many more postings, getting involved and other things. What is the side of it if you're able to be a little introspective for a moment that meant that you didn't want to be a full career officer? And what are, what are, whether other ethical stresses, emotional stresses in the job, which made you feel you might be happier outside? Yeah, I think, I mean, so I've been out now for a decade and in that intervening 10 years, I should have come up with a sexier answer to this question that, that has me sort of, you know, in knots about Syria and the way we dealt with it or the sort of morality of the of the spy business.

56:40And I don't have an answer like that at all. And my answer is this. So, you know, I joined the CIA as an undergraduate intern, which is an actual job at the Central Intelligence Agency. I took my first polygraph when I was 19 years old that came and recruited when I was, you know, in literally international politics 101 and had no sense of the actual world and wanted one. And so when I joined the CIA, I had no experience doing anything other than digging holes for a sprinkler system company and flipping burgers at Wendy's. Like legitimately, those were the two entries on my resume prior to the CIA.

57:15And so after working there for a while, I started to get this sense that I wanted to see and, you know, I'm retrospective about, or sort of, you know, introspective about this point. I, at some point in my CIA journey, I said, I want to get out and see how, you know, how does a business actually function? What is it like outside of DC? I want to get out of here and just kind of see what else is going on in the world. And that was the reason, that was the reason why I left. I was, of course, frustrated by what was going on in Syria, frustrated by our policy. But, and maybe in some way that contributed, but for me at the time, it was the sense of, I want to get out of these walls and see what else is going on in the world.

57:54David, we're coming up to an hour. My last question is quite a big one. When you were, without giving your age away, when you were 27 years of age, I was working down in street and we were in the build up to the Iraq war and we took a decision to publish a paper presented to Parliament, put it into the public domain, which was partly based on intelligence. And fair to say, that was controversial at the time, and it's, and it's remained controversial all these years later. And there was, from the top of the intelligence agencies, if there was any pushback, we didn't see it. But certainly down the ranks, there were people telling the media, telling MPs, they rooted in like this.

58:37I just wondered what, what you would take is on that. But also, how do you balance the, the, the need for privacy, the secrecy, but sometimes policy makers wanting to make a case in public that is based upon intelligence? Yeah, it's a very tough kind of road to walk, I think, in a real balancing act. I mean, most recently, and I think with great success, there's been an example of this with the kind of strategic declassification of intelligence around, you could run up to, yeah, the war on Ukraine, where I think it was, again, from the outside, it seemed like quite an effective way to build a coalition, or frankly, just to warn that the Russians were actually going to do this.

59:27So I think there are examples where putting information out in a way that, you know, doesn't threaten the collection method, doesn't threaten the source of that information, makes really good sense, because if we had not, we, you know, the CIA or the US, if we had not gone around, you know, and, and actually briefed that material, I think it's very unlikely that anyone would believe that the Russians were going to do this, or at least would have diminished the number of groups, you know, in sort of countries who saw it coming. So I think there's a real place for it. But again, you've got to be very careful, because I'd imagine that information that we've collected is coming off of, you know, human assets, or frankly, technical collection programs that are very expensive to, to reconstitute, and that you want during, in this case, during the war, to be able to collect information going forward.

1:00:26Yeah. The final one for me then. What is it that you feel that the public, and I guess in your case, particularly the US public, doesn't necessarily understand about international relations, about countries like Syria, about wars like Ukraine. What is it that you wished you were able to communicate when you see the public debate?

1:00:54I think that, I wish, I wish that when we talk about, when we talk about a place like Syria, and we talk about Russia, Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine's great example of this. I wish that there was a tighter connection made by the people who do the talking, and why it matters to actual people in the United States, or, you know, Great Britain, like why does the outcome of a war in Eastern Europe matter to us? You know, I think that connection really, I mean, I live in Texas. I'm not in DC. The people around me in my neighborhood, and the people who I go to the coffee shop with, and, you know, if you talk about, you know, that conflict, there is an immense confusion over why it matters to us, why we would care at all, why we would fund it, why we would support the Ukrainians.

1:01:50That's just one example. So I think this connection of what goes on outside of our borders with what practically, the sort of the practical concerns and interests of, you know, Americans that live in Texas or Iowa or Minnesota, that is what I wish, I wish policymakers would do more of that, because I think the way we talk about it, and I guess the other thing I would add is I wish we did, we created a tighter connection between the things that we say and the things that we did, because I think we have allowed a lot of our kind of strategic communications and rhetoric to get way out in front of the actual policymaking, and I wish that we were, you know, more, I guess, more disciplined about that.

1:02:37Well, David, it's hard to square that with Heskith basically telling the Europeans, Ukraine's all about Europe and JD Bansing, he can't be bothered to see Olaf Schultz, because he doesn't think it's going to be there very long. So if they're not, it's hard to see that they, I don't think they have that link in mind. But listen, David, thanks for all your time. We've got one final question, which from Andy wants to hear about some future episodes coming up, the rest is classified. I also, before you do that, I want to remind people that our interview with Al Sharra is out, just search leading wherever you listen or you watch.

1:03:12Also, do think about joining the rest is politics, plus a lot of the questions we've got today. So we couldn't get through more of them, but it's been fascinating talking to David. And also, Groorys having a day off tomorrow to watch football, which is we're all know he loves to do. But once Burnley had beaten Preston North End, I am going to be doing another live stream with the mooch. We're going to be interviewing former Bank of England governor and currently prime ministerial hopeful in the 51st state of America, AKA Canada, Mr. Mark Carney. David, why don't you just close off with telling us about some future episodes coming up for the rest is classified.

1:03:50Yes, so we are, we are doing a six -parter on Edward Snowden. Oh, wow. Yes, yes. You can tell me, tell me Gabbard's friend. You can take a wild guess how I come down at Edward Snowden. I'll leave that bag. So we're doing a six -parter on him, which was quite interesting to do. We're going to do a couple episodes actually on Greenland and some of the kind of, you know, spy stories around that, why it matters today, why it's in the news, other than the fact that it'll be my third vacation home after my one in Canada. And then we're going to do a couple on kind of the past and present of CIA purges, going back to the Halloween massacre and talking about kind of the precedent for, you know, getting rid of officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, what it means, and how today fits into that context.

1:04:49So, little sample of what's coming up. Very good. It was great to have you as part of the rest of this family. And final goodbye from me and a huge thank you to the people who belong to the rest of politics plus because this is a stream that's been driven by their questions. Just remind people, join the rest of politics plus, it supports the podcast, which we're very grateful to, but it also allows you early entry to live events. We do specific things which are only available to rest of politics plus listeners, including you'll find unique infuse, you'll find unique content being provided. And we are very grateful for everybody, both those who join the rest of politics plus and those who are just joining us for coming part of this.

1:05:30And we'd also like finally to say this is of course is something that's going to drive you hopefully towards the wonderful work that David does on the rest is classified. Bye, guys. All the best, nice David. Thank you.