#220 Simone Ledeen - Fmr. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy

32:03But I will say this is, like, this is not the same thing. You want this regime that creates these terror proxies that we know have killed Americans, aggressively gone after us. You want them to have a nuke? You want them to give that nuclear weapon technology to the freaking Houthis and whoever else? I don't. And so just because one thing was wrong doesn't mean this is right or this isn't right. Right. I just like having the having Iran have a nuclear weapon like their ballistic missile technology. It's worth saying this to you. Their ballistic missile technology is so was so sophisticated. They were building missiles that could go farther and farther and farther, not just to hit Israel.

33:00What were they going to do with those ballistic missiles that could travel so, so far? They were targeting us or eventually. So it was in our national interest to make sure that they never got a nuclear weapon. And I think if Israel had had the technology to do it themselves, I think we would have let them and we wouldn't have gotten involved. But unfortunately, we are the only ones that have that technology. We have the B2. We have these bunker busters. Maybe we'll start selling those to Israel. Great. But it's in our interest, too. Like, they are coming for us, too. I mean, I know they're coming for us.

33:41You know, I'm not saying that at all. But, you know, there was a couple other things that came out of it. I know you have a lot of friends and acquaintances still in intelligence and probably a lot more than I do. I still have a couple. But, you know, I talked to one person. They said not one of our 18 intelligence agencies reported that Iran had nuclear capabilities. In fact, you know, March 2025, Tulsi Gabbard, this is her, the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei, sorry, I'm butchering his name, has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.

34:232003. And then in June of 25, quoted, America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months. If they decide to finalize the assembly, President Trump has been clear that can't happen. And I agree. And so, I mean, how does that, how did this all change just within a couple of months? They had no capability. Now all of a, I mean, after years and years of intel, all of a sudden in a couple of months, oh, shit, they've got nuclear capabilities. We need to take care of this. That didn't come from us. That came from Assad. Why wouldn't we trust our 18 intelligence agencies more than we trust a foreign government's?

35:09Well, that foreign government had completely penetrated Iran, and we had it. I mean, we see their operations potentially ongoing even now. so targeted, so specific, we weren't where they were. And they saw things that we didn't. And I love a good conspiracy as much as the next person. But, like, they have to get this right. I mean, we did not have, in my opinion, based on what I saw previously, We did not have that level of penetration that they did. And that was a game changer. Okay. Well, that's good to know. It's just things that I don't understand because I don't have a full picture. And with a lot of the stuff that you can read on the internet, I mean, it gets you real.

36:06No, but it's tough, Sean, because people hear that and they're like, oh, the Israelis told us. So we just believe them. And then we're going to go take out their biggest enemy. I get that. And it sucks. It also happens to be true. So I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, it is. I wish that we had better collection inside of Iran, that we had had better collection. And now things are changing, but not in terms of us, but what's going to happen with the regime? I don't know anymore because they're totally defenseless right now. I mean, just going back on our earlier conversation when we were talking about analysts and intelligence folks, I mean, not knowing what they're doing because of where they came from, from the Ivy League schools.

37:00I mean, do you think that played into why we didn't have that type of intelligence? I think that's part of it. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think just our general risk aversion is overwhelming. And, you know, you were in the CIA. You saw, like, institutionally, they're risk averse. Hopefully now things are changing there. But I don't know. And I know I was extremely frustrated by how little was going on. I'm like, four years ago, we could see the trajectory of this whole thing with Iran, with them building the nukes. Whether you want to parse that they're this close or that close, the intelligence community started playing these games where they're like, well, if they decided to make a nuclear weapon, they could do it within, you know, a very short period of time.

37:53But it's like, with medium, I think at the time it was like medium, what do you call it? Sorry, that they had medium confidence of that assessment. I'm like, so you don't know anything, basically, like, I'm supposed to make decisions off of this, or I'm supposed to advise my boss's boss about, like, based on that. that's not that helpful. And of course, having been an intelligence analyst before, I know, like, I get it. And I don't want to, like, beat the dead horse too much. I mean, sometimes you have what you have to work with, unfortunately. But I think at the end of the day, the president in his first term, President Trump made it clear, no new wars.

38:46He didn't want to go to war with Iran. He wanted a deal. There were things that we could have done back then, like beneath the level of armed conflict. We have authorities that we can use to do certain things that are, you know, in the gray zone, Sean, you know about all that. We could have done that. And And I didn't really see anyone who could have done it do it. And unfortunately, it led to a scenario where there was no other option. The only option was this big kinetic public thing. Could we have potentially avoided that earlier with a little more risk taking? I think so. And again, no accountability for any of that at all.

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41:32EPA automotive trends report 2025. Yeah. Is it true that in Trump's first term he took the inspectors of the nuclear facilities out? I don't know. I don't know about that. In Iran? Okay. That's something I've been wanting to dive into. But anyways, let's move on. So I want to do, we have a lot of stuff to discuss, and I really am excited to get into the Iraq war with you, but I thought it would be good to do somewhat of a life story, and then we can go down rabbit holes along the way. Great. So where did you grow up? Well, my parents are American, but they met and married in Italy. So I spent my, I was born in the U.S., but I spent my early years in Rome.

42:25and actually Italian is my first language. Is it really? Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful, but not that helpful outside of like restaurants and going on nice trips. But yeah, so we moved to D.C. when I was like four. My father was a university professor at the time and he started getting death threats from the communists. There was the Red Brigades, very active in left-wing terrorists, communist terrorists, very active in Italy, and they had killed a bunch of people there. And he got a death threat, and I was very young, and he was like, we out. So we came to the U.S. He got a job at a think tank at Georgetown University.

43:25And so I grew up in D.C., in the D.C. area, swamp creature. Swamp creature. Yeah. My parents ended up both working in the Reagan administration. My father went to the State Department and eventually to the National Security Council. And my mother was working at the Pentagon doing technology transfer, like trying to keep the Soviets from getting our best technology. So, yeah, that's why I grew up. And then I ended up, my father, unfortunately, at the National Security Council, ended up working in the same office with Oliver North and Bud McFarlane and was swept up in the Iran-Contra affair. I was 12 when all that happened.

44:21And I had a pretty uncomfortable exchange with the principal of the school that I was in who asked me if my father was guilty. and I went home that day and told my mother and she was like, well, you don't have to go back to that school ever again. And so kind of mid-year, I switched to a new school, very bougie all-girl school where like everyone's dad was way more important than mine and no one cared. So, and I only learned later, you know, how, how much of a struggle that was for my parents to be able to pay that tuition because it was like one of those borderline things where they didn't qualify for any kind of scholarship.

45:09And frankly, I wasn't a good enough student to get any kind of scholarship, anything. But yeah, they had to, they sacrificed a lot to pay for my education. And I'm very grateful. But anyway, yeah, so I went through high school there and then, yeah, off to college. Where'd you go? I went to a school called Brandeis University in Massachusetts. And I did not do particularly well in school, in high school. But when I got to college, I realized that I knew more than a lot of other people just because my school was so good. And it all started to make sense. Like, why did I have to go there and not just public school?

45:57So, yeah, I remain very grateful for that. But, yeah, I went to Brandeis University, majored in European cultural studies just so that I could get credit for a full year overseas. Pretty much always wanted to travel, live overseas, had the wanderlust. and so I went to Italy and did like in my mind I had this eat pray love thing you know I went to Florence and thought it would be this great adventure but I made a critical mistake which was I actually did a program at the University of Florence which was like hard as shit so I had to do it, it was in Italian. And you go to like, the way they do it there is like you go to lectures, you read this whole pile of books, they give you the reading list.

46:52And like, you have one exam at the end of the year. And it's, it's an oral exam in front of a panel of professors. And it's like half an hour and they can ask you anything. And that sucked. I had no eat, pray, love situation. I had like study, study, study. But I learned a lot. And Florence was beautiful. And I got out of Brandeis, which already was like crazy left, crazy left. Coming from D.C., I wanted nothing to do with politics. I just wanted to be like normal kid, normal experiences. I mean, when I was young, I remember in D.C., we had like Jean Kirkpatrick over for dinner one night. And she, my father was like delayed at work.

47:41So it was like me and my mom with Jean Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations. I mean, if you ever look her up on YouTube, she was like a serious person. Okay, serious person. And I guess our oven broke. My mom was putting some like frozen hors d 'oeuvres or whatever in the oven to warm up and the oven was broken. So she sent me next door, like to use the next door neighbor's oven. And I got stopped by the Secret Service because I'm running back and forth with food. They're like, what are you doing with the food? And that was my, you know, I had a weird childhood. It was not like a lot of other kids.

48:20So when I went to college, I just wanted to be normal. And but instead, it was just all this craziness already. And, like, we had, I forget what year it was, maybe my sophomore year, we had a big student event, which was Angela Davis was invited as a speaker. Angela Davis, former vice presidential candidate under the Communist Party. She was briefly on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for like busting her boyfriend out of court. I think a judge was killed in the process. Wow. So she was invited to speak at my school and she was being paid out of student funds. And I was like, absolutely not. And that was also, I ended up kind of speaking out about that a little bit because I'm like, this is crazy.

49:19And you're not even telling the students who this person is. Like, she's bad news. And anyway, it was, even back then, it was a problem. And, you know, I'm 50 years old. So this was a few years ago. So but yeah, so I I just I went overseas for a year, just kind of did that thing and came back. I wrote an honors thesis and got out of there. And I don't think I've ever been back to Boston since then. It's like way too cold for me and just not not great memories. But but I got through it and I finished, which was my goal. So and then I came back to D.C., got a job briefly like for a tech company, just kind of feeling my way around, didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life.

50:16and I got this job working for a guy who had invented something that was acquired by a company called Lucent Technologies which doesn't exist anymore but he he made like over a billion dollars off of it and he decided that he was going to stand start up all these related tech companies that would like be each other's customers. And I worked for him. I mean, I was like basically one level above intern, but it was cool. And anyway, from there I went to business school. And I went to business school in Italy. But that was right when 9-11 happened. It kind of changed my life. Yeah, I saw that. How did it change your life?

51:07well uh one of my mother's like best friends was on the plane that hit the pentagon and um we at the time i was i was like a few blocks away i was in pentagon city um and so we you know you could feel the the the apartment building shake when the plane hit and we already knew, we'd already heard about what had happened in New York City.

51:38And I didn't know till later that day that Barbara was on that plane. Barbara Olson was her name. And she, it turned out that she had switched her flight at the last minute. She was supposed to, She was like a political commentator. She wrote her last book was about Hillary Clinton. Not a fan. And she was on her way. I think she was supposed to go to Bill Maher's show. That's why she was on that flight. It was going to Los Angeles. And her husband's birthday was September 11th. So at the last minute, she changed her flight so that she could be with her husband on the morning of his birthday. and when he got to bed that night he found that she had left him a note as well but yeah that that that changed my life it changed the life of our entire family my my two younger brothers as well so I I was already about to leave I was about to leave for business school in Milan and everything was grounded and I had time to you know think about everything go to Barbara's memorial service and just kind of be with her widower, with Ted, and just think about, like, do I even give a shit about any of this anymore?

53:01Like, I had all these plans to go, whatever, have more European adventures or whatever. And I'm like, I don't care about any of that anymore. I came from, I've been so lucky. You know, I came from a great family. I have a great education. I need to serve my country now. And I didn't know how, but I kind of the seed was planted. And as I thought about it, I realized like, what is school? You go to school to learn a certain set of tools that you can use however you want. So that's when I started to get the idea, like there's going to be somebody tracking terrorist money. So I'm going to go to a business school, I'm going to learn about international finance, and then I'm going to figure out how to help do that.

53:53And that's what I ended up doing. Wow. And you deployed to Iraq? I did, 2003. Yep. How was that? Early days. Well, it was a shit show. um it was it was there for the invasion no no okay um they they trucked us into kuwait in september and we were we were in kuwait or was it late august i can't remember we were in kuwait for like a week and they had started up this like bizarre week-long training in a classroom for civilians who had never done anything like this before. And it was kind of like, mob gear, it's important, but you're not going to have any. Flak vest, also important, yours doesn't have any plates.

54:49So it was like, cool. But at the time when we got there, I think it was sometime in September that we got to Baghdad. It was right before things started blowing up, like right before the UN thing was like a big turning point when the head of the UN mission there got blown up. So when I first got there, they had like government, suburban at the Four Heads Palace is what they called it because it had four heads of Saddam Hussein on top of the palace, the presidential palace, as it's now known. We could just sign out a car and drive into the city, go buy some pistachios. It was like that for about five minutes um after i got there and then things started going boom pretty fast yeah um but we you know we were housed in the palace they just put cots in i don't know if it was like a ballroom so it's one of the huge rooms they just put all these cots out and the lights were on 24 7 um i saw a baby being made um right there in front of like a lot of people they eventually the mother and father eventually got married, but it was, there was a lot going on there.

56:15A lot going on. Yeah. So, but we, you know, we were, we were trying to do the work that we were given. So I was an advisor in the coalition provisional authority. I was an advisor to the ministry of finance. What does that mean? They basically, what they told me my job was going to be was Excel spreadsheets. And like having just finished my MBA, I was like, I know how to do that. At the time, there were a lot of countries that wanted to donate to the rebuilding of Iraq. And a lot of people forget this now, but in the early days, there were also a lot of other countries that were there, not in combat, but in like, they wanted to show up and give and lent support.

57:03Now this, like fast forward to Afghanistan and you see all these, there were foreign nations that were there who fought with us and bled with us and died with us. In Iraq, people showed up. But then pretty quickly, this war became very unpopular in their countries and we were kind of on our own. And I saw a lot of these foreign troops kind of, you know, peace out. But, yeah, so we were specifically, my team was on what they called a budget execution team, which was basically like executing the budget, paying out the money. In an environment like that, it's really hard because everything was cash.

57:54and they also decided, the powers that be decided, the old DNRs that had Saddam's face on them had to be, you know, they needed to be phased out and there needed to be new DNRs made and they were being made in England. And this was after a few months, they were trucked in and we had to, you know, trade out the old ones for the new ones. And we had to make sure like the teachers got paid. But, you know, I remember when, I mean, there's so many things to say about this. I really don't even know where to begin. But I remember when Bremer announced that they were disbanding the Iraqi army. And at the time, they said that the Iraqi army soldiers were going to be given three months pay.

58:51and that's it. Like, go figure out your new life. I mean, I've read books where people tracked, like, when did the insurgency really start? And I remember there were riots. I mean, when they would show up to get their payments and people, like CPA people, not me, but others, had to tell them, like, we're done. You're not getting paid anymore. They would riot. And then they started making threats. And then they started following through with those threats. It wasn't hard to see. It's just, you know, there was a very concerted political effort to ignore it. So, for example, I learned later that going back to our intelligence assessment discussion, intelligence analysts were not allowed to use the term insurgency until Donald Rumsfeld left as Secretary of Defense.

59:51What? Unrest. They had to call it unrest. They couldn't call it insurgency. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So that happened. There were new ministers for all the different Iraqi ministries that were installed. and you know there was this idea of like trying to be fair because obviously the Ba 'ath party was all Sunni and they wanted to put in Shia and kind of make it fair well a lot of the Shia were turned out to either become problematic or Iran related or just weak and not popular with the people so they didn't hang around for that long but it. And I mean, I remember working with the Iraqi Minister of Finance.

1:00:45So our team, we were out of the green zone like every day. We would travel to the Ministry of Finance. For anyone who knows about security, let me paint this insane picture for you. So we were in a soft vehicle in a suburban with a Humvee of soldiers in front of us and behind us. You were in a soft armored vehicle? Yeah. No armored vehicle? For many, many, many months, there were no armored vehicles available for us because we were like GS9. What year is this? 04. 03, 04. Holy shit. Yeah. And we had flak vests with no plates in them. But we were out like every day. And I felt badly personally.

1:01:35We felt badly. I know my teammates did because these soldiers were there like protecting us. I'm like, my life isn't worth more than his life. Like why? It didn't make sense to me. How, why are we doing this? Like, why can't we all just get in like a Toyota, you know, and drive over there? No one will know who we are. Like, why are we doing this? It just seemed crazy. And then we'd be stuck in traffic and there'd be all these like apartment buildings all around us. And, you know, so none of that, nothing ever, none of that ever made sense to me. But we would have, we would have over time, a decision was made because these ministers, the Iraqi ministers, would, they requested security.

1:02:25They'd say, I'm unsafe. Our ministry is not safe. There's no Iraqi army anymore. The American military is not guarding, had no interest in guarding ministry of whatever. So they wanted their own security. So the decision was made by the CPA Bremer, I assume, to provide them with their own security force. They could pick their own security force. And in many cases, so we could train them. We could equip them, give them firearms. and I mean imagine this like new Shia I mean these were like they became some of them became Shia militias and we started them when I left Iraq in 2004 one of the people that I worked with he was an advisor in the Ministry of Interior he was working with this was called the Facilities Protection Service, FPS.

1:03:21He gave me an armband from the FPS. And I still have it. I have it in my office at home just to remind me, like, we are a big part of what is wrong. We did it. And a lot of what we're seeing today is like second and third order effects of the very poor decisions that we made and the fact that we refused to acknowledge them at the time and try to address them and try to find some accountability. Did you elaborate on how we created that problem a little bit more? Yeah. So like I was saying, the FPS, in this specific case, the FPS became like malicious. Like they grew. The security forces around these different ministries grew.

1:04:19And there were some ministers, the Shia ones, that some of them were, it turned out, talking to Qasem Soleimani. Qasem Soleimani was already the head of the IRGC Quds Force, was already like running networks inside of Iraq. And he influenced networks. And this was like a point that he picked up on, an opportunity. But it also came out, I think it's important also to talk about Ahmad Chalabi. So Ahmad Chalabi... Who's that? He was a big figure in the run-up to the invasion. He was someone, he was the head of something called the Iraqi National Congress and was one of the main people saying, when you invade Iraq, like the people will embrace you and throw flowers on you.

1:05:16And he was really embraced by, you know, group like American, like neocons. And of which my father was one. My father was, you know, friends with some of those people. and some of the big kind of pro-Iraq invasion people. And I grew up around them. And so when I got to Iraq, you know, there were people who worked for him who were like, oh, Simone, hello. And this was a really big, like, pivot point for me personally when I just started to see what was going on. And he had this car scheme at the Ministry of Finance where it was basically like a money laundering scheme of like getting cars from the coalition and then selling them and making money off of it, which is money laundering.

1:06:19Wow. And the Iraqi minister of finance one day when I was there working called me into his office. And he had like turned out Chalabi had like someone outside of his office just sitting there watching who came in and out all day. And he called me into his office and shut the door. And he was like, you have to help me. They're going to kill me. And I'm like, who? You know, I'm 28 years old. Again, I told you my background. I'm like, what are you talking about? Who? And he wouldn't say the name, but he's like, you see this guy outside. Like, they're trying to make me do all kinds of things. Help me.

1:06:58So I didn't know what to do. I mean, I went back to my leadership and I was like, wrote my little report. And, you know, that guy wasn't finance minister for very much longer. But I started to see what was going on and what Chalabi in particular was doing. And I told my father, I was like, this is not a good guy. This guy is not one of us. He's not doing pro-America stuff. And in fact, he's doing a lot of really shady things. And my father from day one believed me. But a lot of his friends, who I'm sure are going to see this, they always argued with me. And they said he was misunderstood. But now a lot has come out.

1:07:48And I think it's clear that he was an Iranian asset from the beginning. And I think Soleimani was his handler. He traveled to Iran so many times and always tried to explain it away. Like, of course, I have to deal with them too. Bullshit. So, again, we like this is our own willful blindness. And there's been no accountability for that either. But so many people know about it. So many people are angry. You know, we've been betrayed. And like, we're just sitting here with our anger. You know what I mean? And yet the region and Iraq is not our friend. Syria's doing Syria. I mean, it's still a cauldron.

1:08:37Although things have changed, but not because of us.

1:08:44Not really. Do you think we should have been in Iraq to begin with? No. What makes you say that? I agree with you. I'm just curious. I think Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. And I was totally radicalized by 9-11. We lost Barbara. I was like, let's go. I recently actually went to the George W. Bush Museum at SMU in Dallas. I don't know if you've ever been. I actually, I don't know if I would recommend it to GWAT veterans. It's strange. It made me really angry because there's a whole GWAT exhibition there or whatever. And it has all these speeches, all the speeches that they gave leading up to the invasion.

1:09:35and I got so angry. I'm like, but I was mad at myself. I'm like, how did I ever believe this? How did I ever believe there was any connection between 9-11 and Iraq? There was none. What were we even doing? KBR. You know, uh... Do you think that's what it was, Dick Cheney's? I think it was bigger than that. You think it was bigger than that? What do you think it was? I think it was, I think that might have been part of it because the years of like waste, fraud and abuse through KBR was just like so egregious and no one really ever did anything about that. Maybe that was part of it. But, you know, I also think like there was this, you know, hanging like George Bush Sr.

1:10:30didn't really finish the job in Iraq. Like, you know, he got Iraq out of Kuwait. Iraq had invaded Kuwait. He launched the Gulf War to get Iraq out of Kuwait, which was successful. But a lot of people wanted him to go the step further and regime change Saddam Hussein, and he didn't. But a lot of people in the George W. Bush administration thought now's the opportunity where we can finish that, where we can right that wrong. I think that's very real. And so I think both of those reasons. But it's also important to say that there was a belief that Saddam was trying to, was building weapons of mass destruction.

1:11:24I don't think, I think a lot of people did believe that. And like in retrospect, kind of good for him because there had been this long, you know, Iran-Iraq war. They were mortal enemies. And he wanted the Iranian regime to think that he was holding on to this like huge store of weapons of mass destruction. You know, it got him in the end. but at least it was enough of a thread to pull that they built this whole narrative around it. And I know, I mean, of course he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. He had a large amount of yellowcake uranium that they eventually put on a ship and sent to Canada, but that was not weapons of mass destruction.

1:12:11Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you talk about some of the waste, fraud and abuse of KBR, what are you talking about? Oh, man. I mean, I saw this in a lot more detail in Afghanistan than I did in Iraq. But just like, I remember the, just because I was in Iraq in the early days and all that stuff was just getting going, where, like I said, initially we were housed in the presidential palace. And then eventually they started, you know, bringing in these trailers. And the first trailers didn't have bathrooms. So then those trailers were moved out and they got the new trailers that had bathrooms. And then I personally knew a couple of soldiers that were somehow had gotten vehicles through KBR and were like sending them back to CONUS.

1:13:12Yeah, I mean, obviously breaking the law.

1:13:17And I didn't like I found out about it much later when I didn't even know where anybody was. But it was like it was stuff like that. There was a lot of deal making, a lot of like people kind of I don't even know. I mean, and then. Can you talk about the connection between Dick Cheney and KBR? Well, he was the CEO before he was vice president. Well, he was the CEO of Halliburton, of which KBR was part of Halliburton. And then they spun it off because it looked really bad, didn't it? Yeah, it looked bad. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard to paint a picture of how much money was wasted. I mean, when you're talking about the trailers, you're talking about basically a mobile home.

1:14:08Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of mobile homes that were put out with no bathroom. And then all of a sudden, they're replaced with ones that have a bathroom. I mean, the amount of money. that was just and it's the biggest i mean they ran from what i know they ran all logistics all logistics in iraq and in afghanistan and he was the fucking ceo of it who's now the vice president who obviously has major pole correct yeah correct i mean i i remember at a biop Baghdad International Airport, we used to go there once a week on Fridays when we didn't work. And we used to literally, insane to think about today, risk our lives to go there to get Burger King so we wouldn't have to eat, whatever, just to get out and try to feel like we were doing something normal.

1:15:15But yeah, there was a Burger King there. They were building all kinds of stuff there. And there was still also the duty free. So we were not under General Order 1. We were civilians assigned to the CPA, which was like basically, it was a DOD entity. But anyway, whatever. People bought booze at the airport. But even just in the eight months that I was there, I mean, there was such a huge change in terms of like building things out. And the only thing that I saw during that time that was completely egregious was the trailers. And of course, they weren't like we started getting mortared and rocketed pretty quickly after I got there.

1:16:05And so there was no protection for that at all. Like over time, they started putting sandbags. So at least like if someone got hit, the shrapnel wouldn't hit someone else. But, I mean, it was – that's how it was in those early days. Pretty crazy to think about today. When I finally got home from that deployment, I didn't realize that I was a little rattled. But I remember I was at my parents' house for dinner one night, and there was, like, a window that was up, and it kind of fell down behind me. And I was, like, under the table, and I didn't even before. Everyone's like, where's Simone? So, you know, going through all that, it wasn't like I was in combat or anything like that.

1:16:53But we got a lot of incoming over time. It just kept getting worse and worse. And a couple of my friends, we had a couple of terrible experiences. We worked very closely with awesome translators. We had these two girls who became good friends of ours. And I remember one day they were coming on base for work and there was the security was so bad, like no one really cared about the local nationals that were working with us. It was really sad. And there was a huge line of cars, of their cars waiting to get in through security into the green zone every morning. So one day, some terrorists in an SV bid just placed himself in the middle of that line of cars and detonated himself.

1:17:45And all the cars caught on fire and people were burned to death, including one of our interpreters. And her friend who was in the car with her made it out. we tried to go to the hospital later to just like pay our respects and visit. And the families were like, get out of here. Like, we don't want to see you here. Get out of here. And that was like, you know, that was a pretty low, pretty low moment. We had, we had, oh, I know this was kind of a, So this is another kind of sad story, I guess. But when I was leaving, I'm not always a rules follower. And when we were, in order to leave Iraq as a CPA person, you're supposed to take the rotator out to Kuwait and then back home.

1:18:42But I knew this guy who, also an American, who was working on the kind of political side of CPA. And he had lived in the Kurdish region for a long time before the war and had friends up there and was leaving around the same time that I was. So he offered me to go with him. And basically his buddies were just going to come pick him up outside the green zone. And they were going to drive around, you know, spend like a week in Iraqi Kurdistan and then like leave through Turkey, you know, on the border, like just by foot. So I thought that sounded awesome, idiot. And so I did that. And we got stopped.

1:19:29Oh, shit. First of all, I got in so much trouble for that because it was actually really sad. This woman, Fern Holland, who was doing she was doing she was she was trying to help Iraqi women who were victims of domestic violence. That's that's a lot to unpack there. OK, but she was there doing that. And God bless her. She was killed. And she was killed right when I kind of like wasn't when I had left. And so for a while, there was this Marine colonel who was kind of in charge of me. He had he didn't know. He thought that might have been me. Basically, I didn't give him a lot of information. I think I just left.

1:20:17I'm very sorry about that. But yeah, we drove. So we get to Bakuba and we got pulled over by police maybe or just random criminals wearing Iraqi police uniforms. And we had to – they asked us for our IDs. And my friend just gave them his, like, library card from the school that he had gone to because we were not going to show them our CPA or any U.S. stuff. And they got really mad. Anyway, long story short, I think the Kurds who are kind of driver shooters kind of passed them some money and we went on our way. But it was – we went all over Erbil, Dahuk. We went to Soleimaniya and just had an amazing – did picnics with some of his Kurdish friends and met a lot of people.

1:21:14I actually learned a lot on that trip. And then as we were exiting, we were going into Turkey. I forgot that I had had one spent round in my bag. It was a shell casing that fell into my trailer the night that everyone was celebrating in Baghdad when we caught Saddam. and what goes out must come down. Some of it came down into our housing. And when I was sleeping in the palace that night, when I came back, there was this one spent round. And so I thought it was cool, I'll keep it. And the Turks at the border crossing were not stoked about that. And I had a little bit of a problem getting in. But anyway, that was my Iraq experience.

1:22:08And I will say I did not, it's taken me years to, I think, properly understand my role, but also what I witnessed. There were some really also just sad things that happened there. Like, in addition to what I said, there was a colonel that I had worked with a lot. He was getting ready to rip out. and his last day he brought this woman, this Iraqi woman, beautiful, beautiful young woman. And I understood pretty quickly that they had had something going on. And he was trying to find a job for her because he was leaving. He was abandoning her. And, you know, it was just, it was a terrible, he's like, well, maybe, you know, you guys have space for an interpreter or something.

1:22:58And I'm like, no, we don't. You know, piece of shit. And this woman, probably her whole family knows what you've been up to. And now what's her life going to be? You know, stuff like that just made me really angry because I'm like, we're leaving, you know, we're not going to stay here. And anyway, yeah. Yeah. What are some lessons that you think, what are some lessons you learned from that war? I think I'm still learning lessons from that war. But the important, the most important one for me was how easily, like how you can get your blood heated, how I can. And how easily, in a way, I was, I believed something so strongly that was wrong.

1:23:59And that is something that I hope, like, has guided me in the rest of my life. Because I so believe that was the right thing. And it's so clear now that it wasn't.

1:24:18And I also want to help to teach people about that. Because it's not just we have so many bad feelings about the specifics of what happened and how it happened. But in the broader strategic context, what a huge mistake it was for us. And we're living with the consequences. Today, we're suffering from what that did to us as a country today. Would we be where we are with China if we, you know, if we knew what the threat from China was going to be back then even? We did. But maybe not to this extent. But there were smart people who understood where China was headed. Maybe it wasn't clear that they would achieve their goals, but it was clear where they wanted to go.

1:25:17But, yeah, this was, that was the most important lesson of all of that. But there are many, like, micro lessons, too. Do you think that war was all for nothing? I mean, I want to say no. I want to say no. I'm with you. Yeah. And I'm sure maybe if we sit here long enough, we can come up with reasons why it might not have been. Can you think of any positives? Well, I think it's always, I don't like being totally negative about anything. I think there's always good in everything. You can always find it if you look hard enough. but this was so bad it was so bad and I'm thinking in particular of a friend of mine who died by suicide last year who was a two time Iraq veteran and I was in his wedding and he was a mentor to my brothers both of my brothers served in the Marine Corps one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and you know that

1:26:32But I know that he was very angry about everything and about the war. And I think in his later years, he actually, he was a Naval Academy graduate. I think he regretted joining the Naval Academy, regretted his entire military career.

1:26:54And, you know, that was really tough.

1:27:01he was struggling for a long time. And I know there are a lot of other people who are going through that, too. Unfortunately, he was also an addict. And I think that addiction really got a hold of him. And he wasn't someone who really sought help easily. So, but yeah, I mean, it's, we have a lot of, And my brother who served in Iraq, he went through a lot too. And thank God he got help. He's doing amazing now. But he lost Marines. And I, you know, I just, I have a lot of, like, compassion and love for veterans. And I kind of feel like all of you are my brothers. And I, that's why I love kind of staying in the mix, you know.

1:27:54And when I had the opportunity to go back into government in a role where I could potentially take these lessons that I've learned and maybe try to turn it into something good, that was what I wanted to do. I don't know if I did, if I managed to, but that was kind of my thought process. And it kind of guides me today. So I don't know. I mean, everything bad we go through, we're supposed to learn from it, right? If it doesn't kill you. So hopefully it's made us wiser as a nation. I love to see all these people commenting now about like, no, no war, no. And I agree, but I also think not every military action is a full-blown war.

1:28:47I think it's important to make that that. I think that that difference is important. And I also think we live like the United States is in the world. You know, we can't just totally bury our heads in the sand. And when we do, things get worse. And then in the end, we end up having to do something like I was telling you with the Iran stuff. Then we end up being trapped into actually having to take some action if we're not kind of like managing things early on. Well, Simone, let's take a quick break. Great. When we come back, we'll get into Afghanistan.

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1:31:08All right, Simone, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into some Afghanistan stuff. So you get home from Iraq, and then you roll back to Afghanistan. Yeah, a little bit of a funny story. So when I was in Iraq, I met the assistant secretary for defense for special operations, ASD Solik, who was Tom O 'Connell at the time. And he was just a legendary guy in all respects and became a mentor of mine. But anyway, he asked me what I was doing after Iraq, and I had no idea. And so he offered me a job at the Pentagon. And so that's what I did when I came back. But funny story, you know, it takes a long time to get a security clearance if you've never had one before.

1:32:07And I'd spent some time in Europe and whatever. So I was not able to do any work in that office until I got like a high TS clearance and I only had a secret clearance. So they put me in another office, which was the Office of Iraq Reconstruction or something like that. And I ended up getting stuck. I mean, it was that job was so bad. I ended up getting stuck responding to congressional inquiries about like just hostile congressional inquiries. I was like, you lost eight billion dollars of Iraqi money. Where did it go? And and so I just spent my entire day every day responding to really aggressive congressional inquiries.

1:32:55So I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. I was like, that's got to be better than this. Wow. I've never heard that comparison. Afghanistan's got to be better than this. Interesting statement. Was it? Yes. Good. It was. Good. Yeah. Yeah. So I went in 2004 to Afghanistan. I was there almost the entire year working with, at the time, the U.S. command was CFC Alpha. Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. And the commander was Carl Eikenberry, who later became our ambassador to Afghanistan. He was a three-star at the time. And so I went there. I was embedded in the plans shop. And the reason I was there was because there was someone, it might have been Doug Fythe, I don't know who, someone in the Pentagon who was important had this idea about, so they were at the time trying to solve this problem, which never got solved.

1:34:15How do we leave Afghanistan with some money? What's their revenue going to be? Because with Iraq, that wasn't going to be a problem. Their revenue was oil. But what does Afghanistan have? They have like heroin. Yeah, they have opium. So what are the alternatives? And - Lithium. Well, at the time, that's right. But at the time, the thought was customs revenue. Afghanistan is kind of the waypoint between East and West historically, like the old Silk Route. And what if we could actually - So there was no real customs revenue being collected at the border for the country. It was just like all the Afghan border police, you know, taking bribes and boxation, like putting it in their own pockets.

1:35:07But what if we were able to change that up and actually collect revenue for the country? Could that work? Could that cover the budget of the country? So the plan shop built this pilot project and I got embedded into that to basically do the numbers and kind of see like what were we collecting before? What were they collecting before? What are they collecting now? And I was working with, you know, some military guys from the plan shop, Marines and a Ranger, who had a whole, they did a whole thing. I mean, they picked a border crossing point, which was Islamkala, which is at the border in the west with Iran near Herat.

1:35:56And they replaced the border police commander with a border police commander from the east. So he wasn't part of the Western tribal network. So it was harder for him to be corrupt was the whole idea behind it. And then, you know, he brought a new force with him that was also from the East. They were better trained. They were better equipped. They had more fuel. They had, you know, more money for food and stuff. And so the idea was, like, let's see if we do all this, will they bring back customs revenue in a meaningful way? And so I was the one who kind of, like, documented it and did all the numbers and the budgets and everything.

1:36:41And the answer after three months was yes. And then general, I can bury – and by the way, like, it took a long time to get this up and running. But we did get it up and running three months later. And there's a lot of stories to tell in between like the trip that the guys took. I didn't go on that trip for obvious reasons, but they drove from Kabul to Herat on the Ring Road with these Afghans, the Afghan border police. And it was kind of, you know, they like to talk about, well, there are a lot of stories from that. But they were really part of – I mean, they – I don't know what I'm trying to say here.

1:37:26Anyway, the bottom line is it worked. So basically what you were doing is you were replacing Afghanistan's income with customs issues. We were – You're replacing the opium trade with customs. The OPM trade, the revenue from the OPM trade went to like the drug traffickers. And the problem that we were trying to solve was like, how is the government of Afghanistan going to make money that's not ours? That's not like the U.S. taxpayer money, you know, like they need to be self-sufficient, like fast. So how are we going to somehow that became our problem? That's a different conversation. I just got there when someone was trying to figure out the answer to that question.

1:38:19So, you know, again, I was like, yes, whatever. But that was the job. So trying to document how much money did the government collect at the border crossing points when they were, you know, when things we were really focused on them and we trained them and all this stuff. and so within a three-month period which was the period of the pilot project it seemed like at least you know the initial numbers were pretty good and the old guys had been moved away they'd been fired and kind of moved off the border because they they weren't effective they were just corrupt like everybody else and that was that that worked it did how How many people are coming in and out of there?

1:39:09I mean, so many. It was unbelievable. So many. Day and night, mostly day. But I mean, we also would have people come up to us because the Marines that I was with, obviously, they took off their jackets that had their name tape on it and stuff. And these people would come up to us and be like, are you guys going to invade Iran? And probably Iranian collectors, for all I know. And they're like, yeah, tomorrow. Get ready. Marines. But yeah, I mean, it was, there was a lot of money. And it was, you know, it was, for that period of time, we made an effort to actually capture the amounts and look over their shoulders a bit.

1:40:00And I think at least the concept was proven. But one of many kind of tragic things that happened was that the commander, we briefed him on the program and how it was successful. And he was like, is this Doug Feith? Is this Doug Feith's idea? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know who, you know, we didn't know whose idea it was. It was like we were told to do this, So we're doing it. But he immediately got political, which was to me kind of like a red flag. I'm like, so what? It works. And then he decided that this wasn't a security mission, that it was a board—well, it was customs, and therefore it was a—we needed to transition it over to the embassy.

1:40:50This was not appropriate for the military command to be doing. even though border security, I don't know, classic security. I mean, security is literally in the name, but okay. So we had to transition it to the embassy, which meant that the guy that was assigned to it, nice guy, I guess, like older gentleman, not part of having trained this guy, the commander whose name was General Ayub, wasn't part of that. They pulled all of our military assets that we kind of had just as a show of force kind of around the border police facility. All of that was gone. His partner, like this guy, Tony, who was his kind of trainer and partner also pulled back.

1:41:44So predictably within a pretty short period of time, he was killed. The commander was killed. And, you know, there was reporting that he was like he'd started to take a little on the side and do all that. But it's like, man, we abandoned him. We totally abandoned him. And all of the people that from that region and the drug traffickers that he was going after, they did some really significant drug busts during that time. I mean, everyone knew what was going on. They all knew. And that was the end for him. And really, I went back to, so I came home like in November of 04. And I went back to Herat in like 2009, my next deployment.

1:42:38I just went out there. I was based in Kabul. I was at ISAF headquarters that time. You couldn't travel outside the base without an MRAP. Like you had to be in an MRAP then because the security situation had changed so much. But in 2004, you know, we had our, like, Hiluxes. We'd just drive into Harat. We did, like, tourism one day. We saw Alexander the Great had a – there were still remnants of – The wall. Yeah. And we went and visited that. We did, like, some carpet shopping, you know, drank – had some tea. And it was just a totally different experience. And I do think the two are related. um i i don't think of course when i got back there the iranians had built all this they they built electricity they built a lot of new shia mosques in harat harat was beautiful by far the most like outside of kabul and it might have been even more beautiful than kabul um you think you think kabul was beautiful compared to the rest of the country was built up let me put it that way it was built by parts of cobble were beautiful yes i didn't see those parts i spent a lot of time in cobble i mean i guess it is what you make it in a way but i just there was so the things that i thought were beautiful there were um i i mean i i i liked they have all these fruit trees and you know there was a lot of flowering things there that i thought were made it made it nice um but obviously you know i'm sure you did too we were testing the air quality uh when we were living there and it was like it was 30 fecal matter or something i remember i remember the air especially in the wintertime whenever it was burning tires and shit to literal shit they're Building, burning shit.

1:44:41Yeah. I remember spitting in the sink and my spit was gray and I could barely open my eyes if I went out, especially at night in the winter. Because that's, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm probably romanticizing it a little bit. Maybe just a tad. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. But so what were you doing? How does this fit in with special ops? What you were doing? Well, that was, here's how it fits in with special ops. Great question. So I traveled around the country to as many border crossing points as I could doing my assessment. And I went with teammates when they could go, but a lot of times it was just me.

1:45:32and um and so a lot of the border crossings around the country at the time were like i had to go meet up with like oda odb whatever they were the ones that were controlling that territory so um they i was not allowed to go south they would they would not they said it was too dangerous and i never i never got to see um i never got to see the border crossing points in the south But yeah, I went out east in particular. I spent some time with our special forces out there, Green Berets. And there's one instance I remember. I think it was Asadabad. Not Abbottabad, which was Pakistan, but Asadabad. I went out there and had the opportunity to meet up with this ODA and the ODB commander as well, the major.

1:46:37And they took me to, we went to the AFPAC border, just pretty barren, pretty crazy. I don't really know why I was, I probably shouldn't have been out there in retrospect. I was going to say, that's a pretty dangerous area. It was. It was. And we drove through, we drove across this road that was, it was not paved. It was like pebbles. And they were telling me the story about how they lost their buddy, First Sergeant Jeremy Wright. He had been blown up by an IED there. And that, like, there's no way, just because of the way the road was, there was really no way to tell if there was, like, Like, you couldn't tell if it had been disturbed or not.

1:47:26And they were, I mean, I could see they were still in mourning and that he had been, like, a great dude and it was awful. And the thing that was really bothering them, aside from just losing their friend, was that that road was a USAID project. Paving that road was a project that had already been, like, approved and paid for by USAID. aid, but the contractor was a Turkish company and they hadn't, they hadn't showed up yet to do the work. And so these guys, like every time they wanted to go to the border, which they had to go there a lot, had to drive over the same like patch of earth. So I feel like this might've been the only actual good thing that I did my entire deployment.

1:48:14But when I got back to Kabul, one of my one of my friends there she was a USAID rep or whatever and I told her about it and I actually truly don't know if there was a connection but I heard from them like pretty soon after that the construction company came and paved the road but I was like why why aren't they here like why haven't they done this we someone got killed here already like why wasn't this moved up in the priority. And they're like, oh, everyone's late on everything. It's all late. Everything's late. And then I came to find out one of my trips to Herat, the USAID guy, who was, he was the USAID rep in, in Herat.

1:49:01He, someone showed me some reporting that he had accepted like gifts of 40 carpets from these um from these uh fuel where they like oil and gas traffickers basically they built like a underground pipeline which was not legal and not approved so they could move uh fuel from iran into afghanistan and this guy just let it happen No kidding. I had no idea that was going on. Yeah. And so that I mean, it was small. It wasn't like a huge operation, but it was still enough. Anyway, all that. I mean, we I saw that. But that was the work that I did with with special operations was they supported me when I was, you know, when I was going to do my assessments and collection for this border crossing project.

1:50:03and trying to understand like so if someone comes across like how do you assess a customs duty like who is the one who assesses that um no one who's literate like no one who's i mean obviously you you know the kind of people they had manning those border crossing points was like anyone who would agree to put on a uniform and his tri-boy. So like, yeah, I mean, that was my experience. But

1:50:37I had met some of their colleagues in Iraq, because in Iraq, we started getting calls from military units that, you know, the money, the money movement, like we were moving in U.S. dollars as well as these new dinars. And they were finding pallets of U.S. dollars that were still shrink-wrapped from the Fed in insurgent rates. And the different military units would call us at the CPA and be like, what do we do with this? We found this, says it's like half a million USD. Like, what should we do with it? And yeah, it's like, we have no idea what we're doing. We have no idea. Wow. Where was this money supposed to go?

1:51:28It had a barcode on it too. All of those things that came from the Fed, those pallets of cash, they all had barcodes on them. But anyway, yeah, so I ran into some of the people that I knew from those days. I ran into some of them in Afghanistan. And then just kind of kicking around, like there's not a lot of me's out in places like that. And, you know, Firebase Torquem, I remember that place. That was on the old Silk Route, actually kind of a cool place because like off in the distance, you could see an old English outpost. and again I'm like here we are again you know we hope it's going to go better this time I guess but there was so much traffic coming I mean so much traffic and learning about we basically had no idea who was coming there could have been like WMD for all we knew being trucked in and the roads were just, were, were completely packed all the time.

1:52:37So, but my focus at the time, again, was like, how do we, how can, how can, how can attacks be collected against this? It's, it's absurd to think about today that we were actually trying to do that. Absolutely absurd. But that was, that was the mission. Interesting. So you left Afghanistan, was this 2004? And then went back again in 2009. What did you do in between there? So I did, my clearance did finally come through. So then I did go to SOLIC, ASD SOLIC. And that was when I started working on counter-threat finance. So Tom O 'Connell, he was ASD SOLIC at the time, former Green Beret Vietnam veteran, served in CIA as well, just a legend.

1:53:30And he believed strongly that, you know, Clausewitz and his centers of gravity, you know, his enemy centers of gravity, he felt strongly that money was an enemy center of gravity, and we should be focusing on disrupting their financial flows. And that was like, I'd always wanted to do that, right? That was my original, this is what I'm going to figure out how to do. So very cool opportunity. And when I finally got clear to know everything, I learned that it was a big interagency effort that had already gotten started. And there was an Iraq threat finance cell that was underway that was like a Treasury Department thing.

1:54:14But there were a lot of rice bowl issues because the commander on the ground was like, no, I'm not going to have the Treasury Department leading an effort in my battlefield. Like, I'm in charge. It's like, cool, you don't actually know anything about how to do this, but like, awesome. Good job. So there was a lot of, there was just a lot of drama over those kind of things. But it was really amazing effort. Both you had not just like Treasury and DOD, but you had like Intel people, you had law enforcement people, there was, you know, when things really got going, they had like FBI and IRS criminal investigators, like going inside the booth, like interrogation booth, when military units would roll up, like financial people, they would help with interrogation and really get amazing information.

1:55:16Turned out that the money guys didn't get the same kind of training to withstand interrogation that the operational guys did. And so they talked. And it turned out a lot of them kept two sets of books too, because they were also skimming. And so then we had leverage. And so it was a really cool and very successful effort. I would say the kind of pinnacle of that And in Iraq was this operation, it led to this big operation at the Beji Oil Refinery, where months of work determined that AQI was making a ton of money off of fuel smuggling from the Beji Oil Refinery, which is like the big oil refinery in Iraq.

1:56:07And they were like, the trucking company was AQI and like this dude and that dude were being paid off by AQI. And anyway, you know, the team did a phenomenal job of doing a whole network analysis and being like, here are the key nodes. And the military came and rolled them up and stopped it. It was amazing. Of course, AQI, being AQI, they found new and exciting ways to get money. But that was... What were some of those ways? Kidnapping for ransom, drug smuggling.

1:56:52I mean, that's just a few. I mean, anything you can think of, anything and everything. But fuel smuggling was by far for them, like, that was the real winner. That was when they were making big money. But they still like they would tap into the pipeline, you know, break open the pipeline and just siphon off some gas and sell that. So, yeah, I mean, they're incredibly, incredibly creative. Basically all kinds of criminal activities that you could imagine. That's what they did. and that's what most of these terrorist groups do they're criminals but they have this ideological component they're engaging in criminal activity for some of them for ideological purposes although a lot of them are just straight up criminals and they're just like acting as if they're some kind of religious you know some some type of like high highly moral religious figure but so we Yeah, so I started working on that.

1:57:57And that was amazing. I was doing that out of the Pentagon, but I got to go back to Iraq and kind of see what everyone was doing and just advocate for it. And at the time, the ASD wanted to kind of codify it because it seemed like such an important part of the effort. And everyone was so complimentary and the commanders were really happy about what we were turning out. So, yeah, I got tasked with – this is going to be boring for a lot of people, but writing the counter-threat finance policy for the DoD. So that took forever because the DoD is such a huge bureaucratic monster. And when you're writing a new policy, you have to get everything coordinated with everyone who changes every word and everyone gets in fights.

1:58:47And it was a huge thing, and it took a couple years. But there were so many successes behind it, it was undeniable. So in the end, I think today it's been through a lot of revisions since my time, but I think there still is a counter-threat finance policy. And we called it that because originally it was going to be counter-terrorism finance. But terrorism, like the legal definition, like basically requires like you're talking about designated terrorist groups. And in Iraq, there were all kinds of different terrorist groups, but also insurgent groups that hadn't necessarily been named and designated in that way.

1:59:30But they were also included because they were still killing people and killing Americans in some cases and definitely the enemy. So counter-threat finance was the term that we ended up with. Did you work directly with General McChrystal and General Thwin? I did. How was that experience? I worked for them in Afghanistan, 2009, 2010. That was spicy, spicy. Why do you say that? Well, I loved working for General McChrystal. And I learned a lot working from General Flynn, working for General Flynn. I learned a lot from him as well. But I'll tell you, you know, it was there was a lot of drama always with Flynn.

2:00:31I mean, he was he was a great boss to me. He understood what I was doing. He supported me. And, you know, I'm not like just understanding what we were trying to do myself and like our whole team of kind of counter threat finance people. He was very much on board with that. And so was McChrystal. But, you know, there were there are things that like either you're comfortable with or you're not. So these are guys that, you know, from JSOC, like they operated in a certain way and you either had to be comfortable with that or not. Personally, I was the the the thing that I remember Flynn always saying was like, this is war, like we're in a war.

2:01:18So we have to do everything that we can to win the war. And that included sometimes sharing information, sharing intelligence that was like REL, a very small group, or sometimes not even REL, sharing that with a foreign partner on the battlefield. And by the way, that's a, like legally, that's a decision that they're entitled to make. Like they're legally allowed to do that. But there were some people on the J2 staff who were uncomfortable with that. And I remember one of them actually going home. Who were you guys sharing intelligence with? Other countries that were fighting with us. Why would they be opposed to that?

2:01:59Because it was like, you know, not, oh, it's not real their country. So we shouldn't be sharing it with them. Like, well, they're going downrange with us tomorrow. so they should probably know that this thing is happening. Yeah. Was it major pushback about it? I mean, I guess so. They sent somebody home. No, someone voluntarily asked to leave. He asked to leave. So it was kind of like, this is how we're prosecuting this war. Either you're on board or you're not. It was very clear from the beginning that this was what I believed. And again, I was wrong because we were still there 10 years later.

2:02:41But I felt at the time like this is either going to change the tide and work or like we're done here. And I felt that was kind of the sense that I got from the command was like we got to turn the ship around right away. But then things started happening. like that email and I regret I don't remember his name now but there was an email like halfway through that year from And from a soldier to General McChrystal. So McChrystal and Flynn and the CJ3, they would do battlefield circulation all the time. So they would travel to different parts of the country to kind of talk to people and see what was going on.

2:03:37And this was after the whole counterinsurgency strategy was implemented, which meant a change to the LOE, the ROE, excuse me. And that change to the ROE meant that our people were taking more risk and in some cases getting killed because they couldn't respond to something unless all of these conditions were met. and I know a lot of people were very I had nothing to do with that a lot of people were very concerned about that very angry and felt it was the wrong thing to do and I don't know enough about combat to be like I wouldn't presume to have an opinion but I'm sympathetic to that point of view just because of what I saw so I remember there was an email that came through to like everyone on in the McChrystal's team who saw his email saw this note and it made its way around.

2:04:43I think it got leaked in the media somewhere where there was a soldier who was like, you know, your ROE is a piece of shit basically. And like here, here's like the 50 reasons why, like this is terrible. You know, we can't win like this. Do you remember what the ROE was? I think it was in country when this came out. I would have to look at it specifically. I mean, I remember this is, if I remember correctly, this is when there was going to be a major push in Marja. Am I correct? Do you remember that? I do remember that. Lashkar got home in province was really hot at the time. And I remember, and it was right after the coast bombing at the CIA base.

2:05:25Yeah. And the ROE suddenly changed to basically you can kill an enemy combatant to if you're shot at and the enemy drops his weapon, then you're not allowed to fire. And that came out right before the Marines were going to do that big offensive push into Marja. I believe it was Marja. Yeah. And they said that that would be the second biggest offensive that the military had done since Fallujah. It was huge. I mean, detrimental. And not only that, I mean, demoralizing your troops. Was demoralizing. Demoralizing them. Like, we don't have your back. We don't care what happens. They drop that weapon.

2:06:12You can't shoot. so to have that going on playing in your head yeah you know if i take this shot am i going to prison for the rest of my life on top of all the other decisions that you have to make in combat i mean it was and that was so pissed off about that and i wasn't even the middle in the military anymore i was contracting for cia so it didn't really affect me but man i fell for those guys when that shit came out? I mean, I didn't truly understand until I read that email what it meant. And I also felt for them. And I didn't understand why. That feedback was received loud and clear. It was discussed, and it was, it didn't change anything.

2:07:10It didn't change anything. They were going to proceed. That didn't come from McChrystal and Flynn, correct? That ROE? I think it came from McChrystal. I thought that came straight down from Obama. It might have come from Obama. He absolutely micromanaged every aspect of that war. He did? He absolutely did. Yes. Through the NSC, which grew to like an astronomical size because they were micromanaging everything. I mean, I, you know, I was working in counterterrorism in the Pentagon before I before I went I went back to Afghanistan. And so I started to understand because I was like part of my job was just like briefing all my seniors every week about new things.

2:08:04And this was like at the height of we were designating terrorists and we were targeting terrorists based on financial intelligence. And so there was, you know, these weekly briefings to the joint staff and our political bosses. I was in the room for all those things. And I heard and so I learned a lot about how the chain of command is supposed to work.

2:08:29And when Obama came in, they just added so many layers. And it was like commanders couldn't make decisions anymore. They had to ask permission from the White House. And it screwed up a lot of things. It made a lot of operations impossible, just ended them before they started and just made them so much more dangerous as well. Because, I mean, you know, like sometimes you're dealing with a fleeting target. You got to take the opportunity when you have it. And there was just no appreciation for that. But I will say something that happened that might be interesting. So while I was there during that tour, General McChrystal was at a certain point very interested.

2:09:19There had been a lot of rumors about someone named Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was the brother of President Karzai. And there was a lot of rumors, pretty factually based, that he was a narcotics trafficker and was involved in a lot of really bad things. and also tied to the Taliban. And so McChrystal set us on a deep dive, like the entire, like all of his kind of intel team, you guys go out into, you know, go out into the wild and see who has what on AWK. And, you know, come back. I think I forget how much time we were given, like a month or something. And like, let's everyone get together and let's figure out, like, is this guy, is he really bad?

2:10:12What are we going to do about it? Let's do this deep dive.

2:10:18So no one, there was nothing, like, no smoking gun tying AWK to anything. But also, I will say, there was so much circumstantial evidence that it was obvious that he was all of those things. But because the ceiling, like, you had to meet an impossible level of certainty that we weren't able to meet. Like, no, he never got up on a call and said, I'm going to traffic some drugs today. Hello, my Taliban friends. Like, yeah, I mean, that never happened. And he did, I mean, all of his activities were through lieutenants and subcommanders and stuff. So I remember a huge effort to get everything together.

2:11:13And then it just like, and he was assassinated shortly after that. So the problem went away anyway. But that was at the time really disappointing because I'm like, it's obvious this is a super bad dude. And it's a problem for the United States. and he might have also been working with us in some way, I don't know. But the other... Who assassinated him? One of his rivals, I guess. Do you think it was us? I have no information that it was us. Yeah, I don't know.

2:11:56I don't know. Um, but I think, I think that, well, yeah, I have no, I have no information on that one way or the other, but I know it solved a problem. with respect to you mentioned marja so one of the other things that i i really that i remember from that deployment was um another kind of directive that came down from mccrystal where he wanted he wanted a deep dive on taliban finance and he said look there are all these rumors that people have been saying for years you know gulf like they're getting all their money from the gulf and there's a whole rabbit hole that we can dive down in that, but it's interesting to like 10 people.

2:12:49But he wanted a deep dive on Taliban finance. He's like, is there money still really coming from the Gulf or are there other sources of funding? How would it be coming? How's it coming from the Gulf? Well, they would go to the Gulf. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda would go and other terrorist organizations as well, would go to the Gulf, different Gulf countries and individuals who supported what they were doing. And they would go specifically during Ramadan was like a big fundraising period where Muslims are, you know, encouraged to give to charity. And so they would collect, they would raise a lot of money as a charity towards these, like, towards their terrorist causes.

2:13:33And, you know, they frame it as they're advancing, you know, radical Islam and they're fighting, you know, the great Satan or whatever. And so, yeah, they raised a lot of money that way. They also, I mean, there were in the early days, there were, these were groups that were later designated by the Treasury Department, the State Department, but they were, like, humanitarian. They were masquerading as humanitarian, like Islamic relief or stuff like that. But they were terrorist fronts and they were raising money through those avenues. And they raised a lot of money. And it also became a political hot potato because, you know, the U.S.

2:14:24government's designating Islamic relief like, Like, oh, are you Islamophobic? Like, no, I'm terrorist-a-phobic. But that's, you know, that's, there was not a lot, there was enough political will for a period of time to do that, and then it went away. But fast forward, so, you know, as JSOC commander, obviously McChrystal was focused elsewhere, but I'm sure, like, he had enough information to know that when he was JSOC commander, a lot of these funds were coming in that way. So he wanted to know, like, here I am, commander at ISAF, how is the Taliban today making its money? And so we got, and there were some colleagues of mine from the Treasury Department.

2:15:14And by that point, there was an Afghanistan threat finance cell. And so there were all these interagency folks that were there doing amazing things and put together a really compelling assessment that the Taliban is actually getting its money from us. They are making their money from us. If you consider our logistics supply chain into Afghanistan, they were extorting money on every single link in that supply chain. So we were paying the Taliban. Are you serious? Can you be a little more descriptive how that was happening? So you have supply trucks coming in for Supreme, for our food, our fuel, our sustainment, anything for sustainment.

2:16:03It all went through Pakistan because it couldn't go. I mean, if you look at a map, there are only a few ways that that stuff can enter into Afghanistan. So it all came in through Pakistan. And the Taliban are in Pakistan. and they were not just there, but also in Afghanistan. They had locked down these trucking companies and also not just the trucking companies, but also the individual drivers. And sometimes the subcontractors to big American primes that were not necessarily American, they were also being extorted. Wow. All this came to light in 2010. And you uncovered that? Not me personally.

2:16:50I was part of a team. But yes, we did uncover that. What happened after that? Well, not relatedly. McChrystal got fired. So he did. Oh, his other question, by the way, that I failed to mention was, is the Taliban making its money off of the narcotics trade? Is that like a key part of their finance? And we did find that it was a lot less than everyone thought, that this extortion racket was really, that was the key method of how the Taliban was raising its money. And, but he did, it did give him this whole analysis and like link chart that the team did really gave him a lot of insight into like where the key narcotics trafficking nodes were.

2:17:42And so those were included in this Marja operation. It was part of it. So to disrupt Taliban financing, that was part of the end goal of that operation. How did they act when you got the information to them? I mean, I was in the room when he was briefed on it, and he was shocked. Did they take action? Yeah. He, so in addition to this, you know, kinetic targeting, there was also, like, he put his logistics chief, the CJ4, he put him, like, in charge of doing this whole, you know, deep dive into the subcontractors and how do we do a better job of vetting and all that. And I'm sure, like, I helped him with it for a bit, but then McChrystal got fired and I went home.

2:18:43And I know when Petraeus came on board, he brought General McMaster, who stood up like a very public anti-corruption task force. That was because of what we had found. um but i will say that when uh and i'm grateful to him when mccristle got fired general flynn kind of took me aside and he and he was like you should go home now um and uh he was like nothing good's gonna happen now you should just just get out of here just go home. And I heard later that, you know, it wasn't pleasant for the, all the McChrystal, you know, those who remained. I think Petraeus had a not good view of that team and made sure everyone knew it.

2:19:39So I was kind of grateful that I got rescued from that. But I was, I was so like, Like, I just felt when McChrystal got fired, I was like, well, it's over. You know, it's over. I mean, I knew Petraeus from Iraq days. And I was like, what are we going to do in this country anymore? Like, it's the only, to me, the only hope was McChrystal because he also was dealing with Pakistan. And you can't, there was no hope in really changing anything in Afghanistan without addressing the real problem, which it seemed to me was Pakistan, and the ISI specifically. So anyway, I was pretty... I never at that time would have imagined that we would have been there another 10 years after that.

2:20:34And we never really addressed any of those problems. And we kept paying, like, in a way, secondarily, the Taliban, who kept killing us 10 years after that. And we knew. This is the thing that astounds me. And I'm like, we still have no accountability. Like, all these people knew and did nothing.

2:20:56Oh, man. Every time I dive into this, I just start getting more and more angry. I mean, especially we were just talking offline about the$40 to$87 million in cash that we would send Taliban every single week. Thank God Tim Burchard got it passed through the House. Thank God. And Senator Sheehy's supposed to be introducing it to the Senate. Hopefully that happens soon. But, oh man, I just, I don't even know what to think anymore. It's hard to know what to think. Because at a certain point, you have to ask, like, this is all, like, too many coincidences of us helping our sworn enemy. Like, are we really – are we trying to do that?

2:21:50Do you think it was – that's actually what I was just going to ask. Not then. Are we trying to prolong the war? I mean, what was that? I wonder, too. I wonder, too. I wish I had answers. I don't. But you have to ask yourself when you see what I saw and everything just kept going. It was like nothing. What else do you need to know? I mean, just putting things together because this is all in the 2009 time frame. you know yeah slash the roes cut our troops legs out from under them continue to finance them i mean it's just then everything that happens later i mean it's and this was obama years and so obama um you know was very publicly like trying you know should should we surge or should we just, you know, leave?

2:22:53And this was very public and obviously decided, wanted the public to know that he decided that he was going to surge. And the whole catastrophic withdrawal under Biden was Biden being like, you know, finally getting his, he always wanted us to pull out, this was, again, the narrative, He had always wanted us to pull out. And now that he was president, it was going to happen. And regardless of, you know, we had all the things that happened that could have been prevented, didn't matter, were out. And that's a victory because that's what he had always wanted. But, yeah, that's been the whole narrative that's been provided to us.

2:23:44I don't have any more insight than that. I have the same questions that you do. Let's move into the SWIFT program. What was the SWIFT program? Well, SWIFT is a way to move money, to move funds, and banks use it today all the time. You're basically electronically transferring funds from one bank to another, and it's an international system that's used by many, many countries. This was a very highly classified program for many years that was part of the Patriot Act, but part of the classified part of the Patriot Act. and it got blown in the New York Times years ago. It was very successful because you could track, if you knew who had which bank account number and which bank, you could see who was doing what, who was sending what they were sending, where they were sending it.

2:25:01But it was specifically only for counterterrorism, could not be used for anything else. And once the program got blown, a lot of our international partners, especially in Europe, they have very different privacy laws in Europe than we do in the United States. And they were very upset.

2:25:29But over the years, it's been a very successful program. Like when I was at Treasury managing this program, we were able to – I don't know if you remember this horrible child killer in Norway, this guy Anders Breivik, who just like went to – just psycho, you know, went to an island of like a kid's summer camp. Oh, I do remember this. And just like murdered all these kids. I do remember this. And there was a big question about like, is this a lone wolf guy? Like, what's his motivation? And we were able to look at his bank accounts and tell the Norwegians for sure this man was saved money for 10 years to be able to fund this operation.

2:26:17There was no one else involved. It was just him. But so that program is, again, purely for counterterrorism purposes, very misunderstood. but you know how was it misunderstood well a lot of a lot of because it was secret and then it got blown and like it's not like our it's not like our government is going to come out and explain everything that it was doing I think people assign kind of their own they make up stories and obviously a lot of people are like to think of the United States as kind of this big, bad entity. And sometimes I feel, I feel the same, but no. Sometimes I feel the same. Sometimes I wonder.

2:27:11No, but the reality is, you know, in Europe in particular, if like, if you're European and you've never been here, you don't really understand America, you know, you just read the news, you could think that, like someone accused us, for example, from a European government of like trying to track who is gay in Europe. And I'm like, I can promise you, first of all, when you fill out your form to open a bank account, that's not part of it. So that information doesn't exist, number one, tied to a bank account. And two, like this is for counterterrorism purposes only. And the company, the Swift, the company, you know, has very strict controls over that.

2:27:58And they actually oversee a lot of that as well to make sure that every request is for, meets a threshold. How does it work? I don't know how much I'm allowed to go into that anymore, but I think that it's very safe to say there's a very formal coordination process where there are multiple layers of approval and oversight. And again, you can't introduce other targets that don't relate, that don't have a direct connection to counterterrorism. But when you see new entities designated as terrorists, for example the cartels that's one of the authorities that is now available interesting so basically use the swift code correct and you you can breach into any bank account see where money's coming where it's going to is that it is that am i on there it's way more specific than that.

2:29:11Like you basically, if you have a target, you need to figure out what bank account they're attached to. And then you request any SWIFT transactions from that bank account, and then you see what comes up. So you can't just say like, I want to look at all transactions from Iraq to Iran or vice versa. No, you have to, and then you have to write a whole, And again, my information is very, very old now. This is many, many years ago that I was doing this. But you had to write a whole justification for why. And you had to include reporting as part of your justification. This is who this person is. This is what their bank account is.

2:29:58Here's why I know this. This is why they're a terrorist. Here's the justification for that. I'm trying to find out this. This is why I'm trying to find this out. Do you have anything? Gotcha. It's very, very controlled. You know, while we're on the subject of Afghanistan, I've got a Patreon. It's a subscription account, and we've turned it into quite the community here. And one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Jim Harmon. Why does it appear that our government intel agencies appear to ignore obvious threats to national security?

2:30:44For instance, the fact that Hamza bin Laden is alive is disputed by officials. So we wanted to go into this and, you know, we were talking off camera about my friend Sarah Adams, who says that Hansa bin Laden is still alive, that he is the leader. He's basically over all of these terrorist organizations, which have united. Then she went on to say that the, I believe it was the UK government also reported through their intelligence that he was alive. Now, I know you have a different opinion on this. Yes.

2:31:29Hamza bin Laden, actual, is not alive. He is dead. However, I do not dispute the fact that someone calling himself Hamza bin Laden, perhaps even a bin Laden cousin, is doing all of that. But Hamza actual is not alive. How do you know that? He is dead. Because I have asked multiple people who would know that I trust, and they have told me unequivocally, he is dead. Do they tell you where he was killed? Yes, and I don't remember right now. I know that's a cop-out, but it's real. When was he killed?

2:32:16Man, 2019, is that right? Why do you think the UK government is saying that he's alive? I mean, there's clearly someone calling himself Hamza bin Laden that is, like, organizing a lot of bad stuff. And I don't dispute that. But I just think, like, do you remember in that The Princess Bride, the Dredge Pirate Roberts, that there were like multiple, when one guy would retire, there'd be another guy that came up and now he was the Dredge Pirate Roberts. And you're just kind of like living off of that infamy. That name is so powerful and is a brand in and of itself. And therefore, someone's using it to rally the terrorist troops.

2:33:06But no, I will say he's dead. But yes, there are serious concerns about a person calling himself Hamza bin Laden, who's organizing some very problematic and troubling things. Well, that's an interesting twist that seems like a very realistic scenario. I mean, both things could be right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How do you think the Afghan withdrawal went? Not well. Not well. It was a catastrophe, and we are still living with the repercussions of that today. Very much so. So I got pulled into one of these kind of civilian groups, like veterans and former DOD civilians. And I found out later also active duty folks in special operations who were coordinating with us when they were not supposed to be.

2:34:17But God bless them. Um, you know, I, someone reached out to me right when things started to get chaotic and, uh, a lawyer friend of mine, and she had a client who was just trying to, you know, trying to get into the airport, trying to get out. Could I help? So I don't even remember who I reached out to, someone and someone I thought might know something. And they added me to the Signal Chat group that took over my life for weeks. And I know a lot of people had those kind of experiences where all of a sudden I just dropped everything that I was doing. And I do know people and I have my own network and actually was able to help a couple of families that, DIA families actually, Afghans that were working for DIA that have worked for DIA for a long time.

2:35:13and we're being abandoned.

2:35:19And amazingly, because of the people on the ground and their heroic efforts, their willingness to work with us, they saved a lot of lives. But the things, even sitting in my living room on Signal, just being part of this, I mean, it was so weird because you do, I did feel like I was there sometimes. There was one family we were trying to help. I want to be careful because I don't know what happened to them, but they didn't make it out. I know that. It was a father and some kids, and they were, you know, it was so hot those days, and people were waiting outside for days and days, like passing out, babies dying.

2:36:08and this there was this particular man who had worked for us and was trying to get out with his kids and um there was someone on the wall like a pj on the wall looking for him and we had already you know given everyone when you say this he'll say this you know hold up he had a sign that had word on it. He was holding up the sign and he was right outside. They were right outside of Abbey Gate. And I have a picture of the man and his two beautiful children right before the explosion happened. And we found out later one of the boys was killed. Oh, man. And that wrecked me. That wrecked me for a while.

2:37:00just looking at that little boy's face, you know, and like it was so close. They were so close. And we couldn't get anyone to open the gates. You know, there were all these like, oh, send them to the black gate. Oh, send them to this gate. And they would get there and there was no gate open. There was no one there to open the gate. It was so much chaos. And then the civilians, There were Americans trying to get out. They were also being given this bad information. No one was – people were supposed to help them and they weren't. So they were getting information from, you know, people in my group.

2:37:39And they were getting beaten by the Taliban badly. They were getting their U.S. like blue passports taken from them. and um you know I was so I thought your interview of Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews was so powerful and I want to thank you for for that and to thank him because um there are so many of us who were like at home that day just trying to trying to help and that feeling when that explosion went off when that guy clacked himself off and 13 marine or 13 service members like it breaks my heart to this day. I had the opportunity to meet some of the family members. And I can't imagine, again, my two brothers served in the Marine Corps, and there but for the grace of God, it was so unnecessary.

2:38:36And that was how we left. And that's how the world saw us leave, after 20 years of blood and treasure. And so it also was such an encouragement to global jihadists, jihadis globally. We lost the jiwa, and they know it, and we just haven't admitted it to ourselves. That's the accountability that we still need. We need to be able to say that we lost, and we need to understand why. But the – it's just like there's still – I think in the early, like the year or two after the withdrawal, there were still some people who were – you know, a lot of us know a lot of Afghans who like really competent fighters who served in the Afghan military.

2:39:34like either the soft units or like the zero units. I mean, they're just incredibly competent and some of them really wanted to organize and go back. I mean, I don't really see that happening anymore and especially when our own relationship with the Taliban is sort of unclear. But I just want to point out that we gave up Bagram. Like we could have pulled out and kept Bagram, but Bagram we need for China. And China knows it. And for China to have, people talk about China and Afghanistan, like they get control over all these rare earth minerals and stuff. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the geography.

2:40:25And how are we, look at a map, like how are we going to do this when we don't have Bagram? Bagram would be a great – Bagram would have been the place. And it just, again, makes no sense. It makes no sense. And all of the after-action stuff where, like, people at the embassy were drunk and not wanting to leave. I don't know if you saw that. There was one of the interviews that was done later. one of our, I think one of our service members was like just knocking on doors at the embassy at the end, just like making sure everyone was evacuating to HKIA. And someone opened the door, it's an account, you can find it online.

2:41:13Someone opened the door and was like wasted off their ass. Like, this is OK. You know, and when you learn more about kind of the the who had who was in control or who was in charge of that effort, it was the State Department. It was the civilians, not the military. So anyway, I have a lot of questions. There's a lot of blame to go around. And, you know, I'm complaining about it a lot. Someone said to me a while ago, a response to one of these op-eds that I wrote was like, well, what about you? You know, what about your own involvement in this stuff? You know, I think we can all stand to look at what we were part of and what we were, what our activities were.

2:42:11And I think accountability should be spread far and wide. And I'm not afraid of it. But at the same time, like, I don't, I wasn't part of that. What I do know is at the end of the first Trump administration, we were in a very different place. And we were not, Trump did not order withdrawal. Trump was comfortable with a small force there that was really doing like advise and assist. And we were doing intel support for the Afghan special operations units who were extremely capable and were conducting operations very successfully. So if we had just, you know, part of me feels if we had just continued that, I mean, if you look at when was the last casualty prior to Abbey Gate, it was like a couple years.

2:43:07Because we weren't doing what we were doing before. We were transitioning. So, yeah, the whole thing is just like, you know, mental health crisis. I mean, there's just so many. I just, man, it just seemed like no thought at all went into that. I mean, we have all these jihadist groups that want to kill us. We have zero intelligence on the ground over there anymore. We gave up a strategic air base, which not only for China, but also Iran, because they did use or still do use terrorist organizations as proxies. The rare minerals. I mean, the fact that we abandoned another ally, or I guess I can't say an ally, but abandoned another, just like Vietnam.

2:44:00We trained them up. We were turning it over. They fought alongside us for, what, 20, 21 years? 21 years. And then we're just mic drop. We're out. Done. That's it. I mean. And. What? To add insult to injury, we trucked all these random Afghans here, some of whom turned out to be, like, watchlisted. and people who actually like earned the right to be here, who worked with us, worked for us, were abandoned. And we still have a lot of people here that we don't even know who they are. How do you think that should have gone? They knew, this is where I start to get, you know, they knew months in advance that they were going to leave.

2:44:57They knew they are government. They knew that we were going to leave through HKIA and not through Bagram. So in that moment, like, they knew we weren't going to bring anyone out except for us. You know, they never had any intention of rescuing, of, like, saving our partners, even though they said they did. I mean, those factors, like, look at the... HKIA is in the middle of the city. And in order to have airlifts for the number of people who needed to be brought out, and then also the immigration kind of requirements, like all of the paperwork and stuff and vetting and all that, should have begun months and months and months before.

2:45:45The fact that they didn't do that meant that they were never going to save anybody. and no one ever I mean there were lies during the entire six months from when they announced the withdrawal to when it happened just lie after lie and yeah that's just no one's you can point it out and it doesn't matter doesn't change a thing Sim Raging Yes You know, back to the Swift thing, were you able, I mean, was that instrumental in changing how we target these guys? In some cases, by the time I was working on it, it had already been blown. So I think the enemy had, like, they'd already changed their TTPs a lot.

2:46:42But, you know, for example, bank accounts are one, were one way to move money, but they have this whole underground system. It's not underground, but we don't, it's not part of our Western culture called Hawala, where it's a value transfer system. It's like the easiest way to explain it. And like you can go to – a hawala is not a bank and not even necessarily – it's not a licensed financial institution in many countries. But if you can go to like a corner store somewhere and the guy's a hawala, a hawala dar, and you can say, well, I want to send, you know,$5 ,000 to my boy in Islamabad. So that guy will call up like some hawala in Islamabad and they basically arrange between the two of them because I pay the guy here$5 ,000.

2:47:51They arrange between the two of them how the money is going to be transferred. But again, it's not necessarily money. It can be carpets. It can be gemstones. It can be other items of value. And then my buddy in Islamabad will go to the place in Islamabad and get$5 ,000. So you can't track that through the formal financial system. So it's like a Western Union of commodities. Yes. Yes. Exactly. So that's been a challenge for the intelligence community for many years and law enforcement. to try to understand the Hawala network, global Hawala network, how it works. I was working in banking in UAE for several years, and I worked for a big bank.

2:48:47And we had a relationship with several Hawalas that were like banks. They were huge and they had their own compliance people that were working on doing stuff that bankers all know, KYC, know your customer, kind of trying to understand like, oh, this is your name. Your name does not come up on any watch list. This is your address. Your address doesn't come up as any known bad person on the OFAC list. I mean, there's a whole process. It's very involved. But the bottom line is some of these hualas are very big and they're used like they're across the Middle East in the Islamic world. So they're used very – they're in places where banks don't really operate because for a variety of reasons.

2:49:46And from an enforcement perspective, it's a challenge to figure out like, well, these guys are clearly running like bad money through their hawala. But that's also the only way that this entire region of this country can get access to money. So interesting. I did not know that. Yeah. Interesting. Well, Simone, let's take let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll get into DIA. Great.

2:50:33All right, Simone, we're back from the break. We're going to move into your career over at Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA. So how did you fall into that? Well, I moved over there. Basically, General Flynn became the director of DIA, and I went over there with him. I had been at Treasury, obviously, before that on the intel side, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. And General Flynn was standing up. A lot of commanders have their kind of director's advisory group or whatever they call it. And so he was standing his up, and I had the opportunity to go and be part of that. So, yeah, so that's how I got over to DIA.

2:51:33Right on. What kind of stuff were you doing? Well, his big push was when he got over there was the reorganization of DIA. But I think it's not a surprise to anyone who knew him to say that he was on a kind of revenge tour after his experience in Afghanistan. He wrote Fixing Intel talking about how the intelligence assessments that were being produced or the information that was being collected even and shared was not helpful to people on the battlefield. That, you know, it was they weren't collecting things that we needed to fight the war and to win the war. and he wrote this very controversial.

2:52:29I mean, everyone agreed with it, but the way that it was released, I think Gates, Secretary Gates, he was the SecDef at the time and others were critical of how it was released, i.e. it was released publicly through a think tank. But that was how General Flynn operated. so he didn't really care I think he wanted to just get it to the widest audience possible because he wanted to make sure that people understood how broken it was it was really like he could only jump up and down for so long yelling about the same problem so people have a variety of opinions on that and I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not but it certainly got a lot of attention and it did get things to change.

2:53:22So when he came back and took over DIA, he wanted to move a lot of people out who had kind of stood in his way and really were not helpful in prosecuting the war. So there were these announcements that would come out pretty regularly about like senior DIA employees who were like moving to different jobs and other agencies kind of thing like, oh, they're going to be the liaison at DHS and things like that. And it was, I mean, he was moving people out that he did not view as kind of teammates, people who were going to be helpful in what he wanted to do with DIA. So there was a lot of kind of like rearranging personnel stuff.

2:54:17But the really big effort during that time was reorganizing the agency and putting the collectors and the analysts together in one. So like the collection operations for, let's say, Russia and the analysts for Russia were not like they didn't even know each other. They were in different parts of bowling. They were different parts of the world sometimes. And they weren't working together in a coordinated way. So he reorganized EIA to have like Russia house, to have like China house. And so the Americas was another one where you have, again, the people working together so that they can coordinate effectively.

2:55:16So collectors are actually going after intelligence that the analysts really need to answer the key questions. So, I mean, for people who don't know, it's the, you know, our senior leadership and our government puts out the collection priorities. They put out like, here are the main things that we want to know. And then the intelligence community kind of does an assessment of like, well, what can we answer and where are the gaps? And the gaps are really what the intelligence collectors go after. and they need to be working closely with the analysts who are going to really fill those gaps with that information and that intelligence.

2:56:07So it was pretty revolutionary at the time. No one had ever thought about it like that before. CIA reorganized itself in a similar manner not long after that. So I think it was clearly a great idea. and um and so but to be part of that you know dia is kind of notoriously bureaucratic and uh a lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about dia and um but i worked with a lot of people who spent a long time deployed and who really are patriots and um you know put everything out there left it all on the field, did their best. So I was there for pretty, not for that long, like two years. But I learned a lot during my time there.

2:56:59I worked with some great analysts. I finished out my time. So I did that, was working on the reorg for a while under General Flynn. And then I moved to running a small, like a small unit of analysts, really. We were focused on something that no one at the time cared about at all, transnational organized crime in the Americas, cartels. And no one paid attention to us. No one cared. Had a great group of analysts who knew a lot about the subject matter. Nobody paid any attention to that or cared? No. No. Not at that time. No, not at that time. I mean, it was like checking the box, you know, but we were all focused.

2:57:48Everyone was focused on the Middle East. And we had, I was there. This is really what led me to quit government completely was Syria. the Obama's Syria red line. So first I was, after all my experiences, Iraq, Afghanistan, I was, I was pretty disgusted by everything, but, you know, I still wanted to serve and I loved what I was doing, like on a micro level. I love the people I got to work with. I thought we were working on important things. The fact that I had this kind of financial intelligence background made me a little bit unusual, which I like to kind of niche. But, you know, I remember, I mean, I don't think I'll ever forget it.

2:58:40Obama gave that famous speech about red lines and Assad not, you know, if Assad uses chemical weapons against his own people, like that's a red line and we will act. So I think it was on a Friday when Assad for the first time used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. He did it many, many times after. But the first was, I think, on a Friday, because we all showed up to work on Saturday. Like, no one said, you know, come in. But we just showed up because that's, you know, you know how it is. That's like what you do. Okay, it's going to kick off. We'll just be here to be helpful. And we sat there for hours.

2:59:21And finally, one of the bosses came out of his office and was like, y 'all should just go home. Nothing's going to happen. And I really had a, like a crisis at that time and just realized I was, I was like nearing 40. And I just thought, what am I doing with my life? you know I've been so focused it wasn't just a job for me it was like a life it was my life and I just felt like what am I doing I don't know what what am I doing this for this is crazy and I I just I knew I had to leave I knew I started paying attention to I don't know if they still do this, but at the time, DIA would have these email announcements when someone dies and they tell you, like, so-and-so passed away.

3:00:24People were, I don't know if this is true, but it seemed like people were dying at their desks. And I was like, no way. No way. What do you mean people were dying at their desks? Like, you know how it is in the bureaucracy where people just like, they're going to hang on until retirement no matter what. Like got to get those last years in before you hit retirement. Like that's such a thing. So you get all your benefits. People were dying at their desks waiting to hit that retirement. It's not funny, but it's not funny, but it's real. And when I remember telling people that I was out, I was leaving and no one could believe it because I I had all my tickets.

3:01:06You know, I had like, you know, polygraphs and everything. I had it all. And they're like, you know, your clearance is worth over$200 ,000. And I'm like, there's more to life. There's just more to life. I'm not going to do this anymore. So, yeah, that was. So you didn't believe in the mission anymore. And your values weren't aligned with what was happening. What was the mission, Sean? You're asking the wrong person that. I'm still trying to figure that one out. I mean, I didn't see it. I didn't see it. And I just felt I've given years of my life to this and I wasn't married, didn't have kids and I was like, there's more to life.

3:01:56so uh yeah so i had i had no job to go to but i just uh i did have they were offering early outs you know they called it vera visa basically the they pay you a lump sum for your retirement and that's it you're done and the and your billet is gone so i was expensive by that time i was like a GS-15 Step 5, which in the DC area is a lot of money, relatively for the government. It was like 100-something, like 100, I don't remember, maybe in the 190s. Yeah, so I just, but the VRVSIP was like a lump sum payment. And I just, after tax, took the money and left. I went to Italy. I had a friend that I had reconnected with.

3:02:56One of my brothers got married in Italy, and I had reconnected with this friend of mine there. And he was a friend from business school days. I went to business school in Milan. And he had this luxury villa on the Amalfi Coast. and he's like, do you want to help me? And I just thought, I mean, are you serious? Because I seriously, yes, I would. So I ended up doing that. I just went, I went to Sorrento, Italy and it was, it's funny in retrospect, but it was really what I needed. And I just helped him run his like luxury villa. We started this boat tour company where we would take guests to Capri on day trips.

3:03:44And I was the first mate on the boat and worked for tips. It was great. Wow. It was awesome. Quite the change, huh? I needed it. Yeah. Swim in the ocean every day, be outside the skiff, just experience life. You know what I mean? So it was good until I ran out of money around later in the year. and I had to actually go back to real job and real life. But yeah, it was amazing. And I think in retrospect, seeing how a lot of my friends kind of have flamed out when they've had the kind of similar realization that I had. Were a lot of people leaving like you? In different ways, yeah, in different ways.

3:04:32What were the discussions like? And I mean, when I was telling my friends in the intelligence community that I was leaving and why, I mean, maybe people I worked with didn't fully, like on my team didn't understand, but my friends understood 100%. And some of them had already left. Yeah, people got it. But, I mean, if you look back now at our, like, on the analytics side, the analysts, like, senior analysts that we have who served in GWAT, very, very few. Almost everyone's gone. Like, there was, on Iraq specifically, everyone cleared out. Everyone. Man. There's no, but how sad is that too, because there's very, very limited institutional memory of so many things, things that are important for the institution to remember.

3:05:39That's, you know, one of the big, one of the big challenges, I think. And sure, the army did, you know, Iraq, like the after action kind of deep dive into Iraq, what went wrong. And I've heard there's one on Afghanistan, but it's classified. Go figure. But like, that's still, it's still, you know, that's great for the army, but who's gonna, it's so specific to the military. And there's a lot more to it than that. I mean, there have been so many people have written books and, and they've covered different, different sides of this. And but, yeah, no, the basic fact is the people who are like mentally healthy enough.

3:06:29And I feel like I was borderline at that point. I don't I don't I was not mentally healthy at that point. I knew it enough to not even try to find another job just to like clear my head, you know, and and try to just get myself back a little bit. And then also the reality was I was doing really well. I would have advanced to an SAS, but I had to do another deployment, probably to Djibouti. And I just had zero. I was like, I'm going to burn my sleeping bag. I am not doing that again. I was done. I'm going to burn my sleeping bag. I was, that thing smelled so bad, but it was, it was just time, you know, it was just enough.

3:07:14It was enough. You and I both know people who that's all they can do now with their lives. They can only exist in places and situations like that. And they can't live in the normal world. And I kind of recognized that I was like slapping up against that. And I didn't want to become that.

3:07:39And talking to other people that I had served with, everyone kind of understood that. Because the adrenaline is real and the feeling that you're working on something important and you're, you know, the mission and all that. And so it had to get really bad for me to understand that I had to just pull the ripcord and save myself. And that's what I did. And where did you go from Italy? I went to the UAE. And I got a job working for a big bank that had gotten itself in trouble. violating Iran sanctions. And it was, I mean, they egregiously violated Iran sanctions. How so? They created a manual for their clients on how to hide details about transactions.

3:08:34Holy shit. Yeah. And you were working for that bank? Afterwards. So I guess they forgot about the NSA, couldn't find that sort of thing. And so they got in very serious trouble with OFAC and the DOJ. So they had to pay over a billion dollars in fines. They almost lost their U.S. dollar access, and they had to create a whole new compliance program focused on our laws, the Bank Secrecy Act, and so how to – like the controls around U.S. dollars, U.S. dollar transactions. And so my job, I covered Africa, Middle East and Pakistan from Dubai. I was based in Dubai. And so I was like all over the region for years doing my job, which was basically conducting investigations, doing training, like training thousands and thousands of bank employees, and then interacting a lot with our regulators as well.

3:09:46Just kind of like letting them know what was going on, answering questions, stuff like that. So you're living in Dubai? Yeah. Okay. How was that? We just went there about a month ago, I think-ish. I've been there several times. Yeah. It's like all expats. It is. It is. What did you think? Did you like it? I love it there. Yeah. I think the architecture is amazing. I think it's one of the most impressive cities in the world. I don't know what I would do there if I lived there other than shop. Because I got some great shopping. They do. But, yeah, what's it like living there? I mean, I loved it.

3:10:31It was – I was on the road a lot. So I can see what you're saying. But I just – I loved it. I just thought the people were so nice. I made a lot of friends. it was beautiful it's safe and it's just incredibly impressive the first time that I was there was like early days like maybe 2004 oh okay and so to see what it became so quick quickly what they built there what they made it's just really it's it's like got a vibe you know it's and it's Um, now that I'm older, you know, I kind of like Abu Dhabi. It's a little more chill. Um, you know, I'm like a in in bed at nine o 'clock person now. So Dubai's can be a lot, but it's it's amazing.

3:11:26It truly is amazing. And I really enjoyed my time there. Um, I my job was super interesting, too. I mean, I got to do we were in Zimbabwe when the Mugabe regime was fallen. Like we were there, myself and some of my colleagues from New York City, because at the time we were the only bank that were that was still still had access to U.S. dollars. But because the Mugabe regime was sanctioned by the by OFAC, by the Treasury Department, we had to like wall off, wall them off from any U.S. dollar anything. So we were just, anyway, we were there during like kind of a crazy time for the country. And I had never been there before.

3:12:16And so it was really interesting. We found out, I think the secret police were like on the two floors above us in our hotel. And yeah, it was just, thank God, you know, nothing bad happened to anybody, but it definitely could have. You could tell it was one of those situations where things could pop off in a second. and I was the only one that had my sort of background there. So I brought a ton of cash with me also because I knew, I saw that there were lines for the ATMs and you can't rely on an ATM in a situation like that. So I brought a significant amount of cash and it turned out that all my banker colleagues from New York City had like zero cash.

3:13:02So, but. How do you wall a bank off from U.S. dollars? Well, you know, there's, it's all electronic. But, so the bank itself wasn't, obviously our bank was not walled off, but like a certain set of bank customers who could have access to other denominations, not denominations. but other currencies, but just not US dollars. So you can mark like it's inside the system. I haven't been in a bank system in a long time, but you can say like, this account is for this currency and that currency. And this account is for that currency and that currency. And then these accounts are US dollar accounts. Gotcha.

3:13:55So you can, for example, have multiple accounts in the same bank for different currencies or one account that has multiple currencies. Interesting. And then you get appointed to the Pentagon. Yes. In 2019. Yes. How did that happen? Well, General Flynn called me. And we had been in touch since I left. I mean, kind of the big communication that he and I had had was when I was in Italy, I got contacted by a reporter friend, one of the few, who called me to tell me that Flynn was going to Russia and going to this RT dinner. And I should talk to him about that because it was a bad idea. And I was like, no, he's not.

3:14:53There's no way he's doing that. Like, shut up. um yeah he did that and i did call him and or text him i don't remember anymore and he um he told me that it was thank you very much for your concern i know what i'm doing it's all under control so um and i i really pleaded with him and i just said you know you're you're retired you know i know you're probably excited to you're free and you can do what you want but like you're a retired three-star, like you still have those three stars, like mean something. And like, by the way, don't F all the rest of us that, you know, had in some way, like were tied to you.

3:15:37I mean, I worked for him for like five years, um, in different capacities. So, um, I was kind of like trying to save myself at the same time, but, um, yeah, he did him and, uh, and he, he did that. But anyway, fast forward, he put me up for an assistant secretary job at Treasury at the time. Here's what happened. He called me. I was in Dubai. And he's like, I need you. Like, what jobs do you want? And in the past, I'd been like, you know, salute, like, yes, sir. But this time, the way that banking salaries and stuff work is you get your salary payment, but then you get a bonus. And the bonus, if you're lucky, is a lot of money.

3:16:28And because I was living overseas, your taxes aren't taken out automatically like they are here. So my bonus was going to pay for all my taxes. And the bonus is paid out in March. So the election was in November. And so I was like, can I come a little later this time? Like, I'm not going to be there day one. Thank God. And so that's what happened. Um, so the treasury job went away because Flynn went away and all the treasury deciding people were like, I basically was, um, you know, I was, I was like stray, kind of stray voltage on the Flynn thing, um, which was fine, which was fine. So I just continued on doing what I was doing.

3:17:28About a year later, I got this opportunity at the Pentagon. I guess my name was kind of still on list, still my resume was still in there. So I got contacted by the DOD liaison to the White House. And he said this opportunity, they were looking for someone for the office where I had started back in Solick. in ASD Solik that they needed a deputy like under the DASD to run that special operations and combating terrorism. So I thought, how cool. And I didn't, you know, I had been overseas during the whole election. So I didn't really, I didn't know anything really about Trump. I got my information from, you know, overseas news.

3:18:16And I just assumed that Hillary would win. and when she didn't win, I was like, whoa, great. Now what? Like, cool. But, yeah, so, and then when, you know, everything got crazy really fast, obviously. That's a pretty damn important position. Yeah, yeah, at SOCT. Yeah, it was, I got there. There was the DASD was still there. He moved on a little bit later. But yeah, we were in the thick of it. And it was really, I mean, it was the greatest privilege of my life to work with that group of warriors. I mean, what kind of stuff were you doing? So, SOCT, Special Operations and Combating Terrorism during Baghdadi and Soleimani operations.

3:19:17I mean, that's like. Yeah, I all impressive to the men and women who executed those operations. You know, I I got to see the video of Baghdad, the Baghdadi op like afterwards. You know, they had this whole they're there. Those guys are very good at, you know, their marketing, marketing themselves to the right people. So they made a video of their operation. It's classified. But, you know, you get to go down. They even had really cool music. And so that was – but being part of it really meant – So were you in the planning process, Liz? No, no. I wasn't – that's all the military. The military does the planning.

3:20:07You know, if there's any like approvals that sometimes there's ancillary things that need to be approved, like they need to go up a chain. But the big thing that I had to do with the Baghdadi operation was briefing Congress after the fact and briefing members and the staffs. And what was really awesome, I mean, this was my favorite part of it, and I sound like a fangirl because I am, was, you know, going, it was myself, my joint staff counterpart. He was a very highly decorated ranger and the director of CTC at the agency. And it was really, for the most part, the two of them explaining in detail what happened.

3:20:56So I really can't say very much, but the CTC guy, the CIA Counterterrorism Center's director, I mean, that's some movie shit, what happened there. And the first time that I learned it, just being real, was when I heard him briefing on the Hill. And that's right. I had zero need to know about how they got to Baghdadi and how they figured out it was him and how they got eyes on. Did you share any of that or is that all sealed up? I mean, I wouldn't want to be the one to tell that story. That's someone else's story. Okay. But God bless them. And what was amazing, one of the many, many amazing things about that operation was they had, I mean, it was boots on the ground.

3:21:59And no one was even injured. The dog. Oh, super funny story about the dog. Okay, I can tell that. So Conan, Conan, the dog. So there's a huge public interest in Conan, the dog, that was part of the operation, got injured in the operation, but was fine, mostly. so when the time came to give the unit an award there was some kind of there was something I don't even remember what exactly but there's some type of ceremony at the White House but you know that that unit that's a special mission unit so none of those guys can be identified so oh but they they wanted to showcase the dog so the dog had a different handler for that event because the real handler, you know, couldn't be on camera.

3:22:58And we were watching in the office and he was standing, the dog was, the vice president was standing next to the dog and the vice president started moving his hand like to pet this thing. This is not the dog that you pet. Do you know what I'm saying? This dog has titanium teeth and is like, like, probably like definitely ripped like many throats out. And the vice president's like, we just watch his hand like, we're all like, no. But and not with his regular handler either. So like, oh, my God. But it all worked out. And Pence has both his hands still. But that was just to be part of that in a small way and help tell the story of what these guys did was truly amazing.

3:24:00And, you know, we all knew the story of Kayla Mueller and what she had endured and what he had done to her, turning her into just not let's not even say it, but just so horrific, was so meaningful to be able to, you know, we couldn't save her, but we did like bring justice for her family at the end of the day. And like, I believe in that. I was really proud to be even just be the explainer at the like at the end of that explain to our lawmakers what happened. That was awesome. And then Soleimani, well, I'll just say there were a lot of people in the first Trump administration who said a lot of things about being involved.

3:24:50And they're on a lot of lists now. And, you know, I was not involved other than that. I was in that office when it happened. And so, like, yeah, we knew about it. I knew about it. I don't think my team did until I told them. But, you know, it was a task force operation. And so, like, you know, we were apprised of it and we had to deal with a lot of stuff after the fact. But I remember this, like how stressful it was with all the different operational details as we were learning them. Like, there was just so many things that could have gone wrong, as usual, on an operation like that. And to see at the end his hand on social media, his hand with his famous ring.

3:25:54and knowing the story of Qasem Soleimani and how much American blood he had on his hands, how many Americans he'd been involved in killing over the years and of him really being like this evil mastermind and removing him from the battlefield was really profound. And I had nothing to do with it other than to be in that job at that time, But was very, very proud. And I just I know a lot of the folks who were involved and will never take credit or talk about it. And and they're they're amazing. Yeah. But yeah, that also not my story to tell, but just an amazing, amazing operation. and we got a bonus too.

3:26:46We got, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name. He also was responsible for a lot of, Mohandas. Mohandas was in the vehicle with Soleimani, which wasn't, we didn't know in advance, but that was his day too. Who was he? He was a terrorist leader, an Iraqi. So Qasem Soleimani basically ruled Iraq after we left in 2011 from the politicians really answered to him in many ways. But he also had stood up. So there were a lot of different Shia militia groups. Some were directly like Quds Force affiliated. And then there were some that were more like Iraqi Shia, but still funded and aligned with Iran and the Quds Force.

3:27:43And they became the PMF, the Popular Military Front, which still to this day, I believe, gets paid through the Iraqi budget. They're part of Iraq's military force now. um iraq became a satellite of iran um after we pulled out i don't know if you know that but after we pulled out in 2011 that's what happened and that was really in large part thanks to qasem soleimani um but he he was the mastermind from the beginning um these uh efps the explosively oh yeah i remember those projectiles that killed a lot of people a lot of our people that was like that was his you know that was his mastermind so and muhandas was one of his lieutenants in iraq and so to see them both taken out was just um you know yeah it felt great and knowing everything that they had done to to so many so many of our friends you know it's just it felt good there was a lot of backlash over that if i remember correctly wasn't there And yeah, people freaked out and were like, World War III.

3:28:56It's like 2020. Yeah. Yeah, 2020. They freaked out and said it's going to be World War III. It was definitely a ballsy move. And it definitely, look, the president, when the president asked for options, there are a lot of options that are provided to the president. But on that particular day, that was the option that he picked. And like, was everyone shocked? Pretty much. Yeah. And because, yeah, because no one had ever. I mean, no president before Trump would have made a decision like that. How would that have – back then I kind of lived in an echo chamber, so I didn't really explore any of the other ideas.

3:29:49How would that have triggered World War III? I, in my mind, it wasn't going to. But there are a lot of people, a lot of people in Washington who are always advocating for a diplomatic approach, which, by the way, I don't discount the efficacy of diplomacy in the right situation. But, you know, Iran had just killed an American. That was the backdrop for this. Like, right? I think it was a U.S. contractor that was killed on a U.S. base in Iraq that Iran attacked. If I recall correctly, drone? I don't know. I'm sorry. My memory is not great. But what I do remember is an American contractor was killed.

3:30:50And President Trump was going to do something about it because enough was enough. And you can't just get away with killing Americans, which is right, by the way. Thank you. So he's presented with a list of different options. The military puts that together. At the time, it was, I guess, Milley. And we went through a bunch of sect deaths at that time. Esper. But yeah, I believe it was Esper. So they put together these options, probably mostly Milley, but together presented them to the president. And the president decided to go with a strike on Soleimani. Not all of them, by the way, are necessarily like individual, you know, take this guy out or take that guy out.

3:31:38Some of them are like more strategic. But yeah, that was that he went with that one. And for, you know, there were people in our government who had been tracking Soleimani for years, like many, many years. And the Israelis were tracking him for many, many years as well and shared a lot of really vital intelligence with us at that time. So they did not take they did not, to my knowledge, take take part in that strike other than perhaps providing some intelligence. But we can see today how deeply they penetrated into Iran, into Quds Force, into their multiple terror proxies. It's pretty extraordinary.

3:32:32I'm super jealous. I just like I wish that we were, you know, that could really. How many terrorist organizations is Iran using as proxies? Do you have any idea? Well, there's Iraq. I mean, you want to call these little groups in Iraq like one. There's a couple like kind of key ones, but they've changed, merged, et cetera, over time. But you've got the Houthis in Yemen. You've got Hezbollah in Lebanon. You've got Gaza. You've got Hamas, which is funny because, not funny, but a lot of people were saying, oh, well, they're Muslim Brotherhood, i.e. Sunni. So therefore, they can't be aligned with Iran.

3:33:27They can't be accepting money and training and stuff from Iran because they're Sunni. Well, go back to what we were talking about, al-Qaeda leadership being in Iran. like those guys work with each other. And this was another example where Hamas was clearly taking, they were clearly partners with Iran and Iran was clearly providing funding and training and equipment. So anyway, those are like the main ones. But Hezbollah is a global organization. Obviously, they're based in Lebanon, but you have Hezbollah operating Venezuela. They're operating in that tri-border region. And historically, they have been for a long time.

3:34:21And then, of course, you have the Quds Force, which is the only Iranian-Iranian one. And they're – oh, and I'm sorry, Hezbollah also operating in Syria. They had a big operation in Syria. So, yeah, I mean, they've been wreaking havoc globally for such a long time. And this is the same organization Hezbollah killed Marines in Beirut in the 80s, held a station chief hostage and tortured him and murdered him. I mean, this is the same. Anyway, all that to say, they built, and Qasem Soleimani was the mastermind behind this. They had Israel essentially surrounded. They built this huge terror network, but it wasn't only for Israel because they used it to attack us a lot.

3:35:14And there was no real successor to him. There was no one else like him. So taking him out was quite significant. But yeah, a lot of people freaked out and said it was going to be World War III. And that never happened. And there's like very little reflection I've seen from those people who said that about why that didn't happen and what does that mean about their own assumptions. And maybe I should revise what I think. Because when we attacked Fordow recently, it was like the same thing all over again. Oh, World War III. I mean, obviously. When we attacked who? Sorry. Fordow, the Iranian nuclear program, when we bombed their nuclear, when we bombed Fordow, that was, there was like another round of people freaking out about World War III.

3:36:15Well, I mean, I can, so I can, if you don't mind, I'd like to share my opinion on that. But I mean, I think it was just a different, you know, the Soleimani days, the geopolitics was a lot different. And today we have, I think a lot of people know about BRICS, you know about BRICS, throwing the US dollar off the world reserve currency. And we have Russia, Ukraine going on. We have China, we have the China problem, also China, Taiwan. Then we have all the shit going on in the Middle East. And if you look at the BRICS alliance, I mean, it's Russia, it's Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

3:37:00And the last time I checked, there were like 22 other countries that had joined that. And so right there, Russia, China, Iran, I believe is part of that you know what I mean so China Russia Iran it's I think the at least for me you know when I look at it I'm like oh shit like we're not just messing with Iran right now we're also messing with China with Russia with India with all these other players you know that that are also nuclear powers and and and so it's so it's not just but but i wasn't as tuned in back then either with with soleimani as i am as i am now and so that's my fear is it's maybe a little bit of a bold statement here but i mean it seems like the counter to nato you know what i mean and and what do you think how close are we to world war three

3:38:09I don't know. I mean, hopefully very far away. What do I think of BRICS? I mean, I think they're trying to make BRICS a thing. I don't think it's yet still developing. I think there are a few, if I recall correctly, there are a couple of countries that have actually pulled out of BRICS recently. I haven't heard that. I think they have, which is great. So BRICS is TBD. I mean, we're still the United States. We're definitely weaker. We're definitely in a, we've been headed in a bad direction. But when an American president says this country cannot ever have a nuclear weapon, you kind of put yourself in a situation where the American president has to, if they're about to get that, the country's about to get a nuclear weapon and the American president has said they can't get a nuclear weapon, you kind of put yourself in a box.

3:39:18And again, I'm glad he did for all the reasons that we discussed. But BRICS doesn't mean that any one of those countries is going to be like, how dare you attack our great partner? They don't have a it's a economic partnership right now there's no real like military alliance behind it like there is with article 5 in nato where like if you attack if anyone attacks a nato partner then all nato partners are supposed to like come to their aid which in my opinion i don't actually know if that would ever happen um sorry i mean you i'm not going to disagree with you there but Do you think that China, Russia could have used – let's say that – I'm kind of alluding the fact that Iran would have blown up a little bigger than – that situation would have blown up a little bit bigger than it would.

3:40:11But, I mean, do you think that China and Russia would have used Iran as a proxy to get, you know, to smuggle weapons in there, to aid them, to train them, to outfit them, you know, if that would have turned into something bigger than what actually happened? I mean, they're – they have proven themselves to not be allies. They just – they're like – it's a cynical partnership. How have they proven not to be allies? Well, they didn't come to their aid, did they? Israel was hammering them for months and months and achieved air superiority over a period of days. China and Russia didn't come and help Iran.

3:40:58So if they were real allies, then they would have come to their aid, right? That's what an ally does. So I think it also showed that the fear that a lot of people have of this, like they signed this 100-year agreement or something, didn't they? Iran and China and Russia. I believe they signed 50 years maybe. I don't know about that. They signed an agreement. It was very public that they were going to cooperate on all kinds of things, and now they're real partners. But it's turned out so far to be economic in nature and nothing else. I mean, even China. So China, what does China get from a partnership with Iran?

3:41:47It gets - A proxy against us. It gets a proxy against us. Yes. But it gets like directly, it gets energy. It gets like, you know, oil. But it doesn't get the majority of it from Iran. I mean, China has enormous energy needs. It gets the majority, it gets its energy from Iran, but mostly Saudi Arabia. so even if they lost completely Iran's like access to Iran's oil and gas they still would be okay so that's also a calculation for them it's like is it worth it for you to go into like a full-on kinetic situation with the United States right now like they want to do that at a time and place of choosing and like this ain't it.

3:42:41They have their grand plans. But they would love to see us drag down into the Middle East again because that was so beneficial for them the last time. That's why we can never do that again. How was it beneficial for them? We drained our blood and treasure. We're very demoralized. A lot of the infighting that is occurring here in the U.S. is all beneficial to them. We're fighting ourselves. You know, like, have you noticed that X is so crazy recently? Have I noticed? It's so crazy. But how many, there's so many foreign bot operations and they're focused on, like, dividing us. And I wish, like, Elon, please put, like, I think there's a way of identifying, even if they use VPN, like, of identifying where these accounts are coming from.

3:43:39It would be so helpful if they could start being flagged. And at least we would know, like, MAGA, America, American flag, American flag is actually based in China. You know, super helpful. But anyway, I think it's not, I'm not saying that these countries are not in a real partnership. But so far, it hasn't extended to anything military. And they're certainly not going to risk their own positions for Iran. um you know also very helpful to highlight the fact that russia's air defense system completely failed against our stuff which the israelis have and i mean the israelis obviously have their own stuff but against like our f-35 we won good to know i mean i don't know did you just i'm not even I wouldn't say in a kinetic operation, but I mean, you know, China sends all the precursors to fentanyl into Mexico and that comes up.

3:44:50And I mean, I think all of this stuff plays into some type of a, you know, some type of a master plan. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. I mean, China is really focused on these gray zone operations and they're killing, I mean, I guess bad analogy, appropriate analogy, they're killing it. I mean, look at all of these people folded over all over our cities. You know, that's China. Yeah. And they're very effective at what they do, and they've been partnering with the cartels. And not only are they providing precursor chemicals, but they're also the money launderers for the cartels. How so? Cartels launder their money through these Chinese gangs.

3:45:39I didn't know that. Yeah. and sanctioned by the CCP. Yep. And now - Did you know, you had mentioned you were, was it DIA you were doing the Americas? Mm-hmm. Is that, did you know this all the way back then? No, I didn't. No, I've learned that in the last couple years. I don't know if they were doing that back then, honestly, but they are now, big time. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's hard to think like them because we're so reactionary and immediate and they appear to be very good at a longer game. What they've been doing is very deliberate. And that's why it's important. And that's another reason why I really support what Israel's been doing against Iran because we need to not have to worry about that anymore.

3:46:37And just like willing it away doesn't change the fact that there is a real threat there and they have been killing Americans and we can't take our eye off the ball. But we have another bigger problem. And I don't disagree. I mean, there's so many, especially like veterans of our era are like enough, no more, like no more Middle East. I feel you, you know, and I would like for this to be resolved. And I see a way that it can be resolved. So hopefully soon, hopefully soon. But yes, we need to be as deliberate as China is being. But there's a number of things that we still have to do that we're not doing yet, unfortunately.

3:47:27You know, Beck, I'm sorry I'm switching gears. I just have all these things popping in my head. But we talk about with Sarah, you know, she says that there are at least a thousand sleeper cells, terrorist organizations within the U.S. borders right now. Do you have any insight into that or opinions or? I mean, I don't know. Anything's possible. But even at their height, Al-Qaeda and ISIS didn't have those numbers. So I'm skeptical. Do you think they're strengthening again? They absolutely are. They absolutely are. Why do you think so many GWAT veterans are, they don't want to go back to war, they don't want to go back over there, they're done with the Middle East?

3:48:14Why do you think that is? Do you think it's because of all the shit that we just talked about with Iraq? It was all for nothing in Afghanistan, which was a loss. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that the GWAT generation is just so frustrated with, you know, we talked about stricter ROEs. We talked about all kinds of stuff. And then when you do that, it's like, now you want me to go over there and do this fucking job again? We funded the Taliban. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And apparently we still are. I don't know. But I think. No, I think Rubio stopped it, but it's temporary. But it has to get through the Senate.

3:48:55So Tim Sheehy, please hurry up and get that damn thing pushed through. Amen. Amen. But yeah, I do think ultimately that they're not wrong. I mean, I agree with that sentiment that we can't do that again. And it was, in many ways, a huge waste and created bigger problems. But that doesn't mean that we can't address, like, we now should stop addressing any threat. You know, there's a balance. And we just can't send big armies to address threats. It doesn't, first of all, it doesn't work. We're not good at it. And second of all, we have bigger fish to fry. But again, maybe I'm trying to thread the needle too much.

3:49:57But what I'm trying to say is I'm not isolationist. I'm just I look at where we've come from, what we've done, all the things that I personally saw and learned. And I agree with you and with everyone else who's been speaking out about no new wars, but I don't think that's what this is. I think taking a targeted strike is different from that. And the fact that Israel is doing all this other stuff, that's what partners are for. They're helping us. Let's let them finish what they're doing. Now, doing that in the most humanitarian way possible means finishing it as quickly as possible. The more this drags on, the more people suffer, the more people die.

3:50:53You know, you have this horrible, tragic situation unfolding in Gaza. People are doing their best. we have you know u.s humanitarian workers there now which um you know it's it's hard to see the way things are organized right now how that's going to be successful and not like a pr disaster ultimately for us but i hope for the best you know what i mean like i'm rooting for us It's just fucking crazy, man. I mean, all these other terrorist organizations have ties to Iran. I'm sure the Taliban has ties to Iran some one way or another as well. We're funding them, who are funded probably by Iran, but we're bombing Iran.

3:51:45and it's like, dude, pick what fucking, what are we doing here? Like we're fucking funding the people that killed us for 20 fucking years, like who are Ty Dairan and then we go and bomb our, it's, I just. You said it. Like what the fuck are we doing? Like what the fuck are we doing, man? It's just, it just makes no sense. Like, how about you stop the fucking funding and, like, it's just asinine. Why don't you tell the American people why you're continuing it? Why don't you justify it? You know? That's the other thing. Like, I would love to hear from people, like, we're doing X, here's Y. No one does that anymore.

3:52:36Remember when we used to have like the, you know, our leaders address the American people and explain I'm doing this. Here's why. I would love for that to not that anyone would probably believe in anymore because we all have like zero. We have problems with authority now, given everything that's happened to us. But, you know, I still think at least give it a try. It's hard to know who to believe these days. It really is. I'm challenged by that as well. um i i just we got to keep going and and this this is still worth fighting for as messed up as things have gotten you know our way of life is is really important to continue and we're still a beacon that doesn't mean we're defending everyone or paying for everything but we have to we have to you know retain that we are the beacon yes or the beacon yes the only beacon amen So, yeah.

3:53:37Doesn't mean everyone can move here though.

3:53:42Oh, man. So then you got promoted. Yeah. To Dadsdy. I did. What is that? Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East. So it's just like what it sounds like basically the DOD's kind of policy lead for the region, for the Middle East. So in reality, just a staff officer job at a higher level. But I still had many, many people in my chain of command that I had to prep for meetings and I had to send them memos explaining things and ask them to do things. So there was a lot of that in that job. But it was an amazing job, amazing opportunity, amazing time to be there during the Abraham Accords.

3:54:31And so, yeah, but I was there during COVID. So it was also a little bit crazy. You know, we had coming from special operations where COVID didn't change anything. You know, we all went to work every day. Everyone showed up. No one wore a mask. We just, it was the same. Um, but when I moved over to like the traditional policy world, I had many, most of my office was not there. Oh, and, um, they started this campaign. I ended up kind of, I think, making peace with a lot of the staff, but, um, you know, they're like traditional government bureaucrats. And a lot of them had gone to these schools that I referred to, um, and were very concerned about me coming to be their boss.

3:55:23And so they actually, there was a story in Politico about me before I even got into the job. And it was kind of sad because it wasn't even about me, it was about my parents. And it was just like, oh, you know, we're just really scared about what this means okay uh so i show up there there was a guy wearing this mat literally like a i think it was a rebreather mask or something like just a most insane okay hi um and he i think he wrote me up at one point because i had my own office and i would go in my office i would not wear a mask and um and i would just do my work and that apparently was like an unsafe unsafe work environment thing and i even though i was alone in my office i had to wear a mask no um and also i had a buddy on the covid task force who told me like early days mass are bullshit like they don't do anything um so i'm like this whole thing is is a it's like a performance it's not real um so So I did my best to kind of like refuse to take part in it, but it was impossible, you know, because people they'll tell you like you have to where's your mask, put your mask on.

3:56:51And, you know, it was it was it was tough. Maybe I should have pushed back more. I have a lot of respect for people who did in that environment. It was really, really hard. But, you know, I so it limited what I was able to do. You know, the travel, usually a lot of travel in that job. My travel was limited. And when I did travel, there was like, you know, tests every minute and quarantine. Oh, man. So it was a huge pain in the butt. But the job itself was amazing. We still had a lot of visitors. And, you know, I was there during the Abraham Accords. How was that? I mean, and then my understanding of the Abraham Accords is it's some type of a treaty in between Middle Eastern countries and Israel, basically a peace deal, correct?

3:57:42Can you elaborate on that a little bit for people that don't know? Sure. So essentially, they don't... Since the formation and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, all the countries in the Arab League never recognized the state of Israel. It was never formally recognized. And in fact, there are two different wars where Israel's neighbors attacked it and Israel won. And but there's never been peace. the only there's been individual peace with like Egypt and Jordan who have benefited like they benefited greatly from Jordan in particular from Israel's kind of like security assurances whatever they share a lot of intelligence with Jordan they do a lot quietly a lot of stuff together and in Egypt I don't want to I think things have gone gotten a little more challenged since October 7th and since it was revealed that the number and size of tunnels going between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, where Egypt was supposed to be maintaining security there.

3:59:07Anyway, but the Abraham Accords were when several countries, UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, I think the Sudan, all formally acknowledged the state of Israel. And as such, established diplomatic relations, economic ties, military ties. So it was such a huge, momentous, like, earth shattering event, truly. And we had the opportunity after that to move Israel into CENTCOM. Israel, because its neighbors were always either fighting it or, at minimum, hated it and wouldn't acknowledge its existence, Israel was always part of EUCOM. But during the first Trump administration, after the Abraham Accords, Israel joined CENTCOM.

4:00:18And so that's also been a huge change that a lot of people don't realize where they're doing so many joint exercises now that they were never able to do before. And Israel hopefully can become like the premier security guarantor in the region. And that is a great thing for us. You were a part of that. I was part of the, so I just want to be careful. This was another thing where like many people have written books and have claimed that they've, you know, I'm not, I was part of the arms deal afterwards.

4:01:04So, yes, I definitely was involved in the like second and third order things that happened after the agreement was signed. But no, I wasn't part of the diplomatic effort. There were only really a few people who were. And just a monumental, game-changing thing. It's truly extraordinary to see the changes in the region even since then, just a few years ago. Really amazing and hopeful. And I'm hoping, you know, things are a little crazy right now, but we were on track. I think Syria was on track to joining the Abraham Accords. And I know Israel bombed it this morning. But I know this sounds weird to say, but I'm still kind of hopeful that they will.

4:01:54Um, Jelani has, has, uh, condemned what his people ostensibly did. So, um, and, and they, they've made some kind of ceasefire. So I hope it holds. And I hope long-term that, I mean, that's, that's how this is solved. Like there, there needs to be a broader piece. A lot of people have questions about what happened in the last few days against the Druze and if it was somehow orchestrated by Iran. I've seen people on X kind of raise that as a potential, you know, something that could potentially be the case. Iran is known for doing stuff like that. So it's possible. They don't have a lot of cards at this time.

4:02:46So instigating this kind of unrest, like obviously Abraham Accords is the worst possible thing that could happen to them. And October 7th was a direct result of Saudi Arabia being very, very close to joining the Abraham Accords. And Iran obviously scuttled that with the Hamas attack against Israel. So we'll see what happens. But, man, these people have been in war for so long and there's just so much suffering. But we need to keep a very clear-eyed view into, like, what is in our U.S. interests. Where do our interests lie? What do we want to influence and how? While understanding that at a base level, it's not going to involve troops on the ground.

4:03:35Like, that's off the table. That's just not real. What I do think is possible, though, is we have authorities for other things. We have surrogates. We have partner units. Maybe not in this case, but maybe in the future in other instances, that's something that our government could think about. But I don't really see that playing out right now. well I hope you're right but Simone we're wrapping up the interview I know you got a flight to catch so I don't want to keep you too long so one last question there's three people you could see on this show who would they be

4:04:17great question

4:04:23I need to think about that I don't have an immediate answer do you need one right now rattle one off um

4:04:39I really, I'm sorry, I'm drawing a blank. All right. I apologize. I left it all in the field, Shawn. That was the toughest question of the interview for you. I got nothing left. Well, Simone, I just really appreciate you coming here and I loved chatting with you and getting to know you and going down all those different rabbit holes. Thank you. I don't think you give yourself enough credit, but very impressive career. I want to be careful because you and I both know that community. And, you know, God forbid, I would never want to take any, like, they did the real work. You know what I mean? I think it's important to acknowledge that.

4:05:21But thank you very much. Thank you. This has been fun. All right. Cheers. Yeah. Cheers.

4:05:30Thank you.