Transcript of Iran War Update & Is Cuba Really Next? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Hey everyone, welcome to Eyes On Geopolitical Podcast. I'm Jack Murphy, and, uh, today Dimitri is out because, uh, he got something eating at the buffet. Um, so he's sitting upon the throne holding on for dear life as we speak. Uh, but we got a great cast of characters here today, joined by Mick Mulroy, Mark Polymeropoulos, and John Hackett. Really happy to have all of you guys back on the show. Thanks for coming on a Sunday afternoon.

Good to be here.

Yeah, great to be here.

Poor D, what the heck? I hope he's got a nice bidet. He needs a bidet.

Was it Greek food? Was it? It wasn't a Greek food buffet, I hope.

He needs a little bidet with a little hot water splashing and, you know, won't get irritated.

A little slap and tickle, he'll be fine. All right. On the agenda today, unless any of you guys have things you'd like to add, I got Iran. The ceasefire is ending, I think, in a week. Talk about foreign intel services, who's better than who, and the story that came out this week about the CIA starting up some sort of Cuba task force. So I don't know, do we want to start at the top with Iran?

All right. Sure.

So any thoughts on what's going on with that as far as the negotiations? And I mean, it's seesawed back and forth so much that honestly, I'm not keeping track of it.

So what's interesting today, just to frame this, and then, 'cause others are smarter than I on this, but everyone beats up on Axios all the time, but they are kind of a reflection of what the administration is thinking. And Barack Ravid, Axios, they— Rovida had a conversation with Trump today, basically said he's doing nothing. He said there's nothing's going to happen. He's going to keep the status quo and essentially try to squeeze the Iranians economically. Clearly, he does not want to go back to any kind of military confrontation. I think we've certainly talked a lot about the lack of military options. And, you know, there's reports that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Caine and Admiral Cooper basically told him or warned him about essentially that a lot of these are not going to work. So this is where we are now. But I think the key thing, and maybe Jonathan, you can jump in on this because everyone is going to be, okay, so this is going to be the US policy. What is Iran going to do? And I think that with the old adage of the enemy gets a vote, I don't think the Iranians are going to sit around.

You know, isn't there an opportunity for them to increase hybrid attacks, to increase the use of proxies, and to start to continue striking ships in the Strait of Hormuz? It's not like the Iranians are going to sit around. They're going to inflict some pain because they seem to have a bit of leverage and they think they have the upper hand. What are your— what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think they're already doing that because we see in Yemen just yesterday, the Houthis launched what they called a retaliation attack against the Saudis because the Saudis had launched something. They actually put a drone into Yemeni airspace. But the Houthis, I think, are kind of testing the perimeter to see how much they can actually do in a future movement, to see what kind of air defenses are up right now, what kind of counter-UAS platforms are available, how would the Saudis respond. It looks like a little bit of perimeter testing, kind of like touching around the edges there that they're doing. And we also see the Iraqi side. There's some Iraqi Shia militia groups that are doing some preparations and some kind of early-stage movements that are outside their baseline. I wouldn't be surprised if these were kind of being organized to possibly be used, but maybe not necessarily be used. But it's kind of how we think about positioning forces. We want to have guys there in case we need them. And I think that's what we see moving right now is that Iran is looking at, well, what happens if Trump decides to do something before the election or right after the election?

We need to have forces ready. Already there that could be activated quickly without much assembly required. But then on the domestic front, you've got cracks in the regime. So you have people in the regime that really want this war to continue. You have people in the regime that want to do domestic oppression as the number one priority. And you also have this kind of what could be relatively described as dovish folks in the regime, which, you know, to the rest of the world, they are not doves, but compared to the hardliners like Pasecki and the president, clashing with the Supreme National Security Council, which is the, the strategy setting body that's directly subordinate to the Ayatollah. They don't agree on how this is supposed to be going. Pasezhkian's folks, the people that are actually like Ghalibaf going to these negotiations, are trying to get a diplomatic outcome. We've seen General Cain also on the US side recommending a diplomatic off-ramp as probably the best way out. So both sides have this kind of diplomatic off-ramp option that they're floating on their own respective sides with different conditions for what that means. But then also there are hawks, as well on both sides who are saying, no, we're not going to be doing diplomatic activity.

We're going to be doing military activity or something else that's not diplomatic. Perhaps economic is the other major option. So it's important to watch inside Iran what's going on with the regime, because that's what's going to help us understand what are the actual potential outcomes here. I was on another news channel recently and I was asked that question, you know, like, what, what about this thing that Dan Cain said? He said that there should be a diplomatic offramp. And, you know, really, that's That's our chairman of the Joint Chiefs making a military advisor's recommendation to a policymaker, which is the executive. Whereas, you know, Cain can't set military policy. He can recommend what to do and the president listens. And it's very similar structure in Iran, not the same titles, but similar with the Supreme National Security Council. You've got this policy setting body. Then you have others who are saying, no, we should do X, we should do Y, we should do Z. And the policymaking body is ignoring that or members within the party are doing their own kind of side quests in the Red Sea, for example, with the Houthis. And there's some untanglement going on there where we in the West look at it as a monolith and it's not.

It's actually different actors with different objectives. Some of them are domestic objectives that have nothing to do with foreign policy that they think they need to do the Houthi activation versus a Hashd al-Shaabi, which is a popular mobilization force reaction, or nothing. And just open the straits up. One thing they all have in common is that they understand the straits are now the most important thing in this negotiation. They will not let go of it.

I was going to say, John, I mean, when we talk about the status quo today, it's different than the status quo a year ago or even 6 months ago. And it seems that the Iranians are pretty dead set on militarizing and controlling the Straits of Hormuz, which gives them military control over the Persian Gulf.

I mean, no, that they want to monetize it. So before it was about control, especially in the early days of the war when they're like, we just need to get this under control. This is part of our sovereign territory. If you look at maps, when Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, is speaking on his podium, behind him is a map of Iran. And you can see it's not just the land that's the map of Iran. It's also the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf are part of the map. This is a new development. This was not this way. So this is just something to like kind of think about symbolically, how are they viewing this situation? Well, they've already changed their maps in a way that is not good for us. It's not good for the status quo before the war, status quo ante, right? So they seem to be coming to this with the idea that there is more to be gained than what they've already gained. They're going toward a monetization, which I've seen estimates of up to 7% of the value of cargo passing through. They've also floated the idea of inbound traffic being handled by one of Oman or Iran while outbound traffic is handled by the other country.

They've set up these kind of zones, and they're kind of like creating a situation where it's going to be a fait accompli, where it's already happening and has been happening and cannot be dismantled. And it seems that they're stalling, some of them, in the negotiations to allow these structures to be built up, so that when months from now the US finally comes to a decision that, oh, actually we're going to, to open the Straits again, well, it's going to be a lot tougher then than it is now and than it was obviously 2 months before.

Hey, can I ask Mick a question here? Because I've been thinking of Mick. I'm serious. I know you've been traveling about, but I've been thinking about you because I am now, even though I am the Greek, you're kind of the Greek who kind of wants to be a Greek a little bit. You got your Greek, but you have gotten me into this, all the Stoicism writing.

Yeah.

One holiday. I've been obsessing over this. I've been reading it relentlessly. And so here's what I wanted to ask you, and it does pertain to the current situation now, because again, you wonder, and this has to do with how the US military is poised right now and all the notion of shortages of precision weapons. And it's something that we did at CIA. We actually practiced a lot of the stoic traits in a simple operational meeting. You plan for the worst and you work backwards. I mean, that's the, what is, there's the postmortem, then it's the pre-mortem. I mean, that's an element of stoicism. See, I'm getting into all this stuff.

Yeah, that's good. Good job, Mark.

And so that's what we did all the time because when you plan for an ops meeting, okay, what can go wrong? That's what you do all the time. What are the scenarios? So for the US military with Iran, I still don't understand, and your previous job as a senior civilian official at DOD is perfect. How have we not, how did we not do that? How did we not look at scenarios? Okay, because the scenario would be a long drawn out conflict, period. And then we plan from that. Yet, yet we have a shortage of precision weapons. It's something that I just, I'm scratching my head and I do, I've gone back to the theme before we've talked about, and I will never denigrate the men and women in the US military, but the leadership at the Pentagon, I am kind of, even the uniform leadership, how did Dan Cain and Admiral Cooper and others not conduct this type of stoic planning in the sense of not planning for the worst and then working backwards? Um, what are your thoughts on that? I've been excited all week to ask you this question.

All right, so I just, I just got back from DC literally an hour and a half ago. I landed, right? So I was there in part to have discussions on this.

Were you part of that group that was asked to chat? CNN reported that there's a whole bunch of military analysts who were asked for their opinion.

Maybe I was in DC. Yes, sorry. Yeah, I was in DC and I had many discussions on this very topic, by the way. So the obstacle is a way, it comes from a quote by Aurelius, which is, what stands in the way is the way, right? And that kind of became the ethos for how to train Western militaries, to be frank. That's why I love this stuff.

I just saw— I saw The Odyssey twice. There's a lot of Stoic principles.

Yeah, we could have a whole podcast on The Odyssey for sure.

Shaking his head right now. Where's this gone? Sorry, sorry, go ahead.

That's my next podcast. I'll be talking about that. But for this, so, and I'll get to your question. I mean, this isn't just an issue of this administration, right? So we've been, we've been, think about this. This is a regional conflict with a mediocre military and we're almost out of Schlitz. So that's not, they're talking about the Deputy SecDef now, like it's his fault. Like that would have been the case no matter what, because we don't always get to pick. When we go to war, we could have just gone to war. So this isn't a partisan issue. This could have been Biden, this could have been Trump, this could have been Obama, this could have been— right, so it would have been everybody. So I think, you know, let's dispense of the finger-pointing when it comes to political, but finger-pointing when it comes to USA. This is not sustainable. And now, and in addition to the, the ability to keep up with like defensive interceptors PAC-3s, THAADs, etc. And I think we've used about 80% of the THAADs. I don't know that specifically, but that's what's being reported, not from my conversation. Um, we need to adjust quickly.

And at the same time, we have a massive evolution in modern warfare, which is a low-cost, extraordinarily lethal, uh, alternatives to these really expensive, very lethal conventional weapons that we've always had. So this is an issue we have to address. It's actually not the uniform military's fault, to be frank. I mean, I'm biased, but this is policy, man. This is policy. It's not like the— you're asking generals, do you, do you not want more weapons? Do you not want low-cost alternatives? This is policies. Political people decide where and how they're going to make these weapon systems. It becomes ingrained in the actual political system. So it's a much broader conversation, but we got to have it because we got to change it. That's my take. It's, it's simply— everybody should see this. I think Mark is either meditating or what's going on there? I know somebody turned him off. Oh, there he's back.

He's back. Okay.

Um, yeah. Um, so some of the, um, some of the stuff I could throw out there that might be a good discussion point. You've already touched on some of it. Iran's completely emboldened, right? Their demands are going up, okay? They're not going down, uh, they're going up. I mean, every time— they, they don't believe the United States is willing to use, you know, uh, the force necessary to open the Straits and then keep it open, right? Because one thing to force it open, next thing keep it open, right? Uh, they don't believe we want to escalate, in part because of the lack of precision munitions and defensive interceptors, and the political fallout of an unpopular war being less popular. So every time you hear the negotiators talk about their new requirements, it goes up, right? So complete reconstruction, 7%, like Jonathan said. So somebody told me 7%, just energy alone would be about $50 billion a year that they would get from the normal flow. If you added everything into it, which is all the you know, stuff that goes into food production and all that stuff. It gets close to $100 billion in revenue for the regime.

Think about that, $100 billion. And who's paying it?

Everybody.

It's not the United States, it's everybody around the world. So it's not a tax on the world. Um, that I think should wake the world up to say, hey, wait, um, that's unacceptable to us because my people are going to pay more. I know I push it a lot, but we got to get an international coalition here because This is, this is something that the world should find unacceptable because right now that's the way it's going unless something deviates from that. They own the Strait. I know we don't like to say that, but I mean, clearly, you know, it's normal, like 110 ships that go through a day. What are we at, 4, 6, which means it's closed. So we got to do something to change that. And then you have what looks like somewhat of a Not that it was always unified, but the GCC seems to be falling apart, right? You got Saudi going with Turkey and Pakistan. You've got the Emiratis with the Bahrainis, kind of like, let's go ahead and finish the job. And you've got what, what, who's left? Qataris and, um, other countries that are kind of like, holy crap, this is— Omanis, right?

They're kind of like, holy crap, right in the middle of this stuff. We need to get this resolved. So we have a splintering of our allies and partners who I think are now really concerned about their security going forward and whether we're willing to defend them, because we are, I think, pulling forces out of a lot of those countries and putting them further away, like in Jordan and Israel. Makes sense from a force protection perspective. But, you know, why did these countries host our military before? Wasn't so that when the war started that we would leave, right? So these are all challenges. So you got the GCC question, then you've got, and I'd throw on your list, Jack, Netanyahu just came out and rejected the border pieces 15-point blank. He just said no. And he said, sometimes you gotta tell your best friends, essentially, hell no, right? So the announcement we made about Hamas disarming and the IDF withdrawing. It's not going to happen. IDF doesn't think they're going to disarm. They probably have no way to actually tell if they've disarmed. And so they just came out, you know, they have elections, I know you guys know, in October.

And so that issue, which we didn't have resolved, but at least it was going in the right direction, we thought, is not. Right. And that's all tied together. These are all proxies. So how do we get out of it? I mean, I guess I throw it back to everybody else, but we're in a situation where the United States, I don't think, can accept a closed trade. It has to go back to the original. We can't pay for it. Maybe we can agree to end the naval blockade. That's fair. But we can't be paying $300 billion for reconstructing a country that we attacked. The country that pays the reconstruction lost.

Just saying.

Like, that can't be the case. So, and we got to do something with the nuclear program. They're obviously not interested in a new nuclear agreement. I wish they were. So we're going to have to plan on a continuous mitigation of the threat. It's the best way I can put it, which means we're going to have to keep striking facilities that we think are active. Um, so the war is not going to end. Right, if you think of it that way. So we're in a situation that's, uh, and to your point, I mean, did we plan this out? Doesn't look like it. Um, but we are where we are. So going forward, how does America, how does the United States come out as a strategic success? Uh, it's going to take a lot of effort.

Don't you think there's an after-action piece of this too, in which, you know, I mean, aren't we supposed to fight two wars at once? Wasn't that the DOD strategy? And we can't fight one war, which is like against a second-rate military and sustain it. I mean, I still am just mystified that there wasn't more planning involved, or at least if US military officials were not stronger with the president saying, this is not sustainable. We can't do it. I mean, there's, you know, if you look back, I remember, you know, when I was in government talking to the Israelis and there was some Israeli Mossad chiefs, Meir Dagan, one of them, who would tell the Israeli Prime Minister, we cannot attack Iran. We should not do this, period, end of story. And I don't see that from US officials. The people around Trump don't have that ability like a Jim Mattis had in the first term saying, no, we can't do this. I don't see that. I don't see Cain strong enough doing that. Certainly not Hegseth. And so maybe that's why we're in kind of the pickle we're in.

Yeah, I mean, that's like a larger political question about what happens when a president installs a bunch of sycophants around him, uh, and you're, you know, your, your advisors, the people that are supposed to, you know, help, help you make good decisions, are actually just telling you what you want to hear. Um, and I, I think we're pretty clearly, uh, in that situation right now. But I wanted to ask you guys also about this article in the Jerusalem Post. Um, and we start talking about insurgents in Iran and foreign groups, and, you know, we've talked about arming the Kurds in the past and I know, John, you've also expanded on some of the different rebel groups in Iran. This article is claiming Basij singer abducted and tortured to death as group Ashdara 0 Day claims responsibility. Have you guys seen this article? Like, what's your thought about, you know, who this group could be? Do they have a daddy and is it us?

So this group is actually an interesting one to look at from an open source intelligence perspective, uh, like using like analytical tools. Their Instagram became active in December 2025. They made a few posts up through January and then stopped. Remember the war started February 28th. There were no more posts until April. And the posts in April were different than the posts in January. This, they were still in the same category of material, which was anti-regime. Posts saying, you know, like the Basij had been murdering us, which is true. The Basij were out there shooting and killing and slaughtering people, but there was no communication from January to April. In April, when they came back, they started focusing on doxxing specific Basij people saying, you know, this guy lives at this house. He was there at the protest and killed these people. We will pay you using cryptocurrency on a Telegram channel if you kill them and send us a video of you killing them. As soon as we receive the video, we'll pay you. And this is all from Farsi posts. So in there, this doesn't— what I'm saying to you does not exist in English right now.

I've read the Farsi side of it, and it's very interesting to see that shift in narrative. Of course, these things are all inferential. We don't have the full knowledge of what's going on. So this is just an inference, but it seems that there was a shift in control or shift in narrative that occurred probably in March that pushed whatever this group was, if it is a group or single individual, toward something more targeted, more violent, more real in the real world rather than just reporting past events. They're now focusing on future activity.

And they are, I believe, another one of these groups that is supporting Reza Pahlavi, if I read correctly.

So based on the Farsi side of this, you know, I actually kind of looked at this to question that as well. I don't see really clear indications that this group is a monarchist group or supporting the monarchy. It seems that they're more anti-regime. And from previous discussions we've had, you know, there are a lot of groups that have the same thing in mind, and that is they want the regime gone, but they don't agree on what should come the day after. And actually, 0 Day, in the name of the organization, you know, when I first see that— I used to work at NSA— when I hear 0 Day, that means an exploit that needs to be fixed right now or else there's going to be a problem in the system. But actually, 0 Day in Farsi has been used throughout this conflict to refer to what happens the day after the regime gone.

Interesting.

Okay.

So, and I think Westerners might not pick that up and they'll see 0 Day and think like, oh, this is, you know, some cyber thing. No, it's actually very much domestic for domestic Iranian consumption is not designed for Western consumption. That's another key point to pull out here. The media that's around this is not in English at all. And it's written in a way that is, is common within the Tehrani Farsi speaking youth. Like let's say up to age 30 maximum kind of way of writing. So there's, there's clearly a target audience and clearly a specific you know, way of talking. This is, this is going toward— and in fact, the, the article here that's discussing this, the, the group actually didn't claim responsibility for killing this Basiji. There's a pretty gruesome video of somebody knifing this dude to death, like in a horrific slow-burning way. Um, and he was accused of killing some protesters, and that's why they, they killed him. But the video was sent to this group, and then the money was sent to these people who made the video. Um, and so there's a lot of interesting stuff. Another questionable, interesting thing is a lot of what we know about the murder in particular of that Basiji is not from the group.

It's from regime-linked media sources like Fars and some other IRGC-controlled media. So there's something going on here domestically within Iran about this group that's definitely got alarm bells going off. And interestingly, another Tasnim News, which is an IRGC-controlled media organ in Iran, they published this, an article about this Basiji getting murdered and how terrible it was. And then within hours they took the story down. So this is just very fascinating to kind of watch this all play out in Farsi, by the way. This is not for Western consumption again. So there's something going on here and I— and it's hard to say, is it actually happening? Is it real? Is it the way they're describing it? Who is doing this? This could be Mossad. It could be the United States. It could even be the regime doing something to justify something else. For example, because they killed 4— they hung 4 of the people that they accused of being involved with this. So the question could be, were they just looking for a justification to execute these people that they already might have had captured? So there's a lot of questions here, but there's certainly something interesting going on in here that was meant for a very specific audience and that we are now seeing.

You know, we've always wondered about the possibilities of COVID action. I mean, we saw the kind of the, this botched Israeli plan and there's been really extensive reporting on that in the Israeli press. It's really remarkable. This is the COVID action plan using the Kurds, using the, you know, the recruitment of former President Ahmadinejad, but there's gotta be other stuff going on. It's not, the Mossad didn't just take a knee and I would imagine the agency has something cooked up as well. And so who knows? One of the things that's really interesting from after serving at CIA for a long time and then getting upset when all the COVID action plans that we ran always leaked, you don't see as much leaks on this kind of stuff now. Jack, I know you dig like crazy when you and Sean do all your deep dives on stuff, but I mean, the major covert action plans of at least, Mick, when you and I were in, whether it's in Afghanistan or the Syria program, all that stuff came out in the press. I don't see a lot of that now.

I don't think there's as much happening as there was.

That could be it as well. But I think covert action, you know, probably should play a big role now since the military option is really not as much on the table. But I would imagine they're considering these things. Mick, what do you think?

So I don't know, obviously, or if I did, I wouldn't say anything about it. But I mean, my view is covert action should be continuous. Yeah. Like you don't just start covert action because you started a war, right? I mean, it's a little late. I'm not saying that's what we did. Don't know. But like, it is, it, that's when it leaked, you know, the Israeli plan. It's like, hey, let's arm the Kurds. I mean, now? And then to talk about it, of course, puts a giant bullseye on these guys, right? My understanding was we could put, they could muster around 4,000, right? Can you imagine going against the entire IRGC, the Basij, and the Iranian military with 4,000 people that just got armed yesterday? Um, that's not going to work. So again, I don't know, I wouldn't be talking about it, but I think we should have a long-standing, very broad— I think Jonathan brought up before, can't just be the Kurds, that's not going to work. There's plenty of other groups. What they need is coordination, and that's where I think we could come in to coordinate, to plan, to train the leadership, to organize that stuff, and then obviously to equip.

We should point out, Mick, I mean, you have direct experience in this kind of activity in this part of the world. You know, you were one of those teams in northern Iraq. Actually, one of the other team was, was Sam Faddis, who recently passed away. But I mean, I think both of those teams did some pretty incredible work as far as like sabotage behind enemy lines.

And Jack, let's just be clear, our team did a little bit better than the other team did.

Me and Mark were on the same team.

Jack and I were on the same team.

A lot of that's been out. So I mean, it's an example of what you could do. Their Kurds, right, which you could do with motivated, uh, militias, right? I mean, we saw it also in the fall of Taliban in Afghanistan, but that was the same thing in Northern Iraq. The team that me and Mark were on, and as you said, Sam was the overall leader. We were on a separate team, but he was the, um, I think, I think, you know, I'm biased, but that took on Ansar Islam and Operation Viking Hammer, us with 10th Group. Handful of Americans. I was there. Like, you'd be surprised how few Americans— like 6,000 Kurds and maybe 100, 120 Americans. And then we became the northern front, right? Because the Turks wouldn't let the 4th Infantry Division in, and we had to go to the Kurds and say, congratulations, it's just you and us, right? I remember when we had to say that. It was a little rough. But I mean, that shows how highly motivated and trained groups like the Kurds can do. And they were going against, you know, the Republican Guard. This is a conventional army.

It had tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery. The Kurds had, you know, Hiluxes with, you know, Dishkas and PKMs on the back. They did have our air support, right? But we also— that's And I did a, an academic paper actually with General Tovo. At the time was Lieutenant Colonel Tovo, retired as Lieutenant General Tovo, um, to talk about how the US military and the agency needs to maintain the capability to work together to do things like that. Like that should be part of, you know, special operations officers, be they in the agency or in the military, uh, career progression when it comes to their skill sets, right? Because we keep— whenever we go to war, we kind of figure it out and then we kind of separate, go our separate ways. But anyway, that's— that I'm digressing a bit. But to your point, Jack, this can be done. There is examples of how it's been done well, but it has to be organized, coordinated, maintained. It needs to be a long-term strategy. And I think a lot of CIA people— I think Mark would agree with me— What the CIA doesn't want to see is, this isn't working, we can't figure it out, diplomacy's failed, we don't want to use the military, here you go, dudes.

And then we're like, oh crap. Because I mean, talk about, I mean, you don't want to get it handed to you when it's already, you know, a dumpster fire. So it needs to be coordinated in line with diplomatic efforts, economic efforts, military efforts. But in my view, it should be continuous.

I just want to point out this book real quick. This is another good one. Mark Gertewich, who I believe he was Colonel Tovo's S3 during the campaign.

I have that book.

Yeah, this one's very good. And geez, Sam Faddis wrote one also that was pretty good. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Here it is. The CIA War on Kurdistan. That one's worth reading also. Um, where's that, uh, where can people find that academic paper you mentioned, Mick?

I was Middle East Institute. It was me, um, General Tovo, and Uncle Andy, who went by Uncle Andy. He still does, but—

well, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, that was really good. And it was also cleared by the agency, which is actually really helpful for the rest of us because I've, I've cited that about a billion times. Not yet.

Thanks, man.

So I know it's a— yeah, and I totally agree because you know, uh, uh, with the end of the GWAT, you know, you know, we all— everyone grew up together with our military counterparts, and then just naturally with the great power competition, everyone drifts apart, and that's not good. It's kind of— should be institutionalized. But one quick thing, Jonathan, I don't know if you saw this, um, and it does go to the notion of COVID action and kind of narratives, but the new Mossad chief, uh, Roman Goffman, uh, basically fired his deputy, also fired the head of the Iran Operations Division and their head of analysis. Pretty remarkable. That seems to me to be an indictment of something in this campaign. I mean, and of course you don't see any of that on the US side, but for the new Mossad director to come in and can the chief of Iran is pretty extraordinary. And the chief analytic, chief analyst. What do you think of that?

The challenge too is, you know, the— it seems that the war plan that the Israelis had that they presented to the US was really contingent on the US persisting and actually like continuing to follow through. And it's possible that the plans that those individuals put together fell apart inside of Iran, which we don't see because they're all happening behind the scenes. But things probably fell apart because that contingent requirement of US participation following through wasn't there. And so there probably wasn't this alternative koa built into it because when, I mean, when you're selling a sales pitch, you don't wanna say like, well, in case this fails, we're also gonna do this. 'Cause you don't wanna just suggest that there's gonna be failure possible when you're selling it to the United States because you want the US, especially the people that heard it in that room of 8 people, they need to hear success, success, success. And I think that failure probably was minimized and deemphasized. And now those gentlemen are probably seeing the effects of that minimization in their own behind the scenes politics in the organization.

But of course there's nothing on the US side. There's no accountability on our side. I mean, it's a pretty stark contrast. And then the former Mossad folks that I know are all pissed because they think they're getting blamed for this when it's Netanyahu's the one who of course signed off on everything and was really pushing a lot of these plans as well.

We saw the same thing in Gaza too. I mean, right after 2023 October, there was a lot of blame finger pointing and none of it was at Netanyahu, at least, you know, publicly.

Chief resigned, right?

Ronan Barr.

Uh, so guys, here's a mixed paper that he wrote with Ken Tovo, who was the, uh, commander of 10th Special Forces Group when this happened. Irregular Warfare: A Case Study in CIA and US Army Special Forces Operations in Northern Iraq, 2002 to 2003. Definitely worth going to find that one. Um, so To switch topics, uh, Mark, you wanted to get into— and I have not read this article— but you want to get into that there was a rating of intelligence services across Europe.

It was just great fun. This is in— I think— I mean, it's all over the place. It was The Telegraph, I don't know, but then The Guardian published it, The Times in the UK. So basically, uh, it was a, it was a peer study, uh, amongst all European services and ranking the top intelligence services, um, in Europe. And MI6 came out on top. France was number 2. I think Germany was 3, which is ridiculous. But there, and all, of course, everyone, you know, the Brits and I know a lot of former and current British officers and they're, you know, they're absolutely out of their mind with glee and happiness now. Even if you remind them of the Cambridge Five and all the other things that happened, it doesn't matter. But ultimately it's pretty interesting and a lot of it has, the reason why I wanted to raise it was, a comment that in the article that Ralph Gough, who's a very well-known, very respected—

Oh yeah, I know Ralph.

—agency officer. Yeah. You know him well. That he made talking about how good the Brits have been in Ukraine. And I think there's this undertone that we all have, and the Brits never talk about it, but the British security services and British special forces have done very, very well there and been way forward-leaning. Yeah. And so that's interesting too. And then the other part that I thought that was fascinating was, and again, based on my experiences, the end of my career, which was all Near East and CT until the end, which was Europe, was dealing with the French and how the French, and I found them to be really incredible partners on CT in Africa to the point of where they do not have the same kind of rules that we have. And in fact, in this article that I was reading in the British press, they said, yeah, that, you know, a British intelligence officer said, yeah, that, you know, the French are savages. They basically, there was a list of 40 or 50, you know, ISIS and Al-Qaeda targets that they just went and killed them all, assassinated them all. So it's just interesting to kind of look at the, the, the, you know, our, our allies across the pond and, and there's, I mean, this didn't get a lot of play in the US, but it certainly within the intelligence world, this, this kind of ranking, which was peer ranked, it's not a newspaper journalist doing it.

They really did a, you know, they, they somehow did a, uh, uh, some kind of poll of intel officers. The, uh, the other part of it, just one quick thing is it didn't tell, you know, I think that there are really good services like the polls. Who've done incredible, just ground crazy shit for us over the years. Anyhow, so these are the allies, by the way, Mick, that you want to have help us. Of course, I want to as well. So does Jonathan. So does Jack in Iran. They're really good if they're on our side.

And that's the kind of— Yes. The DGSE is much more aggressive than people realize, I think. I mean, so is the French special forces. Like I actually heard they have done something like 25 military freefall insertions into West Africa over the last like 5 or 6 years doing ops. And during the whole ISIS years, you know, the French special forces guys in Iraq, and I believe in Syria too, part of TF Hydra, they were deployed there with the express mission of assassinating French citizens that had joined ISIS. Like, do not let these guys come back home. Yeah, like that is not to happen.

Isn't it DGSE SA? Isn't that the monitor?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've worked with them, right? They're kind of like special activities. Yeah, yeah, they're good. They're— I mean, I think one thing that is a positive is the intelligence services tend to work together regardless of, you know, what the overall relationship is between the countries.

You know, that politically goes up and down, and they tell us, unless it's like CIA VR, uh, there are some limits on, uh, how well you guys will play.

Yes, yes. No, I meant like out among allies. Like, we could have issues with France and Spain and— yeah, yeah, it— but yeah, we— I mean, I don't know that it got out there, but we helped DGSA with one of their issues. And I think after that, and it was to recover somebody who was kidnapped, the relationships just got really tight.

Oh, you're talking about Walton got kidnapped?

Yeah, you know, the— I don't even know—

helped us out a lot with that.

Well, I'm talking— we helped them with one of their guys, but with one of the French citizens. Yeah, French guys, French DGSE. And, uh, it just got really, really tight after that. I think they were always doing good stuff, but then we just started hearing more about it after that. And, and the Brits— I mean, I mean, just like you, Jack, I'm an Irish-American, so I I can't go too far on this, but I've worked with them, uh, many times in there. I actually had one come over my house and said, so you got an Irish pub and a boxing gym because you're just a freaking walking stereotype, aren't you? I'm like, yeah, what do you expect? Uh, he came to my pub all the time, by the way. But they are, uh, they are, they are good. They can do good things when they're, when they want to. Um, and I think we don't, we shouldn't take our relationship with all these countries for granted.

You know, as Mark points out, the Polish Agencia Wawadu, I believe is the name of the AW, their intelligence service, does some incredible stuff. And then another one is the Belgians, AVID. That's another one of those.

I think you're talking the Dutch.

Are they the Dutch? Yeah, thank you.

They're outstanding.

That should be— Yeah, they punch above their weight class. Yeah. How about you, John? Did you have any partners that you worked with that you were particularly impressed by?

Uh, as far as direct action, it was, uh, Densus Lapan Lapan Detachment 88 in Indonesia. They did some of these like highly orchestrated assassinations inside Indonesia. One of them, they killed this guy named Dolmatin, who you can look up. He was a bad guy in Jemaah Islamiyah, but they basically fixed him in place using his webcam while he was in an internet cafe. And then from like behind the buildings, a couple up behind, a couple streets back, they like shot through and shot him in the back of the head right over in front of the camera and like use that as the fine, the fix and finish. Component of the operation. It was like really well done. This is a long time ago too, like before F3AD was so popularized. Highly good at it.

I would just say one of those ops where—

was it like a guy that was a JI guy that was in prison for killing one of their dudes and they went and raided the prison and like shot the guy through the bars in the cell?

Yeah, yeah. They would do stuff like that all the time and they did it in Sulawesi. Yeah. I mean, they killed the leader of MIT, which is another splinter group of Jemaah Islamiyah, by like going through a village and just like shooting and shooting people on their way to him, like without discriminating and just going toward until they finally got him. And, you know, yeah, he's dead, but so are like 25 other people from the village.

Jesus. Well, Mark, before— I know you got to get going in like maybe 10 minutes. I want to make sure that we touch on this report that the CIA has opened some sort of Cuba task force. Yeah.

So this is, this is a big deal. Just, just in terms of priorities. I mean, I think that's the way you got to look at it now. Adam Entous wrote this for the New York Times. Entous is extremely well-sourced within the agency and has written on Cuba for years. So I would tend to believe it. And then the Miami Herald picked it up as well. And so they, of course, are well-sourced on Cuba just from their proximity and the Cuban-American community in South Florida. But I think it's important just in the sense of, you know, this is something that obviously Secretary of State Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Rubio is of paramount importance to him personally. Um, and when you set up a task force, you do so to increase obviously collection, um, uh, both human intelligence, signals intelligence, you know, imagery, open source. Uh, but that means you're pulling resources from somewhere else. You know, the agency has a finite number of people and money and resources. I would imagine, uh, uh, there probably will be similar efforts in other places in the US national security kind of ecosystem. And that's done either to support future military operations and/or covert action, which also could be covert influence.

So it's not necessarily a coup, but it's influence operations. But you don't do this if something is not afoot in some fashion.

I mean, didn't this already kind of exist under like the, what is it called, the Western Hemisphere Mission Center?

Yeah, not a task force of this nature. So yeah, I mean, there's the Cuba Ops Group, but not an actual task force where you bring in— this now becomes all-source. It becomes— there's analysts who are brought in. I mean, it's a thing. They're going to pull people from it. They're also going to pull people from Mick's old world. I mean, you know, this just doesn't happen because— and at least that's what the article said. And, you know, one can wonder, is the administration really going to jump into another foreign adventure? But certainly that's something that is raised in priority. And in the article as well, it said that this has been raised in what the national security world is called the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework. This is on the first tier. That matters. Again, that's where money and resources go. Final piece on this is in all of my contacts, and Jack, you and I have talked Cuba before because of the whole Havana syndrome issue. I have a ton of contacts in the Cuban American community, including some great wonderful kind of the Cuban exile groups. They will not settle for a Venezuela type operation.

They want full regime. Oh, I know. They are, they said that they consider the Venezuela thing to be a failure and they're very skeptical of, or not so skeptical, but they're gonna hold Rubio to task on this. So the idea of doing a Venezuela, you know, some kind of like light type operation, I don't know. So it just gives you a kind of, you know, you think about signal versus noise. This is signal. This is not noise. A task force is a task force. Of course.

I would add, I mean, I don't know, uh, if the story is accurate, but sounds like it is. I would add that this is actually consistent with our national security strategy and defense strategy. Remember, we used to talk about, you know, we were going to shift to the Western Hemisphere. Not saying I agree with it, but it is what it is. You're supposed to— I mean, you make strategy for a reason. And then of course went to war in the Middle East. But, um, if you look at it as consistency and what we said we were going to do and put our resources toward, it has, it has some validity there, put it that way. And I agree with Mark. I think a lot of people that are focused on this region, the Western Hemisphere, don't want to just see a repeat of Venezuela. Essentially just remove the head, and as you guys know, that the, the problem still exists. It could go back, you know, depending on the interest and or lack of interest by the United States. But I don't know what that necessarily means for Cuba.

Something interesting I saw was some satellite imagery today. There's 4 different locations inside of Cuba that had, they were just farmland and now they have a bunch of Chinese solar panels that have been installed. And of course, obviously there's rolling blackouts and consistent blackouts in Cuba right now. A lot of energy constraints. And it seems that, you know, I, I don't know who in China is providing this stuff, uh, but a lot of things from China don't usually happen without Chinese permission, government permission. So it's just kind of interesting to see this showing up behind a blockade inside of a completely sanctioned country that now you have these brand new solar panel farms built.

Yeah, I mean, that could mitigate. How do you guys, uh, I mean, I guess I don't know, I mean, how much you came across it, Mark, but I mean, how would you assess the CIA's penetration of Cuba? Um, because my impression is that all the sources, you know, that we have on the books are double agents, that DGI has kind of ran circles around us for many years.

Well, the record ain't good. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, you know, Cuba has been a country that has had astounding success against us. There's very senior former US intelligence officers who are Cuban agents. An ambassador. Ambassador who is a Cuban agent. I mean, it's pretty stunning. Cuba, obviously, it's a denied area. If you're serving with the US Embassy in Havana, the CIA station was closed for a while, it then reopened. Now, of course, one of the— and so there is that notion of, you know, are the Cubans still that formidable an adversary? Now, some argue that because of the economic kind of deterioration is that actually the Cuban intelligence services have really suffered because of that. So that's certainly possible. One thing that was wild is that, you know, you had not only John Ratcliffe, other CIA officials actually visited Cuba recently. Openly. Yeah. Yeah. For discussions with, um, uh, their Cuban counterparts. So there's this— there's kind of this interesting game being played. But Jack, I think that, you know, it's a very good question because when you talk about increasing collection, the past collection, at least on the human side, was very suspect, uh, now because there were so many, uh, doubles.

Now, you know, is— has that changed? I'm not entirely sure. And I think that more than likely there's some validity to the notion of the— Cuba's been so battered economically that And again, their patrons have been— Yeah, exactly, Russia. Also the Russians too. And so, are they as formidable an adversary? But we shall see. Let's see what we end up doing. I don't think we should shirk from that just because there's been so much failure in the past in terms of on the human side. But you also can't, there can't be any hubris. We have to have some humility in that we are dealing with a competent service.

Yeah, I mean, we've kind of fucked that one a few times in the past already. Yeah.

I mean, when you talk about the ambassador, the national intelligence officer for Cuba, like there was serious major, the DIA's top analyst on Cuba was a spy for Cuba. That's astounding.

Yeah, we'd be proud of that if it was reversed.

Especially against a superpower. The interesting thing about DGI, as I understand it, is that they get ideological recruitments. Which, yeah, we very rarely get, as I understand it. Like, CIA doesn't get a lot of ideological recruitments in that—

used to, like, during the Cold War.

Yeah, you think that's like a Cold War dynamic, Mick?

Yeah, I think during the Cold War, at least, at least from what I wasn't around then, but at least from what I know, that a lot of it was, you know, the opposition to the Soviet Union and, uh, and the desire to ensure that there wasn't a, you know, Third World War. I would call that ideological.

I'm sure. I think there's a chance that Jonathan and Mick and Jack and Dee, all of us are gonna be talking Cuba in the next month or two. I know, is it gonna be before the elections, midterms or not? I don't know. But, and it's crazy by the way. I mean, Venezuela, Iran, like are we really gonna do another little foray? But I think there's very, I mean, the one thing with this administration, this is not ideological or political. You'll be shocked. I'll say something neutral is that you should never say never. I think that's a fair statement. Things that you thought couldn't happen certainly can happen. And so I think we'll be talking Cuba soon.

Yeah, I've been told that some of these talks that are happening up at Camp David, they're kind of being advertised as being about Iran, but actually Cuba is one of the main topic of some of those talks.

One other thing on this for Jonathan and Mick, like why the hell did we do all our TDYs and PCSs in the sandbox? Like I'm sorry, Cuba is a little bit more fun. Yeah, well, not if you're, not if you're a CIA third station down there with the sandbox.

I got to go to some Latin American stuff and Far East, Philippines, etc. Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. The other thing that people aren't talking about, but, uh, I tried to somewhat unsuccessfully this week is Ukraine. Yeah. Like Ukraine right now has stopped the Russians. Like they're not advancing. They're getting slaughtered. They are striking facilities way beyond where we thought they would. And they are getting almost no US support. Like it is really little support. And even the, you know, the idea that they were going to be able to manufacture like the PAK-3s and stuff, because right now they're, literally, I think they're almost out entirely, right? That's why they're getting hit so hard. Um, I don't even know if that's gonna happen. So I would just— I will beat the drum even if it's not what the news is talking about. Not only is it the right thing to do, right? Uh, we are the leader of the free world, but we have an opportunity if, if we have to play this card to help them win, which means we'd win, right? So I'm just saying we need to win, right? So Like, if we went in, uh, not that we need to— I mean, I'm not advocating we run around claiming victory for the Ukrainians who did 100% of the work, but if we want to get behind a winning cause, not only is it the righteous cause, but these guys already proved they can win by themselves.

Can you imagine if we gave them full throttle support?

So I'm just gonna— by the way, the Russians just tried to blow up several Ukrainian airplanes in Germany. I saw that. This is a terrorist state. This is insane.

Terrorist state. Yeah. They just target apartment buildings, kill women and children, old people.

They don't even hide it. I'm with you.

And it'll never win that way. All it does is make the Ukrainians less likely to ever concede. It's not even a winning strategy. It's just murder.

Well, it's interesting to see the targeting of, uh, wild berries, like the Russian Amazon. Yeah. Because that, that's purely an economic target. You'd have a hard time saying that that's a military target or it's a dual-use facility, um, but it is having a psychological impact on the Russians as they can't get their deliveries.

Well, apparently there's so little support for the troops on the front lines that families buy stuff from Wildberry to send to them. Yeah, they buy helmets. I mean, all the stuff that's not lethal, but like, they don't have body armor. I mean, these guys have like a 1-week life expectancy. If you— if it's your kid, you're buying it. Apparently it comes— they ship a lot of this food, body armor, helmets, you know, all the stuff that you need but isn't the lethal stuff.

Anything else, guys, before we, uh, wrap up here today? Uh, John is the author of Iran's Shadow Weapons. You can go and find that book right now. Mick Mulroy with the Lobo Institute. Where can people find the Lobo Institute, Mick? We got a website, loboinstitute.org.

And of course, we're out here in Whitefish. If you're interested in the Whitefish Security Summit, there's a link to it. We're going to get all you guys out here for that.

He is going to get you out there.

Yeah. And Mr. Paul Amaropoulos, you have a book out too, don't you?

Uh, it's been out for a couple years, Clarity in Crisis. Um, uh, and, uh, and if anyone wants to see me yapping away, I'm on TV a lot in the morning. I'll be on 5 AM tomorrow suffering. I've got a better you than me, bro.

Yep, 6 AM. 6 AM. Well, thank you guys for joining us today, and, uh, we'll see all of you next time.

Thanks, guys. Take care.

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