Transcript of Is America's Influence Eroding? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

What's up everybody? We're back. Eyes on Geopolitics, uh, midweek episode. I'm here with Jack and John. Jack Murphy, of course, and Jonathan Hackett. Uh, a lot happening as usual. What do you guys want to hit on first? You want to hit on the Russians being indicted? Kind of in absentia because none of them are in the United States. So I told you guys this on our, in our group chat that I was a little— I don't know, it sounds a little sketch to me. Obviously it's, it's fucking crazy and the Russians are dirty bastards, but— You know, that these guys are basically not in the States. And this comes out of nowhere. Basically, I don't know if they're trying to change, change the subject on something, change the story on something, but they've indicted 5 Russians and a kid from Brooklyn, right?

Russians, Cubans, and one Venezuelan.

Okay, so it's a mixed bag. Are any of them here?

I don't believe so. Yeah, one of them's a fucking salsa dancer instructor.

That's why I've always told my— I used to tell my ex-girlfriend about worrying about the salsa dancer instructors, not because they were Russian saboteurs, but because she was having an affair with them. But anyway.

This is really interesting, I think. And we talked about this. We had actually some academics on the show when we spoke to Rory Cormac and Magda Long. And she was saying one of the big changes in espionage in this century is that it's happening on the gig economy. And I first ran into this in investigating Havana Syndrome and the harassment that Havana victims had stateside after they came back. And victims, these guys, former CIA, former State Department people, they're being followed around and photographed by people. And, you know, because some of these people have, you know, counter-surveillance training and so on, they picked up on it pretty— I mean, it wasn't even being hidden really. It was harassing surveillance. And some of the people were found to have connections to Venezuela, connections to Cuba. But a lot of times they were also using like Bangladeshi DoorDash guy, you know, who has— he's unwitting in a sense that, you know, he just knows he's being paid $100 to go and take some pictures and then, okay, cool. So it's sort of this relatively new phenomenon, but you're also seeing it like I've heard reporting about, you know, allegedly people who are conducting acts of sabotage in Russia being recruited on Telegram channels.

So it's kind of going both ways. And I think that's a very interesting dynamic and something that's maybe very difficult to defend against.

Yeah, actually, Mahsa Amini, the outspoken Iranian woman living in New York City, was— they tried to kill her with Yeah. Or Masih Alinejad, I'm sorry. They tried to kill her with Chechens multiple times. Um, and of course the, the plan was to move her to Cuba on a speedboat. So there is the Cuban connection there as well, just like this story, which is kind of interesting because, you know, you can hire these people like you said. And also Hells Angels was involved in a similar attempt where they were actually illegal immigrants from Canada, uh, coming over here. Hells Angels guys who, one of them overstayed his visa and the other 2 illegally entered the country to go do an assassination just like this.

And here is something else I would like to draw people's attention to. Okay. United by Chaos: Examining the Russian Nexus to Online Networks of Nihilistic Violence. Now, this is talking about a number of different groups, 764 and others, you know, predominantly Russian-speaking groups. And, you know, they make the point here. It cautions, their report cautions against portraying the Calm, this sort of conglomerate organization, as a Kremlin-directed project, suggesting instead that potentially state-linked actors are attempting to hijack an otherwise organic youth-driven network as a recruitment pool for violence. So these are the guys that you have probably heard some pretty disturbing reports over the last couple of years about these networks and how they essentially groom children online and get them to commit acts of self-harm and other terrible stuff and blackmail them, you know, have them produce, you know, compromising videos of themselves. These are young people, you know, they don't know how to respond or react. You know, they're vulnerable people. And so I bring people's attention to this article and this dynamic because some of these groups are coming out of Russia. And some of the main players are in Russia, and they're targeting people in America and inspiring them to commit acts of violence.

And yeah, it notes that they may not be Kremlin-directed. Maybe not. But here's the next thing I would point towards. So here we have Wali Haddad. He was a terrorist back in the 1970s, worked with the Palestinian Liberation Front. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were opened. We had access to them, and this guy was a directed KGB asset. He was working as a proxy to commit acts of terrorism against the West and to drag the West down strategically, to occupy our resources running around fighting Palestinian aircraft hijackings. So this one was directed, but the other more famous terrorist, if you will, that people know about is Abu Nadal. And Abu Nadal was probably, I would say, definitely not KGB-directed, but he was influenced. He was the kind of guy that the KGB would meet with in East Germany, and they would give him information and just let him do what he's going to do, right? So it's influence as well as direction, depending on how they handle that person. So I, I'm just bringing this stuff up to, you know, maybe make people a little bit more aware of what's going on in the background of, you know, the headlines.

Now, Jack, do you think this is like a directed chaos agent thing from the Russian government, or is it more organic people in Russia who are disaffected and angry at the world and just trying to make other people do harm?

I, I think that it has some government direction behind it. I mean, it, it probably does. And that report is probably correct that it's largely organic, so to speak, that it's, you know, just nihilistic. assholes that want to spread the hate, but that at some point it becomes hijacked and used by the Russian government as well. And I mean, this is a little bit more controversial actually, but I believe the Chinese have agents of chaos here in the United States as well. And there's a few things that I— conversations I've had with law enforcement folks where they pick up somebody. So like one instance was a guy who was ethnically Chinese, but he worked here in the United States. He had advanced degrees. But this guy was living out of his minivan and he was selling ghost guns in New York City.

Wasn't he a doctor?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He worked for a governmental agency, had the ID card and everything.

And living out of your van. That's unbelievable.

And selling ghost— the way, the way the ghost gun thing works is you go into Pennsylvania, you buy a kit. It's like an AR-15 kit. Well, you have— it's like the pieces of the rifle and then you transport it, sell it in New York. the person constructs the rifle, and now you have a rifle without a serial number on it. And which is— and by the way, this is completely illegal to do. And so the police will follow these smugglers from Pennsylv— all the way from Pennsylvania into New York City, and once they come within city lines, arrest them.

So I had a friend directly who was arrested and went to prison for a couple years for doing this, not because he was selling them, but because he, uh, he just loved guns and stuff. He's an idiot.

And New York City has like a whole task force, like, yeah, I think it's the Queens District Attorney's Office actually ran that task force. So it's one of these things that I couldn't prove to you that this guy was a Chinese agent, but he may be more along the lines of like these young kids you hear about, young Chinese kids that try to jump the fence onto a military base in the United States and take pictures, that they're not necessarily like directed assets of the Chinese MSS or something like that. It's more like— They want to do something to impress, you know, the government when they, you know, like, look what I did, you know, look, look, you know, how prominent I am, I did a good thing. Or they may even be pressured in some cases where they get a phone call from someone from like, you know, their aunt who's like, yeah, I got a visit from, you know, party representative in our town. And he was asking, you know, what our son studying in America has done to support the party lately. And they get the message when they hear that. So I, I think this is something that, suffice to say, warrants further investigation.

You know what it kind of like a little bit reminds me of? It has some like kind of threads that like it parallels between is, uh, accelerationists.

Yes, it's closely related.

Yeah, yeah, because once you start like just doing it just to fucking cause chaos, it's like really does— like it's the light bulb went on in my head in terms of like accelerationists.

The thing with the guy living in the van though, that rings some bells for me because I've heard stories about Chinese spies that have been captured by the— arrested by the FBI. One case, it was a husband and wife couple and they both had like good-paying government jobs, but they lived like poor people. Like they ate off of newspapers. They didn't even have plates. And that was because they were hardcore Maoists. They were hardcore committed ideologues. Um, who, you know, all the money went back to the party. Wow.

Well, even with these youths, you know, like you find some male 15-year-old kid who's been, you know, online a lot and already has tendencies that once identified could be easily manipulated to achieve some kind of outcome across the internet in the United States.

Exactly. You know, yeah, you find somebody who's like a borderline school shooter and then just push them over the edge. And, and that's— we've seen that with like, you know, back in the day it was like 4chan, you know, where they encourage people to go and do that. And, and it continues like on dark web and Discord forums and things like that.

Can't these kids just like beat off like I did when I was 15? You know what I mean? Like, sorry, bad joke. But, uh, the interesting thing, like you, you were talking about it, how like they start off slow where they're like, yeah, just take some pictures. And then they're like, you know, make a grand, $1,500. And then it's like, would you mind— you mind killing this guy for like $40 grand? Is that in— like, is that in your wheelhouse? Like, because like the story that just came out, the— about the charges, that's literally what happened. And then the Venezuelan kid from Brooklyn was like, I don't really want to do it, but I could probably find somebody that can do it.

Um, but that's the whole thing with like recruiting assets in the intelligence community. We don't give them a task right away that's going to be the task that we recruited them for in the first place. We give them small little things that slowly create a dependency that they have on us. And they also prove to us that they're willing to do things under certain time pressures, within certain requirements. We also correct their behaviors. You know, we create this whole structures so that when they do get to that moment when you ask them to do that thing that's a little bit more than they should be doing, they almost feel so committed to you that they're— they have this problem in their brain where they're like, well, I have to do it because that's my friend, or that's my whatever, however they rationalize it. And they'll do it for that reason, even though reason is in their brain saying don't do that.

See, I mean, there's example after example like this of people being recruited over the internet and, you know, directed to go and do things.

This is the UK?

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah.

We saw the same thing in Israel, actually. There was an older Jewish man who was recruited online by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence, or Vaja, who basically created like a romantic relationship that was fake and convinced the guy to go take pictures of military installations and other sensitive things and so on. And then they gave him other tasks as well, but the Israeli intelligence services thwarted it and then publicized it. Uh, it was kind of an interesting operation as well.

Weren't they like escalating him up to conducting violent attacks? And that's when the authorities moved in?

Yep. They were doing exactly what we just described. They gave him small little things at first, slowly building him up. And of course, you know, sitting there in your chair, you're like, I shouldn't do that. That's wrong. Like I shouldn't be going onto a base I'm not allowed on, but I like talking to this person. I want to please them. You know?

Yeah. And it's a, it's a, again, somewhat vulnerable person. They're lonely.

Weren't they, wasn't Iranians also, weren't they getting, uh, Israeli, like teenagers to go do BDA?

Yes, they were. And these weren't like Palestinians. These were Jewish Israeli kids.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's interesting out there. So be careful, kids, if you're online, you know what I mean? If some weird guy or your, your fake girlfriend is asking you to go and step on a military installation and take pictures.

Or some elf in World of Warcraft dressed scantily asked you to go observe a military installation and give you gold in exchange. Be careful.

Yeah.

You gotta have that conversation with like your 7-year-old. Like, yeah, don't talk to neo-Nazis on Roblox. Okay.

You guys, let's talk about what's going on. Like, we really haven't touched on it, obviously. Like, we've talked about it, like, slightly, but like, what's happened to like our bases in and around the Middle East?

Yeah, I got one for that too.

Yeah. So CBS reported something. And I think also, didn't the Inspector General come out with something too, in terms of like, well, how much and what the damage was? Like, they really didn't get super specific. But that was only up until June.

So it's been like 3 months. The Office of the Inspector General, which is on the DOD side, and the Congressional Research Service, which is on the legislative side. So 2 different branches of government just put out 2 reports. Which you have to take with a grain of salt, but also appreciate that they at least put the reports out. So we at least have some data to work with. But the OIG one, I would, I would definitely scrutinize that one quite a bit because they're, they fired all the inspectors general last year. And so the ones who remain are the ones that were considered worth keeping. Right. So definitely put some question marks when you see the conclusions they reached in that report.

Yeah.

And we really don't talk about it. Like our Bahrain, like the 5th Fleet HQ is essentially abandoned. And probably destroyed. And all the other, you know, Prince Sultan Air Force Base, like you see that, that—

Yeah, it's a Boeing E-3 Sentry, 4-engine aircraft torched.

Yeah.

And that's an extremely expensive and rare aircraft, right? That's the one with the big dome on top of it. That's like early warning radar.

Yeah.

And actually the Vice Admiral that was the 5th Fleet commander was asked this week, you know, are sailors able to go back to Bahrain and pick up their personal items because they're staying at different bases? They're not in Bahrain. The 5th Fleet is like evacuated from Bahrain, which is crazy. And the admiral said no. And for the foreseeable future, they won't be going back.

Yeah. So forget your, your belongings, like forget, you know, buy another vibrator.

Yeah.

But that means we just lost our toehold inside the Straits of Hormuz. Like that means we have to go operate out of Diego Garcia or Jordan. As we can see, Jordan is not safe, uh, from the way it was before the war. And Diego Garcia is thousands of kilometers away. And Iran did fire a missile there at the beginning of the war. If people remember this, the very beginning of the war, Iran fired 2 hypersonic or 2, 2 very fast missiles, essentially, let's say. And one of them almost struck. Correct.

Yeah. You know, one of my friends was there when it happened.

We're, we're like, you know, like the war planners and stuff like that. Were they, did they think that like, oh, the 5th Fleet HQ in Bahrain will be Have a massive target on its back, essentially.

Like, if you knew these bases were going to get shwacked, if we want to—

I'm assuming, right? Because like Bahrain is pretty fun. It's pretty close. It's not that far from Iranian.

Well, one of the things you need to do for like preparation of the environment is set up these things called continuity of operations sites, COOP sites, which are basically either fallback positions or alternative positions in exactly these scenarios. So like all these bases have COOP sites that have been set up somewhere else so that they can move troops out of there and put them somewhere else. And it's exactly what you said, Jack. We, we have to make the military assumption that these will be attacked. You just cannot plan without that assumption in there. It has to be part of the assumption. The problem is like, how far away can you get? Because this was a big problem with like China deterrence, like the weapons engagement zone concept where like there's these rings of weapons engagement where you look at, okay, how far can whatever weapon reach? But now with ICBMs, and even the Houthis having ICBMs, like, there is nowhere outside the weapons engagement zone, the whole world is inside the weapons engagement zone, especially if we're talking about space-based weapons, which the US just admitted we have weapons in space, which is a violation of a treaty.

And those, those weapons are up there publicly now. Russia has had them for a while. China has had them since the early 2000s. That's why we have about 90% of the debris in space is because of a single Chinese weapons test in space that blew up a satellite and spread millions of pieces of debris around. So the problem now is like, how far away can you get to still be safe from the adversary that you're fighting? Well, Fifth Fleet was right on the cusp of the territory of the adversary, you know. So it's kind of crazy you'd put that— same thing with Qatar. That's where Air Force Central Command is at. So it's like the equivalent of the Navy for Central Command. Both of those are now like inoperable, essentially.

Like the Qatar one too. I mean, I guess that at the time when we were really using these bases, Iran wasn't the primary, you know, threat, I, you know, but At the same time, really, the thing is we always thought that deterrence would be enough.

So like the bases themselves were part of our deterrence of Iran. And in the last 6 months, we've seen that that was a facade and that we were not actually capable of fighting an offensive war for a sustained period of time sufficient to actually defeat them. So we, we started it that way, you know, we ramped up and, but then we dropped off and then every time we restarted, it was below the amount of intensity we had at the opening of the conflict. And those bases are not designed to sustain inside of such a low-intensity exchange with an adversary who actually has medium-range ballistic missiles and other asymmetric capabilities like we see with the Houthis modifying anti-ship weapons to launch them at Saudi Arabia and things like that.

I mean, what do you, Jack, what do you make of this? Like, obviously, see, this isn't, this isn't really talked about a lot, like in American Western kind of news until like recently. You know, we, we kind of mentioned it, but like not really gotten into it.

Well, I mean, I would skip straight to the endgame here. We're talking about the, the tit for tat, the back and forth obviously is important, but the endgame I think is that Iran has soundly defeated us at a strategic level. And that's the conversation that people don't want to have. Yeah.

Because it goes to admitting defeat, which Americans don't want to do. I mean, nobody, no, no person wants to admit defeat. You know, but it's like when Rome was conquered by the Gauls and the Gauls roll into Rome and the Romans are complaining because they asked for some gold. And then the conqueror, I think it was Brennus, comes in there and he's like, now give me £1,000 of gold, £1,000 of cinnamon, and £1,000 of silver. And the Romans are like, no, no, it's too much. And he's like, well, woe to the vanquished. And he throws his sword on the scale too and makes it even heavier. It's like, what are we doing?

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Yeah, I think, well, I mean, there's, there's the cognitive dissonance is real, but I mean, I think most people at this point have to admit that this war is not going well. It's not going as the administration planned. And I mean, I don't know, John, I mean, I've opined on it, but I mean, how do you see this like playing out over the next like 6 to 12 months?

Well, the only way it could actually succeed is if we had ground troops at this point and we restarted the air campaign. I mean, like, I hate to say that and I don't support that, but like, if you're asking like, what's the way to win? That's it. So that, that means because we're not going to do that, that means we're going to be in a war of attrition and part of the war of attrition from the Iranian viewpoint, like from the regime's viewpoint, is political attrition. It's not just a military activity, whereas we're just— we like to look at things as this foreign military operation. And they're looking at— some would even call it a special military operation— looking at it as like this political, military, economic war against a huge enemy that's existential to their existence, which is a very different way than how we're looking at it. And so what's probably going to happen is there will be a lot of fait accompli that will be set up. For example, Iran will gain control over at least half the straits. They're going to set up a treaty with Oman. I almost guarantee that.

The GCC states will agree to that treaty and start paying taxes or some kind of toll to Iran to pass through safely. And there will be a lot of these things that people have been saying like, well, they might do this, they might do that. Iran's going to do that because it's in their interest to do it. And it's in the interest of the GCC states to accept it because right now oil exports are so low, it just cannot sustain for their economies. I mean, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have been trying for a very long time to set up alternatives to a single commodity economy. The Emirates in particular, especially with tourism and other things. But with the way that sanctions are working on, let's say Dubai, for example, that's not really tenable right now unless the conflict ends. So they need this conflict to end ASAP. And the way to do that is to make agreements with Iran. And it's not like this is an alien concept. Saudi Arabia already had agreements with Iran in the past. Turkey already had agreements, and I could list off many of the other countries in the region have had their own unilateral and bilateral agreements and multilateral agreements with Iran on security cooperation, on mutual defense, on economic policy.

So this is not like an alien concept for them, although it is to us in the West. We're like, how could you? How dare you go meet in, in Salalah, which is what they're doing this week to go meet with the foreign minister of Iran? Well, I mean, It's their waterway and their economy is right there. Like, you gotta, you gotta understand this. So that's the most likely outcome is that we will basically lose control of the maritime waterway there that we, for the last 50 years, have controlled in one way or the other. Um, which is a huge sacrifice to think about because a lot of the conflict that we've, we've justified the conflicts in the Middle East in many ways as, you know, freedom of navigation, freedom for governments, like freedom, freedom, freedom, and we just lost it.

By choice.

We gave it up. Yeah.

We gave it up. Yeah. It wasn't like a stronger power came in and took care of it. Like, it's— there's an interesting, like, parallel I'm gonna say again with, like, what's going on with, like, the GCC countries and the Gulf countries. And a little bit, you see it happening with, like, South Korea and China. Right? Like, they're kind of seeing that America is like, they're not going to be here for us, we don't think. And we got to make— at least we need to make sure, like, have an insurance policy, like, where we make nice with the powers in the region and kind of manifest our own destiny rather than have the US kind of dictate us what goes where and how things work really, right? You see a decoupling and we're not doing a great job either with Europe too and our NATO partners, right?

Well, even more regionally with South Korea, for example, I mean, they're looking over their northern border at North Korea and they're like, well, who has the ability to tell North Korea not to attack us? China. It's so, it's in, it's in South Korea's interest to at least develop some more deeper ties with China, even if that's the only reason why. But the economic reason is also very important, especially when we're looking at microchips, AI development, the actual like physical infrastructure for AI that South Korea is a part of that supply chain. And China is a consumer of that supply chain. So there, there are people in South Korea that stand—

Here's another one that is worth at least mentioning, John. The Houthis have been on the move and potentially it looks like closing off another maritime choke point on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula at the Red Sea. And they, you know, are— I don't know if you want to use the term Iranian proxies, but, you know, they're working with each other. That would give Iran control of both of these choke points.

Yeah. And the thing with the Houthis is like, as we've talked about on the show before, like they're not under direct control of Iran in the way that Hezbollah was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They have a lot of their own unique things.

And their interests really align right now with Iran's interests. But as we've seen, the Houthis are not always responsive. Sometimes they do the opposite of what the regime wants. Sometimes, like, for example, today, the Houthis had a direct discussion with the United States. I don't know if people saw that in the news.

Yeah.

Which is kind of crazy, because MBS called Trump twice, and Trump would not help the Saudis defend themselves against the Houthis. But then we took a phone call from the Houthis. So that's kind of an interesting thing, probably because the US is concerned that they're that the West is about to lose control over another strait. So they're probably trying to do some negotiations with the Houthis to get around that. But it may be too late because just like happened in Iran, the Iranians didn't understand exactly how valuable the Straits of Hormuz were, but they knew they were worth something. Now they know they're this like critical piece, just like a nuclear weapon.

Right.

The Houthis now are like, hey, look, the U.S., the biggest superpower on the planet, just called us to talk to us about something. They want to negotiate. The Houthis haven't really fired many shots yet, especially relative to what it took for the Iran War for the US to start talking to Iran to negotiate. So the Houthis are probably feeling pretty strong right now. And they, they, I mean, they have every right to be. Look, the US just called them on the phone to negotiate.

Yeah.

With a tribal group that's got like very small arsenal of weapons relative to the other powers that the US is designed to fight against at the negotiating table as if they were equals.

Not bad for a militia full of guys chewing khat.

Exactly. Yeah. Living up in the mountains. I mean, and they don't even live down in the area that they're about to control, like the Tahoma Plain area and the little islands that they've just occupied are like not part of the Houthi traditional homeland. So like, they're, they're basically expanding their territory beyond what even the Yemeni government controlled before. Right. So it's kind of amazing. And they haven't really fought that much of the United States. They've done some, you know, small things here and there, but they haven't really sacrificed too much against the US, and they're about to probably get something pretty big. I would not be surprised if there was some big US announcement about what the Houthis are about to get in exchange for whatever they asked for.

So I saw— I read today that that conversation with the Houthis, the Houthis basically said like, we're not going to attack American shipping or Israel, even Israeli shipping. We're going to specifically target Saudi. Yeah. Couple that with the Iraqi militias hitting the pipeline, which put that out of commission. And there was some— I saw a couple of, like, a couple tweets about, like, showing that Saudi Arabia is, like, sending a ton of, like, oil to the east to, I'm assuming, go through the Strait of Hormuz, hopefully, like, fingers crossed, maybe.

Well, this exactly illustrates, like, the weakness of that tripartite agreement, the Mecca Agreement that Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia recently signed, where it's supposed to be like a, like an Article 5 like mutual defense treaty and like it just got invoked and nobody's helping, you know? I mean, it just kind of shows like who was the junior partner in this agreement. And of course, Saudi Arabia being weakened is positive for Turkey. This is like a great opportunity for Turkey to expand because we talked about this before, like Turkey sees Saudi Arabia as like they're not necessarily an adversary, but a competitor in exactly the area that we're talking about, western Iraq, like Anbar area. Syria, the desert, the Badia Desert, and then all the way down into those pipelines that in Erdogan's mind, Saudi Arabia used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. And Erdogan is the Ottoman Emperor, right? Like in his mind. And he's like, well, I'll just let them get attacked because the weaker they are, the better it is for Turkey.

And John, you had mentioned earlier that, that Mecca had been hit recently.

Yeah, it was the first time in 10 years actually that Mecca was hit in any significant way. And it was the Houthis. So it's interesting because the Saudi government said the Houthis did it. And the Houthis said that they would never hit Mecca or touch the holy sites. So there's something, of course, going on here. I'm not sure. So I wonder if perhaps it was Kata'ib Hezbollah or another group, maybe, or a group of Yemenis that inside of Ansar Allah, which is the—

Was this a car bombing or something?

It's unclear. So that's why I've got some question marks about like what's going on here. It could be a way to— some would say maybe a false flag, perhaps to have Saudi assistance more readily available from other Muslim countries who would see this as a direct affront to the Muslim world. It could also very much be the Houthis launching something and, you know, and the Saudis exploiting that. I think we definitely need to see some more because if you remember a few years ago, I think it was 7 years ago, 6 years ago, the Saudi intelligence headquarters was hit by a drone. Do you remember this? Which was like a really big deal because how did the Saudi headquarters— intelligence—

Yeah.

Like their CIA got hit by a drone, right? So like it's these kind of actions that there's a lot going on behind it that the public is not seeing that is certainly very substantive. And without that, we can't really analyze it too thoroughly.

Yeah. I mean, it's also, you know, worth pointing out maybe that like the Saudis are, you know, knee deep in all sort of like counter-Iran programs with us. And, you know, if you, you know, folks out there remember that movie Charlie Wilson's War where like, you know, we would donate X amount of arms or X amount of money into a program and the Arabs would meet it. They would meet whatever it was that we were putting into it. Well, that kind of relationship continues with Saudi Arabia to this day where I actually know somebody who was in the room where the CIA was putting like, I think it was like $300 million into a counter-Iran program. And the Saudi, you know, emir or whoever it was sitting in the room was like, 6. And they're all like, 6 what? What are you talking about? It's like 6 million, $600 million into the program. I mean, there's, yeah, definitely stuff going on behind the scenes, as John says.

Same thing happened in Syria during Timber Sycamore when we were, you know, trying to overthrow the Assad government and then ISIS came up and there was a lot of Gulf participation in that, which ended up actually being a bit of a mistake in how it was organized or disorganized. And the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Qataris were all playing separately in that game.

And that, that kind of like in a strange way dovetails with what we were talking about earlier about, you know, how the gig economy interfaces with espionage. During the Syrian war, you saw these militias and these terror groups even form up like, you know, one person described it as being like dot-com LLCs, that they come together mission to mission, then kind of like dissolve and then reform and reconfigure in different ways for the next battle. I mean, it's fascinating to see how that works. And one part of me thinks, you know, maybe this is like how it was in medieval Italy when there were just mercenary bands roaming around the countryside. But at least in our lifetimes, it seems like, you know, sort of a new phenomenon.

Yeah. It actually reminds me of the Hessians coming from Hesse in Germany to America to fight in the Revolutionary War. Yeah. And they were, they were like pretty vicious. Yeah.

And we were France's proxy force.

That's right. We won.

So you think like that stuff that was going on in Syria, was it like just money talks and like a lot of it?

I mean, it was just mayhem.

It was a poorly planned covert action. Like the political outcome was not well-defined for how it should be structured. Like once we reached certain benchmarks and within the first year we'd already spent $1 billion and we didn't know where many of the weapons ended up. And actually for years after that, we were still trying to track down some of the weapons, like the TOW missiles. I was part of that track-down operation. And it was really interesting to try to get the weapons back from these warlords who were like, I'm not giving you my TOW missiles back. And we'd say like, okay, well, can you just verify that you have them? Please just show them to me. So I know that like that they're here and not in this other guy's camp over there that we don't like. And that kept going on. And actually the very last remnant of that just ended this year when At-Tanf Garrison, ATG, was closed. That was like for a long time, like the last vestige of this program.

What happened was we got involved in the conflict too late and the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, the so-called moderate rebels had lost so much power that they were subservient to the Islamist groups al-Nusra and others. And so when we gave them those TOW missiles, we were giving TOW missiles to the FSA. But they were influenced. I mean, they couldn't really do anything that Nusra didn't want them to do. So yeah, the guy that fires the TOW missile is in the FSA, but really whose agenda is being served there? And then, yeah, so the problem that we came in kind of late in the conflict with those programs and with the moderate rebels either being irrelevant or nonexistent was we were recruiting whoever was left. And some of them were Islamists. Some of them were just losers, you know, that like the Syrian army wouldn't even want those guys. And, but, you know, these guys, they, you know, are very shrewd and they figure out how to milk the United States for as much money as possible. And there's also just incoherence, I think. I don't know what you saw, John, but I think all the way up to the National Security Council level where I knew guys that were working on programs in Turkey and Jordan also, and where we were training these so-called moderate rebels.

And those programs were being flipped on and off like weekly, monthly. Like it was really crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's tough too, cuz like these, these rebels, I always just laugh whenever people say moderate rebels, cuz like if you knew who these people were, you would also laugh too. But I mean, there's one of them leading Syria right now that used to hold 2 severed heads in his hand in a photograph. I mean, like these guys are, yeah, these guys are not good guys.

We had a $10 million bounty on him. Yeah.

Well, that went away in a week. Remember late December that went away?

Yeah.

He's a good, he's a good man now. He's a statesman wearing a Rolex. But the problem is like we would promise them cash or weapons and like the stuff would be on the way and it would be arriving and then it would be cut off. And then they're like, well, what are we going to do with this? Or they'd be in battle and we'd be like, well, we don't have enough ammunition to give you guys. Or like, oh, you got to wait because the ammunition is coming through this other pathway or channel because the other one's not available or something like that. So like it wasn't like regular resupply. So they would feel betrayed all the time or that they can't trust us.

Yeah.

Or Turkey is saying like Turkey wants this outcome and the US is like, no, no, we want this like slightly different outcome. And then the guys on the ground are like, well, who's giving me my ammo? Okay, I'm going to do what Turkey said because Turkey is getting me the ammo.

Oh, and these weird scenarios played out where there'd be like American soldiers and Turkish soldiers in the TOC and the Americans are having to pretend like we don't know that the Turks are supporting ISIS and the Turks are having to pretend like they don't know that we're supporting the Kurds. And it's like, what the fuck is going on here?

Yeah.

Yeah. I remember when we were in Syria and one of the team guys was wearing his YPG little patch and it got on the news and it was like it was the Kurdish news, but then it immediately got up national news and And like, there was a big hoo-ha about that and it's so controversial and like, we're not allowed to call them the PKK. We have to call them the YPG and then we have to call them the SDF only. And we cannot refer to the subgroups because if we name the subgroups, that's a problem.

Oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah. It was totally out of control. There's one, one story I heard, one of the camps where we had these rebels we were supposed to be training in Turkey. And because the training kept getting turned on and off, the supplies, as you mentioned, John, kept getting turned on and off. And our rebels started getting antsy in their pantsy out there in the camps. So the US military came in and we bought them all Xboxes and flat-screen TVs so that they could get their, you know, rocks off playing Call of Duty all day.

John, let me ask you, when you were trying to get those TOW missiles back from like whatever warlord, you guys were offering them money and they still said no?

In some cases, yeah. Because the problem is, so first the question was, do you have the TOW missiles? And of course they would say, oh, yeah, maybe.

Yeah.

Well, we're like, okay, show us. They're like, oh, well, they're like in this other area, like, you know, whatever. But the truth is they had sold them on the black market. So like, they don't want to say that because then they get in trouble. So like, they're trying to like talk around it and like, we need to verify the serial numbers of these things to make sure like, where are they? You know, like you can keep them, but like you can't use them or you can't sell them. And even you can use them, just don't sell them. Right. But like they had already sold them.

Big picture, John. I mean, how would you assess the TOW missile program's effectiveness? Like, I know there's all these complications around it, but did it accomplish the thing we wanted it to accomplish? And what was that? I assumed it was, you know, hitting the regime.

Yeah. My thought is that we were trying to replicate Operation Cyclone, which is the arming, in particular, the Stinger missile component, because it was a very public thing that could be clearly communicated outside to show the world like these are objectives we're achieving, because it's a lot harder to do that with small unit tactics, like with automatic weapons and small engagements and things like that. So if you can blow up a tank and then videotape that, photograph that, share that, that's a, that's an information operation win, right? I think that was the true reason for the TOW missiles, because if you look at the mechanized forces of the Syrian Arab Army, like there is no way you were going to defeat them with a couple of TOW missiles. These aren't like the Hind helicopters that the Russians were flying around doing vertical envelopment in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Like these are massive divisions, multiple divisions of highly trained, very, you know, carefully conscripted forces that are believers of what the Assad family was pushing, which is basically sovereignty of Syria, which is actually an easy idea to push when you see that there's all kinds of actors trying to come into Syria and do stuff and have been for a long time.

And so I don't think the TOW missiles were actually for a discrete military objective. I think it was more of an information objective.

I will not— I want to say we, but between the TOW missiles and everything else going on in Syria, I mean, tons and tons of armored vehicles were destroyed and, you know, yeah, that's from belonging to the Syrian military were destroyed.

But the thing is what the Syrian military would do, you know, they have something called Air Force Intelligence, AFI, which is not actually the Air Force. It's just the name of an intelligence entity in the military, which was like highly feared. I mean, that was where the Assad family came from. Like the coup that overthrew the Syrian government was from Air Force Intelligence and so on. There's this huge, like deep legacy with it. They also conducted the Hama massacre in Hama in the night in 1982, like killed tens of thousands of Syrians. So the Air Force intelligence guys would roll around and just like execute people.

And so you're talking about like the, the death squads, the shahida.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So like they were using fear as a weapon. So it didn't really matter if they had their armored vehicles blown up. 'Cause like, let's say you blew up an armored vehicle from the 2nd Armored Division. Well then Air Force intelligence is coming to your village and they're gonna execute 100 of you and capture the rest. So like, you're just, you're just gonna be super careful about what you strike and you're not gonna strike anything actually significant. Not only that, but each village had their own loyalties to their villages and to their provinces, especially down south, like Daraa and Suwaida. Like those guys, some of them are Druze, which is not part of the other religious groups around there. They're defending their own place, especially Suwaida, from everybody. Literally every other entity in the area is trying to attack Suwaida. And the Syrian Civil War started in Daraa when the, the 2 kids went out there and started protesting, and then people got slaughtered in the town. So like Daraa had its own view. So like even if you arm them, Mm-hmm. They're not defending future Syria. They're defending their, their town or their city or their province.

Primary loyalties.

Right. And that goes back to the Houthis exactly, because that's what the Houthis are defending. Like, just because Iran is there right now saying like, hey, here's some weapons and money, if Russia came in or if the United States came in and offered the same thing, the Houthis would accept that because they don't really care about the beliefs in Iran. I mean, they're not even Twelver Shia Islam. They're a different branch of Islam that believes in only 9 imams. And like, they have a whole different religious system than the Shia in Iran. So like, it's not about Shia Islam as this like arc, the Shia arc of danger or whatever people describe it as for the Houthis. The Houthis care about their mountain terrain area that they've controlled since the 10th century. This is a super important area for them. They actually have a different way of electing imams. They have these people called da'is, which is like uncle in this area, that's kind of like a spiritual leader, like the Mirabatun in West Africa also has a very similar thing, where they like select a spiritual leader from just a small, let's say, a 500-people village.

That's the guy they get their orders from. So they don't look beyond that to like some foreign country telling them like, go fight Saudi Arabia or something like that. They're seeing it as like an existential defense of their soil.

How do you even try and corral that?

And you offer them incentives that align with your own interests and then you get the outcome that you want.

And hopefully somebody doesn't outbid you.

It looks like that might be happening.

Yeah. Yeah. Geez Louise. Oh my God. Let me ask you guys, we also like the shots of like the Houthi guy, the Houthi rebels like grabbing all the armored vehicles and stuff like that. And there were memes everywhere like saying to America, this is why you don't have free healthcare and stuff like that, because you keep losing all your military equipment in different countries. Who's, who's operating that military equipment that was abandoned?

You're talking about in Yemen?

Yeah, yeah, in Yemen when the Houthis— like, it was like a few days back, remember? Like the videos and stuff, they're grabbing, they're jumping on like these big Bradleys or whatever.

Saudis, you know, Saudi— what is it actually, Saudi National Guard, or is it just the proxy forces.

It's a proxy force. It's not actually like Saudi armed forces. But this has been the story with the Houthis since the 2014 conflict started when like the government collapsed in Sana'a and the Houthis and other groups raided all the arsenal. That's like where all their equipment came from and still is a lot of it from there. And they got like divisions worth of equipment overnight, you know, amazing amounts of ammunition and weapons and things like that. And that's kind of like Like, as old as war is, like, you know, one side like leaves their stuff behind and you go take it.

So that— so the Saudis had proxies in Sana'a and it's—

They had proxies all over, especially western and northern Yemen.

Okay.

Because that's what the Emirati split was with the Saudis. Like the Southern Transition Council was the southeastern part of Yemen, which was South Yemen during the Cold War. And that was aligned with the Emiratis and still is aligned with the Emiratis. Those were like Yemeni fighters working for the Emirates. And then now you've got Yemeni fighters working for the Saudis that have a different view than the Emirati guys and also oppose the Zaydis up in the mountains, which are the Houthis.

If we're to, you know, the other player that we haven't really talked about, you mentioned very briefly, Jon, Oman is over there on the peninsula as well. How do you see them playing into this?

And it's interesting because the Omanis, it's a very small population. It's a few hundred thousand people in the country of Oman. And if you look at a map of the border between Oman and Yemen, it's like a straight line, but it's actually like a blurry line because there's no border at all. I mean, you just— if the Hadhramaut is like— that's actually where Anwar al-Awlaki was from. You remember the U.S. citizen we killed without due process in 2013? He's from the Hadhramaut area, which is eastern Yemen, right? And that area has just been like ungoverned forever because it's a tough piece of terrain. So the Omanis are looking coastal. They're like, we want to protect Salalah, Duqm, which is another port that they have as well. And they kind of want to keep that maritime route that they have on the north secure. So their interests have have to do with economics and security. That's what— that's their interest. And I mentioned interest because like, if you're looking at how do you make a partner do what you want, your interests have to align. So for the Omanis right now, they're acting as kind of a mediator because they have to, because their interests are stability.

So they're facilitating talks in Salalah with Iran, bringing Iran in and the GCC countries in there to talk because that's in their interest to do that. If the US was helping those things happen, they would probably come to those meetings, the Omanis would.

Right.

And the Omanis have also a very different type of Islam than Iran does, and then the Sunnis do also. And actually, women's rights in Oman are separately governed than they are in the rest of the Muslim world. Women have like certain marriage rights that other Muslims don't have. So I just highlight the cultural thing because like, if you're an Omani, you don't see people in the Emirates as similar to you. They're very different than you, you know. So when you're sitting at a table negotiating, you're negotiating with others, not with like a like-minded person, because you don't have the same interests in mind.

My God, busy, dude. Jack, let me ask you, like, uh, John mentioned Eastern Yemen. That's kind of where like JSOC got busy, right, for a while?

I mean, continues to be active over there.

That's where Al Qaeda is based.

There's a lot of untold stories about various ops that happened in Yemen and things that didn't quite go as planned. Yeah, we've, we've been there.

Yeah, there's a recent one.

What was the more recent one? I was thinking about the one where the SEALs got ambushed in the armored vehicle, like full— the day that across the windshield.

The day Qasem Soleimani was assassinated, we also tried to kill someone in Yemen and it didn't go well.

I remember that. Yeah, we missed them, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

And that's the thing with Yemen. You know, you've got Sunnis in the east, in the desert. That's why the Emiratis work with them quite a bit. In the west, you've got some Shia and you also have some of these Zaydis, which is the religious system that the Houthis follow. Then it's called the 9 Imam type of Islam, right? But in the east you have Al-Qaeda. So Al-Qaeda is not friends with Iran. They're not friends with, you know, the Zaydis. Sometimes in the past they had been lined up with what Saudis were doing. I'll just put it that way. But so you have like different groups of, of these guys that are bad guys that are like all living in the same area and they don't like each other, you know, like the Zaydis and Al-Qaeda do not— like they have an existential reason to kill each other. So it's like Maybe that would be an opportunity for one of them to be co-opted against the other one.

I was just gonna say that, John. I was gonna say that, like, why not do what you need to do to have them fight each other? Remember, they're not bombing other places.

This is also where the UAE was sponsoring mercenaries. Our friends Dale Comstock and Daniel Corbett were over there.

Yeah, we have a couple episodes on the Team House for that. You could check it out. Yeah, we're like, Dale's just openly talking about it, like, you know, I had this fucking bomb and I had to throw it Just absolute chaos.

The Emiratis try to hire us out of the National Security Agency too. They have like a special recruiting system for that to come bring you over to their SIGINT entity.

You remember that big scandal came out when they hired all those people?

Yeah.

And they like told them, oh yeah, this is approved by the US government, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

No, we're supposed to be here. It's okay.

We're supposed to be here.

Yeah.

Your clearance will transfer. It's easy.

Oh my God. And they were throwing around big money for like NSA guys.

Yeah.

So it was around $600K. annual salary, housing provided. You get a driver. There's some other specifics that's, like, kind of crazy that they're giving this to, like, a mid-level person.

Yeah. UAE is always— they're, like, very much in the business of hunting for capabilities. And, like, they had a former CIA NOC working for them. They hire ex-agency people to come in and teach all kinds of tradecraft that, like, I'm like, how is this even legal? Like, what?

Well, even the Emirati Presidential Guard, their most elite unit they have, is led by the former Australian SAS 2-star. And, like, that's, that's what that billet is. It has to be an Australian SAS 2-star.

Interesting. It has to be like, yeah.

And actually, when I, in my previous work, we were training them a lot in the mountains in California doing their cold weather training. And it would be funny because we'd have like, it would be close enough to Las Vegas that they could go on a drive to Las Vegas at some point. Right. And so they would go get hotels in Las Vegas and like refuse to train. And like, this is their presidential guard, like their best, the best guys. Right. And, uh, they, so then we'd eventually like convince them to go to the mountain, to the base camp and be like, all right guys, we like, that's why you're here. And it's funny because like when we would train them as a partner force, the way the foreign military sales agreement was set up, the Emiratis would actually pay our paychecks. So they would pay money to the US Treasury and from the Treasury it would go into DFAS, which is how we get paid in the military. So that any of us like touching that program, it wasn't the US taxpayer paying our salaries, which is crazy. Um, and it was totally transparent to us, but this is how the case was set up, right?

So we'd be up on the mountain telling them, like, you guys got to get up on the mountain. And they'd be like, it's too cold. It's too cold. Like, you better get up on the mountain. We got to go get one of their guys to go beat them and tell them to get out of the tent and go up the mountain. It was pretty wild because I'm like, how are you guys going to go fight war like this?

Yeah, you guys are like the elite.

We've brought over— I mean, I know an Afghan dude that did Ranger School, graduated from Sandhurst, like, super squared away guy. But then you hear other stories where we've brought Afghans over here to train them and they disappear, and then they show up like 2 weeks later in a strip club in Nashville.

You're like, what Yeah, he got someone— he got a stripper pregnant. He's like, I live here now. All right, John, I'll see you later.

Take care.

All right, let's wrap it up, uh, Jack, unless you got something else you want to keep—

No, no, that's all.

All right, I want everyone to do us a favor. I want you to go to our Patreon, patreon.com/theTeamHouse. You get episodes of Eyes On and Team House ad-free and early. and you help support the show. Of course, all the links for all the guys, the books, Jack's The High Side, Jack's book, of course, The Most Dangerous Man, that's out. Uh, all those links are in the description. So if you want to help support the guys, those links are in the description. There it is, beautiful. Look at that cover. And I'm gonna keep teasing it, I have a book coming out next month, October 20th, I think.

Oh, you have a date?

I have a date, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so, all right, I'm very excited. It's called American Insurgent, and it's, it's a fun novel that'll probably upset many people, but that's okay. Such is life. Jack, I love you. Thank you. I'll see you in a little bit because we have a team house right after this.

Coming up in a couple hours.

Very excited. Later.