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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
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- [00:21]
David McCloskey
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- [00:41]
Mike Pesca
Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. It's Wednesday, January 14, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. So Donald Trump has a proposal to cap credit card aprs at 10%.
- [01:06]
David McCloskey
No, I want to cap on credit card interest rates because, you know, some of them are 28, almost 30% and that the people don't know they're paying 30%. The people out there, you know, they're working and they have no idea that they're paying 30%. No way we're putting a one year cap at 10% and that's it. They know it.
- [01:28]
Mike Pesca
He's never really, although he is. You know, he likes to think of himself as a Wall street and finance guy and watches the markets and cares about the Dow like it was 1989. He's never really liked the banks. They shunned him. Is a little bit of the reason why though he finally found Credit Suisse. The banks hate this idea of capping credit cards. And I got to say I kind of agree with them. On the one hand I thought that, all right, everyone who's getting charged 12.99% if you bring it down to 10, it's not going to destroy the credit card industry. But I did a little more looking into the credit card industry guided by a couple of friends I know, not in the credit card industry, but I don't want to brag or seem too highfalutin, but they own credit cards. And also someone who contacted me who's a reader, great reader, Kathleen, of the Gist list where I said maybe this is a good idea. It's not. And here's why. The whole credit card industry, there's like three ways of making money and the big way is people don't pay their balances and then they get charged interest. But this works out for people and people want credit and get credit. And it is true that some of these high credit credit cards, if they were capped at 10, those people just wouldn't get credit and that would be bad for those people and that would slow down the economy. Unless you want to be totally paternal and say they shouldn't have credit anyway. In fact, the economics don't back that up. Credit card companies get a little bit for each transaction, but what they really do is like I say, if you have two, if you high a credit rate or a very high credit rate, they make money on you. So then you ask, well, what about the people who always pay off their credit cards? Why even have them as clients if they're not making money? A little bit of the answer is the transaction fees. So if you get 1 or 2% in perks and they get 1 or 2 or 3% in transaction fees, it might make the credit card companies a little money. But everyone who is now paying off their credit card and maybe has a platinum plus card which costs, you know, 50 or 100 or 150 bucks, that makes money for them, they might one day be a credit revolver. Now don't cry for these high credit people, but they do insist on the perks, the miles. And if you capped and this I really looked into it extensively. If you cap the fees of the credit cards, the perks will go away. And many people, many maybe people who say, oh, it's sad that someone has to pay 14%, guess what that person is paying for you perks guy. And in fact, if you dig down, and I have no idea how Donald Trump, a Republican or any other Republican thinks about this, but the US credit card system redistributes money from the poor to the rich or at least to the people who are high risk liquidity restrained borrowers who pay those high rates to the lower risk high income transactors through pooled pricing and interchange. Meaning if you are a payer offer and you get your perks, who's providing those perks? Seems like the company, but it's the amount of money the company makes on the guy paying 17.99%. So this is a pretty bad idea. It's shocking coming from the Trump administration, but it is in fact a pretty bad idea. I've turned around on the wisdom of capping credit cards at 10% on the show today. More wisdom, but this one is not for me. I've outsourced my wisdom To a really interesting guy. His name is David McCloskey. He is the author of a book called the Persian. It is a novel. He is a novelist but he's also a man with a CIA background and he is the co host of the hit podcast the Rest is Classified. We undid that classification. Welcome to the skiff. That is the Gist interview. David McCloskey for the full show. Up next. True Work. I'm wearing True Work now. It's fashionable but it gets the job done. And that's how it was started. The founder was a guy who worked in the trades who said, why am I always wearing jeans? Maybe back then they said dungarees, they get wet. They don't really work for me. So they made comfortable, capable, ready for work, whatever the day throws at you. I have, I could list all the gear. I got this, I think it's called a wobby hoodie. I got this great hoodie. The moisture is wicked away. I got a couple of pair of pro work pants. Lots of zippers, lots of hooks and they look good. I got one in black, which, you know, everyone is black. Then I got one in this kind of burnt orangey thing. It's a cool looking pair of pants. They have over 50,000 five star reviews from pros in every trade and every climate. I personally endorse True Work. It's not what you say, it's what's on your body right now. And that's what's going on with me. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. Get 15% off your first order@truewerk.com with code. The gist. A lot of times we spell the name of the company. It's very important. There's a little wrinkle here. T R U E W E R K dot com. You get it? T R U E w e r k.com thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Being a homeowner is amazing. It helps to be married to a somewhat brilliant architect who designs a home such that it should go in some sort of digest. But I gotta tell you, there's a lot of stuff to do around the house. Cracks in the ceiling, cracks in the facade. You know what the big win was? In the last few months, the neighbors demolish their house and we have the same kind of brick for our facade than they do. So we took some of their brick, they were just going to throw it away. And now we can mix and match all the cracks that their demolishment caused with our house. So what I'm saying is you protect your health, your car, your phone. But what about your home? It's the biggest investment you have. And when things go wrong, you don't think of it in the context of insurance, like life insurance or any of those other things, things I talked about. So regular homeowner insurance doesn't cover the day to day wear and tear like plumbing failures and H vacs and electrical issues. Hey, you're on your own. And that is where HomeServe comes in. They're here to say you're not on your home. You subscribe to HomeServe for as little as 4.99amonth. They got your back and they get back to you quickly. Repairs hit hard and fast, but they have a 24. 7 hotline. Scheduling a repair has never been easier. A little bit about them. They have four and a half million customers. They're 4.8 out of five on their rating. They have an A plus for the better Business Bureau. They're the real deal. And as for me, I don't know. It's. It's so many things. But the cracks on the ceiling of the kids room, which we've been diagnosed, that you better just fix the whole ceiling. Two plumbing failures, two floods. Lots of floods. Maybe air conditioning systems installed backwards. An emergency repair service really would have helped us out so many times. I'm glad I have it now. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at 4.99amonth. Go to HomeServe.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's HomeServe.com not available everywhere. Most plans range from $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs.
- [09:14]
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- [10:17]
Mike Pesca
David McCloskey is an interesting guy because he writes about interesting things in an interesting way. Wait a minute, maybe I'll backtrack on that. Maybe it's because he's a guy who writes about interesting things and does it in an interesting way that I think that McCloskey, author of the new novel the Pur version, is so interesting. But I suspect not. He was a CIA analyst who worked in Langley and around the Middle East. I listened to him on the Rest Is Classified podcast, which is really the only podcast that justifies the subscription tier. I mean, it's classified. David, welcome to the gist.
- [10:53]
David McCloskey
Hey Mike, great to be here and thanks for having me.
- [10:57]
Mike Pesca
So this takes place in Sweden, Tehran, Tel Aviv, throughout the Middle East. A prison in Iran. I suspect though that the circumstances, the real life events that inspired it took place though in the real world, not in the exact locations. So one of the earliest action scenes is a gunning down of an official via remote controlled machine guns. Now when I read that, I said, oh, that's like the actual killing by. It has been reported in the press. Israeli agents of Mohsen Far Harizad, I think is Fakrizade. Yes, yes. Now is that right? Now that was. That relied on him being in a somewhat remote area. Did you take that event and put it in a more urban area?
- [11:47]
David McCloskey
Yeah, no, I. Straight up. So this was, this was the, the sort of dilemma with the reality of the way that the Israelis operate inside Iran and how it related to my novel was that anytime I did research for the book and tried to unpack how the Israelis had killed somebody in Iran or surveilled somebody, whatever it was, the reality was I didn't need to improve upon the spy story. It was already so insane. And so in this case, I literally took an example from 2020 when they killed the head of Iran's nuclear program and moved places and dates and changed names. But it's the same operation because yeah, it's like you don't actually, and I guess it's somewhat convenient is that when you're writing a spy novel about Israel and Iran, you can just take stuff that's actually happened and put it in the pages of fiction and it sounds like you made it up.
- [12:56]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. But I wonder if the Israelis would have. Maybe now they would. Would have done that in the urban setting. Because in your Book talks about this, the care they take. And it can always be perfect or exquisite care not to kill civilians. So in this case, the scientist who was killed as a fictional character in your book, his wife becomes a main character. She was spared in the attack. So what do you know about that? Would the Israelis. Are the Israelis now bold enough to do not just an operation in urban setting, which they have definitely done, but a remote control machine gun?
- [13:28]
David McCloskey
Oh, sure, yeah, I think so. I mean, the answer is yes. I mean, I think when you look at the way they operated in the run up to the strikes over the summer in June, you know, I think they, they do. You know, the Mossad guys I spoke to for the book said, look, when we conduct these kind of operations, we are generally trying to limit, you know, like collateral. Like we don't, we don't want to kill random people if we can avoid it. I do also think relative to 2020, the sort of tolerance, the Israeli risk tolerance is sort of, you know, it's pretty high. And I think they're probably willing to accept collateral damage if they can hit the targets they need to hit if there's no other choice. So I think the answer to that question is yes. Right.
- [14:15]
Mike Pesca
Well, an exemplification of that. Is the pager operation.
- [14:18]
David McCloskey
Sure.
- [14:19]
Mike Pesca
To operate the pagers or to have that be operational, two hands had to be on the pagers. And one reason for that was, well, you'd blow off two Iranians hands, but also it's less likely that another person would be handing you a pager. But of course that did happen and innocents did die in the. Or at least relatives and young children. So let's say innocence did die and get hurt in that operation.
- [14:43]
David McCloskey
Totally. I mean, I think, you know, the pager operation was a great example of something where when you really strip it down to its bones, the idea was because those painters were held by a sort of what I guess you could consider to be Hezbollah's almost like reservist force. It's a lot of people who, they're not full time kind of fighters for Hezbollah. Right. I mean, they're certainly working for the group in, in some kind of almost part time capacity. Like they could get the call.
- [15:12]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. If they could get called in from the office. They're like, you know, ER docs on the weekend.
- [15:16]
David McCloskey
Yeah, but you think about how exactly, you think about how debilitating it is to an organization's morale. If, you know, like the equivalent might be in our case, all of a sudden a bunch of, you Know, National Guardsmen get their hands blown off and have to go to the hospital. I mean, all of a sudden, you know, your ability to recruit for the National Guard is probably going to kind of go down. Right? I mean, that's.
- [15:40]
Mike Pesca
But also in America, our capacity to fight a war would definitely go down a bit, but with Hezbollah, they don't have limited, limitless sharps. So. Absolutely, in the subsequent war in Lebanon, they had fewer people to throw into the fray because their guys were dismembered.
- [15:57]
David McCloskey
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the, you know, one of the things that we did a couple of podcast episodes actually on this operation, on the rest is classified. And one of the things I found really fascinating to get into this was, you know, if you go Back to the 2006 war that Israel fought against Hezbollah, 34 day war, one of the things that Israel failed to do in that conflict was to degrade Hezbollah's command and control structure. So throughout the entire war, Hezbollah sort of leaders could continue to issue orders. The structure of the organization stayed intact. And what the pager operation helped do, in addition to the 12 days of, you know, airstrikes that occurred afterward, was to degrade that command and control structure in this conflict. And that is why Israel won this time and really didn't win the last go around in 2006.
- [16:47]
Mike Pesca
And it's not that Israel got so much smarter in the intervening 15 years or so. It's the risk tolerance, I think is a key explanation for what happened. How much they were driven, how seriously they thought the threat was, what risks they were willing to take. And also you learn the lessons of the last war, so that's important. Another thing from your book, it's not even said, but the Israeli penetration into Iraqi society and the ability of who they're able to recruit, and this is. The main character is a recruited agent by the Mossad, who is a Swedish Iranian. I mean, but that is. That doesn't have to be exaggerated either, right? That is right out of the pages of reality.
- [17:31]
David McCloskey
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think there's been some great work done on this by like ProPublica in the months since the, you know, the strikes in June where they looked at basically this kind of, you know, you could almost call them clandestine units that the Israelis had recruited inside Iran. And, you know, I think in our minds to some degree, we're thinking of some of the characters like in the show Tehran, where it's like, oh, there's a, there's a Mossad officer that's being sent into Iran, it's like, not really. I mean, that does happen, you know, in certain extreme circumstances. But the Israelis are recruiting Iranians to help them in this spy war against Iran. And it is. The Israelis are aided by, I think, a bunch of different fractures in Iranian society. Dissident groups, ethnic and religious fractures, you know, people who despise the regime. Iran is also a massive place, and it makes it easier to operate. I mean, it's a country of 80 plus million people. That's gigantic. Right. So the Israelis have a lot of seams they can sort of operate in when it comes to penetrating Iranian society. And they're really good at it. They're really, really good at it.
- [18:44]
Mike Pesca
Yes. A massive place that has been described as a distended ovary. Has been described as a distended ovary yanked crosswise. That was your description. Excellent. Excellent phrase. Why not? Then Gaza penetration in Gaza too? We wouldn't expect it to the full extent. You're working with a population of 2 million versus tens and tens of millions, close to 100 million in Iran. But why has there been almost no human intel in Gaza like there has been in Iran for, from the Israeli perspective?
- [19:18]
David McCloskey
Well, I mean, I'm sure the Israelis have a tremendous number of assets inside Gaza, inside Hamas, both before and during the conflict. But I think what was probably missing in the run up to, you know, October 7th was, you know, sources inside the sort of senior ranks of Hamas's military council who would have been able to describe the plans and intentions of the group. So I think, you know, at least, at least part of the Israeli intelligence failure, and I think it's probably a multifaceted one, was that they had not penetrated a very small group of Hamas leaders who were planning this attack. And, you know, similarly, I'm sure that there are pockets of Iranian decision making that the Israelis have not been able to penetrate as well.
- [20:15]
Mike Pesca
Where do you get your information on methods of torture as used by the Iranians?
- [20:21]
David McCloskey
So, yeah, it's actually an unfortunate theme in all of my novels now that I have had to research Syrian methods of torture, Russian methods of torture, and now Iranian methods of torture. And I will say there's a bit of a stew for how I come up with this one, is that I always start by reading Amnesty International reports and actual accounts of people who have been imprisoned in these places. So you kind of start from an actual fact base. And then what I typically do is I decide to add some colorful or luminous details that are all my own and kind of mix it into that. So that it frankly is more, maybe more interesting or more haunting or more disturbing or for the purposes like in this book, you know, I was not able to find. It's very common in Iran, as in many other places, for a method of interrogation to be constantly writing stuff. Right. Kind of writing your testimony over and over again so they can check it against.
- [21:31]
Mike Pesca
Which works for you as a novelist.
- [21:33]
David McCloskey
Right. And, but, but I was not able to find any instances of Iranian prisoners having to do this with a crayon. But I wanted, I wanted my, my protagonist cam to have really a hell of a time writing this over and over again. And I thought it, I frankly thought it would be a colorful detail, no pun intended, to have him doing all of this with the, with the, the aid of a crayon instead of a pen or pencil.
- [21:58]
Mike Pesca
If it gets made into a movie, it's a great visual. Do you specify what color crayon, by the way?
- [22:03]
David McCloskey
It is a blue crayon.
- [22:05]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [22:06]
David McCloskey
And he is then in one scene given a red crayon.
- [22:11]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [22:12]
David McCloskey
And so, yeah, it's always blue. And he is thrown off terribly when the color is switched on him.
- [22:20]
Mike Pesca
Do you think that the torturing countries of the world could take a bunch of Amnesty International reports, put it into AI and get some good and better ideas ideas? Or is that unnecessary? Do they kind of share notes back channel wise, less officially?
- [22:34]
David McCloskey
I, I, I shouldn't be laughing at that question. I don't know why that was my initial reaction.
- [22:39]
Mike Pesca
I mean, I think sometimes, sometimes we do it just as the shock and nervousness escapes our bodies. Yes.
- [22:45]
David McCloskey
I think, I think the human sort of, you know, we have a, it seems like our species has a tremendous amount of kind of creative energy when it comes to inflicting pain on, on our fellow men and women. So I'm not sure we would necessarily need AI to do that. I think in general, what I've seen from looking at intelligence services the world over is that there are some pretty established ways for extracting, if you're actually trying to extract information from people, there's kind of a common set of, of levers you pull to do that. You know, sleep deprivation, writing isolation, you know, things like that that really aren't very complicated, but that really mess people up pretty quickly and get them to start talking and, you know, writing down the truth and things like that. So I think there's a pretty common toolkit.
- [23:45]
Mike Pesca
So as we go through the McCloskey oeuvre, it is not been a question until now where the presum readers sympathies would lie or even to what extent. I mean, the Damascus station. There are no sympathetic, I mean, you have fully fleshed characters, but no really sympathetic people firmly ideologically aligned with Assad in your Moscow books there we know, we know what the Russians are up to and we're not on their side. This is also. Troy interviewed Brad Thor and he wrote a book recently about Ukraine and there wasn't a question, even though there's some American question, about righteousness or wrongness in Ukraine. He created a Nazi unit there. And it was clear that when you fight the Russians who are running their operation as Nazis, the who the sympathies are for. What about this book? Did it change from conception to execution? I think it probably did in terms of if you polled the potential book buying public and how, if at all, did that affect what you wrote in the book?
- [24:55]
David McCloskey
Yeah, so I have dealt with this, I think, through, throughout all of the novels to some degree, which is, I generally don't think that. Well, number one, evil people don't think that they're evil. So when you write a character who's doing despicable things, they're usually not sitting there cackling to themselves, you know, thinking that they're evil. They're doing things that they see as necessary for some end or, you know, they don't even believe in the concept of evil. Right. So, like there you have to sort of get into the head of a character like that, be they Iranian, Russian, Israeli, Syrian, American, you name it. Right. So I'm generally trying to draw out characters that I think are authentic to the settings that they arise from. Right. And what I find in that process is that you as the reader, hopefully are not going to feel drawn into some kind of morality play that I've concocted for you, but that you're going to be interested in why these people are doing the things that they're doing and you're going to keep turning the pages. And to be honest with you, Mike, like, when I write a book about Israel and Iran, I'm not thinking a lot at all really, throughout the writing process of like, who's good and who's bad and who's right in this conflict and who's not. I'm thinking a lot about the individual motivations and desires and dilemmas of the, the humans involved in this story who all think that they're doing the right thing.
- [26:46]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [26:46]
David McCloskey
For the most part. Right.
- [26:47]
Mike Pesca
And I do got to say, and that comes through, especially in places, a couple of caveats. One, this is about Iran. And there's not real sympathy, except actually online, you do feel you see some sympathy for Iran, but there's no real sympathy for Iran in the US public. And two, there are characters. I mean, you do flesh out the real motivations. Roya, who is the widow of one of the characters who I mentioned who was killed earlier, you know, at some point in the book, one character says to the other, yes, many Iranians hate the Zionists for stupid reasons and crazy reasons and inaccurate reasons, but in this case, we did kill her husband. So.
- [27:26]
David McCloskey
Yeah, right. Well, no, exactly. And I think, you know, like, my hope. I mean, you're right. There. There are absolutely. There's a character in this book, an Iranian character who is, you know, his name is Jafar Korbani, and he is this kind of senior guy in the Quds Force who is attempting to, you know, assassinate a bunch of Israelis.
- [27:50]
Mike Pesca
And is he. Does Suleimani, by the way, to interrupt, does Suleimani exist, existed in this world, or is he a Soleimani stand in?
- [27:58]
David McCloskey
No. So Suleimani does exist, and in fact, in the sort of world of the book, he's already been killed. And one of the characters, I think it might be Roya, sees his face up on billboards in Tehran over the course of the. The story. But, yeah, you're not, like, you know, you're not supposed to read that Gorbani character and be like, oh, man, this guy's, you know, sunshine and roses. He's a pretty despicable dude. But there are Iranian characters like Roya, the one you mentioned, who's like, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, she was married to this scientist, right, who was. Who was assassinated. She's a, like, Iranian widow who loves her daughter and does admin work for, you know, a pretty nasty organization. But she does it because she needs the money, and she doesn't really have many choices. So, like, she's a. In my. In my mind, a very sympathetic Iranian character who's just part of this gigantic system that I think we tend to kind of, you know, we dehumanize it. Right. And we do that for a lot of good mental reasons because we have to construct a mental model of Iran in our heads. You know, over here from the States, like, there's like, 80 million people that live there. And so I'm hopeful in these books that, like, you actually get into the head of a couple of these people and understand a little bit of how they might see the world.
- [29:19]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. Well, anyone who has more than A has any amount of depth. When they analyze the Iranian situation, this is what the royal character exemplifies, is that there are so many victims among the regular Iranians. One of the reasons why the Iranian and the Ayatollah regime is so evil is that they're either outright subjugating, imprisoning, suppressing their people, or just in smaller, subtler ways, forcing them into lives that shouldn't have to be lived in an otherwise free country. So that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about October 7th and what were the calculations of the deadline and how to incorporate that or not to incorporate those events?
- [30:05]
David McCloskey
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a real kind of internal conversation with. With myself and then eventually with my, you know, my agent and publishers as we were looking at the manuscript, because, you know, it's not. This is not a book about Israel's war in Gaza. Right. Full stop. But I felt, you know, I always try when I'm writing these books, I start with a setting, and then the characters come out of the setting and then the plot comes out of the characters. And when you do that and you're trying to write a setting that's authentic and characters that are authentic that come out of that setting that feel real to you as the reader, you. You have to deal with what's actually going on in the world and write the character so that those events, they might not be involved in them directly, but they're affecting their life. Right. They're in their head. And so in this case, like, the war in Gaza is going on as this book is being written, the Mossad officers, who are the principal characters from the Israeli side in the book, again, are not directly involved in it, but have thoughts on it, feel it, their countries affected by it. And so I felt like it had to be incorporated in that way in the same way that from the Iranian side, as they look at, you know, the sort of what's going on in the world of the novel, they're looking at Israel through the lens of the way it's prosecuted the war in Gaza. Right. So like, it had to be integrated in some way, even if it's not ever driving the plot or, you know, there's no scenes in Gaza in the book or anything like that.
- [31:37]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back in a minute with more of David McCloskey.
- [31:50]
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- [32:25]
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- [32:57]
Mike Pesca
We're back with David McCloskey, author of the Persian One thing that I thought, and it's necessary for all books when there are adversaries, to make the adversaries, if not equal, potent on each side. I, and I think you to some extent, have come to the conclusion, I think the world, and maybe even Israel came to the conclusion that Iran's capacities were not what everyone thought they were. So in the book, it's necessary to make Iran very potent, and they definitely will catch dissidents and spies within their midst and torture them forever. But there was an Iranian operation that involved, I think, a drone gunning down Mossad agents in Tel Aviv.
- [33:37]
David McCloskey
Yeah.
- [33:39]
Mike Pesca
So we could just say one artistic license. Artistic license. And that's fine, too, what I said about conflict. But would you say that when you were maybe conceiving of the book, that was something that really could happen and now you would at least downgrade the chances of that actually being possible?
- [33:55]
David McCloskey
Oh, I think it's very possible.
- [33:57]
Mike Pesca
Okay.
- [33:58]
David McCloskey
Like, I mean, it's, it's not so it. When you, when you look at the way. So the Israel's ability to penetrate Iranian society and operate in Iranian society is in no way shape or form equivalent to the reverse. Right. The Iranians do not have the same capabilities inside Israel that Israel has inside Iran. Right. That said, the Iranians have had a decent amount of success in recent years recruiting Israelis to do things inside Israel. Like, anything from sort of putting up propaganda to, in one case, I think, trying to, like, start forest fires. And I think there was another case where somebody put, like, a severed animal's head on someone else's doorstep to, like, try to intimidate them. So kind of small bean stuff, but that shows that.
- [34:51]
Mike Pesca
Just let me interrupt. Was that in Iran? Because something like that happened where they hired Russian cutouts and did it in.
- [34:56]
David McCloskey
The U.S. this was, this was Iranian.
- [35:00]
Mike Pesca
Oh, was that in Israel?
- [35:02]
David McCloskey
Doing this in Israel? Yeah, so.
- [35:03]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [35:04]
David McCloskey
And they're doing it digitally. They're recruiting these people digitally. Right, so.
- [35:07]
Mike Pesca
Right, right, right. I remember that. And yeah, they didn't know, obviously the recruited didn't know who their master was. But yes, they were able to do that. Right.
- [35:16]
David McCloskey
Well, and if, look, if you, if you believe the kind of Israeli police and internal security sort of, you know, press reports that have come out of this, in many of these cases, the Israelis who are recruited did understand who they were working for and were winning waiting agents of, of Iran. And so I think what the novel does is it takes that and take like basically cranks it up a level to say, well, look, what if you had a very effective Iranian recruiter inside Israel who was able to actually put together a small, you know, network of what we'd call support assets to do things for the Iranians inside Israel, move things around, you know, in particular these drones. So like that, that is not the idea that the Iranians would be able to either through a cutout or directly recruit a group of disaffected Israelis to do things for them inside Israel. Very plausible. And this just takes, this just takes some of the tech that the Israelis have used against Iran and turns it the other direction. Because the whole way I came up with this was I basically said, look, you look at the Israeli targeted killing assassination campaign they've run in Iran over the last two decades. What if the Iranians had the capability to do something similar at a smaller scale inside Israel? And then you're off to the races with the novel.
- [36:44]
Mike Pesca
Yep, yep. Do you think if the public knew the depth and intricacies. But I don't just mean depth, I mean cleverness and plot twists about say the Pedro operation or some of these other operations that your worth delight or whatever as a novelist making up fake ones would be somewhat diminished.
- [37:11]
David McCloskey
Yeah, I do, I do. And I actually joked with my editor after the pager operation. We were having lunch and I said, look, you know, if I had put this in a novel like six months ago, you would have told me it was stupid. You would have said that this didn't, that this was too crazy for a book. And it's not too crazy. You know, that's the thing is like as I again, I go back to what I said earlier, like, you can Just look at the way that Mossad operates in some of these cases and just lock, stock and barrel, pull the trade craft and the idea for the operation and put it in a book. And people will be like, wow, that's crazy. You know, that's a crazy kind of sci fi, ish spy novel thing. And it's like, well, the Israelis already did it. Oh, and by the way, it happened five years ago.
- [37:53]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [37:53]
David McCloskey
You know.
- [37:54]
Libsyn Ads Advertiser
Right.
- [37:54]
David McCloskey
And it just, it blows people's minds. I don't know. So it's, you know, it to some degree, it makes my job a little bit easier as a novelist with most.
- [38:04]
Mike Pesca
Fiction, taking the real and turning it into the fictional allows for, but necessitates 20% exaggeration. I'm making that percentage up. But some amount of creative license with some of these intel operations. The key is to, you know, par away the stuff that people is. Pare away the stuff that people's not. People are not even going to believe. And then also, also, it must be interesting and delightful when you read about some of the real details of the pager operation and Reuters had a great report. And then you find out afterwards. I mean, really play this out like the ripples of what this means. Like, you have to have an actual real pager distribution company, which means not just websites or fake websites or plausible fake websites, but an actual salesperson. You need a sales person. Yeah. And then negotiation on the prices.
- [38:57]
David McCloskey
Right.
- [38:58]
Mike Pesca
Where. What's the. What's the psychology of. I'm holding the line, if you don't buy them for this much, you're not going to get them. And then maybe Hezbollah's like, all right, we'll buy them for that much. Or message boards where they're arguing if the pages are good enough. I don't know if you want to put that in your book, but that all happened in real life. It's unbelievable.
- [39:16]
David McCloskey
It all happened. Yeah, it all happened in real life. And it's crazy. And, you know, I think one of the fun things about writing these books and frankly about telling these kind of stories on. On the podcast on the Rest is classified, is I think oftentimes the how is just a very fascinating question. It's like, how did they actually do this? And when you go down to a detailed level and are able to reconstruct an operation like this, you see just how intricate it is. And I mean, let's put aside any question of sort of the ethics and morality of it for a second. Just from the standpoint of the tradecraft, the imagination, you know, It's. It's absolutely fascinating. And I do think that that is why the fact that these operations, for the most part, take place in complete secrecy also adds to the allure of this kind of, well, how would this actually happen? And that's some of the fun of writing these novels is I can take stuff that I know has happened in the Secret World and then put it in the pages of the novel and change the names and the places and the dates and things like that, and you end up with, you know, you mentioned 20%, right. Like, you kind of crank up the sort of implausibility level. 20%. I like to think about it. I think about it a little bit differently, although the way you framed it, I think it's not wrong. The way I think about it is what I'm trying to do is construct a series of situations that might be individually unlikely, but are all plausible. They're plausible, you know, and. And that if you add a whole bunch of unlikely situations on top of each other, but that are all individually plausible, you end up with a book that I think, you know, can be really compelling from a story standpoint.
- [41:01]
Mike Pesca
So you're well in touch with the intel community. How long were you in the CIA?
- [41:06]
David McCloskey
I was there for eight years.
- [41:07]
Mike Pesca
And where were you based?
- [41:09]
David McCloskey
Washington, in the Middle East. So I was mostly a Syria hand while I was. While I was there. And I was an analyst.
- [41:17]
Mike Pesca
Right, right.
- [41:17]
David McCloskey
While I was in. Yeah.
- [41:18]
Mike Pesca
Do. Do you think that the United States does not have the capability to pull off a Pedro like attack, which I heard some people arguing? We got. We got lazy or fat and slow. On the other hand, what you were just talking about risk tolerance, necessity. So could we. We could the US if they wanted to, in the same amount of impressiveness. It's just. It's better to use our economic might and our, what, nine aircraft carriers to do the job.
- [41:52]
David McCloskey
I. I think that it's less a matter of capability and it's more a matter of sort of willingness or necessity. I do think we probably don't have the people, the sort of organizational setup or the legal structure to enable that kind of operation. Let me put it that way. I also think we don't face a series of. Of. Well, I think we. I mean, we probably do face a series of existential threats, but they're not Hezbollah, they're not Iran. They don't emanate from the Middle East. Right. The Israelis have a very different psychological and organizational structure and legal, you know, processes. And when they look at Hezbollah, when they look at Iran, they're like, well, you know, these are like existential threats to the security of our country and its existence. Right. And so they're willing to do things like this that really, you know, carry a lot of risk. And I just don't think this kind of idea inside the agency, I mean, even if we had the sort of capability to do it, like it wouldn't make it past, you know, the lawyers just wouldn't.
- [43:16]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that, that's another actual concern. Not that Israel doesn't have lawyers, but you know, they have different, they have different laws. 11, 11 aircraft carriers. I looked it up as it said we were talking, what about Iran? I guess the most capable of Israel's enemies. Do they have the capacity to do a pager type?
- [43:39]
David McCloskey
I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, I do think when you look at the Middle east, you know, Israel's intelligence service is more capable than the others. It just is. It's a more effective organization. Not every intel organization is created equal. And the Israelis have a more effective foreign intelligence agency than the Iranians do. And so I sincerely doubt that the Iranians would be able to carry out something like that. I really do now. I mean, you know, smaller scale in scope maybe. I think again, you know, the conversation we're having earlier, like if the Iranians wanted to conduct a campaign of targeted assassinations inside Israel, like I do think they could have some capabilities to do that. But the pager operation is a pretty, you know, that's a pretty elegant long term operation that requires, you know, I think some real, real skill that I'm not sure that the Iranians have demonstrated.
- [44:41]
Mike Pesca
Yet, taking the pager operation as the part that stands in for the whole and totally setting aside morality. So from an amoral perspective, who holds the stronger hand? Is it the small country? Is it population wise, geographically that is forced to be unbelievably clever in these kinds of attacks and also has some compunction based on the way that they define morality and adhere to law? Or is it the country, the huge country that has all these terrorist proxies and has a willingness to use terrorism and martyrdom as a way to achieve their political goals? Because right now we're seeing just in terms of Israel and Iran, Israel has the upper hand. Is that because they were in a better, smarter, cleverer, cleverness thrust upon them position or for some different reasons?
- [45:40]
David McCloskey
Boy, it's the big question. This is the. Yeah, it's a big, it's a big question. I mean, I think you Know, a, a very, I mean, it's got Israel, it's got its own, you know, sort of seams and divisions and cracks, right? I mean, you look at its politics, you look at its society right now, and it's got some seams in it for sure. That said, I mean, you've got a, you know, a small sort of fortress state that is extremely technologically advanced and very well capitalized and benefits from, you know, a partnership with us and the broader, broader west in general that, you know, has fed it. I mean, those are all significant strategic advantages that, you know, I'd argue the Iranians don't have. I think that, you know, both sides, I would say, though, have really, I, I think kind of struggled to translate tact, you know, in general have struggled to translate tactical sort of intelligence operational successes into broader strategic advantages. I do think that what the Israelis are doing right now, you know, you look at just sort of the broader regional strategy though, you know, again, morality, ethics, blah, blah, blah aside, right? Like, you could argue that the, let's just take Lebanon, the pager operation, you know, the sort of 12 day war against Hezbollah was, you know, change that pattern a bit and actually strategically, you know, altered the strategic balance between Israel and Hezbollah right through this violence. So, I don't know, it's a big, it's a big question. I think that a lot of the long term trends on all sides in the region look pretty bad, you know, and it feels like a, a part of the world where, man, you know, you look at each of these conflicts and you're sort of like, man, everybody kind of loses in the long run. But I'm very cynical. You know, I'm, I'm, I think cynicism is generally a good speed when it comes to looking at the Middle East.
- [47:50]
Mike Pesca
David McCloskey is the author of the Persian and the co host of the Rest is Classified. Thank you so much, David.
- [47:58]
David McCloskey
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.
- [48:05]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. The producer of the show is Corey Wara. Leah Yanni is our production coordinator. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the gist list. Jeff Craig helps me with everything that's a pixel. And Michelle Pesca helps me be direct and yet at the same time loving and uplifting to the aforementioned members of the team, I hope. Ideally. Thanks for listening.
- [48:39]
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