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How America Went Blind in Iran | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS
01:38:48
This week we trace four decades of American intelligence failure in Iran, from the 1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh through the 1979 embassy takeover that wiped out our human network overnight. Jonathan Hackett walks us through Stuxnet, the JCPOA, the...
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- [00:02]
Host
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- [01:01]
Host
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Eyes on Geopolitics. I'm here with Jack Murphy and Jonathan Hackett. I would say the two, the two big brains of the group. Ivy League grads are almost Ivy League grad for, for John, he's getting there. Today's show is going to be a little bit different than a normal show usually obviously we do like, you know, what's going on current events wise, you know, day, you know, week 18 of the Iran war. I mean this does have to do with Iran, obviously. This is more like, I guess you can kind of characterize as like one of the bigger intelligence stories of the last four decades and how the US Is kind of like, try to understand like what's going on in Iran, especially after what happened in 1979 with the Revolution and like, you know, our embassies being. Our embassy was a hostage place, a hostage, you know, home for hostages essentially. And like we lost all of our intelligence, at least human intelligence inside of Iran after 1979. And just leading up to what we're at, where we're at today, like who we leaned on for intelligence help throughout the last four decades. I mean, really, it's a longer story too because we talk about like 1953 and stuff like that. Like it's so much like there's so much there and I'm open to talking about that, but my thought process was basically starting it off right after 1979, after the revolution and basically us trying to have, having to build back our intelligence apparatus or the picture Inside of Iran. So I brought our Iranian expert, which John Hackett. And Jack's here. Jack's here just because he's cute and I need sex appeal on the episode.
- [02:52]
Co-host/Interviewer
I. I get it.
- [02:54]
Host
Yeah. So like John, where do you want to start? You want to talk a little bit about what happened in 1953 and stuff like that, just to set the stage for what eventually happened with the revolution.
- [03:04]
John Hackett
Yeah, so I can go back a little bit earlier than that because it's kind of relevant to like, why did 1953 happen at all? So in 1906 you had something called the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. There was this group called the Qajars which had been ruling Iran for about two centuries. That was the monarchy for a while. They were this originally Turkic backed group. Turkish group, although they're not Turks per se, like Turkey Turks, they're a different kind of Turks that were ruling the country for a while. And you know, the Persian people are Persian, they're not Turk. And there was a lot of friction between that monarchy and the Persian people that this Qajar Turk monarchy was ruling over. So there's a lot of friction there. And leading up to that point, you had a lot of British and Russian interests. Interesting. In what is now Iran. The Brits were interested in the south and the Russians were interested in the north. This will come into play later in World War II also, especially why some Kurds are pro regime and some are anti regime and some are anti other Kurds. That had a lot to do with how the Russians and the British separated Iran and also separated what is now Iraq and Turkey. As far as spheres of influence. And if you remember the Sykes Picot Agreement, people have heard of this. May 16, 1915, 1916, the French, the British and the Russians agreed to split up the Middle east into spheres of influence. That's how we got the borders of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and so on. This is obviously before the creation of Israel, although it did set things in motion for what would today become Israel in 1948. May 1948. So a lot of these kind of things, like these little balls were getting put in motion and started to move around around this time, like after 1900ish to 1906. Skipping a ton of history. 1906, the Iranian people said, we do not want this monarchy anymore being as oppressive as it's being. This is the Qajar monarchy. And so they actually had something called the Constitutional Revolution where they actually created a. What's now called a Majlis, which is a council. It looks A lot like a parliament that did not exist before. They basically drew it up from scratch. And they said, this is what we want for our parliament. We want representation from all of our provinces. There are 32 provinces. We want all these people representing in parliament. The Qajar monarchy became very weak because the Russian and British influence was poorly managed, just like it was in a lot of imperial situations throughout South Asia and West Asia at the time. And so they basically got what they wanted. The Iranians got an elected parliament for the first time in 2000 years of history of monarchy. And the British and the Russians did not like this. They said, well, if that happens, we lose control over this country. And in particular, they met the things under the ground which was oil, because if you remember Winston Churchill, right before World War I converted the Navy into an oil only navy. Before that it was a sail navy, it was a coal navy, slow navy. And so the British interests were, we need oil to power our ships because we know that we're going to be in war. So what do we do? We go find oil. There's no oil in the uk, obviously. And the refinery at Abadan, which is where the refinery still is now, where most of the crude oil from Iran exits, that was a British run petroleum situation. So fast forward a little bit. World War I happens. There's, you know, the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russians have their own situation going on up in Russia. The Russians back out of the SYKES Picot Agreement. They actually publicized the secret Sykes Picot Agreement that, that divided up the Middle East. And that's how we actually know about the Sykes Picot Agreement between Britain and France and why the Kurds don't have a state and all this stuff. And, and so the Russians kind of let go of that for a while, but then they realized, like, oh man, actually there's a lot of good resources there. Let's return there. And actually, Reza Shah, the first Shah of Iran in the 1920s, early 1920s, was picked by the British out of a Russian backed Cossack brigade. Essentially it was this kind of this like irregular force that the Russians were sponsoring and let him become the Shah of the country. They kicked the Qajars out and put the Shah in charge, Shah Pahlavi, Reza Pahlavi. So then he gets a little bit too close to Ataturk, which was the Turkish autocrat that emerged out of World War I after the Ottoman Empire dissolved. The SYKES Picot Agreement said there's no more Ottoman Empire. There is now a Turkey and there's an Iran and a Syria. And so on. And they didn't like the way that he was aligning with Ottaturk. In fact, he was starting to wear the same mustache, the same hair. He started banning certain clothing that looks like too European. He liked the more fascist type clothing because there's a lot of fascism going on. And then 30s in some parts of Europe. Yeah, right, yeah, there's some different varieties of fascism going on. And it turned out that Reza started getting a little too close to that. World War II happens. And I'm focusing on Iran here. So World War II happens. Russia and Britain are still interested. They were allies in World War II. Middle east starts getting a little disrupted after World War II because a lot of the way France was ruling, things got disrupted because of Vichy France, which was the Nazi backed part of France. So there's a lot of disruption there. Also in Vietnam, different story. But in Iran, suddenly there are a lot of Kurds that were helping the Russians and the Brits against the Nazis in parts of the Middle East. There was a whole part of the Nazi situation in the Middle east that there were some Syrian groups, there were some Lebanese groups, some Vichy French backed groups through the background of the Nazi party there. Very fascinating part of history that I think a lot of Westerners don't really understand or think about what was going on in the Middle east during World War II. And so what happened was the Russians didn't let go of northern Iran. They said, no, we're still interested in Iran even after the war ended. They said, we want this northern part for ourselves. Because the Soviet Union went all the way up to the border there. And so you had some Kurds who said, well, we want independence then in exchange for us supporting you, Russia. And Russia said, okay. And so you suddenly got the republic of Azerbaijan, not the country of Azerbaijan today, but the province of Azerbaijan in Iran became independent for two years, backed by Russia. And so did Mahabad, which is a Kurdish province in Iran near the Lake Ormia region, which is where the Barzani family from, which is now why the Barzanis are not in Iran, they're in Iraq. Because of that exact situation. They actually fled Iran for their lives and survived. Whereas the other Kurds who backed that uprising all were slaughtered by the Shah's son who came in after he was the father was actually ousted for a very brief period of time. There was a Coup. This was 1953. So I put a lot of spaghetti in that bowl. But all the little threads kind of lead to that moment of why did we have this coup in 1953 with the CIA and the British backing this guy, his son Pahlavi. And that's kind of how we got there. And I can talk about, like, what it was, if you want, or we can go down different pathways. Whatever you think is best.
- [09:38]
Co-host/Interviewer
I mean, I think I would love to continue with the history, but I think to take a quick pause, if you could contextualize a little bit of how much is the history of this period of Iranian history that we're talking about? Is it a history of foreign meddling, or is it a history of indigenous power struggle and. Or is it a confluence between the two, which is what it sounds like happened? I mean, what system do you think ended up being the defining feature of Iran?
- [10:07]
John Hackett
So the problem in Iran is that the Iranian people have not been able to rule themselves ever since Islam arrived.
- [10:13]
Co-host/Interviewer
Gotcha.
- [10:14]
John Hackett
And this is kind of the narrative that you hear a lot of. There's actually a book called Two Centuries of Silence, which is by a author named Zarin Kub, who wrote this book in Farsi. It's now in English as well, I think. But it's basically about when Islam arrived in Iran. The Iranians lost control of themselves because there were these caliphates, you know, from Mecca and from what is now Istanbul, basically ruling over Iran in various ways, whether that's religiously or politically or a combination of the two in various iterations over those times since the 9th century when Iran lost its independence, which was a result of the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire fighting each other so intensely in the Middle east that neither of them emerged, and both the Byzantines and the Persians lost control and the Islam came in out of nowhere and basically, basically took over, which is exactly what happened. That's why Turkey is Turkey and not Rome anymore. And also why the Iranians don't rule over any part of what used to be Persia anymore. There is no more Persia per se.
- [11:11]
Co-host/Interviewer
And this must be a source of huge consternation for the Iranian people who. They're very proud. They see themselves as, I guess you could say the center of civilization in some ways.
- [11:23]
Ryan Seacrest
They.
- [11:24]
Co-host/Interviewer
Some of them see themselves as a regional power, if not a world power. If you go back into Iranian history, all the way back to like, Darius and all these other characters in the. In the historical past, this must grind pretty bad on the. On the Persian people and, you know, influence, you know, their desire for self governance.
- [11:46]
John Hackett
Well, Yemet, the story of Islam in Iran is a story of humiliation for a lot of Persians, because if you look back, like you mentioned with Dariush and Kourosh, which is Cyrus in English and Greek. When you look at that time period, the things that they invented, it's kind of like when you look at the US in the 19th century, like railways, electricity, telegraph, like, that's how they look at that time. Because the kingdom of Lydia, which was under Persian control at the time, in the fifth century, sixth century, they invented, coined money. They also invented the postal system, they invented passports. I mean, like, things that are so fundamental to modern society came from that empire, like a very short period of time. Really. It was about a century and a half to two centuries maximum. And suddenly, like, this stuff was just coming out of there. I mean, even during the Islamic Golden Age, the 13th century, that we think about as like Islam kind of being this enlightened period. During the Dark Ages in Europe, those were all Persian scholars who were under Muslim control, you know, like the invention of algebra. Although the name Al Jibra is an Arabic name that was a Persian mathematician, you know, and, like, the list goes on and on. Like all these inventions, like the concept of the zero sifir was invented by a Persian mathematician, like, all this stuff. So, like, they're thinking, like, also. So they actually got chess through an Indian intermediary named Bazorgamir, who came in the 8th century to Iran and delivered it to the. The shah at the time, which is actually in the book called Shahnameh, which is the book of Kings by Ferdowsi, who's a famous Persian poet.
- [13:10]
Co-host/Interviewer
Interesting.
- [13:11]
John Hackett
Very fascinating. But the word chess actually means shahs, kings. And when you say checkmate, it's shah mate, which means king is dead.
- [13:19]
Host
Wow.
- [13:19]
John Hackett
So, like, all this stuff is Persian.
- [13:22]
Host
Wow. Yo, John, I just. A little aside, I feel like you're very good at Jeopardy. Is that true?
- [13:29]
John Hackett
Facts are important.
- [13:30]
Host
Yeah, you're right. All right, so where do we leave off? We left off, you know, the 1953.
- [13:38]
Co-host/Interviewer
You know, the. The, you know, subsequent CIA and MI6 interest in. In Iran. Yeah.
- [13:45]
John Hackett
So it was called Operation Ajax. And what it was. Remember I said the thing about 1906, it was the first time in history that they had their own elected government and so on. Right. And that was destroyed by the British for economic interests. For the British. Well, Fast forward to 1952. You have this guy named Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the first really, truly widely elected prime minister in Iran that represented the people in a way that was kind of disruptive for the monarchy because a lot of the things that he supported did not align with the monarchy, which meant, remember, this monarchy was put there by the British, essentially. And so this guy who's very popular, did not agree with the things that this British installed monarch wanted. You have a friction point. And right after World War II, the world's recovering. You've got Bretton woods in Europe, you've got a lot of reconstruction going on. There's a huge demand for oil and other industrial growth capacity in developing countries that are now recently decolonized, including the places through the Sykes Picot agreement, like Iraq, like Basra, which was a very important Iraqi port that was run by the British. And Abadan, another oil facility. Well, Mohamed Mosaddegh nationalized Iran's oil. Kind of like happened in Venezuela. And you kind of notice this theme of when leaders nationalize their oil, Britain, the US or Russia or a combination of the three will enter that country and stop it from happening. Venezuela is an example. Libya is another example. This is. Even if they start talking about it, you just see this giant influx of Western interest into the country. Like, you will stop that now or we'll stop you. So it's very fascinating, actually, Egypt, the whole reason we had the Suez crisis in Egypt in 1956 was again, because they wanted to nationalize the oil. And so France and Britain basically told Israel to invade Egypt and stop Egypt from nationalizing its oil. And it wasn't, you know, until later on that the world realized that that wasn't Israel. That was actually Britain and France doing that through Israel.
- [15:33]
Co-host/Interviewer
And the United States kind of opted out of that. Right, and it damaged relations.
- [15:38]
John Hackett
Yes, exactly. And then we had the Liberty incident, very, you know, around the Same exact time, June 8th. And, you know, 100 over 100American sailors were killed by Israeli Air force strikes on the, on the, the ship, even though they knew it was an American ship, but they didn't want a second ship collecting on what they were doing. So they killed all the Americans on board, which I think Americans like don't realize that was a deliberate strike on an American vessel by Israeli Air Force pilots. But zooming back out again to Mosaddegh, he nationalizes the oil. The British are like, no way. Because they had the British Iranian Petroleum Company. And they said, remember, this is like when you had Shell Oil, like Royal Dutch Shell and all that. There was the British bp, British Petroleum ran Abadan, the crude oil output platform, and Carg Island. All the stuff we're talking about today, that was all British colonized oil infrastructure. It was like slave, like conditions there. And Mosaddegh basically wanted to wrest control of that because they were only getting less than 10% of the oil revenues. The rest was going to the British Exchequer. And so they wanted more. They didn't want 100%, actually. They want to just negotiate, right?
- [16:40]
Host
Wasn't it?
- [16:41]
John Hackett
Yeah, they want to negotiate, yeah. Because Saudi Arabia actually successfully had done so at around the same time. And they're like, hey, we want to be like Saudi Arabia and gain control of our sovereign assets under the soil. And the British. No, you're not.
- [16:51]
Host
Shocking theory, right? Like, want to take control of your sovereign assets.
- [16:55]
John Hackett
Yeah. It's like trying to come to the US and be like, we're going to take over your oil. And the US Is like, okay, take it. You know.
- [17:00]
Host
Yeah, no problem.
- [17:01]
John Hackett
Yeah. So it's crazy. And then the British basically said, well, we can't do it on our own. We need help. Who else can help us? Well, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Roosevelt, raised his hand, you know, OSS guy, now CIA guy, basically went in there and they came up with a plan to put another guy named Zahidi, who was a military officer in charge of the country temporarily in a coup like situation. They surrounded Mosaddegh's house. They like basically threatened to blow his house up and kill the guy. They captured him. It went south. It didn't go the way they thought it would go. I mean, imagine that this kind of operation, if you saw it, was very complicated and went badly. We have a history of doing so in Iran. Like you look at Operation Eagle Claw, 1980. Look at that. And you know, even now, things sometimes get out of control there because we don't really understand the situation anyways. So Mosaddegh is removed. He's kind of like put into disgrace. And they bring in Reza Pahlavi's son, Muhammad Pahlavi, and he. He becomes the. The Shah. So they basically destroyed the elected officials in the government, got rid of all of them, and put in autocrats that the US and Britain selected to rule the country. And they ruled the country until 1979. So there was a lot of discontent at the time. And if, even if you talk to some Iranians today, some of them that are monarchists don't support Mossadegh. Now they look back and they're like, oh, Mossadegh was terrible. He was an. He was a tool of the Russians. He's a communist, he's a Marxist. You hear all this like negative Stu stuff. Because the people who are monarchists really are anti anything else than the monarchy. So there's a lot of friction there on the outside of Iran, when you're thinking about why aren't these groups working together to overthrow the current regime? If it's so bad and they all hate it, it's because they don't all agree with each other on what should happen in the country and what's the right government, which makes sense. That's what democracy actually is. People all disagreeing about stuff, but somehow they all vote and get through it. Sometimes better or worse. But yeah, so that's what happened in 1953 and kind of like a broad brushstroke.
- [19:03]
Host
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- [19:42]
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- [21:13]
Host
Yeah, and then you saw, I mean, during that time, obviously people were getting fed up with the shock and, you know, that's when the first. I don't know how you pronounce Khomeini came up.
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John Hackett
Khomeini.
- [21:24]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:25]
John Hackett
And he was exiled in Iraq. He was exiled to Najaf. He was in Najaf. He was making all these little tapes and sending them around with basically his message against the regime or that regime, the kingdom. And then from Iraq, he went to France. Because at the time, France was very socialist. I mean, I don't know what they are now, but at the time they were very socialist. And there was a lot of this. You know, the war in Algeria had just ended. They got out of Vietnam. So there's a lot of this, like, anti colonialism going on, anti monarchy going on in France with the population. So they were very supportive of bringing Khomeini into France and giving him basically state protection and giving him a platform to send his message instead of through tapes with couriers. Now he was able to be in the newspaper and on recordings and like, really made into this legitimate figure of opposition. He made a ton of promises. He said, like, oh, women will be free under my control and I'll only rule for a short time and then there'll be an election. You know, women will have not any requirements about what they wear. Islam will be an option. Like all this stuff which actually is still in their constitution now. Like, women actually have full rights in their constitution, but as you can see, that is not actually what's going on. So people believed him to the degree necessary. And actually there were a lot of people from the Mosaddegh camp, like the elected officials who were kind of now just afloat and not really part of the government anymore. They came to see him and visit him and he was saying, like, hey, I'll let you guys actually come on board. If we have a revolution, there's a place for you. Right? And that's actually how it worked out in the very beginning. Sadder Bonnie Sadder, who was from the old government, was actually able to be president of the country for a short period of time until there were, you know, massive assassination attempts across everybody in the government. But it wasn't just Khamenei who was resisting the Shah. You also had the Mujahedini Khalq, which was a Marxist organization. You had the Fedayini Khalq, which was an even more Marxist organization. You had some people following Ali Shariati, who was a very smart intellectual that was also quasi Marxist, talking about how the Shah should be removed and there should be this kind of egalitarian Islam in the country. You had Kurdish groups as well. There were Komala, which means Hope Komala was one of these parties, Congrega, which was in Turkey, and some other groups as well that now have formed into groups we recognize today, like Pjak. And those groups, those came from that pre revolutionary period to resist the monarchy. And as I've said in shows previously, you know, it's not that they don't like this government. They don't like any of the governments that have been there. They want their own ruling situation. And if you've been to Syria, you know that there's some Kurds in Syria who want like no government at all. They want this anarchic egalitarian system and they've been able to actually live it to a degree for some years. But it's kind of a challenge for it to belong to the rest of the region. Yeah, so you've got all these groups there with a unified goal and that goal is getting rid of the current government. But the unification ends there because once the government's gone, they are no longer friends. And when the revolution happened, you saw that right away with the Mujahideeni Khalq, which is still currently the largest opposition to the current government that exists. Their headquarters is in Tirana and Albania now. But during the revolution, they were immediately ostracized because the Ayatollah recognized that these guys are powerful, they have guns and they don't like us. They didn't like the Shah either, but they don't like us. So we're going to get rid of them as much as we can. They executed like 3,000 of them across a couple of days through hanging. So this like mass lynching going on. And so a lot of them went to Iraq where Saddam Hussein protected them. Because remember, the Iran Iraq War started as soon as the revolution happened. Revolution happened. So these guys went over there and Saddam protected them because they knew Iran, they could infiltrate Iran and they could help Saddam basically doing quasi advanced force operations inside of Iran.
- [25:10]
Co-host/Interviewer
Is this the origins of mek?
- [25:12]
John Hackett
This is the MEK Mujahideen I Khalq, which means the people's Mujahideen or the people's fighters. Essentially. There's another group called Tudeh, which means the workers. Tudeh was an actual Communist party, like a legit Communist party that was like directly connected to Russia, that was immediately outlawed. They were all executed. But the Mujahedeen actually knew how to fight. And so they were a much more difficult problem for the new government after the revolution. Well, Saddam, you know, and the government of Iran came to an agreement that in 1988 that the war is over. Saddam basically kicked the Mujahideen Khalq out of Iraq. There was nowhere for them to go, but the US saw them as a partner because remember, the US was backing Iran and Iraq at the same time in that war. And so the US said these are useful people. Let's, let's do this. They actually ended up in Albania and they are there now at a place called Camp Ashraf Number three. And Ashraf is actually the name of the woman that was married to the original founder of the Mujini Khalk. And he was in love with her and all this, but he actually married somebody else. And she's the one. Rajawi. Miriam Rajawi is now leading the Mujahideen. It's a very crazy, interesting cult like situation, but I'll just leave a pin in that. But they're in Albania basically leading the resistance from one angle against the regime. Now monarchists hate them like they are arch enemies of the monarchists because they also were fighting the Shah. So it's not like they joined the revolution and yet everything's different. Like they still hate the Shah and they hate the current government in Iran. So you have this like armed, trained organization that hates both resistance and the current government that's allowed to operate. And you know, now today their best friend and trainer is Israel because Israel saw this as an opportunity to balance against Iran in the region starting in the 1990s, the early 90s, especially after the Oslo Accords made Jordan part of the alliance supporting Israel. So when that happened, Israel started supporting surrogate forces that were Mujahideen I Khalq and forces in Azerbaijan because the Aziris have ethnic Azeris in Iran as well. Remember I mentioned there's that separatist group that had an independent Azerbaijan for two years inside of Iran. Well, there's the country of Azerbaijan across the border. They're the same ethnic group. So Israel recognized like, hey, we can actually have a pretty porous border situation if we work with the Azeris and Azerbaijan and send them into Iran to do things for us. If you remember Farouk Zadeh, the nuclear scientist that was assassinated with a machine like a robot situation, that was Mujini, Nihalq and Aziri entities working together to do that. There wasn't like an Israeli operative on the ground with a button that was recruited assets that worked from these ethnic groups and these resistance groups to do this. And Israel has used this to great effect. I mean, a lot of the penetration of the Iranian government is through these Azeri and mujahideen people that are in Iran, that live in Iran, whether that's from the western side of the country crossing over from Kurdistan or from Azerbaijan coming south.
- [28:03]
Host
Yeah, no, I'm glad you talked about the MEK a little bit because they do seem like a little bit of a paramilitary force for Israel.
- [28:10]
Co-host/Interviewer
Well, one that's been active in Iran in the past. I'm not sure where they are today. Jundala.
- [28:16]
Bluff
Yeah.
- [28:16]
John Hackett
So Joondala is in Balochistan in southeast. They have had their own separatist situation against the regime. And actually Qasem Soleimani, the former Quds Force commander, when he was a field grade officer, when he was like a major, his first combat experience was in Baluchistan fighting Joondala. And that's where he actually led units for the very first time in combat. So he actually ran them out of southeast Iran into Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghanistan, because there's a tri border area there that's known as Balochistan. In all three of the countries they, the Joondala people wanted to basically have a separate Balochistan country that would consist of parts of Iran, parts of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. They were in some ways supported by Pakistan against Iran. But as has happened with Pakistan numerous times, Pakistan has supported, you know, insurgents in another country that end up coming into Pakistan and causing problems in Pakistan because they're somehow don't have the foresight to think about that. But Joondala has actually changed its name into a couple of different groups now. And so Pakistan, that way they can say that they've defeated Joondala. It is not defeated. It continues till today. And it's actually a huge problem because there's a Chinese owned mine in western Pakistan that's inside of Balochistan that's been like significantly under attack by what is what used to be Jondala, but now different forces. And this is part of China's Belt and Road Initiative in Pakistan. So you've got this mine in Balochistan and you have a port called Gwadar which is also in the Pakistani coast, which is completely owned by China. And it's owned by China, run by China. It's basically China's access to that waterway over land if they want to. And that all occurred while the US was deployed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. Meanwhile, China was in Islamabad negotiating with the Pakistanis basically to set this thing up and also gain access to all the tritium, which is a special rare earth mineral that we need. They paid something like $6 billion for all tritium in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it's worth several trillion dollars in. So that was a pretty good bargain for them. And actually, yeah, and actually the government of Afghanistan was great with that because they signed the document and then when the Taliban came, the Taliban took that document from the government of Afghanistan also honored it. So China and the Taliban also, you know, still are in agreement about the tritium. And of course they are with Pakistan too. So that kind of goes to the Jandala issue, because Jandala is looking at that. They're like, hey, we have sovereign, you know, ethnic ownership of this area. You've got China, Pakistan, Iran, like, threatening our ethnic homeland that we have been in for thousands of years. You know, a lot of them are either nomadic or semi nomadic in the past. They're a little bit more settled now. But they're responsible for a lot of the drugs going into and out of Iran because they're getting a lot of opium from Afghanistan. There's no border. I mean, if you've been to that area, there's literally no. You have no idea which country you're standing in at that moment. And that's happened to me several times. It's just like open desert and rock and mountain. And you're like, oh, did we land in Pakistan or is this Iran or Afghanistan? And they're able. They have like, complete control over it. They move drugs, all like huge amounts of drugs. And the other problem for Iran's government is that a lot of the IRGC border control guys are like, in, in bed with these guys as far as drug movement because they're making a lot of money off of it. So there's a lot of, like, interest from Tehran over that southeast border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, like, monitoring, counterintelligence monitoring of the IRGC officers that are down there, because they're so concerned about the drugs moving into Iran, which is a big problem in Iran.
- [31:42]
Co-host/Interviewer
So, I mean, when I listen to you talk about this subject, what it sounds like is that there are all of these different factions in Iran who dislike each other and have their own grievances and have their own ideas about how the country should be run. Are we in a situation where these factions have kind of been tampered down by oppressive authoritarian regimes for, you know, 50 plus years? And if we Americans were to go in and remove that regime, it would plunge Iran into civil war just like the Syrians went through a civil war.
- [32:12]
John Hackett
I like to use the example of Yugoslavia, actually, because I feel like there's a lot of similarity there where under a particular structure, very specific type of government, the people were able to be managed to a degree. You remove that person, Tito, and then you've got Bosnia, you've got Kosovo, you've got the Albanian conflict, which wasn't part of Yugoslavia, but still was on the cusp of it, you know, Croatia. And before that, though, the reason Tito was able to actually make a country was because of British OSS SOE support. So the US OSS and the British SOE sent in very small teams to set up drop zones inside of the Balkans. And it was a pretty incredible operation that I, if you're a student of special operations, I think, like, you need to master that case study because it was probably one of the best ones we've had in the past, I don't know, 80 years that was very successful of very minimal Western contact, like, you know, US and British contact with the partner force. The partner force, like owned that conflict and they, they execute it really well. They actually killed more Germans than the conventional forces did in that area. And they were like a huge problem for the Germans in the conflict. And Tito was able to actually, as a partisan leader, bring all those different ethnic groups together. So the question is, can that happen today? Is there, is there a Tito like figure in Iran today? And the answer is no, there isn't.
- [33:34]
Co-host/Interviewer
John, I'm going to let you go or I'm going to let you carry on. I just want to mention to people out there, there's someone we interviewed on the show a while back, Jacek Wallowski, Polish last name there. He uncovered a lot of unpublished information from the OSS years in museums and archives and he wrote this book, he's written a series, but the one I read is codename Spike and it is all about exactly this OSS operation into Albania back in the day.
- [34:10]
John Hackett
Yeah, it's a fascinating case study and especially because we didn't really have a special operations unit before that. You know, I mean, Special Ops really came out of World War II the way it is structured today. And that was During World War II, we were basically building the aircraft in flight in that theater and succeeded where we didn't succeed a lot in a lot of other places. You know, it was kind of tough. So the question. I even was speaking to an Iranian this morning, and he was asking, like, what could we do in Iran to actually fix this problem? Like, he was asking me that, and I said, you need guns. And he was concerned because, like, okay, he said, what happens if we get guns? We take over the government. What happens the day after? That's a really important question because maybe the Kurds have the guns, the Baluchis have the guns, the Aziris have the guns, which we've all just discussed. But those guys do not agree on everything. They have some. Some shared interests, but they also have their own interests in mind, and they've never really wanted to be ruled by anyone else except themselves.
- [35:07]
Host
Are they all Muslim?
- [35:09]
John Hackett
Some are Zoroastrian, some are Shia, some are Sunni, some are Turkic speaking, some are Persian speaking primarily. Some are Bakhtiari, some are Lur. There are some ethnic groups there that have existed far even before Persia was Persia before there were Persians there. Like in Elam Province, there are, you know, like the Elamites in the Bible. That's Elam Province, Iran. You know, like the code of Hammurabi was discovered in Shusha, which was the capital of Iran at the time. You know, like, you're talking about, like, very old ethnic groups. Like, it's true that culture is not genetic, but it is passed down, you know, from person to person, generation to generation. And the people that have that culture look back to those things. Whether that's right or wrong. They. That is who they are now. That's their identity. And especially up in the mountains, like where that pilot went down. Part of the reason that pilot was rescued was because the population there was so against the government that they. They created ways to slow down the process of the government getting around traffic jams and things. Yeah, exactly. And these people are like, fiercely independent. So, I mean, if you give them guns, they're probably going to just defend the place that they are at. Right? Because especially, I mean, the two times they had a democratic system, it was destroyed. They're probably like, well, if we do it a third time, probably get destroyed again. What we should do instead is consolidate power in our local area and rule ourselves, which then again leads to that Balkanization problem. Like after Tito, that is what happened where you had ethnic groups basically roving around and eliminating anyone else that wasn't their ethnic group. And like controlling the territory that they're in.
- [36:35]
Host
All right, let's get back to the revolution. I guess, like the Islamists were the people that like came out on top of everything, essentially. Right. Because it's like you said, most of these groups probably won't march on Tehran. They'll just take control of their spheres, like where they're from, their local areas, and run it how they want to run it.
- [36:58]
Co-host/Interviewer
And could we talk a little bit about sort of like the emergence of the fanaticism, Shia fanaticism that culminated in the 1979 revolution. You hear these stories about, you know, the Iranian students getting all glassy eyed, talking about, about the sh. About Khomeini, what, what was that movement and why did it happen?
- [37:20]
John Hackett
So you remember I was talking about how this, like the fascism issue in Europe was influencing the leaders, the Shah. So the Shah's son was also doing this Westernization push, like dramatic push, where he was basically subverting the clergy, telling women that you're not only is it optional to wear the hijab, you're not allowed to wear it. So there were some people that were already religious and now they're being forced to walk out in public, essentially naked.
- [37:42]
Bluff
Right.
- [37:42]
John Hackett
As far as they're concerned. And because the King says so, which caused a lot of discontent within the population. So he was, over the, you know, 20 years or so, since the time he came in office in 1953, he was really pushing this clerical class in, away from the country, like away from him in a way that made them upset. And they're thinking about, like, how do we get people to resist this? Well, we can tell them how terrible the Shah is. And the Shah is going to, you know, make your women be exposed to the public and like, take away your beliefs and destroy Islam and et cetera. Because they were bringing in Western clothing, they were banning the traditional clothing that people used to wear. So there's a lot of this, like, disruptive stuff that was very visible in society that a lot of different people didn't like. So there were some religious people, it was some secular people, but a lot of them just didn't like how the Shah was disrupting society. And people were very poor. There was a lot of labor issues going on. And then amidst all of that, the shah has this 2000 year anniversary of or 2500 year anniversary of the founding of the empire and brings in all these foreign diplomats, spends millions of dollars on champagne and caviar. No Iranians, except the government people are allowed to come to it. It's widely televised. They all see this. They're all very upset. In order to counter this, there's a lot of protests against this. And in order to counter this, he has this thing called the White Revolution, which came right after it, where he basically tried to go out into the villages and towns and like, turn people back toward the government. Is this when theater got set on fire? That was later. That was during the revolution. And nobody is for sure who did that. It was very most likely the Mujereni Khalq, but we don't know who did that and probably never will because there are a lot of attacks at that time that just were not attributed, and we'll just never know who did it. And actually, the most recent ayatollah that was just killed in February, he had a damage to his arm from one of those attacks. He was almost assassinated in the early 80s by. We don't know who. We think it's Mujahideen, but we don't know. But, yeah, there was a lot of this stuff going on. It's kind of like fomenting unrest. And the loudest voice at the time was Khomeini. And he was able to unify a lot of people that might not have been as religious at first, but they started to get more whipped up into it because they saw what was going on in the streets, this inequality and this unfairness to them, and they were saying, like, maybe we should follow this. This idea. And, you know, Shia Islam is a lot about martyrdom and kind of like the little guy against the big guy. I mean, that's. That's where the idea of Shia Islam separated from Sunni Islam, because the Sunnis basically killed the two most important figures in Shia Islam, which eventually became the two most important figures. And there's this kind of like, you know, a hundred of us against 10,000 of them will just all die to the last man. That's part of Shia Islam. And so there was a lot of that rhetoric getting tossed around. And the best way to access people's minds in Iran at the time, because there's no Internet, there's no cell phones, right? The best way to access people is through the Friday prayer at the pulpit, because that's when everybody is in the same room together hearing the same thing. And if you're coordinating the messages at all those Friday prayers now, across the entire country, everyone's hearing the exact same mess every Friday. And this is a lot of what pushed the religious fervor into high gear, because not only were they upset and Hearing similar stuff. They were hearing the exact same message. So if I traveled like 800 miles, you would also know in that same village, 800 miles away, what I heard in Tehran.
- [40:57]
Bluff
Right.
- [40:57]
John Hackett
So this is, like, really unifying force going on. And at the same time, you had people at universities in France, the United States and Britain and some other places that were Iranian students. They were very intellectual. You this, like this intellectual group that was ostracized from the Shah. And they were thinking about, like, how do we fix this problem? Like, Mustafa Shamron, for example, was at University Berkeley in California in the 1970s. He founded Amal in Lebanon. Amal became Hezbollah, eventually Hezbollah later on. He was the founder of that. And he actually came up with that idea with a student, an Iranian student group in 1973 in Berkeley. And you had a lot of this stuff going on in the early 1970s. A lot of them were listening to Ali Shariati, which is the guy that I mentioned earlier. He was in France. He died of mysterious heart attack in his early 30s. And he had been writing all these tracks about how to resist the Shah and why the Shah was illegitimate and why there should be an Islamic country, you know, and all this stuff. And a lot of this stuff is kind of like floating around. And Ayatollah Khomeini brought it all together. It kind of said, follow me. And a lot of people did that. They said, we will do that because there are various things that bother us. It seems like you know what you're talking about. And that's kind of how that unification happened over about an 8 to 10 year period.
- [42:09]
Host
So, John, let me ask you. That white revolution that Shaw tried to pull off, it did not. It went nowhere.
- [42:14]
John Hackett
Yeah. So it affected some areas, but some areas, it made them even more upset because basically, like, if you see some of the imagery from it or videos, you'll see, like, women dressed up in, like, really Western military clothing, like, marching around their village with guns and stuff. And people saw that, like, what? This is not Persian. This is not Iran. This is the West. And in fact, there are two people, Ali Ahmad and Ali Shariati, who I mentioned, that use this term garbzade, which means west toxification. In other words, being drunk on Westernness. And this was the thing that Ayatollah kept talking about. Like, these people are just drinking the water of the west and getting corrupted by these Western ideas. Disgusting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And actually Khomeini, the Second one, during 1988, when they were deciding to end the war, he said I'm drinking from the poison chalice to accept this peace agreement. And that was, that was a hearkening back to that idea about like, I'm drinking this Western poison, you know.
- [43:13]
Host
Right. Because I'm making a deal.
- [43:15]
John Hackett
Right, exactly. So even though it was with Saddam and not with the west, but it was because the west had supported Saddam.
- [43:24]
Host
All right, so 1980, 1979 happens, the revolution, the Shah's gone, you know, the Islamic Republic is born. The CIA in the United States basically loses all of its intelligence assets inside of the country. More or less, yeah.
- [43:41]
John Hackett
So what happened is the students. There's this. Remember I mentioned these student groups. There was one student group in Iran called the Imams Line or Students for the Imams Line. They were not connected to Khomeini at that point. They stormed the embassy actually twice. They happened earlier in the year that was stopped. They realized that they could get through. So they did it again and actually succeeded the second time, taking over the embassy. And when they got in there, they found all these documents in a bunch of filing cabinets that had intel reports and sources written on them about like, who said what. And basically the people, the Americans in there tried to shred a lot of this stuff, but the Iranians actually pieced it back together and they're like these shredded pieces of paper glued back together.
- [44:20]
Host
I'm assuming most people watch the movie Argo. There's a scene in that when they take over the embassy and they're putting together some shredded pieces of paper. That's.
- [44:28]
Ryan Seacrest
That was real.
- [44:28]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah. And that was actually why now we used like pulverized paper when instead of just shredding straight, that came from that situation. And also there are Anti Terrorism Force Protection, or ATFP that we have in the military and at embassies also came from Iran related terrorist activities in Lebanon. So both of those were kind of like new moments for us or turning points for us in the intelligence community where we're like, we can't just operate with autonomy in countries anymore. We have to come up with ways to protect sources, methods and the intelligence we collected. And that came out of that embassy situation. And when they took over the embassy, Khomeini at first didn't think it was a good idea. He thought that would actually disrupt the revolution. But then he saw the media attention they were getting and he reached out to them and said, you guys are on board with us now and actually supported them. So a lot of people in the west think that like that was a ayatollah sponsored thing, like it wasn't. It was actually organic. And then he took it over and made it look like it was his idea and it wasn't. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was at that embassy takeover, by the way, which is a very important thing to keep in mind about now when Israel is trying to make Ahmadinejad in charge of the country again. Like that dude was. Yeah, that dude was there.
- [45:34]
Host
Right?
- [45:36]
John Hackett
So, yeah, we lost control at that time because at the time our liaison partner in Iran was the savak, which was the Shah's secret intelligence service that we helped build. All those SAVAK guys were either executed, exiled, or turned and worked to train the new government's intelligence apparatus. So we completely lost control over everything going on in Iran at the time. Part that actually led to why Saddam Hussein decided to invade in 1980, because, you know, just a few months before, the country was very powerful. It was a regional actor. And now they have no intelligence service, they have a disarrayed military, their weapons just kind of like floating around like Libya for a few months. And Saddam said, like, look, I've had this issue over this waterway with the Shah for a long time. This is my chance to, to win that conflict with the Shah. The Shah is gone because the Shah was still alive. If you remember when this was going on. He didn't die yet. He was, he was almost dead, but he didn't die yet. But he. So in Saddam's mind, like this wasn't a revolution of a new government. This was just like, the Shah is absent. And so he, he invaded the country. And that invasion really galvanized the Islamist set because now it's like Sunni Islam against Shia Islam. The story of Ali and Hussein against the evil Sunnis, that's exactly how it was framed. And that's suddenly, like you mentioned, the glassy eyed talk about the Ayatollah. That's where that started immediately. Because they were like, now we have one enemy and it's Saddam Hussein, it's the Sunnis.
- [47:02]
Host
So that kind of helped, you know, essentially completely set in the Islamic Republic's power over the country. Right. You have a common enemy. You know, even if really that, that
- [47:16]
John Hackett
Saddam Hussein invasion is what made the revolution real up to that point. It was just a disarray of people, different groups against the Shah for various reasons. There was no real unification that. I've said this before. There were eight different major groups that were against the Shah, that participated in the revolution. The Islamists were not like the, the one guaranteed to make it, but once that, once they crossed Once the Iraqis crossed into Iran, like, that was. Was really that invasion that kicked off the. The cementing of what we have now as the Islamic Republic.
- [47:49]
Co-host/Interviewer
And that brought on, like, as. As I recall, there were, like, human wave attacks. They even used children. Suicide bombings became a thing.
- [47:58]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's because they were running out of conventional assets to use against Saddam. I mean, Saddam was. And if you read about the Iran Iraq war, it was the longest in the world in the 20th century. And somebody argued with me once that there was a Japanese conflict with China that was longer, but it's actually the same. But it was the longest in the world in the first two years. Iraq was winning. Iran turned the tables, started winning, and pushed the Iraqis out of Iran completely back into Iraq. And if you do, like, some military strategic analysis of this, that was the moment that Iran should have just declared victory and stopped. But they got a taste of victory and kept going. And this was the big problem, because suddenly that's when the war became a war of attrition because both sides couldn't advance anymore. Now it became like, you know, the Eastern front or the Western Front. In World War II, these guys are just stuck in trenches while the Iranians don't have a ton of equipment and training. They do, but they don't know how to use it. They don't know how to use the equipment. They have Phantom aircraft that the US Sent them. They have Hawk radar systems. They have all this stuff, but they didn't know how to use it very well because there's a revolution. And all the. All the army people left. So they said, well, what else do we have? We have guys on the ground that are willing to fight, send them. And they did. And like you said, human waves. You had kids, like, running over bodies because there were huge minefields, and the only way to clear the minefields was to send people over them to blow up, to clear them with their bodies. So you'd have kids, like kids, young kids running over the field, blowing up, and then guys behind them seeing that happening and continuing on, which is wild to us. But if you believe in what that is, you're going to do it. You know, that's. That's the way the human brain works. Like, if you believe in this thing, I mean, we do that in the military. Like in fighting Japan and the Battle of Peleliu, guys were fighting with knives because they ran out of bullets. You know, like, that's wild. And it takes a lot of something in your brain to be able to do that. And those guys believed in it at that time.
- [49:50]
Host
So there's a couple. Go ahead.
- [49:51]
Co-host/Interviewer
I was just gonna say where. Where did the. The United States fall on this conflict? Because I recall reading that we kind of backed both sides. Like, wouldn't it be a great thing if they both lost? Yes.
- [50:03]
Ryan Seacrest
What?
- [50:03]
John Hackett
The US Was looking at this from a Cold War angle and seeing that Saddam Hussein had primarily been funded by the Soviets. And actually in the 70s, Egypt suddenly gained access to a choice. Do we allow primarily US Weapons or Soviet weapons in our military infrastructure? And the US Convinced Egypt, and that's why we got Egypt to agree to recognize Israel. That had a lot to do with it. Or this, like this triangular agreement going on where. So suddenly now we got Egypt. The other problem is Libya, as far as Soviet Union is concerned, and Iraq. Iraq had the fifth largest military on the planet at the time, primarily sourced with Soviet assets. So the way the US Saw this, and if you look a little bit wider, Afghanistan on the east side, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan because the monarch in Afghanistan was kicked out and replaced with a communist leader. The Russians supported that communist leader. They invaded Afghanistan. So the war in Afghanistan is going on at the exact same time as the Iran Iraq war is going on. So the US Is seeing this from a Cold War perspective that if we can disrupt the Soviets and keep them bogged down like Ukraine now, if we can bleed them but not win, this is a victory. And this was the US Strategy in the Iran Iraq war, and also the British strategy and the French strategy was to arm both sides, but not so much that they would win. And remember, I told you the first two years Iraq was winning, and then Iran pushed them in. Part of the reason Iran continued going is because they thought that with the weapons they were getting clandestinely, they'd be able to win. And that was the plan on our side, was to make them think that even though it wasn't true. So there was this war of attrition that started that we wanted. The US Wanted Iran and Iraq to continue fighting each other to the last man. That was the whole goal. And so from 1983 to 1988, that last five years of the war, that is what happened. You had this massive war of attrition of guys just murdering each other. Whether that's civilians, soldiers, does not matter. They were shooting ballistic missiles at cities. You had one battle called the War of the Cities because they were basically setting up launch pads inside of dense urban centers on both sides of the border and just firing ballistic missiles into the Cities at each other for days.
- [52:06]
Co-host/Interviewer
Byrne was in one of those cities. You remember that story?
- [52:08]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [52:10]
Ryan Seacrest
And that was.
- [52:11]
John Hackett
The strategy was just destroy each other. And the US said, that's a great thing, we'll support that. So you had the US supporting Saddam Hussein on one side and also supporting Iran on the other side through Israel intermediaries who, quote, unquote, did not work for the government. But, you know, that's how things work in the Middle East. Everything is connected. And the US did not want Iran to win because of the Russians. They did not want the Russians to win, essentially. And this was kind of a test of, you know, who is stronger in the Middle East, Russia or the United States. And if you remember, we talked about The Suez Crisis, 1956, when France and Britain supported Israel into Egypt. Well, that was a disaster for Britain and France. That was the end of British and French influence in the Middle east, and that was the beginning of US and Russian influence in the Middle East. So from 1956 through the 80s, you see this dramatic increase in US and Russian contest in the Middle east between which partner is going to work with which power. And so that's part of what the Iran Iraq War was. Was the US exploiting that contest to keep both of these countries fighting each other until 1988. Because remember in 1988, that's when perestroika, glasnost, which was two policies in Russia about restructuring and changing the economy and becoming part of the Western world. And that led to the Wall coming down and all that, and especially the failure in Afghanistan when they had to retreat out of Afghanistan in 1989. All that was happening at the same time. So you have to look at it in that context of the US was seeing this as a piece in a larger play against the Soviets.
- [53:38]
Co-host/Interviewer
And I know this is like.
- [53:39]
Host
And that's known as a. Part of. It's known as Iran Contra.
- [53:42]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, that's what I was. That's exactly where I was going with that. That's a whole other can of worms. But I think since we're into the 1980s, we should probably touch upon that.
- [53:50]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah. So think about the Iran Contra as just a larger zooming out of the same exact contest between the Soviets and the United States. Because the Contra rebels were CIA rebels in Nicaragua that were fighting against the actual legitimate government. Although we didn't think it was legitimate in Nicaragua. Called the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were socialist, some would call them, or maybe worse than that. They were supported by the Soviets. So the US Was looking at this as an opportunity to crush a Russian interest in Central America while also crushing a Russian interest in the Middle East. And so what was going on here? You had a group of folks in the National Security Council, including Oliver north, who's a Marine, that active duty at the time, that came up with this idea. They knew Reagan wouldn't approve it, so
- [54:35]
Host
they didn't even ask Gates, too, in the CIA.
- [54:38]
John Hackett
Yep. And so what they're basically doing was they can't pay for weapons in Iran because of the laws that happened after the hostage crisis. So they said, well, how do we pay for it anyway? Well, we can use proceeds from this other clandestine activity to pay for weapons. And actually this, this whole thing went through, I said earlier, Israel, but there are a lot of intermediaries involved, including folks in Lebanon and Hezbollah. And actually it was a Hezbollah guy that made this public, that published it in a newspaper, because he was in a set about. Yeah, yes, exactly. Because they were upset about the, the diversion of assets that they thought they should have because we were pushing all these weapons through Lebanon. They were fighting a war in Lebanon against the Syrians and the Israelis. And they're like, hey, we need weapons too. And the US Was like, no, we have something more important in Iran going on right now. And he said, okay, then we're going to publish it. And they did. And that's actually how the Iran Contra affair became public.
- [55:28]
Co-host/Interviewer
I mean, and then you had the plane go down in Nicaragua, which was kind of like, by now it's, now it's splashed on United States newspapers because just for folks out there was a CIA aircraft and one of their paramilitary guys parachuted down and was captured.
- [55:45]
John Hackett
Yep. And we also had Operation Eagle Claw around the same time, 1980, at Desert One, when I believe was 18Americans were killed in the desert trying to rescue the American hostages. So there's a lot of US Activity going on over there, trying to kind of take control of the situation. And we never quite got our hands around it. And that's the reason we have JSOC today is because of Operation Eagle Claw, where we realized, like, hey, we don't work together very well in something like this. Very specialized problem. We need to have a unified command that can do this kind of national level activity.
- [56:16]
Host
All right, let's talk a little bit about the proxies you mentioned a little bit about Hezbollah and stuff like that. Hezbollah obviously came up, started in 1982. Right. During the war, you know, and Hezbollah being, you know, Iran's chief proxy Essentially close.
- [56:31]
John Hackett
A lot more nuanced than a lot of people understand. I mentioned Mustafa Shamron founding Amal in Lebanon in 1975. Well, Berkeley.
- [56:40]
Host
Like going to school in Berkeley, banging coeds in. In California.
- [56:43]
John Hackett
Oh, for sure.
- [56:44]
Host
You know what, I got a sick idea, dude. Let's start Hezbollah.
- [56:48]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah. Let's get some guns. Yeah. He went to Lebanon. And there's actually a lot of connected history between Lebanon and Iran, like culturally, because the Persian empire used to rule over Lebanon. So there's a lot of connection there. Right. Especially in Jabal Ali and Abu Musa, which is a mountain in the south of Lebanon. There's a lot of Shia clerics that are Iranian that have lived for centuries in south Lebanon. So there's already like this deep, deep connection going on there. And you remember Israel had been harassing Lebanese territory since 1978. Really? 1975 was the first incursion. We also had Operation blue bat in 1958 when President. I think it was Johnson, Kimber, which president. But we, the United States actually invaded Lebanon in 1958. We sent a bunch of Marines in there to stabilize the Christian leadership against.
- [57:36]
Host
Was that Eisenhower?
- [57:38]
John Hackett
I guess it was Eisenhower, yeah.
- [57:40]
Host
Before Kennedy.
- [57:41]
John Hackett
Yep. Yes, that was Operation Blue Bat. Very interesting thing. We don't really talk about. So there'd been a lot of Israeli and US interest. Remember I said after 1956, Britain and France pulled back and the US came in. That was the US coming in 1958.
- [57:53]
Host
Operation Britain and France leave in the 50s. The US and the Soviet Union, Russia are like trying to fill the vacuum essentially.
- [58:01]
John Hackett
Yep, yep. And remember, the Russians are supporting Syria. The Assad family, which just had a couple, took over the country in that period of time. So the Soviets are backing Syria, the US is backing Israel. It's only a matter of time before there is a conflict or, you know, a clash. We had already co opted Jordan. There's something called no Beef, which was the name of the covert operation to recruit the King to become a U.S. asset. That's why the king's son is a U.S. citizen. Has a whole other story. But that was happening at the same time. So the US had already bought Jordan. We were working on Israel, Soviets are working on Syria. And there's these Lebanese people who are like, stay out of my country to everybody. Israel kept coming in 1975, 1978. The PLO was there. Israel invaded in 1982 to come after the PLO. The PLO were gone within three months. September is when they left to Tripoli or to Tunis. They were Gone. And Algeria as well. And Israel stayed.
- [58:59]
Host
Mission accomplished. PLO's out.
- [59:01]
John Hackett
They stayed. So they actually went up to the Latani river, which sounds familiar. And then Ariel Sharon said, well, if we've gone this far, we should keep going. And the Israeli government said, no, you shouldn't. And he said, well, who's in Lebanon? Me, not you. And they actually kept going up to Beirut, and that's how they got into Beirut. So you can imagine some people, they were pretty upset that this was going on, and they saw this as, you know, an existential threat to their existence and other things as well. And there were a lot of different groups that resisted the Israeli occupation, which, by the way, lasted till the year 2000, 18 years. So in those early years, one group broke off from Amal because Amal was not as violent as some of the people wanted them to be. Amal was the main resistance force down there, led by Nabi Berry, who is actually still the speaker of parliament in Lebanon today. This group called Islamic Amal broke off. That contributed to what became Hezbollah. You had another group called Islamic Jihad, which was led by Imad Mugnia, who the US And Israel killed in Syria a few years ago. These different groups were all separate. They were not one group, but they had one common enemy, which, again, familiar refrain. They had a common enemy. They banded together. This guy named Mousawi led them. Mousawi was assassinated by Israel in 1991, by the way. And that's why Hassan Nasrallah took over Hezbollah. So Mousawi was leading Hezbollah, his little organization, which wasn't called Hezbollah yet. They didn't really have a name. The Syrians came in and they said, hey, we noticed that you guys are fighting Israel. We're fighting Israel too. Because, remember, the Syrians also invaded Lebanon. The Syrians said, we will back you. And then the multinational force came in there to try to stabilize the country. 1982 multinational force was the U.S. france. You had some Italians there, and it was the French embassy that was actually hit first, the French barracks. They also tried to blow up the Italian barracks, but no Italians were actually sleeping in the barracks. They were sleeping outside, so there was no damage there. And they struck the U.S. the CIA compound, and the U.S. embassy. This was all in opposition to the multinational force that came in there to support Israel inside of Lebanon. So Israel asked for our help to come in and support their invasion of Lebanon. This is why a lot of Shia and Lebanon are opposed to the US In Lebanon, because they see it as the US Came in there and helped Israel occupy their land. Right. And the Malta National Force did leave after the U.S. embassy bombing, 1983, October. The U.S. was there for about a year, but in that period of time, they felt the US was on Israel's side. So they said, well, we have one common enemy, Israel and the United States. The US is supporting Israel in our country and like taking away our land and hurting our people and murdering people and like. And it's true, it was happening. And so, I mean, it was war. Plus the Syrians were like telling them, like, yeah, those are your enemies and here's some weapons to fight them, by the way. So. And Iran was also coming in there and saying the same thing because these are Shia people. Like, hey, we're Shia, you're Shia. We had just had a revolution. We got this war against Saddam over here. Those guys in Syria, some of them are Sunni Saddam, Sunni. Those guys are Jews. We don't like them either. Here, let's support you. There was more nuance.
- [62:02]
Host
Christians too. Fuck them.
- [62:03]
John Hackett
Yeah, well, and the Americans were only supporting the Christian Lebanese government, not the Sunni or the Shia parts of the government. So again, it's like this, this alien country in here, like running around with guns and blowing stuff up and like causing problems everywhere. In Israel too, doing the same thing. You had the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where over a thousand civilians were murdered in two days by the Israeli controlled Katab party, which is a political party in Lebanon now. But it was called the Phalanges back then that Ariel Sharon watched himself. He was there, watched it, witnessed it, allows it to happen. That was just one massacre. There were many massacres in Lebanon all the way through the 18 years. You know, there were two torture prisons in south Lebanon. Like, so I'm just mentioning all this as like context of like, why do they, like people ask, like, why do they hate us?
- [62:47]
Host
Yeah. Why does Hezbollah up one day and we're like, you know what, The Jews, those Americans too, you know what I mean? Like, let's kill them all.
- [62:55]
Co-host/Interviewer
They hate us because we're free.
- [62:57]
Host
Yeah, right.
- [62:57]
John Hackett
Yeah, yeah. It's really because we were there, like shooting people in front of them. You know, that's, that's where that came from. And of course, you know, times have changed, things are different, the world is different. But, but memories are there, you know, like if you go to Lebanon, like, I've been there several times and there are still bullet holes from us. There are still bombed out areas that the Israelis bombed out. Not just the recent ones, but the ones from the beginning. You know, so if you're people in
- [63:21]
Co-host/Interviewer
that part of the world, they talk about Sykes Pico like it happened last month.
- [63:25]
John Hackett
Absolutely. I was in Iraq in 2016 in Kurdistan, and I was trying to go to a source meeting and I got interrupted because there was this giant parade coming down the street of guys crying, younger than me, carrying signs that said like, down with the British. Fuck Sykes Picoul. Like on the, on the 100 year anniversary of Sykes Picoul.
- [63:43]
Drew McIntyre
Insane.
- [63:44]
John Hackett
And most Americans don't even know what that is.
- [63:46]
Host
Right. And it's got it, honestly, frankly, like as an American, right, we were, you know, America was born through a revolution and established freedom, as shitty as it might have become already. Like, the fact is we're a democracy. You, I, you can't help but kind of feel for those people, right, because they want to be able to self determine their country, have self determination, have some self respect and stuff like that. Not have other outward countries, you know, using them as a pawn. Whether it's a pawn between capitalism, communism during the Cold War or something else. Right. Like they want to be able to make their own decisions about their country.
- [64:25]
John Hackett
Frankly, even in America, like when we were our revolution, we only won that because the French came to fight the British. You know, that was a great power competition. We were the surrogate force. We happened to have a great success later on, but we wouldn't have had the successes we had without, you know, Lafayette and all these guys like coming across and helping us out with, helping George Washington. He was like the sir, he was the partner force leader. You know, they're training us and we were the surrogates and you know, they were advising and assisting us and accompanying us in combat. And that's still to this day, very similar happening in the Middle East.
- [64:58]
Host
Or the British.
- [65:00]
John Hackett
Yeah, people should really read the Declaration of Independence, like the list of things, the litany of problems they had with the king. And think about like, people have these problems with governments today. You can't just be like, well, you guys should just accept our freedom. It's like, well, I mean, they might have actual legitimate grievances going on here in addition to some stuff that might also not be legitimate. But think about like Afghanistan, when Hamid Karzai came in there and we were like, hey guys, here is your new constitution. Take it. We didn't do that for our own constitution. You know what I mean?
- [65:29]
Host
Yeah. All right, so where we like we're in the 80s now, Hezbollah, Syria, that, that, you know, powder keg. When do we start hearing about Iranian nuclear weapons.
- [65:46]
John Hackett
So you had a guy named A Q. Khan, he was Pakistani. He had these centrifuges that he was selling to people. And this is important to put in the context of Israel's nuclear weapon program, which was older. Israel got its first nuclear weapons exposure testing exposure in Algeria from the French in the 1950s. And there were some Israeli scientists that were there that were invited there to witness these nuclear tests. There were some other Israeli scientists in the United States that actually took some uranium from the United States to Israel and use that as, like, the seed for the Dimona reactor in Israel and the weapons program as well. There was also the Vila weapons test in 1978, which was a highly classified detection the US had of a nuclear test in the Pacific Ocean, south of Africa. This was and is considered to be a South African joint Israeli nuclear weapons test with the apartheid government of South Africa testing out nuclear weapons. If you remember, South Africa gave up its nuclear program after apartheid ended. All their stuff left South Africa. Nobody asks where it went. It went to Israel. So that's important to know because you have this other country, Iran, that's looking at Israel like they have a nuclear weapon. They have probably 100 of them. They have a reactor. They have not signed the Biological Weapons Treaty. They have not signed the Chemical Weapons Treaty. They haven't signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. They haven't signed the NPT Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Like, this is a country that clearly has weapons and intends to use them. By not, I mean, it's indicated by their insistence on not acknowledging them and also not signing these agreements. That's, like, rationally what they're thinking. They're like, we need something like that. So in the 90s, they start doing that. They start researching, like, can we do this? Well, Ayatollah Khamenei says, like, you can do nuclear research, but you can't make weapons. And he actually issued a fatwa that said, no weapons, but research is okay. And this was kind of the genesis of that. It was exposed in 2003 by the Mujahideeni Khalq. The Mujahideeni Khalq are not intelligence collectors. They're intelligence assets. It was Mossad that collected this intelligence and then had the Mujini Khalq announce that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. And actually in the early 2000s, like 2002, 2003, Mer Dagan was the Mossad director. He was told by Netanyahu, we're no longer interested in the PLO and Palestinian issues. We're now focusing on Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. And they shifted their priorities against Iran. Part of that nuclear weapons announcement, or part of that shift was the nuclear weapons announcement that the Mujahideen made. Up till 2003, the Mujahideeni Khalq was a terrorist organization in the United States. Like, we. We had them labeled as a terrorist organization. Miraculously, that same month that that announcement was made, we. We took the designation off. That's crazy or coincidental, but it happened. Suddenly they started being on our side and we started giving them diplomatic protection and things like this. And now suddenly, after 2003, you start to see a lot of this stuff released to the public.
- [68:41]
Host
Yeah. So why did it happen in 2003, I wonder?
- [68:45]
John Hackett
So there was this discussion in the 1990s, 1996, I believe it was, when Netanyahu first came to power, the very first time. They wanted this idea of removing extreme governments from Israel's periphery. So they got Egypt 1978-79 with Sadat to agree to stop doing that. They got Jordan in 1993. Then they said, well, these other countries are just never going to sign a peace treaty. So what we need to do is regime change for the really serious ones. Those serious ones are Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This was part of the push that Israel had with the United States, like, we need to change the regime in Iran, change the regime in Syria, and change it in Iraq. And they actually struck the nuclear reactor in Syria. They struck the nuclear facility in Iraq. They didn't get into Iran because they couldn't reach that far at the time.
- [69:33]
Bluff
Right.
- [69:34]
John Hackett
So who could do it?
- [69:35]
Co-host/Interviewer
Oh, U.
- [69:35]
John Hackett
S could do it. So there was this push since the early 2000s to convince the United States that Iran was part of this problem. And if you remember the famous George Bush State of the Union, the axis of evil, that caught the Iranians off guard. They were like, wait a minute, we had just given you guys intelligence about what was going on with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And they did. They had given us, like, actual raw intelligence from their collection in Afghanistan. They were. They're trying to work with us. The Syrians also had given US intelligence after 9, 11, saying, like, hey, there's al Qaeda guys here and here and here, and you can do what you want with them. That shocked those guys. But it was part of this push to alienate those countries. And as I said, Israel couldn't do it itself.
- [70:14]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, there's. I wish I could remember exactly where it was published, but it was in a memoir they wrote about a meeting that happened during George W. Bush's presidency, where the discussion about invading and doing a regime change in Syria came up, and Dick Cheney was the only one in support. This was post 2003. They had gotten burned by the war in Iraq, obviously, and Cheney was all about it, but everyone else in the room and the National Security Council was like, nah.
- [70:43]
Host
Oh, sorry. Yeah. Very Cheney thing to do. Just so be down to go into it.
- [70:49]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [70:50]
Host
And wasn't there also an intelligence assessment in 2007 that basically said. Had a US intelligence assessment that said that the Iranians were not building a nuclear weapon?
- [71:01]
John Hackett
That's correct. And if you've seen, you know that you could probably make a montage of all the clips of Netanyahu in the UN holding up a piece of paper with a bomb saying, like, tomorrow.
- [71:09]
Host
Yeah, two weeks away.
- [71:10]
John Hackett
Exactly. And he's been saying that since that 2003 announcement. I bet you if you asked him now, he'd still say it, even though we've completely obliterated all their nuclear materials. But that's part of what they want to do, is to change the regime, to have control over that regional actor in a way that they can. They can manage. That's the end state.
- [71:28]
Co-host/Interviewer
And throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there were all these, like, American joint, American Israeli programs, like developing new bunker buster bombs and things like this that was all specifically targeted for Iran. And there were all kinds of plans drawn up that you would have, you know, American submarines and Israelis would come in and do this and that. Basically, regime change plans for Iran. And my understanding is that Obama had the opportunity, the plan was put in front of him, and he said no. And, you know.
- [72:02]
Bretzky
Yeah.
- [72:02]
John Hackett
And actually, the Obama situation, Obama had his. His idea about Iran was to use the diplomatic instrument of national power as the number one instrument. And that's how we got to Stuxnet. Because it was a dual track, covert
- [72:14]
Co-host/Interviewer
effort and supporting a diplomatic effort.
- [72:16]
John Hackett
Yeah, absolutely. Yep. So they're putting pressure on the program while also trying to negotiate the program. That was the way that was working, and it worked.
- [72:22]
Host
Israel's way of doing that, just murdering nuclear scientists.
- [72:25]
John Hackett
And that came later, 2012. They killed six of them in one year. Yeah.
- [72:31]
Host
So Stuxnet, like, as the layman, obviously, I've heard of it. I've read about it slightly. My understanding is that stuxnet was developed by the United States. We shared it with Israel, and then Israel deployed it without our. No, without our. Okay.
- [72:45]
John Hackett
So that's not exactly accurate. So it was actually called Operation Olympic Games. The reason it was called Olympic Games is because there's five rings in the Olympics logo. Each of those rings was one of the five countries participating in Stuxnet. Israel and the United States were two of those five countries. There were also three European countries participating as well. And the reason all of these countries were participating is because they all had some stake in. They had a problem with this nuclear program in some way. For example, Germany was one of the five. And the reason Germany participated is because Iran was using the Siemens produced centrifuges and they didn't like that. The Germans also provided a ton of intelligence on the Siemens centrifuges to help the US build the zero day attack against the Siemens centrifuges. That's how we knew how to actually exploit them the way that we did, which is very creative. It's because we were given the schematics by Germany as a participant in this program.
- [73:39]
Co-host/Interviewer
Siemens has a pretty long history backstory with the CIA, I believe.
- [73:43]
John Hackett
Yeah.
- [73:43]
Host
The Germans, that's another episode, probably.
- [73:46]
John Hackett
Yeah, it is, yeah. Because actually in the 90s, the Germans were training the Iranian intelligence on how to do intel ops against the West. So that's a whole other thing. But they had kind of cleaned up their act by the early 2000s and they were actually helping us at that point. But yeah, it was the bnd. The BND is also the one that owned operations. The curveball asset in the 1990s that gave us false information about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So that's another Germany contribution.
- [74:11]
Host
Home run.
- [74:11]
Co-host/Interviewer
Yeah, thanks.
- [74:13]
John Hackett
No, it's a curveball, not a home run.
- [74:15]
Spinquest Announcer
Yeah,
- [74:17]
John Hackett
but yeah, so what happened was they got these zero day exploits, which means exploits that the moment you use them, they disappear. Right. They lose their efficacy because they're so bad. They attack a vulnerability in such a way that you can only use it once. It's like a one shot thing. The US came up with a couple of them that were within the chain of reactor elements there. So it wasn't just the centrifuges, it was other stuff in there as well in Natanz. And what they were able to do was actually slow down the centrifuges on demand using this kind of program sequence on these things called programmable logic controllers or PLCs. And it would basically speed them up and slow them down and degrade the process of enrichment, but not destroy it and also not let it happen perfectly. It was like the perfect gray area in between where it was just enough to degrade the activity. It was pretty brilliant. And it was done with these zero day exploits, the real win there is not the zero days, because there are zero days everywhere. It was that they were able to jump an air gap, which means the reactor system was separate on it. It was not on a network that was attached to anything. They were able to actually jump the air gap between a computer attached to the world and a computer not attached to anything. This was the pure stroke of genius in stuxnet.
- [75:36]
Co-host/Interviewer
Is there any idea how they did that? Did they have somebody put a USB stick into it? How did that come about?
- [75:42]
John Hackett
That's exactly what happened. So there's actually a control laptop in there in the reactor sub bay, where it's this computer that's hooked up because programmable logic controllers use machine language to work. And that laptop has to kind of work with the machine language, you know, without getting too technical. It's basically like a way for the human to interface with the machine language. And that gentleman did go in there with a USB thumb drive. That gentleman was unwitting to what he was doing, put the thumb drive in there and was able to deliver the exploit package to the reactor system.
- [76:16]
Host
This was all, don't take, don't leave your laptops, your usbs around. Hot ladies, guys, just remember that.
- [76:23]
John Hackett
Yeah, actually we had a problem. I was at NSA at this time, and we had a problem because we had USBs also in our computers back then. And as soon as the exploit was getting developed, all of us in the whole NSA enterprise had to switch out our laptops and change everything. And all the USB imports were disabled because there was a counterintelligence concern that once we use this zero day, it will be understood and it will immediately we'll all be exploited.
- [76:47]
Host
I mean, there's just so much more, like so much to cover. You know, in conjunction obviously with stuxnet, you know, we. The Obama administration was trying to made it happen. It took a few years to get the JCPOA together. Let's talk a little bit about that and how it came, how it came up, how it was established.
- [77:12]
John Hackett
Yeah, so basically what you had was these five countries plus Germany. So the five countries of the National Security Council or the UN Security Council representatives and Germany, P5 plus one is what it was called. And they all had the shared interest of basically using kind of an Atoms for peace approach, which is the Eisenhower idea of how countries should have nuclear programs, like let them have it, but let us participate in it. That was the kind of concept that was there. So they're trying to like make it a new a New way to do that, where instead of obliterating their nuclear program, because if you tell people they can't have something, they tend to go, want to get it. So instead, let's actually participate in their nuclear program. And this is Russia. They're also in China. So, like, there are actors who are actually aligned with Iran that were willing to, like, come in there and help out to make sure that Iran could have a peaceful nuclear research program, but not weapons. And the best way to know that is to be really close to the program and see it and observe it and know, like, okay, they're not enriching past X percentage. And so John Kerry actually went there and met with Mohammed Zarif in Switzerland numerous times. They had hours and hours of time together talking about this and actually, like, really working this out all in secret. Like, the world knew the negotiations were happening, but we didn't know what the substance of the negotiations.
- [78:23]
Tyler Redick
Yeah.
- [78:24]
Host
Weren't screaming that stuff on, like, Twitter or anything like that.
- [78:27]
John Hackett
Yeah. So in 2015, we finally reached that agreement. The thing was, this was a nuclear agreement, not a comprehensive treaty with Iran or something. So it was missing the ballistic missile component. It was missing the. The surrogate force component. This was where a lot of the backlash came to this agreement because people said, well, this. This isn't covering Hezbollah. It's not covering ICBMs. And the thing was like, well, yeah, that's not what this is about. This is about nuclear research and nuclear weapons. Specific. It's very specific. And if you read the jcpoa, it's extremely specific. It's just the program. And it was a victory in its own. Like, it's amazing that we even got to that point because we disagreed on a lot of things as countries. I mean, five countries, Russia and China, agreed in this thing with the United States. That's. That's amazing. Not just the Iran that Iran agreed, but that those two countries agreed. Right. So we had that 2015, and Trump, when he was elected in 2016, immediately began saying that they were going to withdraw from it. And so 2017, the withdrawal threats grew louder and louder. And then 2018, we finally withdrew and also kicked Iran out of the SWIFT banking system. SWIFT is the system you use to actually have, you know, finance transfers across the world. So that means Iran was cut off from the world banking system. We ramped up sanctions, we pulled out of the nuclear agreement, and instead of Iran, like, immediately going and building a nuclear bomb, they stayed on the diplomatic track and tried to slowly, slowly get back to the plan. They said, look, we're going to do this ratcheted program where if you don't agree by this point, we're going to do this thing. If you don't agree on the next thing, we're going to do this thing. And they actually laid it out and they did that. They ratcheted up enrichment, for example, very slowly. You know, they said, okay, next, there
- [80:04]
Host
was a bunch of other countries involved in this. It wasn't just us in the, it wasn't bilateral.
- [80:09]
John Hackett
Right, right. The problem is it was an executive action on the US Side. It wasn't a treaty, which means that any president as the executive has the ability to pull out of it. There's nothing wrong with that. Like, that's how it's designed. That's supposed to be that way. So, you know, because we in the US knew, remember, if you remember, this was a Republican controlled Senate when this thing was first thought up, and Republican controlled Congress who did not agree with the JCPOA from the very beginning. So, you know, Obama knew that, like, hey, I can't make this into a treaty. I have to do an executive agreement instead. Because Congress will never approve. They have to ratify a treaty. They'll never approve it.
- [80:42]
Host
Why would they, why would they do that? Right. A treaty to stop the enrichment of uranium and to not have another country that is looked at as a belligerent country to the United States get a nuclear weapon. Why would Congress ever act in the interest of the world or the United States? It's wild to me.
- [80:58]
John Hackett
Well, they thought it just, you know, it's missing Hezbollah and the icgm and that's, that's the problem.
- [81:02]
Host
I get it. Yeah, yeah, that's a fast forward. Can we be honest?
- [81:06]
John Hackett
So we fast forward and Trump has now made Iran the most sanctioned country on the planet. This was 2018, when Pompeo was the, the sex state and all that before he was CIA director. And that was his plan was basically like, hey, instead of like negotiating with them, let's sanction them into submission. And I've said this before, sanctions are perfectly designed to hurt a capitalist economy. They are terrible on an authoritarian government because authoritarian governments already have their own access to assets. They don't care about the regular economic system enriching them. They don't care if their people are harmed and starving. And so we had over 750 sanctions on them after 2019, and it actually made them richer. And there's a graph that I have in my book that you can look at where it's like an Upward pointing arrow. As soon as we pulled out of swift, pulled them out of swift. As soon as we sanctioned them every year their, their riches of that small group of elites running the country doubled. It made them extremely wealthy because now no Iranian can participate in the banking system, even regular ones. So guess who controls the banks in the country. The IRGC now controls the entire black market. And they're taxing you and charging you. If you want an iPhone in Iran, you can have it. It's just $4,000 and all that overhead money goes to the IRGC. So it basically served to enrich the government and the people that run the government and their families and all that. They're super wealthy now because of how we exited the jcpoa.
- [82:32]
Host
And as we're exiting the jcpoa, and that's, you know, beginning to slowly fall apart. Well, at least on our end, after sanctioning them and all that, our intel network inside of Iran was compromised.
- [82:46]
John Hackett
2019.
- [82:47]
Host
Yeah.
- [82:48]
John Hackett
Yes. So we had a lot of human recruited assets inside of Iran that we were meeting with inside of Iran. Not just CIA, but also some dod, very specialized collection entities working in there. And they were using certain ways of communicating that got compromised once one of those was compromised. The regime was able to analyze that and look for patterns and how that communication happened across the Internet. And they were able to identify many, many recruited assets that also used that communication method. And the truth is we got kind of complacent with our covert communication methods and started using the same ones over and over with multiple assets, which allowed them to be compromised once that communication method was discovered. And so what the regime did was they let the meetings go on for a while and they actually captured some of the recordings of those meetings and then publicized them. Kind of what the Cubans did in the 1980s when they there was a bunch of double agents in Cuba, very similar thing. The Russians actually released video of US dead drops and stuff like that with sources inside of Cuba. So the Iranians did that. They captured a lot of these Iranians that were working with the us Executed them. So then we're left with no assets in Iran. Almost like, let's say almost none. Well, who still has assets in Iran? Israel. So now the US has to rely on Israeli gathered intelligence, like filtered through Israeli intelligence systems and released to us what they approved to be released to us. That's the intel that we now have on human intelligence in Iran. We still have signals intelligence and other mechanisms, but the HUMINT is now reduced to a third country providing it to us. Every country has their own interests. Every country, even when we share intelligence with the British or whomever, we, we have decided what we will share and how we will share it for our own interest. It's not because we love them. Right. And Israel is the same way. I'm not making it, I'm not defending them, but I'm just saying like you cannot expect them to share the raw stuff because that's just not how it happens. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So that means that we probably got some biased intelligence about the situation on the ground in Iran.
- [84:50]
Host
So I mean we had like the, the national assessment, intelligence assessment that was obviously flying in the like, you know, going up against what Israel was giving us and telling us over the last like year or so.
- [85:05]
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Host
Obviously, probably before June of 25th when we hit the nuclear reactors saying that they weren't, I mean they had enriched uranium to 60% but they weren't actively going at it. And the weapons weaponization part was still like a year or so away and particularly after the bombing in June of 2025 when we obliterated quote unquote their nuclear program, you know, there was no indication of any enrichment whatsoever anymore. So why do we go into Iran this time?
- [87:11]
John Hackett
Yeah, so there's these deeply buried facilities that Jack was mentioning. We had this whole program about like, how do we penetrate these deeply buried assets and how do we use either weapons to do that or how do we breach them? There's like a whole package designed for these types of activities. There's a whole element within JSOC that does this. And the reason they had designed that is because they thought that that threat was real. Right. Sometimes when you have a tool, you want to use it. And when someone comes to you and says, hey, that threat, that thing you have that you can use, that, that threat exists, you should use it. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm kind of oversimplifying here, but that's kind of how the case was made to the United States, that you have an opportunity, you have a one time opportunity. Right now the regime is weak, their air defenses are poor. We have, we can create air superiority so that you can go in there and destroy this and you can have a win just like you had in Venezuela. This is how it was framed and it was believed. And again, we don't have human assets in Iran the way that we used to. So we couldn't really verify even if we wanted to, we couldn't easily verify that that was true. Like to be able to know what's going on in underground facility, you can't really rely on sigint. Right. These are deep things. You cannot. Even if someone brought a cell phone in there, the cell phone won't work because it just can't. There's, there's no transmission between that person and outside the facility. Right. If you've ever been in a tunnel, you understand how this works. That means you need a human source to go in there or use measurement and Signature Intelligence or mazent to measure soil movement, density, the weight of vehicles, different things like that. But that can only give you inferential information. You can't make deductions based on Mayzent alone. You have to have HUMINT to corroborate the mazent. Well, Israel's the humint. We have the Mayzent. We can see that earth has been moved. We can see that very heavy vehicles that are heavier now than they were when they got there have left. So like we can see that something has happened here. We need to fill in the blanks. Well, Israel says we'll fill the blanks in for you. They're enriching uranium. We know it. Here's what we've collected, and it was believed. And it's hard because we can't just go recruit an asset today and be like, hey man, can you go check that out for me and let me know if that's true.
- [89:17]
Bluff
Right.
- [89:18]
John Hackett
It's super tough to verify this stuff. And we've talked about this with battle damage assessment even during the war. We don't really know if we've destroyed that transporter erector launcher really until it fires another missile. Because then we say, oh, it wasn't actually destroyed because you could blow up the tires, you could damage the erector, you could damage part of the tail fin. The thing's still going to go. You know, it's really tough unless you have a guy there saying like, it's actually destroyed, or I'm the guy that operates it, I'm not going to hit the button because you're paying me not to hit the button. Like, that's humid, right? So there's like two different ways you could go after that. We don't have any of that. In January, when this delegation came to convince our country's leadership to go do this operation.
- [89:57]
Host
I hear you right? And like, you obviously know that and that they're, that their human intelligence that they would be feeding us would be tainted and, or biased. Why didn't, how didn't they know that? Like, how, how wasn't that taken into this, into the assessment? I guess generally it was right because like the actual nationalist intelligence assessment was like, they're not doing it, but in the room, like, you know, that's why I wanted to talk about the intelligence that led up to this because it seems kind of sort of like echoes of Iraq, but in a different type of flavor and maybe a little like turbocharged a little bit. But, you know, and it's cr. It's wild to me because there's a lot of smart people out there doing this and how we can continue to make the same mistake over and over and over again because we knew how it would play out. Maybe we didn't know that they would bomb the region. You know, that all the, all of our bases and all of our allies in the region, we knew that they would close the straight of Hormuz. We knew it.
- [91:03]
Co-host/Interviewer
Well, it's a policy decision that's already been made in search of a WMD crisis to justify it.
- [91:12]
John Hackett
And humans are optimistic.
- [91:14]
Host
Go ahead. I'm sorry, John.
- [91:15]
John Hackett
Well, humans are just so optimistic. Like, we see a problem, we're like, no, it has to be the best outcome. And it's very hard for us to, like, wind ourselves down and be like, wait a minute. It might not actually work out the way we hope it does. Like, look Back to Desert One, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw. You know, when they're briefing that to the President, that is a wild operation. Like, if you look at, like, how it was designed, like, this is crazy that you guys have all these, like, logistics hubs and farts and, like, there's no way, like, even, like, getting to the desert. It was incredible they even got to the desert. Like, the desert was supposed to be a refueling point where they continue to tear on, like, hundreds of kilometers north. Like, you kidding me? But, like, people look at that and they're like, this could work, guys. This could work. You know, and it's very similar. Like, when you all want the same thing, it's like, you don't need very much pushing to go do it, you know, And. And Trump has wanted this. The people in National Security Council have wanted this. Rubio, even though he's. He probably doesn't like the way the war is going to. He's from a Cuban family that fled from an authoritarian state. Like, somewhere in his soul, he's like, we need to get rid of these authoritarians. Like, oh, they're bad guys, and, oh, there's a threat right now. We should go do something about that, you know, like, so. And I think there was only, what, eight guys in the room on the U.S. side when this was briefed. Like, there weren't experts sitting there to, like, say, hold on, guys, have you thought about this? Or guys that at least had served in CENTCOM during the Gulf War, and they were like, hey, we remember this back. You remember back there, a tanker war in 1988 when we had Operation Praying Mantis and we had to, like, try to re flag the Kuwaiti vessels and protect them in the Straits of Hormuz. And that didn't work out very well. And we accidentally shot down a civilian aircraft with one of our aircraft carriers. Like, you remember. You remember that? Like, there wasn't anyone in the room to, like, bring that up and. And like, remind them of this. These were civilian leaders, which is how our government's designed civilian leadership sitting there without any expertise. There wasn't, like, the depth of bench of National Security Council advisors in there that you would expect. It was. It was people that just don't understand the problem, hearing people that they trust as experts, which is the Israeli briefers telling them, like, this is real, you guys can probably win. Pretty good chance, you know, and even with intelligence, like it's never 100%, even if we have great, great data, you still never know. Like there could always be some black swan event that comes up and like disrupts this whole thing. You know, I mentioned the Tito's partisans, like they luckily succeeded. Wasn't necessarily going to be that way, you know, so these guys went in there and basically convinced some layman with a lot of power to do something that was probably a bad idea.
- [93:36]
Co-host/Interviewer
Where does that leave us today? That it seems like. I know people are maybe allergic to the term forever war and maybe I don't want to go that far myself, but it does seem like a war that has, as of now, no end state, there's no strategic end goal. And is it just going to continue on until the next administration when they negotiate some sort of settlement? I mean, how do you see this playing out over the next couple years?
- [94:01]
John Hackett
The way it's rolling right now, it looks like the regime is going to be stronger than it was when the war started. Like before the war started. I mean, and that's a result of how we are handling the situation. We the west, we the United States. There's still opportunity to turn things around if we had the political acumen to do so. But it seems that we're not willing to, to use that acumen. Instead it's, it's very hard for us to admit that we might have been wrong about something we did and turn left or turn right and go the other way. Instead we're kind of digging our heels. And I, like I mentioned I was talking to that Iranian this morning and he was, he was talking about the war and I was telling him, like, you haven't heard them mention the Iranian people recently have. You know, it's about the Straits of Hormuz suddenly. Wasn't it about the ballistic missiles at the beginning? Wasn't about the nuclear program? Like what happened to all those objectives? It was so hard to even hear what the objectives were in the beginning. And now it's like the objectives are just a new set of objectives.
- [94:54]
Host
Yeah, there weren't very many objectives either. I remember when they first, we first started bombing them in February 28th, like we didn't know what the plan was. There was no plan, There was no actual, I guess, like they had targets. And I think what they're doing is cherry picking, like sencom, like what sencom's picking to kill and being like, oh yeah, that's our, that's Our strategy is to, like, we're blowing up ballistic missiles or blowing up where they build ballistic missiles on the ground or Navy ships. So we took out their navy, we took out their ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, we have it, you know, at least, like, they've reconstituted it. You know, we've gotten nowhere and we seem stuck in this escalation spiral.
- [95:34]
John Hackett
That's the other problem is, like at centcom, like, you've got these spreadsheets with targets on them, right? Some of those targets were put on that spreadsheet in like 1993, and they haven't been validated. And they just like get turned over and turned over. And these spreadsheets are just like continuing through. Like, this is how targeting works. You're like, okay, what's the grid coordinate for this location? Is that still valid? We think so. Like, it's still physically there. I can see it on the imagery. Like, let's blow it up. But you have no idea if that thing is still what you think it was back then when you put that
- [95:58]
Host
on the spreadsheet, blew up that, that girl school.
- [96:02]
John Hackett
I mean, you can even see the satellite imagery of that school, like in the past five years, how it's been built up around that facility that we were trying to strike. And like, we just didn't have, we didn't use that imagery. We used a spreadsheet that said, this is an IRGC target.
- [96:15]
Host
And we struck it on Google. It actually says something, whatever school, you know, like.
- [96:21]
John Hackett
But we don't use Google. We use our own proprietary, you know, stuff. And, and the way it's literally a spreadsheet that has like the targeting on it, it's got the MGRS, the 10 digit grid on it, and like some other stuff on there. And you're like, this looks like a target. And we did the same thing in Operation allied force in 1999. We bombed the Chinese embassy by accident because we had a grid that we thought was an enemy grid and it was wrong. It was, it was like a number off and we, we didn't validate the target. We just blew it up.
- [96:47]
Host
Mamiya. Yeah, I don't know, I didn't even think about an ending to this show, but.
- [96:52]
John Hackett
Well, there is no ending. Just like the war.
- [96:54]
Host
Yeah, it's still going. We're actually on day six now of continuous bombing every night by the US Into Iran, and Iran shooting missiles at, you know, our allies, our bases and stuff. I mean, I, I, in a few years from now when this actual comes out, like the actual battle damage Assessment comes out. I would not be surprised if it was like 20 or 30 billion dollars worth of damage like on our radar systems and everything like that in and around the area. Our fifth Fleet HQ is essentially abandoned. You know, our aircraft carriers are hanging out like 350 miles into the Gulf of Amman.
- [97:32]
Tyler Redick
Yeah.
- [97:33]
Host
You know, they're not. We're not exactly showing our, you know, walking around. Yeah. We're not strutting around at all. Were at a safe distance. And. And it's. It almost makes you think like, what's the. What's the actual point? I know not just about aircraft carriers, but in. In terms of like projecting power in any way. Right. Yeah.
- [97:55]
Co-host/Interviewer
The Navy can't secure freedom of navigation through the Straits of Hormuz. It's like, why do we have a navy? Explain that to me.
- [98:04]
John Hackett
Especially aircraft carriers.
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Host
Yeah. Makes no sense. Just a big tar. It's a big target. It's a big target that's got probably $30 billion of hardware on it, plus 5,000 people.
- [98:17]
John Hackett
But hey, it gave people jobs in Virginia to manufacture it.
- [98:21]
Host
Yeah, it's pro economy. It's pro business. Good God, guys. I never feel good better about these ever. I think I'm done. I think I'm gonna quit the show. I'm gonna do like a good news show. We're gonna talk about like dogs getting adopted and shit like that. Or like a cancer. Or like cancer research that's working out and like people you might cure cancer. Because this, this. I mean, I don't even know how you guys worked in this business, to be honest. It's ridiculous.
- [98:48]
John Hackett
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
- [98:49]
Host
Yeah, it's crazy. All right, so obviously we'll keep our eyes on it like that. There's so much more we can get into. Obviously. We like basically just glossed over most like of this 50 or more, you know, 100 year history.
- [99:07]
John Hackett
Yeah, we scratched the surface.
- [99:08]
Unknown Guest
Thanks.
- [99:09]
Co-host/Interviewer
Thanks, John. I mean, you covered a lot of ground in an hour and a half here.
- [99:12]
John Hackett
Yeah, sorry for all the tangents, but I think the context is super important.
- [99:15]
Host
Yeah, you're right.
- [99:16]
Co-host/Interviewer
Matter.
- [99:16]
Host
Yeah, yeah. The context is extremely important. If you guys want to read more. John's book, Iran Shadow Weapons Incredible, really goes into and shows you just, you know, the Iranians are working on a pretty. They're pretty sophisticated bunch of. I'm not gonna lie to, you know, so for us to like underestimate them, which is what we've seemed to have done has seemed to be a huge blunder. A huge blunder. Of course, Jack Murphy The Most Dangerous man book is out now on Amazon. New York Times bestseller.
- [99:51]
Co-host/Interviewer
We can hope.
- [99:52]
Host
No, no, we just. Once you say it, it's true.
- [99:54]
John Hackett
So manifest.
- [99:55]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
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Co-host/Interviewer
I am a former New York Times bestseller, so I can legitimately say so.
- [100:00]
Host
Yeah, I'm not even lying. Yeah. Jack Murphy, New York Times bestseller, but
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Co-host/Interviewer
not this book, as far as I know.
- [100:06]
Host
The new book is called the Most Dangerous Man. It's a lot of fun. It's incredible. Check that out and do us a favor and go to our Patreon. Patreon.com theteamhouse. You get both Eyes on and Team House episodes ad free and early. Of course. Jack has the high side with Sean Naylor where they do a deep dive. Investigative articles, incredible stuff. All those links are in the description. If you want to DM the guys and tell them you love them, you can go to the links and do that. Don't DM me because I don't love you. All right, a pleasure, guys, as always, thank you.
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Co-host/Interviewer
All right, thanks guys.
- [100:40]
John Hackett
See you guys. Thanks.
- [100:44]
Co-host/Interviewer
Hey guys, I want to take a moment to tell you about the Teamhouse podcast newsletter. If you go and subscribe, it's totally free and what it will do is aggregate all of our data, all of our content that we put out, the things that are on the team house on our Geopolitics podcast, Eyes on things that I write journalistically with Sean Naylor. On the high side, anything else that we have going on, books we recommend, upcoming guests that we have coming on the show and also, you know, filtering in some fun stuff in there as well if you'll go and check it out. We send it out just once a week. We don't want to spam you guys. It's just a kind of roll up of all of our content on a weekly basis. You can find our newsletter@teamhousepodcast.kit.com join again. The website for that is teamhousepodcast kit.com join. So we hope to see you there. The link will be down in the description.
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