 It's a lot with a lot of pleasure that I get to introduce Matt Leavitt, who as many of you know has had a very distinguished career at the Department of Treasury, at the FBI, at the State Department. He's the author of multiple books. He's at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book is Hasbollah, the Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God, which is already receiving favorable reviews. He's one of the world's leading experts on terrorism financing, amongst other things. And Dr. Leavitt has agreed to speak to us for about half an hour about the big themes of his book, and then I'll engage him in a bit of Q&A and then throw it open to your questions. Thank you. First of all, thanks for the kind introduction. It's a pleasure to be here, especially since here is literally across the street from my office on a frigid day like today. It was nice not to have to go very far, but I'm especially grateful to all of you for coming from what I presume is a little farther out. And I'm always grateful to anybody who's willing to spend some time with me talking about a book that took me a little over nine years to do. I'm happy to talk about it all day. We'll see what we can get in in about a half an hour. And it's a timely discussion, not only because of what's happening in Syria, but because we're seeing an uptick in his bullet terrorist attacks around the world, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the late 1980s and early 1990s. And we'll get to that in a minute. But as I look around at Hezbollah's activities in Syria, as I look around at Hezbollah's activities around the world, in particular, Hezbollah's willingness to carry out attacks on Israeli tourists around the world specifically at Iran's behest, something that is not directly tied to Hezbollah's own interests in Lebanon or the interests of the Lebanese state. I'm brought back to 30 years ago. Just a few weeks ago, we marked the 30th anniversary of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. And arguably, this started it all. In fact, it wasn't the first Hezbollah attack on Western interests in Lebanon. When Hezbollah first started targeting Western interests, it was in Lebanon, then elsewhere in the Middle East. We just had the anniversary of the Kuwait bombings, I think, of seven or eight bombings in about two hours in Kuwait targeting mostly American interests. And there would be other bombings in Beirut that would follow, in particular, the bombing of the U.S. embassy that already occurred, the bombing of the U.S. embassy annex that would follow shortly thereafter in this 18-month period. But it was the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks and the French military barracks that really helps explain a lot. What I mean by that is the following. I think it's fair to say that all relationships fluctuate over time. But the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah is a critical one to understand, if you want to understand what the group is doing at any particular time. And it has come full circle. We now understand the U.S. intelligence community now describes the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah as a strategic partnership with Iran as the primary partner, quote, unquote. We no longer describe this as a patron proxy relationship. And that's really telling. And it goes back to where things began with the Marine barracks. There's a lot of tremendous amount of declassified intelligence in this book. The only benefit to doing something like this over nine years is you get to continue plugging away and pestering people. And if you're annoying enough, as apparently I can be, you will get some information. One of the pieces of declassths in there is the fact that three and a half weeks before the Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks and the French military, U.S. intelligence intercepted a telephone call between Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, MIS, station headquarters in Tehran, rather, and the embassy in Damascus. And the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, was told to reach out to a senior Shia militant who was actually the head of Musawi, who was the head of Islamic Amal at the time, which had already begun to be the backbone of Hezbollah, and to task Musawi with, quote, carrying out a spectacular action targeting the U.S. Marines. Now the sad, disturbing part of the story, especially for someone like myself who worked 9-11, I led the analytical team for Flight 175, is that we didn't do anything with this information in time. This information that we collected three and a half weeks before the bombing didn't reach the desk of anybody who could do anything about it until two days after the bombings. But it does, looking back as uncomfortable as it is to talk about it, does give us very tangible evidence that that attack, in the first instance, in other words, when Iran, when Hezbollah, that is, first started targeting Western interests, it was doing so to Iran's behest. This had nothing to do with Hezbollah's interests, Hezbollah's interests in Lebanon even. Many people said it had to do with Hezbollah trying to push out foreign occupation. In fact, this had to do with action carried out at Iran's behest. Before I go on, I want to make a, I want to make an admission. And that is that this entire project wasn't intended to be. I had other things on the agenda. I had left the FBI as before as brought into government again at Treasury and elsewhere. And I got invited in 2003 to a U.S. government conference here in Washington, D.C., unclassified with bi-invitation only for current and former U.S. intelligence analysts focused on Lebanon. Interesting. Go to an interesting conference for a day on something I'm not working on. That's wonderful. It's a day off. I'm not the type to necessarily go to every conference and take copious notes, but as soon as the panelists started talking, this one I did. They were brilliant. It was co-sponsored by the CIA and State Department's INR Intelligence and Research Branch. And the first couple of panels were all about things very domestic, the minutiae of things in Lebanon that were beyond my expertise, certainly then in 2003. And I'm taking copious notes. By the third panel, and almost all of the speakers, while the panels were moderated by a CIA or State Department person, almost all the speakers were people brought in from Lebanon, academics, journalists, etc. By the third panel, they started talking about terrorism in the Middle East, something that I know about for my work in and out of government. And as soon as the first speakers started opening their mouths, they were so far removed from reality, so far into the twilight zone, like a ton of bricks crashing on my head. It made me wonder, is this panel full of lunatics, or has the whole thing been full of lunatics? And I just didn't know because I had no barometer to measure it against because the people in the first couple of panels were speaking about things that were beyond my expertise. First person gets up and says, listen, I know that you Americans and Israelis, there were no Israelis in the room, mind you, but I know you Americans and Israelis believe that Hezbollah has carried out acts of terrorism abroad, but it's just not true. Can we please be mature about it? I mean, Al Qaeda, they do this stuff. But Hezbollah, they're just a political party, which in fact they are. They are a social welfare movement, which of course they are. And of course they're militia, which they are too, and the Israelis don't like that, and you're close to the Israelis, you Americans, so you call them terrorists, but they're really not terrorists, so enough already. I know you think they blew up the Israeli embassy in 1992 in Buenos Aires, and I know you think they came this close to blowing up the Israeli embassy in Bangkok in 1994, and a few weeks later successfully blew up the Amia Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires and Kobar Towers. I know all the things that you claim, but that can't be because Hezbollah is just a domestic actor in Lebanon. Now it would have been easier if they had said, look, I know you say that Hezbollah did these few acts of terrorism abroad, but primarily there are these things in Lebanon. That would have been something we could have discussed because that is what makes Hezbollah so complicated. It is a political party. It is a social welfare movement. It is a standing militia, but it also is these things abroad, and there was none of that to be had. I don't suffer fools very well, so I'm already kind of you know, sitting in my seat, you know, going like this, and getting all annoyed, and my friends are all pointing, look, there goes Matt getting annoyed again. They'd already announced that the questions and answers were going to be reserved for the end of the day, so I wasn't going to get my opportunity to say, you know, what are you talking about till much later in the day? But by the end of that panel, the rest of the panels weren't so bad, and I had calmed down. The next panel comes on. The very first speaker says, again, I know you Americans and Israelis believe, so they've got my attention already, that there's some boogeyman out there, she said, making fun, an American academic now in Lebanon, some boogeyman named Imad Mugna. But I don't think he exists. I live in Beirut, said this academic, and I have no evidence that he exists, because that's what Mugna or any other terrorist would do. I walk up to you on the street, I'm in Mugna, if you want to get a espresso anytime, I'm around. I have no evidence he exists, she said, and I live in Beirut, so I think that he's just a creation of the Israeli imagination, and you've bought it hook, line, and sinker. So I did, she said, what a real academic would do. To this conference, 200, 250 U.S. current and former U.S. intelligence analysts. I got an audience with Hasan Nasrallah himself, she said, and I asked him, yes, Said, does Mugna exist? And he told me no. Ergo, Mugna doesn't exist, QED. This is a room full of people who have worked the issue of Mugna. This conference is co-sponsored by the CIA, which takes Mugna, has ball in general, Mugna as an individual, quite personally, from the decimation of the CIA station in Beirut to the kidnapping and torture of Bill Buckley and his murder, et cetera. On the sidelines of the conference, she and I have a conversation, let's say diplomatically, that we agree to disagree, but it really blew my mind. It's part of the book to our vintage Chicago already a few times. It's kind of like someone going up to Al Capone and saying, Al, are you a mob boss? And Al says, no, I'm in the trash disposal business. And you go to a conference and you say, I can't possibly be a mob boss because he told me so. So I left the conference and I thought to myself, this is not a bunch of conspiracy theorists. This was a serious conference. Maybe actually it's me. Maybe I just know the terrorism, the international terrorism, logistics, crime, arms procurement side of Hezbollah from my work in the intelligence community. And maybe I shouldn't be assuming that people at an open conference would be able to be as conversant about it. So I had my research assistant do a literature review of all the literature that was out there on Hezbollah at the time in 2003. And it turns out there was tons of literature on Hezbollah, much, much more so now. And almost all of it was strictly limited to Hezbollah as a political party, which it is social movement, which it is in a militia, which it also is. The best book in terms of the terrorism piece was a book that had chapters or 30 pages, 40 pages. It actually had a chapter on terrorism with seven pages. And almost every paragraph was according to the Americans this, according to the Israelis that no one bothered to go and collect the court documents from Argentina from Switzerland, from Italy, from France, from Germany, where there had been forget intelligence just open court cases involving Hezbollah in the 80s and the 90s. There was plenty to talk about. So I just started conducting interviews and as I traveled around the world begging for documents and going to courthouses and meeting with intelligence officials and journalists from all over the world and people come to Washington all the time. And at the end of the day, put together this book on Hezbollah's global footprint. I say in the opening of the book, this is not meant to supplant or take the place of any of the literature that's out there already. You cannot understand Hezbollah if all you do is read this book. This fills the gap. This doesn't talk about Hezbollah in Lebanon, not because it's unimportant, certainly not because it's not true. It's absolutely true, but there's lots of literature on that. What was missing is what is Hezbollah doing abroad? Now, fast forward five years after this conference in 2003 to February 2008 when Imad Mugna, who did exist, but whose existence was denied in life because he was in fact the head of Hezbollah's Islamic Jihad organization, was assassinated in Damascus. And the man whose existence was denied in life is embraced in death, streets named after him, squares named after him, new titles given to him. You can go on Hezbollah websites and see the Hezbollah poetry written about him, much of which, by the way, is really quite bad. A lot of Hezbollah stuff is quite beautiful. This stuff is actually quite bad. You can go to His Tune, which is another of Hezbollah's kind of tourist terrest museums. And you can pose, isn't it cute, in front of His Tune with a mock-up of the ivory-handled handgun that all the survivors of TWA 847, the hijacking of the flight from Athens to Rome with onwards service to the United States, which is why there's so many Americans on the flight, remembered when he boarded the flight. This was actually his big debut. He boarded the flight with this fancy gun. There's the famous picture of him holding a gun to Captain Tistrache's head as the two of them are sticking their heads out the window of the flight. When he's assassinated, since I'm not a very nice person, I drafted an email to this academic from this conference from several years ago. It was a very short email, just said, and now we're both right. He did exist, and now he doesn't. But my wife, who's an infinitely more mature person than I am, told me that this might not be, you know, the paradigm of maturity to send this email. So I didn't send it, and I now have to admit to you that I'm also a petty person, because I did feel much, much better for just having drafted it. A couple of days later, at his funeral, Hassan Nasrallah appears by video teleconference for a fear that he'll be next on the hit list and says, Israel, you want open war? Those are his words. Open war. I'll give you open war. Interesting. You'll see from the D-class in the book, it's quite clear that neither Hezbollah nor Iran at the time that Nasrallah made this threat were entirely convinced that the Israelis were behind the assassination of Imad Mugna. They now are quite certain. But at the time, their number one suspect was actually Syria, which is rich in terms of where things are today with Iran and Hezbollah backing up the Assad regime. Nonetheless, it was only a few months went by before the Israelis experienced the first set of threats with Hezbollah operatives trying to make good on Nasrallah's threat or promise. The first was an attack, an attempted plot to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in Baku, Azerbaijan. Then you had a series of kidnapping and assassination plots of current and former senior Israeli officials in West Africa. A couple of plots, Honeypot and other plots in Southern Europe, Eastern Med, each of them fails and fails again. And I have a theory. We know for a fact that many terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, which was not involved in 9-11, looked at 9-11 and said, there's no way I'm going to get caught in the cross areas of what we were then calling the war on terrorism. They did not want to be put in the same basket as Al-Qaeda. And while they carry out violence in terrorism like Al-Qaeda, they are in fact very, very different than Al-Qaeda. And so they withdrew people from abroad, not a logistician, not a financier, not a criminal supporter, not an arms procurement officer. But they did pull back the small number of trigger pullers that they had stationed around the world capable of doing things in the near term. And a few places around the world, one place I remember off the top of my head is Manila, they actually maintained small caches of arms. And they dig it up from time to time and oil it. They'll read about it in the book. There were two in Southeast Asia. So that they could, if they ever were called upon, do something in the very near term. Well now in 2008, after withdrawing these people from abroad, they just didn't have the capability. And in two different instances, they wanted things to happen so badly, so quickly, that they actually tasked people who were just smugglers or procurement officers with going and carrying out surveillance. And that actually, the Art of Surveillance takes some training. These people weren't trained in the Art of Surveillance. They were picked up right away. And they lost networks that had been operating quite well. In two different places in the world because they had them expose themselves by doing things more operational that they didn't have the capability to do. And so that's why they failed and failed and failed again. So by 2009, the approach to the Iranians and they say, listen, Mugna was important to you. And in fact, we do believe that by the time he was killed, he was dual-headed. He was likely a commissioned officer in the Quds Force. And he's important to us. And therefore, we need a little more help than usual. And the Iranians said, sure. And they came up with a plot to assassinate the Israeli Consul General in Istanbul, Turkey. And for this, the Iranians provided a little more support than usual. And this too was thwarted. And then in the end of 2009, multiple intelligence officials used the same language. And you know how this is done, Peter. You don't use leading language. You don't say, I heard the following from this one. What do you say? You just let them speak independently. A bunch of different people said towards the end of 2009, Hezbollah and Iran are yelling at each other, whether it's literally or figuratively, they're angry at each other. Hezbollah is saying, you know what, Iran? You used to be really reliable supporter. Now you're more than a little bit distracted by your nuclear program. And Iran is saying, you know what, Hezbollah used to be reliable and capable. If you needed something to get done, you'd get it done. And now, frankly, you stink. You failed and failed and failed again. And the argument is put to bed as they're arguing throughout the end of 2009, not because they resolved their differences, but because a few weeks later, in January 2010, somebody pulls up on a motorcycle alongside the car of an Iranian nuclear physicist in Tehran, by the name of Professor Muhammadi, and slaps a magnetic sticky bomb on his car, and he's killed. And the Iranians are furious, as frankly we would be if that happened on the streets of Washington. And they call in the Quds Force, and they call in Hezbollah, and they say enough, this is how it will be. They instruct the Quds Force with establishing a new unit, Unit 400, to assassinate diplomats from Western countries undermining Iran's nuclear program. Three plots in 24 hours targeting Israeli interests in Thailand, in the Republic of Georgia, in India. A plot targeting British officials was thwarted in West Africa, and they came this close to assassinating the U.S. Ambassador and other members of the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, as well. There have been about a dozen plots between Hezbollah and the Quds Force, sometimes separately, sometimes together in Baku. And this wasn't entirely removed in the United States, by the way, also because one of the two people who was tasked with heading this unit at one point had been in Los Angeles, where he was carrying out surveillance of Iranian dissidents there. Meanwhile, Hezbollah was tasked with setting up its own capabilities. They were given two tasks. Your first task is stop. Just stop. Take off six, seven, eight months, recruit the Kremzillah Krem from your militia, the Islamic Resistance, the Mokalama. Preferably people with foreign complexions, foreign languages, foreign passports, dual nationalities. Teach them the dark arts, Hezbollah. We Iran will help you teach them the dark arts, and then you send them abroad to hit Israeli tourists. I know, said Iran, I know you want to hit a senior Israeli official current or former official to avenge Mugni. It has to be someone of equal stature. This is not for that. This is to exact the cost on the Israelis for we Iran perceive them to be doing, targeting our nuclear program on their own, and maybe in concert with other powers. And to do that, Israelis are very sensitive to civilian losses. And civilians are softer targets. You'll be able to do this faster. You still want to hit hardened targets will help you find. And they do a series of plots around the world, some of which are well known, the one that succeeded in Bergus Bulgaria, one that was thwarted in Thailand, Hussein Atreus, a dual Lebanese Swedish citizen is serving time. He's been convicted in Thailand. Another dual Lebanese Swedish citizen Hussein Yaqub is serving time. He's been convicted in Cyprus, a whole bunch of other plots, some of which you probably haven't heard of, including surveillance of Israeli tourists at the airport in Johannesburg. And this continues, though it doesn't continue at the same operational tempo, not for lack of interest, but because quite frankly, his bullet is distracted by its all in involvement, commitment in Syria. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to do those things at the same tempo. How are we doing for time? Okay, so I want to leave you with with a couple of things. It's not like on, I'm sorry if this is bursting anybody's bubble, but it's not like on Homeland. Take it from someone who used to work kind of tourism at the FBI. I have a hard time watching that show. It's not like on Homeland where necessarily in those instances, when a group like Hezbollah, which has phenomenal tradecraft that they learned from Iran stuff that al-Qaeda will never have, it's not necessarily the case that when they execute with great tradecraft, they succeed. And when they make mistakes, they necessarily fail. In Bulgaria, they succeeded, killed six people, five Israelis, and a Bulgarian, actually a Muslim Bulgarian. The Bulgarians aren't very proud of it, but they were so worried that it might have been an inside job because the bus driver who was killed was a Muslim. No one from the government went to his funeral. It was actually one of the local synagogues was the first Bulgarian community of any kind to mark his death, putting up six candles, not five. And in fact, we now think that he might have heroically moved the bus at the last minute and saved some lives. But in that case, in that case, they made a huge number of mistakes, and yet they succeeded. And a week and a half earlier in Cyprus, incredible tradecraft, and yet they were thwarted. In Bulgaria, I'll give you just one example of many. They had one of their counterfeit experts, and Hezbollah has counterfeit capabilities second to none. Counterfeit currency, counterfeit documents, incredible case out of Philadelphia. One of the best penetrations of Hezbollah ever out of the JTGF by the FBI actually spearheaded by a New Jersey state trooper involved a case what they were trying to sell off hundreds that now millions of dollars of counterfeit hundred dollar bills at a time. We sent sources into Lebanon. We lured a senior Hezbollah person here to the United States where he met with someone who he believed to be a Philadelphia mobster, is actually FBI undercover, unbelievable case that you'll read about in detail in the book. They had one of their counterfeit officers put together a counterfeit Michigan state driver's license for one of the three operatives in Bulgaria. Again, just as they were tasked with recruiting by Iran, two dual Lebanese Canadians who were relatives, one we know, the other died in the attack. We don't know his identity, but from DNA we know they're related. We thought it was a suicide bombing at first, but now definitively it's clear from reconstructing the bomb that this was remotely detonated. And the theory is that an Israeli tourist had put his suitcase under the bus where you put your suitcases right where he wanted it. And the bomber moved it over to put his backpack bomb where he wanted it. And this tourist got annoyed that his suitcase was moved from the spot where he really wanted his suitcase to be. And they got into an argument. And the other two, one of them a Lebanese Canadian dual citizen, the other a Lebanese Australian dual citizen, Melyad Farah, got concerned that maybe the operation was blown and they detonated the device remotely and prematurely. This license was beautiful. I mean, as a piece of art, the hologram, the whole bit, excellent, phenomenal, phenomenal fake license, except for two things. One, the photograph of the individual, he's wearing a, you can see it online. One of my publications has it in the cover. He's got a, he's wearing a wig that kind of goes straight out like this. It's either something from a Saturday night live routine or he just stuck his finger in an outlet. But no matter what you look at this, and the first thing you see is this bizarre picture. But in my mind, maybe that's not the forger's fault. I picture a forger in a dark room with one of those bank lights over his desk and someone knocks on the door and says, sir, we have, we have the picture for your license. And he looks at it and he says, are you expect me to put this piece of junk picture into my beautiful license? So I'm sorry, sir. That's the only picture we have. Maybe that's not on him. But what is on him is that this Michigan state license, the specs of which are beautiful, includes an address in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Now, some young girl working the clerking at the desk of the local car rental agency at the Burgess Bulgaria Airport did not in fact know that that's not close by. Did later admit that the guy acted suspiciously, but didn't report it because, A, if you report everybody who acts suspiciously when they travel will be reporting a lot of people. And B, because until recently, Bulgaria was a satellite state of the Soviet Union, and its intelligence service was tied to the KGB actually went to Bulgaria, met with them, met with the head of their intelligence service. And in fact, when you walk into his office, he's got the curio cabinet, and it's all KGB stuff. And so there isn't a culture in Bulgaria of going to the authorities voluntarily. And so that wasn't caught. But there was a whole bunch of other cases of how they made big, big mistakes in Bulgaria, and yet they succeeded. A week and a half earlier, Hussein Yacoub was thwarted despite incredible tradecraft. Make a long story short. In the real world, again, not like on Homeland, when you actually capture these guys, they don't lie completely. They don't not say anything. What they're taught is what we teach our officials, which is real, serious R2I resistance to interrogation techniques, which is buy some time. Don't say anything for a few days a week would be great. And then when you do, you can tell some truth, but slowly spin a little bit of yarn to and then at the end, by the end, you can tell the whole thing. And it's exactly what happens. At first, he says, I have nothing to do with his ball up. I was not conducting any surveillance at the airport. But the Israelis, however, he found out about him and told the Cypriots and they'd done surveillance of him. And they said, really? Because here's the picture of you at the airport. Well, okay, well, I went back to the airport. That's not a crime. They've got good coffee, but I wasn't doing surveillance, really. Because here's the picture of you actually doing the surveillance. And here's the notes from your hotel room where you write down the license plate numbers of the buses. And by the way, it's not particularly good code that you used. Then he spins the yard. Yes, okay. But I was randomly recruited on the streets of Beirut. I was at a falafel stand. A guy named Rami approached me. I have no idea why. And later, he says, remember, I told you about some guy named Rami? Yeah, he doesn't exist. And he tells the whole story, which we're able to vet and confirm. And it turns out that when was Hussein Yaku, the dual Lebanese Swedish citizen, the second dual Lebanese Swedish operative to have been arrested within six months, when was he recruited? You might logically say, well, Levitt just told me a few minutes ago that Iran told them to recruit people just like this in January 2010. So maybe sometimes shortly after January 2010, and that would be a very logical assumption, and it would be wrong. And so you might say, fine, well, Levitt also told me that they started trying to come up with ways to avenge Mugna's death after his assassination in February 2008. So maybe it was sometimes shortly after February 2008. And that would also be a very logical assumption. And it would be wrong. We now know he was recruited more than a year earlier, in early 2007, when his Bullah was already looking for people like this and plotting things like this. You'll see throughout the book, even in periods when long periods of time go by and his Bullah isn't blowing things up, they're doing all kinds of other things. There's no point in the history from its inception to today when his Bullah stopped. Not one. And maybe what's most disconcerting is the fact that in his final interrogation, in his effort to convince the Cypriots that, fine, okay, I belong to his Bullah. It's not a banned entity in Lebanon. It's not a banned entity here in Cyprus. This was before the European Union banned the military and terrorist wings of the organization. And yeah, I did the surveillance, but that's not terrorism. And he clearly really believes it. He's explaining this is resistance. We are resistance. That's noble. This is not terrorism. And in his effort to explain this, he says, I told you, fine, I belong to his Bullah. And yes, I did the surveillance, but, and I quote verbatim now. But I was just doing surveillance of the Jews. This is what my organization does all over the world. Quote and quote from the official government transcripts, which I have in my possession, which is a scary thing given the extent of their activities. The book is loosely structured chronologically and geographically. So North America and South America, of course, Middle East, two different chapters, one historically going through Kobar Towers, and the other taking from Kobar Towers really through unit 3,800 as well as dedicated unit to support Iraqi Shia militants during the war there. But perhaps what was most amazing to me wasn't even the Europe chapter, wasn't even the Africa chapter, it was the Southeast Asia chapter, where they recruited two different networks, mostly run by Sunnis, doing all kinds of things, logistics, crime, fraudulent passports and terrorist operations over a very, very long period of time, which continues to today with the case of Hussein Atrus in Thailand and a bunch of others. I just got back on Friday from a trip to Australia and New Zealand on these issues, and they've got cases too, including at least one Australian who has died fighting in Syria, not on the Sunni rebel side, where the vast majority of their cases are. In fact, they had two arrests in Sydney while I was there, but at least one guy who died fighting alongside Hezbollah. And that's rare, because in most of these cases where you have Western Hezbollah operatives, they are far too valuable to be used as cannon fodder. They got plenty of Iraqis and others to do that. We've got lots of cases, including here in the United States. One case of Muhammad Dabouk, who was primarily in Canada, but at one point spent a little time in the United States too. Now believed to be back in Lebanon, where while in North America six different times he asks, he begs, can I please go back home and be a suicide bomber? This is just before the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. And they said, no, you are far too valuable to us. And so it's rare to have an occurrence like that, but it does happen. The bottom line is, if you want to understand Hezbollah, you have to understand and appreciate that they are a political party. You like their platform, you don't, you like their elected, you don't, doesn't make a difference, they are. So anybody who says they're only terrorists, they're only Iranian proxies, they're just wrong. It'd be a lot easier if that were the case. But it's also the fact that anybody who says they're only political and they're only social and they're only a standing militia, that's also equally wrong. If you want to understand them holistically with Nasrallah at the top of all the decision making, you have to be able to appreciate all these different things. In fact, one of the things that amazes me when the Treasury Department, my former office, long after I left, re-designated Hezbollah not just for terrorist things, but for its undermining stability in Syria a couple of years ago, one of the pieces of intel that it declassified, and you can go online and find it yourself on Treasury's website, is that the man who is quarterbacking, the man who is overseeing Hezbollah decisions and operations in Syria is not some mid-level manager, is not some mid-level militant. It's a guy named Hassan Nasrallah. This is being run at the highest levels. Let me stop there so we can have some time for questions and answers. Let me thank Peter and the New America Foundation again for hosting me. Thank you all for coming. It goes without saying I will be happy to sign as many copies of the book as you'd like to buy. I will thank you in advance in the bottom of my son's college fund and I'll be I'll be just perfectly blunt and honest with you. Once you buy the book I don't even care if you read it. Thank you very much. You mentioned the Bulgarian episode where the six tourists were killed and it seems like a short-term tactical victory for Hezbollah, but didn't that lead to this designation by the European Union for them as a terrorist organization basically? It wasn't that the sort of impetus? That attack certainly, the Cyprus episode and a bunch of others for some European countries were the kicker. I submitted the book to Georgetown University Press last December. God bless university presses. Georgetown by the way for the record was wonderful to work with. If anybody's writing a book I recommend Georgetown. But it takes time for university press and so I had about eight months. I spent a lot of that time running back and forth to European capitals on this issue, testified for the European Parliament on this issue. For a whole bunch of countries this was the major issue. For a bunch of others, including France, had nothing to do with this. Nothing to do with their terrorism abroad which is equally legitimate under the common position 931, their designation authority. It doesn't have to be acts of terrorism in Europe. For the French it was Syria, just Syria that pushed them over the line. But this gets to the issue where I started. Today, Hezbollah and Iran are in a strategic partnership. If you think about it, if I'm right, which I am, and Hezbollah tried after 9-11 to stay out of the crosshairs of the war on terrorism, to agree to attack civilians by any definition terrorist targets. Just because Iran wants you to avenge things over their nuclear program, not having anything to do with your own agenda, not having anything to do with Lebanon, that says a lot about where you are in your relationship with Iran. And if you think about Syria, Hezbollah has its own interests of course, but at the end of the day Iran has asked Hezbollah to play the kind of role, not just to be involved, but to play the kind of role that it's been playing, despite the fact this is severely undermining Hezbollah's position at home. Yeah, what is the practical effect of designation by the EU of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization? So the practical effect is manyfold. The main one, well the main thing is two things. One is the naming and shaming, right? And it's an opportunity to tell Hezbollah, look, whether people like your political platform or not. If you can separate that from the rest of this, we're happy to continue talking. So the way to year, the year and a half, whatever it is, then they're going to need to reassess whether, you know, making this distinction, a distinction that Hezbollah itself doesn't make. No one is more articulate about the fact that there are no distinct wings within Hezbollah than Hezbollah officials themselves, especially after the EU designation. But it's an opportunity to kind of give them an opportunity to bifurcate. The other thing is that, and John Brennan said this when he spoke in Ireland before he left the White House for the CIA, that one of the main things is that many European countries were already running preemptive intelligence investigations regarding Hezbollah, but many were not. So if they caught Hezbollah breaking the law, stealing money, counterfeit, moving drugs, all of which they do in Europe, then fine, they'd open up a law enforcement investigation. But after the fact. And so what was really necessary is to A, create a situation where there's more legal things, you can stick on them if they do things, and B, giving European Union member states the cover to be able to open up these preemptive intelligence organizations. But would they be arrested? I mean, does it name leaders? I mean, would you be arrested? Is it like having a red notice for Interpol? And what are the actual practical consequences? So this is much more important than putting individual names on the list. This was my fear that they wouldn't name any part of Hezbollah. They would name individuals. They would name Hussein Yaqoub from Cyprus, and individuals who did attacks, and that's meaningless. Most people in this room probably are unaware. Certainly many of the senior European officials I met with were unaware that Imad Mugna was on the EU's list. Hezbollah wasn't. No part of Hezbollah was. But Imad Mugna was, but that doesn't mean anything. If you only put a bunch of individuals, so fine. So Hussein Yaqoub can't function in Europe anymore, but anybody else can. And being on this list, just for clarification, I mean, no bank accounts can be used. What are the really practical... So beyond the naming and shaming, the irony is that CP9-1 is only an asset for for your authority. It doesn't have a ban on travel. It would be politically sticky, but there's no ban on travel to any European country. There's no ban on contact. A lot of Europeans said to me, look, we don't want to ban Hezbollah because then we won't be able to reach out to them. And I had to take out of my pocket, actually carried it with me any time I was in Brussels, a copy of CP9-3-1 to show them that no, actually, there's no ban on contact whatsoever. And the irony is that because they designated part of the group and not all of it, they basically guaranteed that they'll seize not a single euro of Hezbollah funds. Is a group like FARC on the EU list? I don't remember FARC as on the list. Who else is on the list? Lots and lots of groups, all the al-Qaeda's and a bunch of Palestinian groups and the Jews. And is there any discussion at the UN to put sort of the armed wing of Hezbollah on them? So at the UN, Kenneth Charsen listing is basically in two committees, one of which is the real list. The other one is de facto. So the 1267 committee is what is the real list, the actual list. And the UN lists are limited by statute. You have to demonstrate that an entity is tied somehow to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. You cannot ban at the UN FARC, Kahana Khai, Hamas, Hezbollah, period. The other committee is 1373, which doesn't deal with individual groups. It deals with actions, and so it bans terror financing. Some countries say, well, if terror financing is banned, I don't need to ban Hezbollah because if it finances, I can target it. But people on the other side say, well, if Hezbollah is not considered a terrorist group, then funding for Hezbollah is not terror financing. And therefore, 1373 doesn't apply. So you get costs in some of the legal machinations of it all. At the end of the day, I think that the way we do things here in the U.S., banning entirety of a group, is much, much more effective. And the responsibility for that, even though Hezbollah does many things that aren't terrorist, falls with Hezbollah. They're the ones who muddy the waters between their activities, and they do it because it's very effective. And as you'll read the book, case after case after case of Hezbollah, quote unquote, political figures. That is to say, they are in fact political figures, but I say quote unquote, because they're also doing all kinds of other terrorist proliferation, criminal things as well. Again, these distinctions that we make between the quote unquote wings of Hezbollah don't actually exist in their mind. How effective is Hezbollah in Syria? What are the numbers, do you think, and what are they doing? So I think they're extraordinarily effective. The numbers is a very interesting issue. When I first started looking into this, you would read numbers in the press, eight, 10, even 12,000 Hezbollah guys on the ground in Syria. It's just not possible. We believe that Hezbollah has standing militia of 10, 12, 15, let some even say at the end of, upper end of 20,000, probably more like 12, 15. In total. Of their standing people with a much larger group of people who then do reserve duty. Israeli military officers said it's kind of like our reserve duty, too. The people, they come, they do their reserve duty for a few weeks, they go back to their lives and they keep their AK-47 in their closet. The best figures after really lots and lots of interviews with people around is four to five thousand people on the ground at a time doing 30-day rotations. Are they playing a sort of SF type role or what is their role? It's not just special forces. There's a lot of urban warfare that they're very good at, but they're also training others. There's a big push to recruit more Iraqi Shia militants. Again, many of whom are trained by Hezbollah, some by Iran, many by Hezbollah, some by Hezbollah in Iran, some by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The really high-end training, people would graduate from the courses in Iran and then be taken to Lebanon. During the July 2006 war, a whole bunch of Iraqi Shia militants were stuck there because they were there for training, maybe even more interestingly. Despite the tensions between Sunni and Shia now and even historically, the UN Monitoring Committee reports that a not-so-small number, several hundred, Somali Shabaab were stuck in Lebanon during the July 2006 war, where they were getting trained by Hezbollah as well. What's the relationship between Qods Force and Hezbollah? Qods Force has the responsibility for coordinating that relationship, and they are the dominant player in that relationship, a strategic partnership. What are they within the Iranian security establishment? Qods Force is the domestic, their own kind of terrorist element, and more than that. There's the standing army and there's the IRGC army, and then within the IRGC separately, there's the Qods Force, which is as if they're special forces. But they also oversee a lot of policy. You remember the story of Petraeus getting a communication through an Iraqi Shia politician from Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Qods Force saying, welcome to Iraq. You'll be dealing with me. The current ambassador is one of mine. He's leaving. The incoming ambassador is one of mine. I oversee policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Welcome. So there's more than just kind of militancy, but certainly that. Who is he? Qasem Soleimani is the general who is the head of the Qods Force. Dexter Filkins did a good piece on him. There's been a bunch of recent pieces coming out. Some people describe him as the most dangerous man in the Middle East. He has the direct ear of the supreme leader. Don't we have an interest, a common interest with him? Well, you know, there is that irony, right? He is arguably our greatest adversary and our most dangerous adversary. And then in certain areas, we have mutual interests. Which is? Well, we want to see, and we wanted to see even back in the day, it was stability in Iraq, right? We want to see stability in Afghanistan. But isn't he taking the fight to al-Qaeda in a way that no one else is? Oh, we're getting to Syria, right? And now, of course, in some ways, yes, there's this fighting of al-Qaeda. I am not of the school that thinks that since Iran and Assad and his baller are on one side. And al-Qaeda is on the other. Anybody who fights al-Qaeda is necessarily the good guy. I'm more of the frustrated school that says if we had done some of the things we could and should have done 18 months ago, they were implementable then in terms of supporting the rebels. That we're now only talking about doing now 18 months later where they're not as easily done, if at all, as we can't talk about doing them now just because we're convinced now as if nothing has changed in the past 18 months. Everything's changed in the past 18 months. Those good guys and the rebels are now fighting on two fronts. They're fighting al-Qaeda on one front and they're fighting as Bala and Assad on the other. The fact that you could have days in a row of aerial bombing, whether it's barrel bombs or otherwise, fixed wing or helicopters for days in a row and we can be talking about sitting down at the table with Assad, frankly, sickens me. What do you anticipate coming out of Geneva? I'm not convinced Geneva is going to happen. Secretary Kerry just yesterday was saying it's possible that we could be meeting with the Islamic front. Islamic front is not quite al-Qaeda, but they're pretty darn close. And now Ambassador Ford says today that the Islamic front has not said why, but has refused to meet with us and kind of said it as if like a spurned, you know. Tell us about the Islamic front. Who are they? Well, we have a reality now where there are dozens and dozens and dozens of actors on the ground in Syria. And the Islamic front is just one, which is now kind of an umbrella for a bunch of groups that would like to be able to establish an Islamic state in Sharia law within a Sunni state in Syria. They're not al-Qaeda. They're not Jabhat al-Masura or ISIS. But they're not very far away. They are not our friends. They're not our allies. And they should not be the answer. And are they sort of hiving off from FSA because of frustration about lack of battlefield success? So what does that do? Absolutely. And because FSA is hemorrhaging money and Gulfies are giving money, those that are being convinced not to give money directly to the Jabhat al-Masura ISIS school are saying, okay, well, then we'll only give money to the Islamic front type of school. How long do you think Assad will be in power? Look, not so long ago we were counting the days and we were trying to make estimates that if we could do some more to tighten the strings on Iran financially and Iran wouldn't be able to finance Syria. Syria was in a situation where it had enough reserves to pay its soldiers at the time. I think it was for four more months. Right? So a fool is going to answer that question. I'm not even going to try and answer. We don't know. I think it's quite clear that Assad could hang on for quite some time, not in a sense of ruling all the country and having stability. But right now, I don't see him being pushed out anytime soon. The Iran nuclear deal. I mean, you worked at the Treasury. I mean, to what extent was the deal coming out of the sanctions regime and what is the likely effect of the deal on Hezbollah? So I think it's a fact, and I'm very, very proud to have played a small part in it, that the sanctions concept and there's multiple parts to it has been so successful that it got Iran to the negotiating table. And you know, Juan Zaradek was sitting here to never heard of him talking about his book. And he said a very interesting thing, I think, about the kind of concept of the sanctions, which they weren't sanctions in the way that we used to think about sanctions. We basically made it almost impossible for Iran to go out to the market to get capital from any bank. Exactly. And we didn't call them sanctions, both because sanctions have become a dirty word and because they weren't really sanctions. We described in this targeted financial measures, TFMs. Everything's going to have an acronym in government. But the fact is, nobody ever thought that sanctions were going to end the nuclear program. The best we thought was that it would create a dynamic by which other things, including diplomatic engagement, might be able to change things. I don't know if we've put enough financial hurt on them yet to get them where we need to be yet. The interim deal, if it ever gets finally negotiated, and actually starts, I think has some pretty big flaws in it. But at the end of the day, it's really what's going to be with a final deal. My concern is that the president is already talking about a final deal, allowing Iran to have some level of enrichment domestically. I have real concerns with that. Is Rouhani a sort of wolf in sheep's clothing? Well, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would answer it that way. I would describe it as saying that Rouhani is not a moderate. He's the least radical who is allowed to run. You have to be allowed to run in this system. And in any event, presidents don't make a whole lot of difference in Iran, all elements of power with the supreme leader. But for fun, I want to read you and see if you can guess the date of the following piece from a declassified CIA report. Okay? Okay. Because this gets to the question. We have to guess the nearest date wins the prize, which is what? My everlasting friendship. Because you asked what is the impact for Hezbollah. And I think that the impact for Hezbollah is, again, Hezbollah is in this strategic relationship. I think they lose not a wink of sleep over fear that they will be thrown under the bus in some grand bargain with Iran. Not one bit. Listen to this. I'm just taking out some names. That's all I'm changing here. Although the president of Iran is sought to improve relations with some Western nations, since directly assuming the presidency, events of the past year prove that Tehran continues to view the selective use of terrorism as a legitimate tool. Iranian terrorist attacks targeting enemies of the regime of the previous year were probably approved in advance by the president and other senior leaders. But the planning implementation of these operations are probably managed by other senior officials, most of whom are the president's appointees or allies. I'll go with 2005. 2005. Anybody else? August 1990. August 1990, referencing here, Rafsan Jani. If you're interested, this is actually something that's cut from the book. It's published on our website at Washington Institute.org. The policy watch entitled Iranian terrorism under moderate presidents. And I used some of the D-class from after Rafsan Jani and Khatami, the last two, quote unquote, moderate Iranian presidents were elected, and some of the CIA's assessments thereof. They note that there was increased diplomatic engagement around the world. It was much more pleasant. There were openings at home theological, social, women could wear more color in their clothing, show more hair, not even cover their hair. But that ultimately on the issue of terrorism, nothing changed for the better. In fact, things got worse, including Kobar Towers. They also stress, as I said, that ultimately it's the supreme leader, not the presidents, who make decisions on these things. But I'll ask you this. Once Rafsan Jani was one of the first people to say that Iran should get a nuke and maybe use it against Israel, a lot fewer people continue to refer to him as a moderate. But when he was elected president, he was widely seen as a moderate, especially in compared to his predecessor. Do you remember who his predecessor was? The guy who is now the supreme leader of Iran. It's amazing to me how few people remember this. And compared to him, no question. Rafsan Jani was seen as a moderate. Two quick questions before we open it to the audience. You mentioned Kobar Towers. Tell us about what you're taking. Explain what Kobar Towers is, in a sentence, and then your take on what happened. Kobar Towers is the 1996 bombing of the barracks for U.S. Air Force personnel. It's actually a coalition base in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia near Duran, there to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, ironically protecting Shia of Iraq from Saddam Hussein, that was bombed, one of the largest explosions ever to happen, non-nuclear explosions on planet Earth. It supplanted the one beforehand, which was the Marine Barracks bombing, which at that point was the largest non-nuclear explosion on the planet. I think it was felt in Bahrain, I think. It was. It was felt across the causeway. And it was carried out by Saudi Hezbollah with support from Kuds Force. And one of the people who had been indicted as a John Doe was a Kuds Force officer and from Lebanese Hezbollah bomb makers. There's an entire chapter dedicated to Kobar Towers. I worked at FBI under Louis Free. Louis Free, this possessed him. He, some people praised him, some people not, that he all but became the case agent for this case, became very, very close to the families, reportedly still meets with them annually on the anniversary. Just before the statute of limitations kicked in, the Department of Justice issued what I describe as an uber indictment, much, much longer, much, much more detailed indictment than any indictment you'll normally see, basically to get the information out there before the statute of limitations kicked in. Without the expectation that we'll necessarily see these guys, almost all of them we believe are hiding still in Iran. Was it misinterpreted at the time as an al-Qaeda attack? I get into this in the book and it was, you know, there was a lot of al-Qaeda activity happening at the time. It came on the heels of the al-Qaeda affiliated or inspired bombing of the OPM Sang, Saudi Arabian National Guard facility about a year earlier, which wasn't carried out by al-Qaeda per se, but they claimed that they got inspiration from bin Laden. The fact is we had, after the fact looking at it, there were multiple government inquiries that I get into in the book, we had al-Qaeda-related threat information going on. We had Hezbollah, Quds Force threat information that was going on. And so even in the first days after the attack, some of the declassified CIA reports are hemming and hawing it. It could be al-Qaeda. It could be Iran. It could be this. They also tied it to all kinds of other things. It could be. At the end of the day, we have zero doubt now, none, that this was in fact Hezbollah with the exception that there have been times when al-Qaeda and Hezbollah have sort of cooperated. So for example, when Hezbollah, when al-Qaeda decided that they were going to try and blow up and eventually did successfully blow up two of our embassies in East Africa, they just didn't have the capabilities for these massive truck bombs. And so they sucked up their pride and they had a former Egyptian-American special forces officer. Someone I think you've written about once or twice, facilitate some meetings for them with both Iran and Hezbollah. It's all, the CIA class is public now. I've written about it many times that some of these guys actually went to Iran and got trained. Some of them went to Lebanon, al-Qaeda people, and got trained by Hezbollah. Some of the people who carried out these East Africa embassy bombings were in fact trained in Iran and in Lebanon by Hezbollah. There's earlier precedent or potential precedent with Khabar. I worked briefly for the 9-11 Commission and one of the things 9-11 Commission report notes is there are some things that point to possibly some type of al-Qaeda small involvement in what we understand was a Hezbollah-Iran operation in Khabar. And that's one of the tantalizing things that the 9-11 Commission leaves out there as needs more investigation. The other one along these lines is the fact that there was a flight from Beirut to Tehran on which some of the hijackers were flying that included some Hezbollah guys. And was that planned? Was that just Iran keeping tabs on them? How many Beirut to Tehran flights are there where there's nobody in the flight that has anything to do with Hezbollah? I mean we don't know and they say requires more investigation. There's a lot of conspiracy theory out there that Khabar was al-Qaeda. It's bull. Khabar was Hezbollah with Iran. There are some questions as to whether or not there was any kind of al-Qaeda-ish fingerprint on there too. And the same way that one might say there was an Iran Hezbollah-ish fingerprint on East Africa even though that was absolutely al-Qaeda. One point. So the final question is Hasbollah's drone program, how advanced is that? Well this has come up now because about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago, someone assassinated Hajj Hassan Hilal Aqees in Lebanon. And he is a senior Hezbollah commander who after his assassination Hezbollah said was in charge of basically everything. They said he was in charge of the drone program. They said he was in charge of Palestinian portfolio. He was fighting in Syria. He was smuggling weapons, which is weird because he might have been involved in one, two, or maybe even three of those things but probably not everything. He wasn't very well known but he's discussed in the book because we had a case here in the United States of a bunch of Hezbollah guys raising a few million dollars probably not tons, maybe 1.5 million, maybe more. And some of it going to Hezbollah through cigarette smuggling in North Carolina from the Carolinas up to Michigan. And one of the people there was involved with a network in Canada that was procuring dual use items, night vision goggles, laser range finders, these types of things for Hezbollah. The guy who was heading that network was Mohammed Dabouk. The guy who I mentioned earlier wanted to be six different times asked to be a suicide bomber and was turned down. And Hajj Hassan at the time was overseeing this Canadian procurement ring. And so in this case in open court here in the United States in Charlotte, in fact I served as an expert in that case for DOJ interpreting and explaining some of these FBI reports, some of the Canadian security and intelligence service intercepts. The only time I know of still to date more foreign intelligence service has declassified, mildly redacted but declassified I think it was about 110 pages of telephone intercepts for use in open court. And a whole bunch of them involved Mohammed Dabouk and others in the phone with Hajj Hassan Hila-Lakees. And including we believe a couple of references, one overt and one not so overt. They talk about the father but later on US law enforcement says that it was their understanding that the father was a reference to Mugna. And the drones, what are their capabilities? Well the only thing we know for sure is that they have. How many we don't know. You remember about a year ago they flew a drone out from Lebanon over the Med south and then made a sharp left hand turn into Israeli airspace over Israeli land in the south near Demona where Israel's believed to have the nuclear reactor. The Israelis shot it down. Did the Israelis allow it in so they could shoot it down and test it? Were they caught off guard? Anything's possible. The Israelis were certainly shaken up by it. It's a long-range drone and there's a lot of concern about this. And it was a surveillance. I mean there's no, these are surveillance drones at these points. Right. This is not a drone like our drone with hellfire missiles. The fear is that surveillance drone could also be fit with explosives and be used as a dumb drone meaning just crashing into something. But at a minimum in terms of surveillance, yes they have pretty sophisticated capabilities that they get from Iran. If you could, if you have a question raise your hand. Raise your mic and identify yourself and your affiliation. Start with this gentleman here. They see behind you. Can you hear me? Yes. My name's Adnan Zulfika. I'm a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. You may have addressed it right at the start of your talk. I was a couple minutes late so my apologies if you've already touched this. I'm curious as to what you think Hezbollah's involvement in Syria and sort of this engagement with kind of Sunni transnational jihadi networks, et cetera and the tensions that's raised. Like what impact do you think that's going to have with regard to Hezbollah's global footprint and sort of their relationships with the Sunni groups moving forward? You know this has created tremendous Sunni Shia tensions and it's not just this in a vacuum. It's coming on the heels of Iraq, coming on the heels of existing long-standing Sunni Shia tensions. I wrote an article a couple months ago already in foreign policy actually around the anniversary of the East Africa Embassy bombings talking about some of the intelligence we just discussed and I concluded that if there is any you know very very small silver lining of any kind to this and there are very few this is a massive humanitarian catastrophe you know geopolitical catastrophe it's that the likelihood that the extreme Sunnis and the extreme Shia cooperating together like for East Africa or other things is very very unlikely right now but what is likely is whatever happens in Syria and it's not going to end soon and it's not going to end well I would love to be wrong don't get me wrong. The Sunni Shia tensions are going to have ramifications we'll be dealing with for a decade from the Levant through the Gulf at a minimum and it's going to be very very ugly but it does it reduce that global desire to do something in Argentina or or not at all not at all. Hezbollah is not like Al-Qaeda in the sense that if Al-Qaeda can do something their goals are so macro that they do it and I think each thing somehow helps Hezbollah Hezbollah is not going to hit you every time they can they like to have off-the-shelf planning if their interests are Iranian interests dictate if they can get done what they want to get done without violence that's fine violence is just no more or no less legitimate tool than anything else our concerns is that we have all kinds of of stresses going on with Iran right now if this Geneva process doesn't go well there more tensions one of the consistent things throughout all of the D-class I find is this ongoing assessment over the years that the likelihood is that Hezbollah wouldn't target American interests certainly not in the homeland unless they felt that we the United States were directly undermining their interest core interests or their ability to continue functioning or those interests of Iran I can make a pretty compelling case that we're there they believe that we're behind Syria we've been doing all kinds of things against their financing from Lebanese Canadian Bank exposing networks in Africa all kinds of different things you can make a pretty good case that that they think that we're coming pretty close to undermining their interests right now it's not their footprint abroad that's going to be as affected as it is their ability to continue playing the dominant political role that they played in Lebanon think about it Hezbollah spent tremendous amount of time doing two things a especially since the 2000 Israeli withdrawal the 2006 war and the 2008 takeover of downtown Beirut a trying to convince people that they are resistance and create eight in their words not one a culture of resistance and that resistance of course is targeting Israel but the Israelis aren't in Syria I mean they're not resisting Israel in Syria they say that they are defending the Palestinian cause in Syria but it's so ludicrous that their own people aren't buying it even and mothers are complaining when their sons come home from Syria in coffins draped at the Hezbollah flag well it would have been one thing if he was fighting the resistance but what's he doing in Syria and then even more so again especially since 2006 2008 they've been pushing and pushing and pushing this idea that they are Lebanese Lebanese first yes they are Shia and yes they are a particular party and yes they're close to Iran but they do nothing that is only in the party's interest in the interest of the Shia sectarian community alone or in the interest just of Iran if it's also in the interest of those things that shouldn't surprise Lebanon has mutual interest with all of these groups but they are Lebanese first you can't make an argument that anybody will respect that what you're doing in Syria which effectively is taking a rebellion that became a civil war and transforming it into a sectarian conflict spilling over borders east and west including west into Lebanon that this is in Lebanon's interest and it is facing a huge problem within the Shia the Shia community many people are very very angry and I think as Bullah has a short-term strategy contrary perhaps to conventional western wisdom how to deal with this problem they're not concerned about how to win back the Sunnis eventually they believe they'll win this war through muscle and financial digest they'll get them back what they want them maybe a little outside your area of expertise but it seems to me you know Assad and his and al-awaits in general have pretty heretical beliefs well they they if you're a kind of you know standard Shia and presumably if you're a you know a member of the regime in Iran you have very strong beliefs about the right form of Shiaism and yet Assad practices something we don't even really know what al-awaits believe but it's clearly very unconventional by any standard right so why are they supporting him because it has much more to do with geopolitics than anything else and because they and their Shia allies and Bullah on either side of the al-awaits have the al-awaits who are at least maybe sort of Shia uh there can be explained that way as as allies if I just finish this point yeah their their their strategy is to make this conflict even more sectarian in the long term that's not in Hezbollah's interest the more sectarian things are it's not good for Hezbollah at home but in the near term the more sectarian it becomes the faster Christians and Shia alike are going to circle the wagons getting back to one of your earlier questions for fear that if they don't those frothing at the mouth barbarian Salafi jahadi takfir al-Qaeda guys are going to butcher us all and Nick Blanford and others have written about some of the even Iranian radicalization recruitment videos that have been found clearly weren't intended to be made public being used more in Iraq but also a little bit in Lebanon making this exact pitch who I mean you mentioned Nick Blanford who who writes on Hezbollah that you found was particularly useful for this book well it's really interesting because there's a lot of people who do really good work on Hezbollah and basically nobody who's focused on this okay Nick Nick has done some of it if you read Nick's book he has a few things abroad here and here and there but nobody's really done it it just wasn't out there this was not something you could do research by Google and I'll be honest it took me nine years to put it together and then start piecing it together because even when you got it you know what it's like you go out and you do research you get a document but then you've got to vet it and and you have to as we said earlier do it in such a way that you're not feeding them the document so it just takes time and you meet with the Americans well Americans might have a position on this you know the Israelis they might have a position on this so you can't take anybody at complete face value so by the way once I started doing this I obviously met with the Israelis and the Americans and the Brits and the Canadians but I also met with the Chileans and the Singaporeans and the Indonesians and the Kuwaitis and the Jordanians and Romanians and you know if this book in fact is as I expect his bullet will describe it an international conspiracy then it is just that an international conspiracy this gentleman here oh from the microphone one second that way we can Ali al-Ahmad al-Ghulam stood recently in a London court it was shown that the brother of the Saudi king laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for Hezbollah but we don't see him in the treasury list of people who are funding terrorism so why is that is that part of the trend since 2001 that to exclude the Saudis from these measures I don't know this particular case and I think it'd be a hard press to make a case that after 2001 we were excluding the Saudis especially right after 2001 the Saudis were a little bit hysterical at our fixation on the Saudis in particular because so many of the hijackers that come from Saudi Arabia there's a lot of radicalization coming from Saudi Arabia it really took till you had the the bombings and the shooting attacks on on foreign workers for the Saudis to start doing better on some of the things that we've needed them to do better on there's more the Saudis need to do corruption in the Middle East is not unique to Saudi but shouldn't surprise but there are things that they're doing better now and on this in particular the Saudis tend to do quite well because till it's be perfectly blunt the Saudis are in Saudi Arabia a professor version of Sunni Islam that has no love lost for Shia in general and for Lebanese Hezbollah they are quite vocal about their antipathy for Hezbollah now Hezbollah seems quite convinced that the Laquice assassination was if not carried out by the Saudis at least financed by the Saudis I don't know if that's the case but there actually is precedent for it in terms of Saudi financing and some CIA how serious was the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington well that's a completely separate story it wasn't Hezbollah it was Quds Force and as kooky as it was and I write about it in the last chapter of the book as strange as it was it was absolutely real you think Cafe Milano was the place it was a very well-known restaurant not far from here where a lot of senators are known to frequent on a daily basis and I think they don't want to freak people out by by highlighting which place it was the fact is though it forced the intelligence community to reassess kind of where the red lines are and I get into it in the book I talked about unit 400 right around the time that unit 400 was created and these two guys one stranger than the other were assigned to to head it shortly right thereafter one of them is told your cousin is visiting from the United States and it turns out his cousin is this game that guy named Arbab Syar whose wife left him who's used car business went down the toilet who's getting stuck in some criminal business opportunity south of the border goes home to Iran to visit family for the first time in a long time and one of the family members he meets as a cousin who just happens to be one of the coulds force generals tasked with leading unit 400 the spell onto their lap like a on a silver platter and then just became a question of can we do this with enough reasonable deniability they really hoped and thought that we if we found out about it or or when it succeeded would think that it was done by drug cartels and frankly as strange a plot as it was that probably would have been the case if it weren't for the fact that we got completely lucky and the person that he went to his contact through whom he was going to get an assassin was a DEA informant in the back here no stop thanks hi I have a question with Hezbollah getting involved in Syria do you expect a direct confrontation between al-qaeda jihadist with Hezbollah in Lebanon can you identify yourself sorry can you identify yourself I'm ziat I'm from Lebanon okay it just work in the financial sector but just have an interest to so it's already happening in Syria that's for sure the great fear is that it's going to start happening in Lebanon just today state department designated a fatah al-aslam associate as they describe him who apparently has been tapped to be the chief of the Palestinian branch of jibid al-Nusra in Lebanon a fatah al-aslam is what but the al-aslam is an al-qaeda affiliate in in in Lebanon you remember they they fought this battle pitch battle with the laf and in the Palestinian refugee camp in the north and our bard and they have been largely confined to the refugee camps now since then many of them are now fighting in Syria the fact that you have a guy whose job appears to be the chief of the Palestinian branch of fatah al-aslam in Lebanon is disconcerting and this is one of the many reasons I'm saying that look the bottom line is I don't mean to speak for you but I'll speak for you if you are Lebanese of any faith of any sectarian community I'm not but I have many friends who are your greatest fear is renewed civil war and the fact that Hezbollah they're not the only ones now you got al-qaeda in there too but Hezbollah has done more than anybody else to make this a sectarian conflict that a and b and one that is that it's flowing over the border both ways into Iraq west I'm sorry east and west into Lebanon uh this this is a huge this is a really critical critical issue this lady at the back yes please manargo name from Middle East news agency Egypt uh do you think that the ongoing nuclear talks now could lead both Iran and Hezbollah to abandon support for Syria for a certain period for example or and at the same time could it also lead both Iran and Hezbollah to abate the terrorist acts in the whole world for a certain why this talks no because wouldn't it be great if but there's no evidence whatsoever Rouhani himself has said that they are negotiating over as he put it this one file by the way it's a brilliant political way to put it because then we hear this one file we hear the nuclear file his constituency here's this one file they hear the economic situation in in in Iran but he's making this one file they're not negotiating over their human rights abuses at home they're not negotiating over their support for Hezbollah or other terrorism around the world they're not negotiating over Syria I think Hezbollah sees what's going on in Syria as an existential threat to them I think Iran sees this also in not quite but nearly existential terms this is their only real alliance in the Arab world they are all in to throw them under the bus now would be to to to do what they say we the United States have done with all of our allies with Mubarak etc they are saying look say what you will but we stick with our allies and the best of all circumstances maybe they can try and convince Assad to leave and some other Alawite who's not a whole lot better to take his place I don't know if that would be a whole lot better but frankly at this point that might be the best we can hope for and I don't think it'll have any bearing whatsoever as the quote I read from 1990 makes clear even then that this is going to undermine their support for violence around the world when it suits their interests not everybody in Iran but certainly the revolutionary hardliners still today believe not only that but judge others by their commitment to the idea of exporting the revolution and Hezbollah and this quote from Hezbollah finished in the book he says and it's quite refreshing a little scary but quite refreshing he says look if you don't appreciate our sincere commitment to the principle of the rule of the jurisprudence then you don't understand who we are and there's this other quote that is probably apocryphal and I say this in the book but it was too good not to use so I use it noting that it's probably apocryphal one of the Hezbollah parliamentarians tells the story it's also a game of telephone one of the Hezbollah parliamentarians tells the story that Nasrallah once told him that if the supreme leader of Iran asked him to he Nasrallah would divorce his wife now maybe she's just a horrible woman I don't know but they tell it clearly to underscore the idea that that's the level of the commitment can you say that about every Hezbollah's foot soldier I'm sure not can you say it about the upper echelons the Nasrallah's Naim Qasem's etc yeah maybe right here in the back Sena Syrian coalition I just want to ask you don't you think the war of June 2006 and then when Hezbollah made a lot of like people support him and he looked he looked like the hero for Arab people at least Syrian Lebanese who fought like Israel and now in Syria like a lot of people Christian and like Sunni they still support Hezbollah because they believe that he's fighting Israel so don't you feel the war if there's a relation between the war of 2006 then like the uprising that met Hezbollah still looking like hero thank you I actually think it's the opposite I see no evidence at all that there are Sunnis in particular who still see Hezbollah as you know the the the big hero who stuck it to Israel no question that after the July 2006 war Hezbollah in general Nasrallah himself riding high all over the place but Hezbollah now is in a war with the Sunnis and I I'd be very interested if you know anybody a Sunni in the region who's going to tell me because I'm talking to people all the time and I'm hearing anything about that Christians it's a little bit different the Christians are divided many many different ways in Lebanon one of those many ways tends to be who is more fearful of the Shia and who is more fearful of the Sunni and that is shifting right now I think because you're having a much greater al-Qaeda presence in Lebanon than you've ever had and that I think is already beginning to push people closer to Hezbollah not because they love Hezbollah but because they see Hezbollah as the only armed capable militant entity capable of protecting them from the Takfiris gentlemen here yeah I'm Jim Burr I'm a lifelong life server here as a journalist given your tremendous range of experience at very high levels of fighting these things what's your assessment of how good our our strategy is and and our tactics and controlling this I alluded earlier to this case and it's a series of cases in Philadelphia when I when I give public talks I actually like to end with that one when I'm speaking for longer than half an hour because by the time we get there people are just petrified and I want them to understand as well as not everywhere and the people who are here keeping us safe are actually quite good at what they do that gets to more tactics though my concern I think most of us that have concerns our concerns are more at strategy I think that strategically we over the past few years have been making a lot of mistakes because we made huge mistakes in Egypt and through no wisdom of our own we've been given a second chance I think that we've made a whole series of mistakes in Syria and as I said earlier there are things we could have done 18 months ago that now we can't do as easily and only now we're discussing maybe to do something and we're moving so slowly I mean think about it we were as we said we were at a period not too long ago where we were counting the days how much longer our side could passably last and now there's I don't think anybody's counting days at all you can't and I think that there are there's a missing connection between the two I'll give you just one example and I work at a non-partisan think tank this is not a partisan comment at all but I think we missed an opportunity after the use of chemical weapons the big use of chemical weapons in august and the crossing of the president's red line which appears to have happened on the one-year anniversary of the president's issuance of said red line if you think that's coincidence please see me afterwards for bridges I'd like to sell you all the politics aside there was a lot of concern about doing something that would be perceived as being such a big deal that a would be disproportionate and b it would be seen as getting involved in the war anything that might undermine the Assad regime's ability to continue existing was deemed to be a step too far because then we would be making a direct difference in in the fight and I think that was part of the outside the politics discussion which was obviously a huge piece of it all this was from a substantive perspective part of the issue I can't just ask you something about that I mean are we not did we sort of become paradoxically caught in a very we had a very mixed strategic approach which was we wanted Assad to go but then we didn't and we never really admitted that publicly that was the day fact officially our policy still is we want to start to go we didn't we wanted to start to go but we just didn't want to be the ones to do it de facto suddenly I think it became we sort of actually want Assad to remain is that a reasonable the way I put it is this and it's actually it makes you feel dirty to say it because more than anything else this is a humanitarian catastrophe but I think that if we could snap our fingers and end this conflict tomorrow we probably wouldn't because bad guys on one side of the other they're only bad guys in the sentence right now but let me just finish making this point what I was telling people at the time is I thought there were some very very very specific things we could have done one the biggest one in particular was there are only about 12 to 15 airstrips in all of syria that can take the heavy aircraft flying in from Iran resupplying his ball up in the Assad regime with weapons on a weekly sometimes daily basis right we have specialized munitions to take out exactly those types of runways no boots in the ground not necessarily you could have might have been more efficient didn't even have to use fixed wing aircraft the likelihood of doing this in the middle of the night and hitting a runway and having a bunch of unintended casualties is pretty small and the impact for the day after it would have been seen as proportional the impact for the day after it would have been huge they're able to get all of this resupply and we're not resupplying the rebels and what we do supply them with mostly non-lethal they can't control and and and and now we've suspended and what would be the legal authorities to do that we have so much precedent Kosovo and that to to go in and Kosovo was a NATO operation which which doesn't give you more authorities well it gives you at least I mean it gives you at least some international consensus that I think we would have had massive international consensus for this yeah like I'm not a lawyer but I think my mind but I mean I think you can't you know we're not in the business of unilaterally you know I think usually we're looking for some kind of top cover whether it's the Arab League the UN I'm sorry we've never looked the Arab League for top cover well in Libya in Libya obviously we did Libya Libya was much more NATO our belief came on that's fantastic but look whether whether it was Gaddafi in the day if the president of the United States wants to do a limited night amount of airstrikes and national interest there there are plenty of ways to do that at the end of the day this came down to from a policy perspective not wanting to do things that would be seen as the United States making all the difference in the world and then this becoming a US issue and then much much more so the politics of it all the president looked at the polling data saw people are against foreign intervention of any kind they want out he thought maybe McCain and Lindsey Graham could help bring the Republicans around because they've been saying this is something we should do I think he felt maybe together this could be a first bipartisan thing in a long time buck public opinion together that didn't happen thank god Putin was there to save us at the end of the day by the way if we actually do get rid of these chemical weapons but it's a it is it's a bigger deal than the small number of airstrikes if in fact it happens that would be great but the fact that we got saved doesn't mean that this was to your question strategy thank you very much I'm Benjamin to a no affiliation uh you mentioned that uh the the interim agreement with the Iranians had some flaws has some flaws I don't recall whether you said they were serious flaws or whether you think that what is the most serious uh flaw in that agreement uh how much time do we have we have two minutes well there are several um I think the most fundamental are well a they're still allowed to engage in enrichment and we de facto have acknowledged their as if right to enrichment we have not said that but by saying they can continue to enrich during this time we're de facto saying enrichment is not the ultimate thing and again as I said earlier my concern is that the president has already said to the public he sees that under an ultimate deal you'd have to give Iran some enrichment rights which I think is a very bad decision a b uh the kind of activity that they would anyway be doing at Iraq a r a k the plutonium facility is completely allowed the type of things that they aren't within six months of doing they can't do but build the road there finish building the wall it's as if I say to you listen you can't go to mars tomorrow and then I tell people who's not going to mars tomorrow because I said he can't all the things that they are on schedule to do in the next six months they can continue doing but to me the biggest thing is this this idea of it being mutually renewable after six months right separate the fact that it hasn't even started yet since then to now it's just free time for them the Iranians I actually have a master's degree in negotiation theory there's a lot of literature on how Iran negotiates including negotiating with you over the right for you to continue negotiating with them for which they will expect some concessions what Iran is going to do is over the next six months make sure that they're able to get close enough to our nose with a big enough carrot to say look we're not there yet but let's continue negotiating in which case this is going to get renewed and it's going to buy time and it's going to buy time and uh that's not in our interest so when people say well so we do this for six months and if nothing happens at the end of six months we're no less off which is almost a direct quote of what the president says I don't agree there's no commitment this is necessarily going to be six months I don't have faith that we're going to be able to walk away from a deal and unlike most things in life that are mostly gray area this is one of those rare places it's black and it's white there is a good deal and there's bad deal there's no almost good deal my fear is that we're going to agree to a pretty good deal which by definition is not a good deal most people have gotten it wrong saying the Israelis are against the negotiations no they've said explicitly they are for a good deal and in this they're right if there's a good deal great if it's not a good deal it's not a good deal that's up to the boss go ahead the Iranians would agree to a deal in which there was no enrichment no not at all I think that's what I think that's what we need to be demanding of them I think that there are ways that we could have made things acceptable enough that they would have had a hard time turning it down but I think whether or not they could accept it we can't say well that's too hard for them therefore we won't demand it even though that really is the threshold of what we need if you know if all they'll give us is a whole lot less than our minimum then that we don't accept that just because that's all they'll give some negotiations are great well thank you very much talk to love it thank you good job