372. Syria, al-Sharaa, and the future of the Middle East

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Welcome to a very special Restless Politics live stream with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Studd. Joined by David McCloskey, who if you are wise enough to have signed up already to the Restless Classified, you will know as a former CIA analyst and author. But the reason we wanted to do this live stream with him is because David is something of an expert on a country that we're very interested in, which Rory and I've just been to, namely Syria. Whereas you may know we interviewed the new president, former al-Qaeda fighter, Ahmed al-Sharaf. It's been one of our biggest, most successful, most watched interviews by some distance, actually. You can watch that on YouTube or you go to Leading.

But we thought it'd be really interesting to get David's take. If you listen to the Restless Classified, you'll know he talks a lot about Syria because he knows a lot about Syria. So, David, thank you very much for doing this. And we're going to talk about all sorts of things. But first, just, you know, I know you listened to the interview. First of all, if you were still a CIA analyst and you've got a new leader coming into the scene like that, what sort of things are you looking for when you actually hear the guy talking on the record like that?

Well, first off, thanks for having me on, guys. Really excited to be here. And, you know, honestly, my thought while watching and listening to that interview was basically that this is about as good as we could have hoped for, I think, in Syria. I mean, this guy, you know, is saying the right things right now, which given his, and as you guys discussed at the beginning of that, like, given his background is not necessarily, you know, that wasn't a given, right? But the fact that he is, I mean, I wrote some of these quotes down, you know, "what unites us in peace is far greater than what divides us in war." You know, "the revolution ended with the overthrow of the regime." I mean, this guy is saying a lot of things that I think should give us some hope, and at least some cautious optimism about the way he wants to sort of run this play in Syria going forward.

So I'm just about as hopeful as, you know, you could be in Syria, which, you know, is saying something given the past 15 years. And David, you've written a wonderful novel, which if people haven't read it, they definitely should. Set in Damascus, really realistic spy story, set in Syria. And one of the themes that keeps reoccurring in that book is an attempt by the regime to portray the opposition as Islamists. This is seen in Paris, where one of the conditions given to the lady is that she's to go back and say they're all a bunch of Islamists.

Take us back to that moment. And to play my own cards on the table, when I was asked as a British government minister to fund Syrians in northwestern Syria, I was very anxious about people's links to Al-Qaeda. And particularly anxious when one of the people we funded, who was a head teacher, appeared on a Jabhat al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda linked stage surrounded by these people.

Take us back to, before we get on to why you're reassured, take us back to why, you know, eight, 10 years ago, people would have been worried about this outcome. Yeah. Well, I mean, quite simply, I mean, you, you hit it right there, Rory. I mean, the most effective fighting opposition to Assad was almost always, when you're talking about sort of the Sunni Arab groups in Syria, they were almost always sort of Salafi jihadists with that kind of maybe an Al-Qaeda bent, right? I mean, those groups with experience fighting in Iraq, they were the sort of vanguard of the armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad in the kind of 2011, 2012, 2013 stages of the war. They were the most well-organized groups. They tended to be the most well-funded. They had actual practical combat experience fighting us in Iraq, and they could raise money. And so it was, it was always this tremendous concern, you know, in the intelligence community that these groups tended to be, and also they had, many of them had a real view on how do you actually govern a piece of territory you hold? How do you actually provide services? How do you, you know, run hospitals and build roads and deliver bread? I mean, you know, they had this kind of proto-state structure to them that made them, you know, a potential replacement to Assad. At the time, and I think you guys talk about this also in the interview up front, at the time, many of these groups also had a kind of transnational view of the sort of, you know, they wanted to carry out or they were interested in carrying out attacks in some cases outside of Syria.

And I think what you have seen with Shara over the past five, seven years has been an evolution toward, really away from that, and some instances where he has actually fought and defeated groups in Northwest Syria who have been promoting that kind of more transnational ideology, I would say.

And David, just quickly, and then I'll back to Alistair. Give us a sense of why the US would have put a $10 million bounty on his head. How important would that have made him? What did that really mean? Why was that important to the US government?

Well, I mean, you know, he came to, he came, I mean, he's Syrian. And one of the things that I think is interesting about this guy is that he's like an upper middle class kid from Damascus, right? So in some respects, he's kind of now back to form. But I mean, he came back to Syria from Iraq after having served with then Al Qaeda in Iraq, and then the Islamic State, he came as Baghdadi's guy in Syria to sort of take these networks that the Syrians had permitted to run through Syria to sort of fuel the fight in Iraq to turn them back into Syria to fight Assad. And so he came as kind of the vanguard of, you know, a caliphate, in many respects, which is why he has that bounty on his head. And he also knew, you guys talk about this as well. What exactly this guy did in Iraq, in those years, remains a bit of a mystery to me, you know, how deeply involved he was.

So and I'm sure inside the intelligence community right now, there are probably some hard facts on those things that fed, you know, the sort of stamp of a $10 million bounty on his head.

So David, there's you saying that he said a lot of the right things, and that gives you some sort of hope. You had Tulsi Gabbard, who's now Trump's kind of head of intelligence, as it were, her confirmation hearing, this is somebody who famously went out and spent a bit of time with Assad, and has ever since been saying that she wasn't kind of, you know, fond of Assad. But she basically said, you know, I've got no, no sort of truck for Assad. However, Syria is now run by an al Qaeda terrorist who danced in the streets, when 9-11 happened.

So where does the policy position get formed? And how does it get formed? And how do people like you are working on the ground, or you're analyzing every word? How do you frame what you then put up to the policymakers and just trying to explain to people that process and how it might take shape?

Well, yeah, I think, you know, we have, and I think, frankly, the statements, those sort of statements by Tulsi, and frankly, they reflect a not insignificant piece of our kind of political spectrum here, which is you look at this guy's background, Al-Shara, and you look at the groups he fought for. And it's quite easy. I mean, you know, sort of the sort of cartoon stamp of we've got al Qaeda running Syria is you can sympathize and empathize with that, with that viewpoint.

That said, you know, we, I think, have a pretty poor track record over the past 20 plus years in the US foreign policy establishment of looking at a part of the world could be Syria, could be the broader Middle East, trying to think about the things that we want, and then resourcing practical policies to get them. We are so I don't know if it's the fact that we have staffed our foreign policy establishment with not the greatest folks over the past two generations, or whether it's just the fact that we're separated from this part of the world by, you know, sort of language, culture, and ocean.

But we it's just fantasy, you know, we have to engage with Syria as it is today. And I think the reality of the place is that we have interests there, we have things that we want. And we have some leverage, be it the sanctions, or be it our support for the SDF in Northeast Syria, we should use those things to come up with a practical policy that that, you know, advances our interests, we shouldn't just wave the Al Qaeda card right now, because I think it's disingenuous and disconnected from reality.

And the guys in the CIA and the other agencies who are doing your job today, does it help or hinder that when Assad falls, Trump's initial reaction is to say, Syria is not our problem? In other words, we don't want to get involved in this? Is that is good for you? If you're working on that brief? Or is that? Is that a problem?

Yeah, I think I would separate the intel from the policy side on this. I think on the intel side, it doesn't matter all that much, because, frankly, what the CIA is doing right now, and I have no idea what sort of covert action authorities we might have in Syria, but from a straight up intel foreign intelligence gathering standpoint, that kind of stuff, those statements don't matter at all. There's collection priorities in Syria, we're trying to collect what we can be at via human network signals, intelligence, whatever, from a policy side of things. You know, I think that statement, it actually does reflect something that is kind of true about Syria, when you think about a small country without significant natural resources, without nuclear weapons in a part of the world that doesn't, you know, matter as much to us as other parts do. Trump's reflecting something real there. At the same time, we do have interests, we have US troops on the ground.

"I think a statement like that doesn't help us from the standpoint of working with regional partners, working with the Syrians, to get things that we want done down the line, that kind of statement, it gets us nothing, and it potentially confuses sort of friend and foe alike, which is not helpful."

"David, one of the things that we went through in Britain quite painfully, is as Britain ceased to be a global power, and retreated from the world, there was less and less interest from British politicians in secret intelligence. Yeah. Because frankly, there was less and less they could do, or less and less they wanted to do in many of these countries. And so, we closed stations all over the world, and we shut down a lot of agents, a lot of intelligence streams, because frankly, we were producing a Rolls Royce service for people who couldn't act on that intelligence. So, if the US is moving quickly towards isolationism, and is basically saying, we couldn't care less, the administration couldn't care less about Syria, we don't really care about Africa. In fact, we don't really care about much of the world. Eventually, presumably, that does have an impact on how resources are allocated, how intelligence priorities are set, and how the CIA does its job around the world."

"I think so. Although I think that process is slower than one would imagine. And frankly, I'm not yet convinced that a lot of the smoke at the highest levels of our political system, in terms of talking about the Central Intelligence Agency, the overall intelligence community, why we need it, why we don't need it, I'm not yet convinced that that is going to translate down into sort of significant changes at the actual working level. I mean, you know, we have this kind of buyout program dangled as a starting point. It's not at all clear. I mean, we could talk more about that and how I think it's, you know, probably better do these things in a sort of targeted way. But that sort of thing, it's not at all clear yet what that will actually do to CIA."

"And I think, frankly, you know, we continue to have a level of policymaker, at least we did in the first Trump administration, who was, you know, below Trump, but still very interested in consuming, you know, secret intelligence about parts of the world that maybe the president himself was not particularly interested in. So I think we'll have to wait and see."

"What sort of impact will it be having on people who work in, excuse me, your line of work, that, for example, those who even suggested that the Hunter Biden stuff might have been a kind of Russian operation are now sort of basically told you no longer want it. And this idea that you, you know, you have to show absolute loyalty to not just the position of the president, but the current person of the president, that must be sending pretty alarming waves through the whole thing, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I think so. I actually I had a number of conversations with with intel folks just before Trump took office in kind of the December, January timeframe. And, you know, I think a lot of people who served in the first administration would again, again at the working level, right, these are people who are, you know, case officers and analysts who are out there, you know, actually doing the work, right? They're not political appointees. And in many cases, they're not even in DC. What they would have told you is, we basically just kept doing our jobs in the first administration, it was it was there was no real significant disruption to the work of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, I'm sure you can find little pockets where that wasn't the case. But in general, that seems to be the view. Now, there is precedent. And I think we're actually going to do this on a rest is classified show here in the next month or so. There are, you know, there is precedent for, you know, pretty significant purges at CIA."

Stansfield Turner did one famously called the Halloween massacre and Halloween of 1977, where they basically eliminated the position of about I think it was around 800. Directorate of Operations officers and just kind of set them packing, right? That was almost a decade before you were born, David. That's, um, that was a highly classified piece of information I gave Rory and Alistair before this started that Alistair's immediately leaked, immediately leaked to the live stream, shame on you.

So there is precedent for this kind of, you know, sort of purge or whatever you'd want to call it at the CIA. And it'd be within the rights of the CIA director and the President to do something like that. But I think different sort of the different twist here today is that, and I think you're right to point it out is that it is not, you know, it's very conceivable that you would, you'd come up, you'd drop that list based on a perception of sort of loyalty, right to the Trump agenda. And I think inside an organization like the CIA, that is a political, it has two political appointees in total. That is an extremely worrisome prospect and one that nobody should want to see come to pass.

Yeah, David, I mean, just to push it one more time, because I think we are entering a very different territory from the first administration. We're beginning to get signs that the administration basically cannot tolerate the idea that the US government could be funding anybody that disagrees with them. So, so one example of that is the way they're going after NGOs and civil society and saying USAID is a criminal organization because it was funding NGOs that occasionally criticize the American government. I mean, it's sort of mind blowing, given that our whole idea of civil society around the world was that we were funding NGOs that criticize other people's governments, right?

And of course, the CIA is still relatively fortunate. But if you look at USAID, you can really see the scale with which this administration is prepared to move and the speed with which they move. And I think the new director of the FBI is going to be a sort of terrifying thing to watch.

So is there any chance, David, that you're still putting too much reliance on what happened in the first administration and not reading the tea leaves enough from what's happening to USAID and FBI, and what therefore may soon be happening to you?

Yeah, no, I think, look, I'm very open to that. And I will agree that I've got a bit of anchoring bias just in looking at what happened in Trump 1.0, right? I think that, you know, the USAID, I mean, even apropos of Syria, right, this sort of, you know, evisceration of USAID, you know, is kind of a, it eliminates a source of influence and leverage, frankly, that we have in Syria, right, practically right now. And to really almost no benefit. I mean, the thing that if you zoom all the way out, and you kind of look at what, what these guys what they're doing now, with USAID, with these buyouts, whatever, I mean, you kind of, I'm left a bit scratching my head as to what the objective here is, because if it's cost cutting, you know, you're not really, you're not really cutting the most, you know, you're not cutting it the most effective way possible, right.

And so I agree, Rory, that it's, it's very possible that this could kind of unspool in a much more chaotic and ultimately destructive way than we saw in the first administration. And do you think there's even a risk that when we've seen this whole Tulsi Gabbard thing play out, the FBI guy that Rory's talking about, and you know, America is clearly a much bigger power than any of the other Five Eyes countries of which we're one. But at the same time, and I'd be interested in your take on which are the best intelligence agencies in the world, I think we think that we've got a very good intelligence service.

And I think there will be people within the secret intelligence service and in Australia and Canada and New Zealand right now, particularly Canada, that are thinking, can we really trust these people with the stuff that we're digging up and that Five Eyes relationship? First of all, how important is it? And secondly, do you think this kind of makes it a little bit vulnerable?

Yeah, you know, I'm already scouting, you know, for my second home in Canada and my third home in Greenland. So you know, I'm looking forward to the new era of American imperialism here. I mean, I, you know, I don't know, it's, Five Eyes is critically important. I mean, you know, it's a, I guess, a classic case of, if we have 20 of something, and you've got five of something, and the Canadians have three of something, and the Aussies have two, and the Kiwis have one, it's better to add all those things up and use them together, be it HUMINT, be it SIGINT, it makes a tremendous amount of sense, practically, right? Because of our shared interests, values, like, you would not, that is a valuable construct. And it's important to American security, it's important to UK security, Canadian, etc., right? I think that, again, the risks of, you know, information sort of leaking out on our side that end up damaging those relationships, I mean, it's there, certainly, I think, you know, I would probably have, again, there's a bit of a wait-and-see element here, but I do think that there is a risk, right, that if you pass us something, right, I mean, this is the case in any administration, but probably, maybe more so given the information management proclivities of the people in this one, that information that you might provide us that's sensitive gets out on our end and ends up damaging, you know, the relationship, damaging the Five Eyes Construct, certainly, but that overall, you know, Americans should want there to, want that Five Eyes Construct to exist, we get a lot out of it, you get a lot out of it, it works for everybody's benefit.

David, we're going to take a quick break, Alistair and David, and then as we come back from the break, we're going to pull you back a little bit towards Syria.

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Welcome back from the break and on the subject of Syria, I guess I'd love you to reflect on the risks which are facing the new president. So we've got Kurds, we've got Turkish-backed groups, we've got a bit of ISIS. But before we get onto that, what I want you to start on was the former regime.

So you, more than anyone, have written so beautifully about Bashar al-Assad's regime and its strength. And we've seen something that on the surface looks a little bit like debasification. We turned up in a Damascus where there was no police, no intelligence service, no security service and very few soldiers because they'd all been associated with the old regime. And a lot of them at senior level had headed back to Latakia where they're sitting up in the hills.

What risk is there that those people might come back and cause trouble? And how can one put a weighting or a probability on that risk? And how would it happen?

Yeah. Well, I think it's a very significant one. I think in, I'll just maybe take the debasification analogy first. And there's a very obvious comparison point here, which is you, in Saddam's Iraq, you had a sort of minority, Sunni-dominated regime. They said it's sort of military and security services that is overrun. And then those military and security services are essentially sent home, right? Where they start an insurgency.

In this case, you have a minority, Alawi-dominated military and security and sort of militia apparatus that in the same way is sort of sent packing after Assad flees. And it's very uncertain what's going to happen to them. So at that level, I accept kind of the analogy.

I think where I do think Syria is different, at least right now, other than both of these things could change. Number one, structurally, and I think, Shahid, I made this point in your interview, and I think he's right. The idea that sort of Assad was running a national army and that there was like one major coercive institution in Syria, or even a small handful, when he fell is false. It was a patchwork of sort of militias, warlord fiefdoms, you know, Alawi militias that were very fragmented, in many cases were essentially gangs and sort of, you know, money-making operations.

So the thing that got destroyed or dismantled was already extremely fragmented and messed up prior to him leaving. Then the second point I would make is that what HTS and what Shara have said thus far, and what they seem to be doing, is taking a much more selective approach to the former regime elements that have, you know, sort of fled, and how they would vet them and potentially bring, you know, ordinary kind of mid-level people back into the new regime, be it in its sort of bureaucracy or be it in its coercive apparatus.

So said maybe more plainly, I think they're being, they're not being as sort of, you're not just cutting off all those former elements and saying you have no future, there is a potential pathway back in to a new government. Now, so those are the differences, but I think it is true that there is a massive risk that as you have a bunch of, you know, Alawis with military, with combat experience who sit in the mountains for a long time without any hope of coming back into some structure where they are paid, the longer that goes on, the greater the chances that you have yet another, you know, sort of armed faction that Shara'a and the government need to deal with. And that I think is one of the major issues facing the country right now, is just the proliferation of the number of armed groups that need to be dealt with and sort of absorbed or coerced or included into a national government.

I said when Roy and I had a chat after the interview that I kept sort of feeling and seeing parallels with the Northern Ireland situation and how the IRA kind of moved, or parts of the IRA moved at different paces to others to get to the idea that there could be kind of a peaceful approach to the problem. I mean, how, and I remember once Tony Blair saying you've got to understand these guys, Adams and McGinnis, Gerry Adams and Martin McGinnis, they're walking around with the not inconsiderable risk somebody's going to put a bullet in the back of their head. Yeah. How big a risk is that to him right now? And I mean, the security, Rory will testify, the security around him was pretty intense. And what are the fears? Who will he be worried about? How will he be trying to get those people on site?

Yeah, well, he has a massive number of problems. He's got, I think, you know, he's got, I mean, you started to take this off, right? You have the Syrian National Army, basically Turkish Janissary group in the north of Syria. He's got the Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast, Kurds, armed group that's totally separate from HDS. He has, there are Druze militias down in Suwayda. There are other militias down south in Daraa. And he's got the Islamic State, which I mean, if you look at, I think there have been probably almost 10 foiled terror attacks over the past few months, probably in part because the US has been sharing intelligence with HDS to prevent these from happening. So he's got a massive number of potential groups interested in putting a bullet in his head. I also think, or at least, you know, where you'd have elements of a group that might consider it and really try to make it happen.

I also think below the waterline, and it's something we don't see, because these are not the guys who are giving interviews to British podcasters, but you have a harder line sort of group inside his kind of military council, who are, again, they're not the public face, but these are the people who have fought with him, bled, died, and who, I think, probably have views about the future of Syria, that most of us would, you know, they're not Jeffersonian Democrats, and he has to assuage that group and keep them on side as part of this transition while negotiating. So David, would they be hoping, if they were to listen to the interview that Roy and I did with them, would they be hoping and sitting there thinking, oh, I kind of understand why he's saying this, but he doesn't really mean it? Maybe. Maybe. But I think this is where I think some of the real risk is, and it's less on his points about sort of transnational jihad or external attacks or anything like that.

"I think it is more about how closed or open the political system will be, and whether, I think the biggest risk here is really about a drift into authoritarianism, and I think that's what those guys would be looking for, is when we talk about, when Chadha talks about being inclusive and kind of running a more open process to represent the different factions and groups that comprise Syria, is he talking about actually giving away power that this HTS sort of armed faction has earned over the past couple years, you know, or not? And I think that's where the tension probably below the waterline really is."

Al-Hajjah Help us understand a little bit more about the ideology of the hardliners. So I guess the Syrian opposition was broadly split in two, or it felt like it was. There were people who initially the West was very excited about, 2012, 13, 14, who were educated, apparently quite progressive, liberal Democrats. And then there was another group, which was very much associated with the current president. And those guys fought and died for 20 years, including losing their friends who went off as suicide bombers and got themselves blown up, fighting for quite a different vision.

Can you tell us a little bit about, even if it's changed, what was the hardliners' vision five, six years ago? Socially, what was their vision of Israel? What was their vision of the United States? What was their vision of how countries should be run? What is this hardline view in the background that he's going to have to navigate and deal with and that may ultimately pose a threat to him if he doesn't deliver?

David Yeah. I mean, well, I'll say that I kind of look at this through the lens of how he governed Idlib in the Northwest, right? Where you had a sort of technocratic government that was doing a lot of the things we would associate with a state, right? It's delivering services, it's building roads. There was a military college for defectors that actually brought in people who had left the former, the regime's military. They delivered emergency relief after the earthquake in 2023, right? So there were a lot of these things that you'd look at that and you'd say, that's great to have an alternative to Assad. At the same time, there was a, I think it was called a Supreme Fatwa Council, which sat outside the kind of maybe more democratic structures or the more technocratic structures of Hayat al-Sham. It's administering Quranic schools, things like that. And then in these kind of what they would call liberated areas, the minority groups, be they Druze or be they Christians, were not really represented in any of the sort of political elements of HTS.

And so I think the concern, and then you of course have cases of HTS members talking about, or even I think in some cases, executing women for corruption and prostitution and things like that. Although I will point out that they never had a kind of promotion of virtue and prevention of vice kind of morality police in Idlib. So it's complicated, right? Because it's not, again, I think the problem here, or one of the problems, is that we set our expectations in the States for what is going to happen in Syria so high that we're sort of expecting it to become this kind of, you know, wonderful flowering democratic experiment. I don't think that, you know, Hayat al-Sham is a democratic organization. It's politically authoritarian. And I think that is, you know, in addition to some of these kind of ideological bent of its recent past, you know, it's cause for some concern."

David, we've had lots of questions in while we've been talking. And here's one from a member, Helen Dance. And this, I guess, goes to the heart of the intelligence agencies like to give a sense of being all-knowing.

But she makes the point, given that nobody saw the situation we have in Syria today arising with either the outcome or the pace that it did, how will today's analysts be changing the way they think about the country and what develops next? And by the way, I noticed you didn't answer my question earlier about which are the best agencies in the world.

Oh, it's the CIA, of course. No, I, okay, well, let me take the intelligence agency one first. I mean, I think you're right that, you know, the SIS is an exceptional service, particularly, obviously, what it does is human and it's very, very, very good at that. I think that the, you know, it would be hard to answer this question without bringing up the Mossad. And I do that simply because, you know, if you look at, Mossad does not have a global mandate, really, right? They're very, very focused in their neighborhood. And they're very, very good at what they do. I mean, look at what they did in Lebanon with the Pager attack. And, you know, you could argue about the sort of strategic rationale for that and certainly the morality of it. But from the standpoint of an intelligence operation, it's absolutely incredible. And the way they've penetrated Iranian society over the past 20 years is absolutely astounding. So, I think some of these smaller services, frankly, you guys, the Israelis, even the French, like, that have a more targeted, you know, sort of mandate in some respects can pull off incredible operations.

Okay, and Helen's question?

Helen's question. So, I will, I would say that, number one, I would argue that nobody saw this coming in the way, as quickly as it did. But I would argue that the kind of the weakness, the corruption, the hollowing out of the Assad regime, that was very well known. It was also well known that HDS was planning a major attack in the fall, and that it was going to be new and different from what had come before. So, those things were known. But I do think when we talk about the regime collapsing in the way that it did, essentially bloodlessly, not really, but close, you're sort of dealing with a psychological, a mass psychological shift on the part of the regime's soldiers, and its officials, where everybody just sees it collapsing at once, and it just goes like a domino. So, I think that, you know, the point being here, I think the CIA analysts prior to this probably had written papers about how a lot of the pillars supporting the regime had weakened significantly, and that they were sort of primed for problems, but they would not have predicted the collapse. That said, I think the way that the CIA is probably looking at this now, I'm not sure they're changing the way they think about the country, necessarily, but they're probably now looking at a set of questions, much like we're discussing today, and coming up with practical signposts that they would see in the intelligence to indicate sort of which scenario we're headed toward, because it is very possible that we, you know, we head toward another phase of the civil conflict in Syria, and they'll be watching that very, very closely.

David, let's just sort of step back for a second and maybe develop Helen's question a little bit more. One of the big problems in intelligence is knowing when something will happen.

I mean, often it feels a little bit like somebody's saying, well, there are, you know, big problems in the American economy in terms of debt, and so at some point, the market's going to collapse, but we never have really any idea how, and I remember this because, you know, my first posting in an embassy was in Indonesia, and people for 20 years have been pointing out that Suharto's regime was corrupt and hollow and was going to collapse any time, but officers came and went, and posting after posting 20 years never really happened, and I remember in Syria that, you know, we were told by a lot of people who knew a lot about Syria that Bashar al-Assad would be gone within six months, and, you know, I suppose what I'm trying to get at here and in Ukraine and all these things, how on earth do intelligence officers get around the problem of timing, because it's all very well saying these regimes are hollowed out, corrupt, their institutions are crumbling, but if you miscall by 10 years when they actually fall, that makes a lot of difference in the real world.

It does, and it drove the Obama administration absolutely nuts when we would write these assessments because we were not able to be precise about the timing. We were able to point out the sources of strength that Assad's regime had, where there were weaknesses. We were able to do the same on the side of kind of the opposition in the early years of the war, but they wanted, and they being Obama's NSC, you know, they wanted an assessment of how long this guy had left, you know, can he survive another six months or not, and we couldn't, we could never do it, and it made them very, very angry at us to the point where, you know, I think oftentimes they would just ignore the analysis because they would look at, you know, they ask a direct question and that you don't give them a direct answer, and that makes, you know, that tends to make policymakers very angry.

I do think the reality of it though is that, and the comparison I would make here is the way that communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989. You would have looked at that and you would have been able to say, you'd have been able to write assessments in the late 80s about the different weaknesses that these regimes had, that the Soviet regime had. You would have been able to paint a very negative picture like you could have of Assad's regime in military four months ago, but when you're dealing with a mass psychological shift that happens all at once, I think you are pushing up against the limits of human cognition and forecasting, and all you can do at that moment is put together a set of scenarios for what could happen, put some weight on them, and explain what you would expect to see if you're moving down one of these three or four paths, and that kind of thing, you know, to a policymaker though is not what you want. You want an answer to the question, and as an intelligence analyst, you oftentimes just cannot give it.

David, would your successors be that interested in where Assad is now and what he's doing and how he's living? Does he remain somebody that the CIA are interested in and want to know about? Probably not. I think, I mean, well, let me put it this way. As an analyst, as a former analyst working on Syria and having spent a decent amount of my youth thinking about Bashar al-Assad, God help me, I am immensely curious, just from the standpoint of, I mean, look, in my book , I have a scene where I almost kill Bashar al-Assad. There's a bomb that gets put into a big, you know, sort of security meeting, and he's nearly killed, and that actual event happened more or less as I wrote it, but Bashar wasn't there, and I put him in that scene because I wish him ill and despise the man and wanted to sort of give him a good scare, right, in the novel. I am deeply interested in, you know, him, what he's doing, moping around one of his luxury apartments or his dacha, his new dacha in Moscow.

Like, I'm interested in that, but I think from the standpoint of sort of where are the intelligence, where are the foreign intelligence collection priorities right now, I would have to think he's pretty low on the list, unless we start to see members of HTS or Shara starting to, you know, engage with the Russians around this idea of him being, you know, maybe a return to Syria or something like that, which I think is very unlikely. Will you be taking more members' questions? Sorry. So, Dylan from Solihull coming in, what's to stop Syria going the same way as Libya? And I wonder whether you could use that as a routine to talk a little bit about what this regime was like. What was the difference between Bashar al-Assad's regime? You were living there on the ground in Damascus, you were a CI analyst operating out of the embassy, and you would have had a sense of what it was, and how was it different from Qaddafi's Libya or Putin's Russia or other forms of autocratic gangster regime?

Give us a sense of how it worked.

Yeah. Well, in many respects, it was similar to the way those, I think there was kind of an autocratic model for how you run one of these places. And there are some similarities between, you know, Libya and between Russia and, you know, pretty much any other authoritarian country on earth, where essentially the way they ran it was, and again, it had been prior to Assad's father taking power in 1970, there had been something on the order of like a dozen coups between independence from the French in 1946, and Assad taking power in 70. So, you know, it was very politically unstable.

When Assad took power, what he did, and this is the system that Bashar more or less continued up until the eve of the Civil War, is they coup proofed the place. And what that meant was they took, they built a system of, you know, four main security agencies that were responsible for internal security that all had overlapping mandates, and similar capabilities, that all spied on each other, and that were sort of managed by Assad at the top, so that you never let one get too powerful. And they could report on each other, so you could understand where threats came from. You also build a set of sort of Praetorian military units that are loyal to you, typically by blood, and that are capable of destroying in urban combat, any other formation of, you know, sort of irregular military that might conspire against you in a coup. And they had actually multiple of these Praetorian units, because it was the same sort of hub-and-spoke thing with them, where if you had one that got too big for its britches, the other one could destroy it.

Now, you then, you basically had a state that was being run as a, you know, it was a repressive apparatus masquerading as a state. The state itself had become quite hollow. The security institutions, the repressive institutions, were the most powerful and effective ones. They were deeply predatory. And, you know, the Syrians had a word for this, was you could get pulled or taken behind the sun. You could just be plucked off the streets and taken away by these, you know, by these groups and put into these horrible prisons, which we've seen so much of over the past few months, and be gone. And so there was this kind of wall of fear that developed. There was no, I think by the end, and this is a big part of Bashar's downfall, whatever social contract had existed, largely between his father and Syrians, which obviously had these elements of repression mixed in, but was based on some promise of stability and some measure of sort of economic output, all of that was gone. There was no social contract anymore between the government and between society. It was kind of a slave society in some ways. You could think about that mentality as the one that destroyed the regime.

So...

David, can I just jump in there? What can you tell us about the, what seems like a rather remarkable journey of the wife?

This sort of seeming, fairly ordinary, quite good looking middle class British woman who becomes, I listened to your discussion with Gordon Carrera and the rest is classified by this, who becomes a kind of complete monster, but a very powerful one. Yeah. And also, would the wife of somebody like Al-Sharanow be somebody that the CIA will be trying to find out about? Were you interested in Asma at the time?

Yeah, very much interested in Asma, because she played a role, I mean, even before she took on more of a formal kind of economic role in recent years, she was a kind of informal advisor to Bashar and was obviously a very helpful way for him to really portray the regime in kind of this soft and, you know, comforting glow. I mean, there's the famous Vogue, you know, article that came out about a month before the protest started called A Rose in the Desert. I don't have it in here in my office, but I have one in my house. I retained the hard copy because Vogue tried to eliminate all references to it. So Asma was a very, was always of interest to us from an intelligence collection standpoint. And I would imagine that Shara's wife right now, there'd be a similar sort of interest in understanding who she is, what she believes, what level of influence might she have over his decision making? Absolutely.

But yeah, I think that, you know, the journey, it is something that is, you know, it's sort of, it's a very interesting story to think about Asma going from, I think she was, she raised an acton or something. Her father was a cardiologist, is a cardiologist. And, you know, to go from that to overseeing, in many respects, the system of sort of industrial level slaughter and repression, I don't know, it says something about humanity that I think we don't, you know, and just the way all of us can be pulled into systems that become bigger than us and where we, you know, sort of can lose ourselves. It's just really a profound human story, I think.

David, as we sort of come towards the end, we're getting a number of comments. And so Steve has come in and said, how about Ukraine? Surely that matters more to the world than Syria. And I guess what that's an invitation to do is to give you a chance to think a little bit more about the bigger world picture. You know, lift your head from Syria and give us a sense of what's going on, what you're worried about and whether Syria does or doesn't fit into that.

Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, as I alluded to up front, I do think that from a, you know, if you zoom all the way out, you kind of look at the world from, I don't know, a geostrategic standpoint, does Syria matter all that much? I'm not certain it does. I think it is intensely interesting. And the reason I, you know, have written about it in novels is because I'm very interested in the place and its people, right? And so I think from just a human standpoint, it matters deeply, right? But yes, if you zoom all the way out and you look at the, you know, sort of menu of challenges that we have in front of us, I mean, I think, I guess the way you could think about it would be, we've got sort of the, you know, absolute nasty revenge of geopolitics ongoing right now. You could look at Russia, Ukraine, you could look at, you know, China's military buildup in Asia, you could look at realizing they've sort of been, you know, diminished over the past six months, but you could look at Iran and its position in the Middle East. You would look at the sort of really, I think, frightening implications of a wave of technologization of life and intelligence that are now before us and create all kinds of, you know, scenarios in which the marginal cost of violence and chaos are going way down, which is, you know, disturbing. And then lastly, you look at kind of the global information landscape, how fragmented it is. I mean, even in the States now, where do you get your information about what's true and what's false? It's very hard to make sense of basic facts.

So you put all of those things together. Syria is a piece of all of them, I'm sure, to some degree, but yeah, it's not the headline. David, when we interviewed John Saws, who was my former colleague in Downing Street, went on to become the head of MI6, he said that your novel, Damascus Station, was one of the best things ever written about espionage. And I was surprised by that, because actually, not because it's not a great novel, but because a lot of people in the special forces, in the intelligence agencies, they kind of have a bit of a thing about insiders writing when they're outside, even if it's presented as fiction. And I just wondered how conscious you are of that, and whether even as a novelist, you're actually quite careful about what you write.

Yeah. Well, I really did appreciate that comment he made to you guys. That was wonderful to hear. I mean, you know, I think, look, I do have to be careful. I have to send everything I write to our publication review board. They review it. They determine if, you know, I put anything that's classified in there. I have a pretty good self-censor at this point to understand where it's inappropriate if I were to... So your books get cleared?

They get cleared. Yeah, they get cleared. They get cleared. But, you know, I think I am trying, and I really do think there is space for this, as evidenced by the fact that all the books have been cleared, and I, you know, they're out there. But I think there's space for writing in an authentic way about the espionage business, not just the tradecraft and the operations, but they, you know, but like the culture of these institutions, what it's actually like to work there. I mean, even the fact that if you look at the Hollywood rendition of the CIA or SIS, like, it's like this superhero spy construct where you have someone who's always very attractive running around with a weapon in a car chase, you know, killing somebody. And the reality of the work, I think, is actually far more interesting than that. It's far more about human drama, and I think the books, you know, they've been a way to sort of tell that story about the actual...

Have you seen Slow Horses?

I have, yes.

So are we talking James Bond or Slow Horses? Where is the reality?

Yeah, I think the reality is that it is more Slow Horses, right? I mean, there's obviously stuff in there that's, you know, crazy, too. But it is more like that. I mean, it is the way I have kind of described CIA to people, and I think it's true of almost any intelligence service, is that these are really bipolar institutions, right? On one hand, you have this very sort of high stakes mission, which is to go out and convince, you know, people in Syria or Russia or China or wherever to sell you or give you state secrets. I mean, that's a bonkers, you know, objective. And then on the other hand, you have these massive government bureaucracies, like at CIA, there's a, you know, there's a gift shop. Like, so you have a kind of weird, like, and I think you have weird bureaucratic stuff that would be similar to the way anyone who's worked in a big corporation, they'd look at that and say, yeah, that that's like what, you know, it's what it's like to work at British Airways or AT&T, you know, so both of those things are happening all at once. And I think the best kind of spy fiction melds those together to some degree to show you the reality of that world.

David, tell us why you left. I mean, you obviously have enough love of it to be writing novels about it. But not enough love of it to want to have put 40 years of your life into becoming a senior person doing many more postings, getting involved in other things. What is the side of it, if you're able to be a little introspective for a moment, that meant that you didn't want to be a full career officer? And what were the other ethical stresses, emotional stresses in the job, which made you feel you might be happier outside?

Yeah, I think, I mean, so I've been out now for a decade. And in that intervening 10 years, I should have come up with a sexier answer to this question that has me sort of, you know, in knots about Syria and the way we dealt with it, or the sort of morality of the spy business. And I don't have an answer like that at all. And my answer is this. So, you know, I joined the CIA as an undergraduate intern, which is an actual job at the Central Intelligence Agency. I took my first polygraph when I was 19 years old. They came and recruited when I was, you know, in literally International Politics 101, and had no sense of the actual world and wanted one. And so when I joined the CIA, I had no experience doing anything other than digging holes for a sprinkler system company and flipping burgers at Wendy's. Like legitimately, those were the two entries on my resume prior to the CIA.

And so after working there for a while, I started to get this sense that I wanted to see, and, you know, I'm retrospective about or sort of, you know, introspective about this point. At some point in my CIA journey, I said, I want to get out and see how, you know, how does a business actually function? What is it like outside of DC? I want to get out of here and just kind of see what else is going on in the world. And that was the reason, that was the reason why I left. I was, of course, frustrated by what was going on in Syria, frustrated by our policy. But, and maybe in some way that contributed. But for me, at the time, it was a sense of want to get out of these walls and see what else is going on in the world.

David, we're coming up to an hour. My last question is quite a big one. When you were, without giving your age away, when you were 27 years of age, I was, I was working down the street. And we were in the build up to the Iraq War. And we took a decision to publish a paper, present it to Parliament, put it into the public domain, which was partly based on intelligence. And fair to say that was controversial at the time. And it's and it's remained controversial all these years later. And there was, from the top of the intelligence agencies, if there was any pushback, we didn't see it. But certainly down the ranks, there were people telling the media, telling MPs, they really didn't like this.

I just wondered what your take is on that. But also, how do you balance the need for privacy, the secrecy, but sometimes policymakers wanting to make a case in public that is based upon intelligence?

Yeah, it's a very tough kind of road to walk, I think, in a real balancing act. I mean, most recently, and I think with great success, there's been an example of this with the kind of strategic declassification of intelligence around the run up to the war in Ukraine, where I think it was, again, from the outside, it seemed like quite an effective way to build a coalition or frankly, just to warn that the Russians were actually going to do this. So I think there are examples where putting information out in a way that, you know, doesn't threaten the collection method, doesn't threaten the source of that information, makes really good sense. Because if we had not, we, you know, the CIA or the US, if we had not gone around, you know, and actually brief that material, I think it's very unlikely that anyone would have believed that the Russians were going to do this, or at least would have diminished the number of groups, you know, in sort of countries who saw it coming. So I think there's a real place for it. But again, you've got to be very careful, because I'd imagine that information that we've collected, is coming off of, you know, human assets, or frankly, technical collection programs that are very expensive to reconstitute, and that you want during in this case, during the war, to be able to collect information going forward.

Yeah. David, final one for me, then.

What is it that you feel that the public and I guess, in your case, particularly the US public, doesn't necessarily understand about international relations, about countries like Syria, about wars like Ukraine? What is it that you wished you were able to communicate when you see the public debate?

I think that I wish, I wish that when we talk about when we talk about a place like Syria, and we talk about Russia, Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine's a great example of this. I wish that there was a tighter connection made by the people who do the talking, and why it matters to actual people in the United States, or, you know, Great Britain, like, why does the outcome of a war in Eastern Europe matter to us? You know, I think that connection, really, I live in Texas, I'm not in DC. The people around me in my neighborhood, and the people who I go to the coffee shop with, and, you know, if you talk about, you know, that conflict, and you talk about, you know, that conflict, there is an immense confusion over why it matters to us, why we would care at all, why we would fund it, why we would support the Ukrainians. That's just one example.

So I think this connection of what goes on outside of our borders with what practically, sort of the practical concerns and interests of, you know, Americans that live in Texas, or Iowa, or Minnesota, that is what I wish, I wish policymakers would do more of that. Because I think the way we talk about, I guess, and the other thing I would add is, I wish we did, we created a tighter connection between the things that we say, and the things that we did, because I think we have allowed a lot of our kind of strategic communications and rhetoric to get way out in front of the actual policymaking. And I wish that we were, you know, more, I guess, more disciplined about that.

Well, David, it's hard to square that with Hesketh, basically telling the Europeans, Ukraine's all about Europe, and J.D. Vance saying he can't be bothered to see Olaf Scholz, because he doesn't think he's going to be there very long. So it's hard to see that they, I don't think they have that link in mind.

But listen, David, thanks for all your time. We've got one final question, which from Andy wants to hear about some future episodes coming up, the rest is classified.

I also before you do that, I want to remind people that are interviewed with Al Shara is out, just search leading wherever you listen or you watch. Also, do think about joining the rest is politics plus a lot of the questions we got today. Sorry, we couldn't get through more of them. But it's been fascinating talking to David. And also Rory is having a day off tomorrow to watch football, which is weird, although he loves to do. But once Burnley have beaten Preston North End, I am going to be doing another live stream with the Mooch. We're going to be interviewing former Bank of England governor and currently prime ministerial hopeful in the 51st state of America, aka Canada, Mr. Mark Carney.

David, why don't you just close off with telling us about some future episodes coming up for the rest is classified.

Yeah, so we are we are doing a six parter on Edward Snowden. And wow, yes, yes. You can tell us about Tulsi Gabbard's friend, Tulsi Gabbard. You can take a wild guess how I come down on Edward Snowden. I'll leave that leave that vague. So we're doing a six parter on him, which which was quite interesting to do. We're going to do a couple episodes actually on Greenland. And some of the kind of, you know, spy stories around that why it matters today, why it's in the news, other than the fact that it'll be my third vacation home after my one in Canada. And then we're going to do a couple on kind of the past and present of CIA purges going back to the Halloween massacre and talking about kind of the precedent for, you know, getting rid of officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, what it means, and how today fits into that context. So little sample of what's coming up.

Very good. It was great to have you as part of the Restless Family. And final goodbye for me and a huge thank you to the people who belong to the Restless Politics Plus because this is a stream that's been driven by their questions.

Just to remind people, join the Restless Politics Plus. It supports the podcast, which we're very grateful to, but it also allows you early entry to live events. We do specific things which are only available to Restless Politics Plus listeners, including you'll find unique interviews, you'll find unique content being provided.

And we are very grateful for everybody, both those who join the Restless Politics Plus and those who are just joining us for coming part of this. And we'd also like finally to say this is of course, is something that's going to drive you hopefully towards the wonderful work that David does on the rest is classified. Bye guys. All the best, David. Thank you.