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The ruin that is the Middle East

Sep 23, 2024

Few people think about what the Arab and Iranian people have lost in recent years. For those of us who support Israel, and despise Iran and its terrorist handmaidens, the images of Israel’s almost perfect counter-attacks inside Iran, Syria, and Lebanon are a cause for celebration. We talked about the details of Mossad mastery this week on the pod with our former CIA ops pal Marc Polymeropolous.

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But, with your forbearance, I’d like to talk about the other side. Unlike Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and their Jew-hating compatriots, I have less than no sympathy for the Hezbollahis who lost their bollahis in the one-two punch Israeli hit on the Lebanese terrorist group. These are people who, until 9/11, had murdered more Americans than any other group. But Lebanon is not all Hezbollah.

Lebanon was once a beautiful and successful multisectarian country. Without over-romanticizing past history, it’s safe to say that corruption notwithstanding, Lebanon had a functioning political and economic system. It wasn’t just — particularly to its Shi’ite underclass. But even for them, Lebanon was a place where one could raise a family and not fear the future. Lebanese politicians, with an assist from Syria, destroyed that country. Palestinian “liberation” organizations added to the mix. Iran stuck its own oar in. As did Israel.

And now, Lebanon is barely a country, with no government, a non-functioning economy, a military that pretends to be for the nation, but works for Hezbollah. The resolute live there, along with millions who have no choice. The lucky ones have bailed out, moving to Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Africa.

And now, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s “spiritual leader,” has invited the Israelis to invade once more, and offered up the territory of the Lebanese people as a hostage to Hamas and to Iran. Sure, he admits, Hezbollah just suffered a "big, harsh, and unprecedented blow" because of Israel's "technological superiority." But what’s a few deaths in the service of Yahya Sinwar?

Israel has also been forced to address attention to Iranian IRGC operations in Syria. And while the development hasn’t gotten much attention from the MSM, Syria has now become Iran’s terrorism and WMD depot, a headquarters for arms shipments, planning, and non-conventional weapons development. Israel has hit both Iranian personnel and weapons sites in recent months. But spare a thought, again, for Syria.

The country has had little to celebrate since the 1950s. But it is a beautiful country, with a history that is at once rich and deep. Like the Lebanese, Syrians have for centuries been the entrepreneurial class of the Middle East. But Syria is a shell of its former shell. Since the war Bashar al Assad launched against his own people in 2011, 500,000 have died. (Rashida? Alexandria? Hello?) There is now a growing al Qaeda/ISIS contingent, as well as tens of thousands of hardened terrorists on the ground, some in prison, some in camps.

In Syria, the United States has a small contingent of troops to back up Kurdish allies that are keeping both terrorists and the regime at bay. (Joe Biden would like to pull those troops out, btw.) And then there are the Russians. Barack Obama invited them in (John Kerry did the actual asking) to avoid confronting his own “red line” over Assad’s brutal and illegal attacks on the Syrian people. Now Russians are on the Med again for the first time since the Cold War. Luckily for the region, they’re distracted in Ukraine.

And what of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the mastermind behind so much of this misery? While the mythologizing of America’s far Left suggests that Iran was suffering under the brutal tyranny of the Shah, the reality is that Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was an amateur dictator when compared with the current denizens in Tehran’s halls of power. Yes, he was no democrat, and had little regard for human rights. Then again, given the choice between the openness, economic function, and modernity of the Shah’s times vs the Islamist dictatorship of today, there should be zero doubt what most Iranians would choose.

I fear that few readers will share my lament for the Middle East. Still, you don’t have to love the region to recognize the destruction that has been wrought in the last half century plus. Where in the Arab world are people not dancing to the tune being played by the Ayatollahs in Iran? Who — including the Palestinians and Israel — has not lost so much that is dear at the hands of an Iranian-backed minority of murderers and terrorists?

As I wrote before 10/7, thinking about what the Middle East would be like absent the predations of the Islamic Republic is a valuable thought exercise: Assad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Hash’d (Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad — all serve a master in Tehran. All are hated, some more, some less, by their people. What would the region be like without this evil?

I don’t want to pretend that there aren’t real grievances in the Middle East, or real problems. The Israelis would have, and have had, a challenge addressing the Palestinians even absent Iran. Lebanon’s internal composition poses intolerable strains. But Iran has exploited every fissure, exacerbated every grievance, and used the Arabs to further an agenda that is theirs alone.

So, yes, woohoo to the Israelis for their intel magic. Would that they had been as on the ball on 10/6. Would that they didn’t need to be.

HIGHLIGHTS

Immediately after Hezbollah pagers began blowing up in Lebanon you said “This is the most impressive denied area kinetic op I have witnessed in my career." Why is that?

MP: I canvassed nearly all of my other retired colleagues and had the same reaction. Now, some of them we have kind of our own friendly rivalries with Mossad. We've worked with them very closely, so we don't always want to give too much credit to other intelligence services, but everyone stepped back on this and we were like, "Whoa, that was unbelievable." And I worked with the Israelis for years and years and let's go back to... And of course, I've been in liaison contact with them.

Go back to 1996 when they killed Yahya Ayyash, a master Hamas bomb maker with the cell phone that exploded. Really extraordinary op. And even let's fast-forward now to July when they killed Fuad Shukr in Beirut. Incidentally, something we should all celebrate because Fuad Shukr was responsible for the deaths of 241 US servicemen and women at the Marine barracks bombing in the early eighties.

And then of course they killed Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. But these are one-off high-value target strikes. And that's what... The Israelis kind of wrote the playbook.

What are the reactions in Lebanon to this attack?

MP: I was talking to people in Beirut and there was panic. There was absolute panic in Lebanon and particularly in Beirut. And so you think about this and you kind of sit back and you say, "This is a Jason Bourne movie or Tom Clancy." I mean, intelligence world is generally boring. Most of my career was boring. And then a couple of moments of absolute sheer terror and some excitement.

But frankly, this stuff doesn't happen. And so tip of the cap to them, and I'll say one last point on this. The Israelis were rightfully criticized after October 7th. That was a catastrophic intelligence failure, really more from Shin Bet and IDI, the internal service and Israeli military intelligence. Mossad is generally responsible for Lebanon, Iran, and other places, but they've got their mojo back.

This was some badass stuff. And really tip of the cap to them because I've never seen a kinetic intelligence operation at this scale. If you're a Hezbollah member right now, you understand that Israel has total intelligence dominance over you and your head is on a swivel. You are terrified and the psychological warfare aspect of this too.

How were the Israelis able to pull this off?

MP: the way the Israelis run operations, they use commercial cover. Their officers are not assigned necessarily to Israeli diplomatic facilities. They might have a declared chief who does liaison, but they're real, their clandestine operations are handled by what we would call non-official covered officers, the Russians call illegals. But these are individuals under business cover and often with different passports.

And so what the Israelis did here... And my thinking on this in fact has evolved really in the last day or so, and I'll tell you why. So at first I thought they conducted a really brilliant supply chain operation in which they would actually... They certainly find out that Hezbollah needs pagers.

Hezbollah switched from cell phones because they were worried about Israeli signals intelligence capabilities. So then they're going to switch to pagers. This is old school stuff like The Wire, probably the best show ever made on TV, by the way. So then the Israelis, figure out how Hezbollah is procuring this, and they get in the middle of this, they create a front. The Israelis would create a front company. We've heard about this company in Taiwan that makes pagers. It was a subsidiary in Hungary. And so I'm thinking, okay, they created a front company, they got in the middle of this, and then when they acquired the pagers, Israeli technical teams and their explosives experts placed small amounts of explosives in them and rigged it. And so a page would trigger the explosives and then it goes back in.

And that makes a lot of sense to me.

What I'm thinking about today though, because now there's this strange Bulgarian angle in Sofia. There's a front company there that the Israelis might have been the supply chain. In essence, they created a company. They didn't take it, they actually had Hezbollah contract through them. And so in that way, the Israelis created the actual pager. They didn't have to tinker with it because these companies in Taiwan were saying, "We stopped making these models," when we're talking about the walkie-talkies. So I love this stuff. I'm going to geek out on the forensics of this, but this might not be a supply chain operation. They might've been the supply chain.

You mentioned the Bulgaria angle. What is the Bulgaria angle?

MP: I literally had journalists who were calling me. They were in Sofia tracking down the storefront, which I thought was hilarious. I mean, that's what we would do.

And everyone's gone, by the way. Nothing exists in any of these places anymore. There was someone on a Norwegian passport who has now disappeared. I mean, to me, these are the Israeli non-official cover officers. And so the forensics of this are going to be fascinating, but really everyone is kind of amazed that you could take a device, rig it with explosives and command detonate it. That's easy. What is amazing is doing it at the scale of 3,000 and injecting it in the Hezbollah supply chain.

One thing that was so impressive about this operation was its ability to strike Hezbollah in Dahieh, Hezbollah’s headquarters. Walk us through why that’s so impressive.

MP: This is a denied area. So what does denied area mean in intelligence operations? It means it's hard. It means people are not welcome there. It's tough. There's another point of this too, is that October 7th was a failure in human intelligence. It was clear to me that Shin Bet got lazy. The IDI got lazy. They relied too much on sensors, on building this fence. There's all these stories of how the Israelis were using artificial intelligence to monitor Gaza, and they forgot what Shin Bet and Mossad are good at, which is recruiting human sources.

Well, these operations that are going on now, and someone called it a cyber operation, it's not a cyber operation. These are human-enabled technical operations with a kinetic side to it. And so that means that the Israelis have so thoroughly penetrated Hezbollah, not from signals intelligence, but from human sources.

And with that in mind, think also what's going to happen inside of Hezbollah. They have a pretty legendary counterintelligence unit, and they're going to go on a witch hunt. And if I was the Israelis, if I was back in my old job, we would stir the pot. I mean, you want them totally distracted in a huge counterintelligence investigation. And so on that note too, again, the paranoia, if you're a Hezbollah member, you don't feel safe anywhere. Not in your apartment, not in your house, not going to the market.

What was the strategic goal of this operation?

MP: What are they doing here? They're sending a message to Nasrallah saying, "We know everything about you. We've just knocked out your whole comms infrastructure, and if you go down this road for a wider war, this is what we can do." I think there's a strategic value in that.

Even today, as you saw the Israelis just pounding Southern Lebanon, Nasrallah is giving his speech and you have F-16s or F-35s overflying Lebanon. This is a message. They're climbing the ladder, but it's strategic in saying that, "Look, we want you to decouple this notion that you are protecting the resistance in Gaza. Forget the idea that if there's a ceasefire, then you'll stand down, because we want you to decouple this because right now you've got to stand down. We have 70,000 people in the North." The Israeli cabinet voted. Returning the people to the North is a war goal.

Look, I talk to Israelis every day, and Gaza is essentially over. The North is what everybody talks about, period. There's huge support and a huge criticism of the Netanyahu government for not doing enough on the North. Ultimately, I do think this is strategic. Is it going to work? I don't know. Is Nasrallah going to blink? All the conventional wisdom says he doesn't want a war. Okay, well, he can stand down, and let's see what happens.

How do you think Iran and Hezbollah will retaliate?

MP: So look, everyone's focused with the Iranian retaliation on just open overt military strikes. And they certainly tried that. But if you think about Iran and Hezbollah, the real threats is kind of the asymmetric threat. And the fact of the matter is, before Al-Qaeda, and we were rightly focused on Al-Qaeda. Hezbollah killed more Americans than any terrorist group. And of course Iran and her proxies, look what they did to us and our US soldiers in Iraq for years and years. So extremely capable adversary, not in necessarily conventional sense, but certainly in that gray zone.

And so, look what we've seen over the years. And this goes back to after the US killed Qasem Soleimani. So the Iranians have hatched these assassination plots on numerous former Trump administration officials who now are running around with security details.

Are Iran and Hezbollah already plotting assassination attempts?

MP: You saw Shin Bet announced about three days ago that they had foiled a plot to kill the former Israeli Defense Minister. And I think that they rolled out, I don't know the equivalent in Israel, the indictment or whatever, they showed this ... It's a 73-year-old Israeli guy, maybe not the best asset to recruit. But the Iranians had recruited this guy for such operations. So absolutely they're going to try to do that. And a dramatic attack would be against a former US official or a US official in the US or an official in Israel. But I worry more about the soft targets, Israeli embassies overseas.

Or they might target Jews around the world.

MP: Or Jews anywhere, absolutely. Which would be ... It's part of Hezbollah's, of course, and Iran's playbook. Think of the attacks back in Argentina in the early nineties. And so, ultimately, I think there's ... From the counterterrorism perspective, look, I was told by a former FBI agent that the joint terrorism task forces, that's the entity in every major US city. It's a task force of primarily FBI, but then local law enforcement, CIA, others. Every one of them has been scrubbing their assets on Hezbollah and that they're pulling special agents in to work on this. Because there is concern about Hezbollah activating. What they operate very effectively in the United States and in Europe and other places is fundraising. Well, it's really easy to flip that switch. You have a fundraising cell, switch them to become operational. And so, in that gray zone, that asymmetric warfare of terrorism, I think there should be some significant concern.

Are there serious terrorism threats to the US homeland?

MP: I got a chance to speak with a ton of current FBI officials in senior counterterrorism capacities and they were worried. It's not just Chris Wray going to testify in Congress. You talk to the rank and file, you talk to senior FBI special agents or special agents in charge in the field offices, they are very nervous about the threat picture now. And look, as Danielle said, there's two US carrier battle groups. There's a nuclear submarine. There's Marine amphibious units on standby. There is a chance that the US gets involved here, and that increases our threat picture dramatically, if that occurs.

Read the transcript here.