How Iran Shapes Global Politics : Behind the enemy lines with Ken Timmerman

[00:00:07] There's really some just crazy stuff going on with Iran, like all the different strategies the US has tried to deal with Iran. But my next guest, Ken Timmerman, I agree with. Iran is the biggest issue we have right now and the closest we can come to World War III. What is going to happen? What did we do wrong? And Ken has been covering Iran and terrorism for 40 years.

[00:00:34] And he starts off, he talks about how he was held captive by terrorists in his the early part of his career and what happened. And it was just insane. And, you know, sometimes we're almost afraid to look at how irrational the world has become. And some of the irrational conclusions you can draw from that, that turn out to be real.

[00:00:58] And I can test some of Ken's conclusions on what's happened, but he might be right. And I'd love to know what what you guys think. So here's Ken Timmerman. He's the author of the recently published book, which I highly recommend the Iran house to see the entire history of what's happened and what could happen. And we talk about it here. So Ken Timmerman, author of the Iran house and Iranian slash terrorism expert.

[00:01:30] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show.

[00:01:47] Ken, I want to talk all things I ran with you because you're the expert and so much of what you have said makes sense. And I have a lot of questions just about common sense in our dealings with Iran.

[00:01:59] But I want to hear, you have such an amazing story that goes back 40 years. But when you first were a journalist, I'm sure you must've told this story a million times, but do you mind telling me what happened in 1982?

[00:02:12] You first started being a journalist and the next thing you know, you're a prisoner, being held prisoner by really bad terrorists, like bad things happened.

[00:02:24] Well, that's right. And I tell that story in and the rest is history. So that's the first volume of the stories of my reporting life over the years as a war correspondent and investigative reporter when when that was still an honorable profession.

[00:02:39] I'm not so sure that either one of those is still an honorable profession. But I went to Beirut in 1982 from Paris from the left. I was a left bank, left wing intellectual, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli.

[00:02:55] I went to Beirut to, as people would go to Gaza today, although I don't think many left wing journalists would go to Gaza today to actually live there and to live the fate of the Palestinian people.

[00:03:08] I went there to live their fate and to tell it kind of in an earnest Hemingway sort of way.

[00:03:14] And I had made friends with Palestinian ambassadors and stopped on my way in the embassy in Athens.

[00:03:23] And as soon as I got into West Beirut during the siege, they took me captive. They kidnapped me.

[00:03:28] I said, I'm your friend. Oh, no, you're not. You're a Jewish spy. You're an Israeli spy. We can tell by your name.

[00:03:36] Do they have any basis for thinking that?

[00:03:38] Your name is Timmerman. You're born in New York. You have these round gold rimmed glasses and, you know, you look like a hippie.

[00:03:47] So you look Jewish. You look Jewish and you sound Jewish. And we don't believe any of that.

[00:03:53] You're a Jewish spy. And they put me into an underground cell for 24 days and nights when we were bombed constantly by the Israelis.

[00:04:04] And I thought I was going to die many, many times until I was saved quite literally by Jesus, my savior, who I had neglected for years.

[00:04:15] And he came and sat with me in my cell and got me, yanked me from the darkness out into the light.

[00:04:24] Later on, I was in a briefing with the Israeli defense spokesperson in Jerusalem later that year.

[00:04:34] And I think I think Tom Friedman, The New York Times, was there.

[00:04:37] And everybody was complaining of how the Israelis had been conducting indiscriminate bombings of Beirut.

[00:04:45] By the way, the same as they're doing. They're accused of doing today in Gaza and in Lebanon.

[00:04:50] And I said, well, Major, it was Major Ranan Gisson, who was conducting the brief.

[00:04:54] Major, I can tell you that you were actually very accurate in your bombings because I was in the place where the Palestinians had concentrated their anti-air defenses, their triple A artillery.

[00:05:10] And all of those pictures that you show from your gun camera footage fell within 100 radius, 100 meter radius of the place where I was kept.

[00:05:19] Most of them fell on me.

[00:05:21] So I can attest. You are very, very accurate.

[00:05:24] You deserve to be bombing the place where I was being held because that's where the Palestinians were shooting at your aircraft.

[00:05:30] They were so close.

[00:05:32] Like, I want to hear more about your experience with Jesus.

[00:05:38] And I'm sure that your faith helped you through also the psychology of surviving these 24 days.

[00:05:45] But did they actually did the bombing release you?

[00:05:49] Did they actually get the tunnels and the terrorists who were holding you?

[00:05:53] Like what what sort of happened during those 24 days?

[00:05:56] Well, what ultimately released me was an act of God.

[00:05:58] But there's no other explanation for it.

[00:06:01] If you remember, you know, the story of Peter when he's being held in that jail in Jerusalem and all of a sudden the angel appears in front of him and kind of waves his hands and the guards go to sleep and his shackles go.

[00:06:16] That's what happened to me.

[00:06:17] An angel appeared there and said, are there any French people here?

[00:06:21] And I said, well, you know, I speak French.

[00:06:23] My kids are French.

[00:06:25] They speak French.

[00:06:26] You know, we live in Paris.

[00:06:27] Yes, I'm a Frenchman, not an American.

[00:06:30] And he said, well, come with us.

[00:06:32] And I said, well, I kind of did a flip the coin in my head.

[00:06:36] And I said, well, that could be good or bad.

[00:06:38] It could be bad because the two other Frenchmen are here.

[00:06:41] We're actually working for the opponents of the Palestinians laying landmines into the approaches to the airport in Beirut.

[00:06:50] And maybe they finally figured out that these guys are French legionnaires working for the Saad Haddad in the South of Lebanon.

[00:06:57] So maybe they're going to kill me.

[00:06:59] I said, well, maybe I'm going to die here where I am buried because we were being, as I said, we were being bombed day and night.

[00:07:06] And the eight-story building that I was in when I finally got out, it was one story and a half and pancakes on top.

[00:07:14] I would not have lasted more than two more days.

[00:07:16] And so you left, you just walked out then?

[00:07:20] I was taken out.

[00:07:22] The three of us were taken out.

[00:07:23] So there were these two French mercenaries and myself.

[00:07:27] And we were taken out and ultimately handed over two days later to a French consul who promptly reprimanded the two mercenaries and sent us all up to a monastery,

[00:07:38] a wonderful, wonderful place in Antilles up above Beirut to recover for several days.

[00:07:46] Which we certainly needed to do.

[00:07:48] I could not even, I could not go out in the sunlight.

[00:07:51] My eyes had been so affected by being in constant darkness for 24 days.

[00:07:55] It took me days to adjust to the bright sun of the Mediterranean.

[00:07:59] I couldn't eat because I hadn't eaten anything other than Palestinian soup, which was water with boiled tomatoes and boiled onions,

[00:08:08] where you take the tomatoes and the onions out and then serve the water that's left.

[00:08:12] So it was a wonderful experience to be there in a Greek Orthodox monastery.

[00:08:19] And I relate those stories and the rest is history.

[00:08:24] That's kind of the first volume of this three series books about my life as a reporter.

[00:08:32] Oh my gosh, I can't wait to read your memoirs.

[00:08:34] We'll of course have to talk again after I read those.

[00:08:38] After you had this experience, did that change your views on what was going on between Palestine and Israel?

[00:08:46] Well, yes.

[00:08:47] I understood first of all that there was no black and white in the conflict at that point.

[00:08:52] Today I think there is a black and white, but then I did not.

[00:08:55] And I went back almost immediately both to Lebanon and to Israel.

[00:09:01] I lived in the West Bank for two months with a friend reporting on what was going on with Palestinians there.

[00:09:06] And they were remarkably different from the Palestinians who would take me hostage.

[00:09:10] And I went to Lebanon and also continued to report on Palestinians.

[00:09:16] There was a civil war inside the PLO.

[00:09:18] So I was there reporting on the ground for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1983 in the Bacaw Valley and in Damascus and other places.

[00:09:29] But yes, it changed my view completely.

[00:09:31] And I realized also that I had been saved.

[00:09:35] I had been saved for a purpose.

[00:09:37] So Jesus had put his hand on my shoulder and said,

[00:09:39] My son, you're not dying in a cellar in Beirut.

[00:09:43] I've got other plans for you.

[00:09:44] And I'm still trying to figure out what those plans are, but I'm still around.

[00:09:49] Well, clearly it's to give a message to the world now about what's going on in Iran.

[00:09:56] Like when I look at the, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm completely naive about all these topics.

[00:10:00] But when I look at the geopolitical landscape, it seems the one thing that is most kind of radioactive metaphorically,

[00:10:12] but also literally for world affairs is Iran.

[00:10:15] Like this is, this is, it's not like Russia.

[00:10:19] It's not Russia, Ukraine.

[00:10:20] Iran is where World War III could start or because of them.

[00:10:24] And I just want to understand there's, there's so many things that have happened between the U S and Iran over the past few decades.

[00:10:32] But particularly recently in terms of, you know, we had a nuclear deal.

[00:10:37] We, we, we, but then we released funds to them.

[00:10:40] Like what's happening.

[00:10:41] And maybe at a high level, why is Iran?

[00:10:45] Why are they doing this?

[00:10:46] Why are they funding all the terrorist groups in the Middle East?

[00:10:48] It seems, it seems to me the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Sunnis, Shia, doesn't matter.

[00:10:54] They're just funding everybody.

[00:10:55] What, what is going on there?

[00:10:56] Like set the stage.

[00:10:59] They are funding everybody.

[00:11:00] And for many years, the U S intelligence community refused to acknowledge that Shiite Iran could be working together with Sunni fundamentalist groups.

[00:11:12] So I work for, uh, uh, still work as a consultant investigator for the families of nine 11 victims.

[00:11:21] And we won based on the testimony that I was able to acquire from, uh, several defectors from Iranian intelligence organizations.

[00:11:29] We want a $6 billion judgment in U S district court court in New York, uh, against the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a number of top Iranian officials for their,

[00:11:42] uh, material involvement in the 9 11 attacks.

[00:11:46] Uh, so the, the, and this was something that completely went against the, the, uh, how should I say the conceived wisdom at the CIA and elsewhere where they said that,

[00:11:57] look, uh, Shias eat Sunnis for breakfast.

[00:12:01] They can't possibly work together, right?

[00:12:04] They can't work together.

[00:12:05] They hate each other, the Sunnis and the Shias.

[00:12:07] And there is truth to that.

[00:12:09] When you get on the street, uh,

[00:12:11] ordinary Shias and ordinary Sunnis in different parts of the Muslim world, they do hate each other.

[00:12:18] They do.

[00:12:19] But when it comes to killing Jews and killing Americans, guess what?

[00:12:23] The terrorist groups get along just fine.

[00:12:25] So Iran was funding, uh, Hezbollah, a Shiite group.

[00:12:30] They were funding Hamas and the PLO, Sunni groups.

[00:12:33] They funded the Taliban, another Sunni group.

[00:12:37] And today they're funding the Houthis and others, uh, and, and, and groups inside of Iraq.

[00:12:42] The Iranians have never hesitated to fund a terrorist group.

[00:12:47] If they had the certainty that that group was going to attack America because that regime in Tehran today believes that they are destined to destroy America.

[00:12:59] They say it every day when they say death to America.

[00:13:02] They are not joking.

[00:13:03] That is their destiny.

[00:13:04] They believe.

[00:13:05] And we have to wake up and not, and acknowledge that and realize it.

[00:13:10] And why do you think like, okay, by the way, did congratulations on winning that $6 billion reward.

[00:13:15] Did they collect, were they able to collect that money?

[00:13:18] Uh, we're still working on it.

[00:13:20] We've got several, several cases in progress for many billions of dollars.

[00:13:24] Uh, uh, some of it has come in.

[00:13:27] Actually, some collection has come in through dirty banks and I'm very, very happy about it.

[00:13:31] Uh, so U S taxpayers are not on the hook for this.

[00:13:34] It's dirty banks around the world who've been funding Iran.

[00:13:38] And there's a thing called the victims of state sponsored terrorism fund set up by Congress where those banks pay into the treasury.

[00:13:46] Uh, they pay criminal fines into the treasury in some cases over $1.6 billion for the French bank, the BNP, Banque Nationale de Paris.

[00:13:57] When Iranian funds were frozen, uh, was, were, were you able to seize any of that to, to pay off the victims?

[00:14:06] Uh, there's a great deal of mythology about Iranian frozen funds in the United States.

[00:14:13] Uh, and, uh, ultimately, uh, Barack Obama, uh, exploded everything we thought we knew about it.

[00:14:21] We thought that Bill Clinton had returned the last of that money to turn it over to the victims, uh, in 2000, just before he left office.

[00:14:31] And no, no, no, Barack Obama said, we're giving another $1.6 billion back to the Iranians to settle their frozen funds.

[00:14:38] So surprise to me and everybody else who had been looking into it, we did not know that there was still that secret treasury fund that they had denied revealing, uh, in sworn testimony.

[00:14:51] And through FOIA, uh, freedom of information requests from the victims for 20 years.

[00:14:58] Why did we do that?

[00:15:00] Well, Obama was a good friend of the Mueller's just as Joe Biden was a good friend of the Mueller's just as Kamala Harris was a good friend of the Mueller's.

[00:15:11] And I say that, uh, not really as a political statement.

[00:15:15] It's just a statement of fact.

[00:15:17] Uh, uh, uh, uh, look Obama, when he first took office in 2009, you had tremendous protests that erupted in Tehran.

[00:15:27] Um, three million people on the streets, a stolen election in their view, the green movement.

[00:15:34] And they were holding up signs in English, Obama, are you with us?

[00:15:39] And for three weeks, Obama stayed silent and clearly he was not with them.

[00:15:43] And that caused the regime, uh, spokespeople on television to make a play on words on Obama's name.

[00:15:51] And so then they said, no, no, he's not with you.

[00:15:55] Obama's, Obama, Obama's means he's with us, the regime.

[00:16:00] And it was very clear that he was with the regime.

[00:16:03] And by the way, once they started that, why would he be like, I don't understand.

[00:16:07] Like from what I understand, the Iranian populations is, is mostly secular and they don't like their leadership,

[00:16:12] which is why, you know, I would imagine we don't want to really do something military there because these really are people,

[00:16:20] a people held hostage by their leadership.

[00:16:22] Why would they, why would anybody be against them?

[00:16:24] Because Obama ideologically was in favor of the Islamic regime in Iran.

[00:16:31] He was not for freedom in Iran.

[00:16:33] He thought that the Iranian regime was a, one of these, it's kind of like liberation theology, if you wish, in the Catholic church.

[00:16:42] Uh, Obama believed in liberation ideology in the Democrat party.

[00:16:46] So you have your, your ideological soulmates, uh, Chavez, uh, was one of them.

[00:16:52] And the Iranian mullahs were another one of them.

[00:16:54] The nuclear deal that he finally negotiated in 2015 was a horrible, horrible deal.

[00:17:00] Uh, it basically gave Iranians everything that they could possibly want.

[00:17:05] And it took off of the terrorism list, people like Qasem Soleimani and the Quds force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,

[00:17:14] uh, the group that's responsible for killing over 800 Americans in Iraq during the, uh, Iraq war and many hundreds elsewhere,

[00:17:23] including in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983, which I write about in the book.

[00:17:31] Take a quick break.

[00:17:32] If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it.

[00:17:35] It means so much to me.

[00:17:36] Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast.

[00:17:40] Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed.

[00:17:44] Thanks.

[00:17:54] Well, and here's what I don't understand because it seems to me, if you talk to anybody, like a hundred percent of people,

[00:18:01] they will say, yeah, the Iranian leadership is basically the closest thing you can get in the world right now to pure evil.

[00:18:09] And they've been funding terrorists.

[00:18:10] They've been causing wars.

[00:18:12] They, they've been oppressing their own people.

[00:18:15] And I can't believe any American leader.

[00:18:18] And by the way, I'm not, like you said, I'm not being political.

[00:18:21] I just want to know what the facts are.

[00:18:22] Like, why would somebody support them over, again, their, their people who were, who were trying to restore democracy to Iran?

[00:18:32] Well, I almost don't believe what you're saying.

[00:18:35] I get you.

[00:18:37] I'll tell you a story that's taken right out of my book.

[00:18:40] So, uh, the Iran house.

[00:18:42] So after, uh, I've been working with defectors from Iranian intelligence for many, many years.

[00:18:48] And that had attracted the attention of people inside the U S intelligence community.

[00:18:53] And on a number of occasions, I would get a knock on the door, uh, and two agents would show up and they flip down their creds and say,

[00:19:01] we're from this and this agency.

[00:19:02] And we'd like to talk to you.

[00:19:03] May we come in?

[00:19:04] I say, I'm not under arrest.

[00:19:06] Am I?

[00:19:06] No, no, no, no.

[00:19:07] We want to, we, we would like your cooperation.

[00:19:09] We would like you to help us in America's war against international terrorism.

[00:19:14] I said, well, okay.

[00:19:15] In that case, how could I possibly refuse?

[00:19:18] Of course, I want to help my country battle international terrorists.

[00:19:23] And, uh, over, you know, in, in some of these, these cases, uh, you know, I, I was involving, uh, sources.

[00:19:30] I was running a, in fact, a network of sub agents, uh, that ultimately, uh, convinced president Trump in, uh, early 2000, the early days of 2000, January one, January two of 2000, that Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds force.

[00:19:48] Was actually behind the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

[00:19:51] And he said, well, look, we've, we've got to take this guy out.

[00:19:53] He's killed, you know, over a thousand Americans, uh, both in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world.

[00:20:01] And now he wants to take U.S. uh, U.S. diplomats hostage.

[00:20:07] And the president gave the order to take out Soleimani.

[00:20:11] Well, I found out many months later, many, many months later, and from a different Iranian sub agent, that the, uh, order to attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad was not from Qasem Soleimani or even the Iranian regime.

[00:20:26] They were not the ones who instigated it.

[00:20:28] It was an advisor to then former vice president Joe Biden, who was running against Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

[00:20:36] And he was corresponding with a senior member of the Iranian regime.

[00:20:41] And I, I lay all this out in the Iran house.

[00:20:44] I have some of the documents that I put in the appendix as well.

[00:20:47] And he said, look, can't you do to the embassy in Baghdad, the same thing you did to our embassy in Tehran in 1979 to create an October surprise?

[00:20:58] So the Democrat party was actually hoping that they could use the Iranians to take U.S. diplomats hostage, to create an untenable situation for President Trump.

[00:21:10] And luckily, he did not know that at the time.

[00:21:13] I did not know that at the time that the demand actually came.

[00:21:17] The request actually came from a top Biden advisor who, by the way, is still in the White House today.

[00:21:23] That person is still in the White House today.

[00:21:25] I have, I have talked to members of Congress.

[00:21:28] I said, look, you have to start an investigation.

[00:21:31] You can find these original documents because he communicated electronically with a senior Iranian official.

[00:21:37] You can find this out and expose it.

[00:21:40] So that person is still there today in the White House.

[00:21:43] Can you name him?

[00:21:44] I'm not going to do that.

[00:21:45] He was not named to me.

[00:21:46] I can guess who he is, but he was not named to me by my sources.

[00:21:50] But I have a pretty good idea who he is.

[00:21:52] And I know for a fact that he's still in the White House.

[00:21:55] And like just steel manning your argument, like what, what could be, what circumstances could exist that you would be wrong on this?

[00:22:06] Well, we, you know, we could find out that the the the intercepts don't exist.

[00:22:13] And you could convince me that the NSA is not actually listening in to foreign communications between politically sensitive individuals in the United States and officials of a foreign terrorist state.

[00:22:26] Maybe the NSA doesn't do that.

[00:22:30] But if the NSA was listening in on this, wouldn't you think they would have alerted the embassy or alerted authorities to stop events?

[00:22:40] Obviously, they didn't.

[00:22:42] And Bob Woodward, in his second book on Trump called Rage, I quote this in my in my book, The Iran House, because it's significant here, talks, relates in a conversation between Lindsey Graham and Trump.

[00:22:58] Two or three days before the decision to take out Qasem Soleimani was made.

[00:23:04] And Lindsey Graham, who everybody thinks of as a war hawk, was saying, you can't possibly do this.

[00:23:10] If you kill Qasem Soleimani, we will be at war with Iran.

[00:23:15] You can't imagine the consequences.

[00:23:16] It'd be horrible.

[00:23:18] You can't do it.

[00:23:19] And then Trump said, well, I have we have human source intelligence.

[00:23:25] We have rock solid intelligence that Qasem Soleimani is involved in these attacks on the U.S. embassy and Baghdad.

[00:23:35] And we can't let him escape.

[00:23:36] Well, I don't know if they had other human sources, but I was the human source who relayed that intelligence to the White House through U.S. intelligence agencies.

[00:23:46] And the president later at a campaign meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, in September of 2020, actually pointed me out in the crowd and said, oh, I see one of my undercover operators is here.

[00:23:59] I can't name him. Oh, I wish I could name him.

[00:24:01] I'd like to bring him up here and hug him and kiss him.

[00:24:04] I can't do that because of COVID.

[00:24:07] It was it was quite amazing.

[00:24:08] I was sitting I was sitting, by the way, right next to Matt Gates and right in front of Waltz, Representative Waltz, who was right behind me, all the Florida delegation.

[00:24:20] And now they're all they're all moving up in the administration.

[00:24:22] I mean, Gates might be appointed senator if Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state.

[00:24:29] Who knows now?

[00:24:32] OK, but I still want to understand, like, OK, Joe Biden saying stuff to your Joe Biden's advisor saying stuff to people in Iran and Obama, you know, making favorable deals.

[00:24:44] I can't truly I'm trying hard to believe that U.S. leaders would take the side of Iranian leadership.

[00:24:53] I mean, look, 1979 or 1980 or both years, these we knew back then these guys were evil.

[00:25:01] They took the American embassy.

[00:25:03] Jimmy Carter fumbled the whole thing, you know, and Reagan had to spend his whole administration like fighting Iran.

[00:25:08] And then Iran, all this stuff was happening.

[00:25:11] So clearly there's a history that at least from the U.S. perspective, these are not good guys.

[00:25:17] How could any administration?

[00:25:21] I'm more likely to think that maybe they were trying to appease Iran and show, hey, we're not the bad guys.

[00:25:27] Let's all be friends.

[00:25:28] And maybe that was the strategy.

[00:25:30] I just can't understand why anybody would like, you know, help them harm us.

[00:25:35] Well, I get what you're saying.

[00:25:38] And it's something I have puzzled over for many, many years, long and hard, because the facts are pretty clear that Obama was asked if he could help the people of Iran in 2009.

[00:25:51] He said no.

[00:25:53] Again, in 2022, you had another series of mass protests in Iran.

[00:25:58] Biden did nothing.

[00:25:59] And there are many, many other examples in between time.

[00:26:04] The $6 billion hostage ransom that we paid, the $1.6 billion in cash, pallets of cash that Obama paid.

[00:26:14] Why would they do that?

[00:26:15] What could they possibly think to get from the Iranian regime?

[00:26:20] And I tell you, after all these years, there's only one explanation that I can come up with.

[00:26:26] And it's not a fun explanation.

[00:26:29] It's a very political explanation.

[00:26:31] But it's the only one that makes any sense.

[00:26:35] Obama and Biden and the Democrat Party, the way it has become today.

[00:26:41] Why is it that Donald Trump has basically taken the Democrat base and brought it into the Republican Party?

[00:26:47] Because the Democrat Party is run by coastal elites who basically want to get rid of the United States Constitution.

[00:26:53] They don't want you to keep and bear arms.

[00:26:55] They don't want you to have free speech.

[00:26:58] They want to be able to control your free speech through these government slash university organizations that monitor, quote unquote, disinformation.

[00:27:07] Right.

[00:27:08] This is the end of the U.S. Constitution.

[00:27:09] This party and those leaders have become united with Iranian leaders in wishing to destroy America as we know it.

[00:27:19] So they want to get rid of the America that we have known traditionally for 250 some years.

[00:27:25] And the Iranian leaders would like to get rid of America as well.

[00:27:29] That's not a very nice thing to say.

[00:27:31] It's not a very palatable thing to say.

[00:27:33] But it's the only explanation I can come up with.

[00:27:35] They are united on the goal of destroying that America that we have revered for generations and generations.

[00:27:43] And they now detest and despise.

[00:27:46] And they say so openly.

[00:27:49] But like, okay, let's say you hated America.

[00:27:53] But then you found yourself as president of the United States of America.

[00:27:57] And like, I would just think rationally, like regardless of party, I would think rationally, look, just like in the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed and there was this massive what's called peace dividend, like the economy boom for the next decade.

[00:28:13] And if Iran was removed as a problem in the Middle East, I think we would see that peace dividend times 10 because this is really the hottest spot in the world for a potential World War III.

[00:28:26] It's just chaos over there, but only because of Iran.

[00:28:30] And wouldn't you want to do that?

[00:28:33] And it would be great for your presidency.

[00:28:35] Oh, I took down Iran.

[00:28:36] Or there really was liberation in Iran.

[00:28:40] The people are in charge now.

[00:28:42] And we have trade.

[00:28:43] And we have peace.

[00:28:44] And the economy is booming.

[00:28:46] Politically, wouldn't you want to do that?

[00:28:49] You'd think so.

[00:28:50] But let's look at what actually happened.

[00:28:53] Barack Obama, 2009, takes office.

[00:28:56] And what is the first thing he does?

[00:28:58] He gives a speech in Cairo University in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, where he essentially ignites the Arab Spring against pro-American leaders.

[00:29:12] At that time in Egypt, Mubarak.

[00:29:14] And he had the Muslim Brotherhood, who were outlawed in Egypt, sitting behind him at Cairo University.

[00:29:20] And he did not invite Mubarak, the president of the country, to his speech.

[00:29:24] Why would he do something like that?

[00:29:26] Well, because he wanted to remake America's alliances around the world.

[00:29:32] He wanted to fundamentally transform the United States.

[00:29:35] That's what he said during his campaign.

[00:29:37] And that's what he aspired to, I believe, during his eight years as a president.

[00:29:43] And so what happens next now?

[00:29:48] We've done all this appeasement with Iran.

[00:29:50] We've returned money to them.

[00:29:54] We've not really allowed Israel to—

[00:29:58] Israel could probably take Iran down in one day, for all we know.

[00:30:02] They have the equipment.

[00:30:03] They have the missiles.

[00:30:04] They have the reach.

[00:30:04] I mean, they're already taking out the Houthis, which are even further away from them than Iran.

[00:30:09] And we've kind of held Israel on a leash.

[00:30:13] You know, even with the—

[00:30:16] Despite October 7th, we've tried desperately to hold Israel back.

[00:30:22] And I'm not saying anything about Gaza.

[00:30:26] This has been going on for decades, where we know that every city in Israel gets bombed,

[00:30:32] and the U.S. tells Israel, look, just bear with it.

[00:30:36] And we're going to solve this diplomatically.

[00:30:40] You know, how easy would it be for the U.S. to take care of Iran right now?

[00:30:47] I don't think it would be very easy at all.

[00:30:49] And by the way, we don't solve anything diplomatically with Israel.

[00:30:53] One of the stories in the Iran house is of the 2006 war.

[00:30:56] I was there as a war correspondent for Newsmax up on the front lines with Lebanon.

[00:31:01] And, you know, they called a ceasefire.

[00:31:04] And then the marching bands came out onto the field, just like at halftime in a football game.

[00:31:09] And the marching bands were U.N. officials and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

[00:31:13] And they all said, ceasefire, ceasefire.

[00:31:15] We have to continue this because it's just horrible.

[00:31:18] We can't have war.

[00:31:19] And so they stopped the fighting for a while.

[00:31:21] Well, Hezbollah continued to rearm.

[00:31:24] And now, you know, at the start of this war last year, Hezbollah had 100,000, 150,000 missiles

[00:31:32] instead of three or 4,000, which they had shot off in 2006.

[00:31:36] So, you know, Israel has to win the war.

[00:31:40] They actually have to win the war and to destroy the threat.

[00:31:44] Look at what happened in 1945 when the Allies destroyed Nazi Germany.

[00:31:51] We destroyed Nazism for generations, if not forever.

[00:31:56] We destroyed it for generations.

[00:31:58] The German people, just as the Japanese later on, understood that there was no future for them

[00:32:05] in opposing the United States.

[00:32:07] The Israelis have to make the Palestinians understand there's no future for them

[00:32:11] thinking that they can oppose Israel and wipe Israel off the map.

[00:32:16] Because that's what it's all about.

[00:32:17] The Palestinians still, and you can see this in opinion polls,

[00:32:21] you can see this in the way that Hamas has behaved,

[00:32:23] and even the way that the Palestinian authorities behave.

[00:32:27] They want to wipe Israel off the map.

[00:32:30] When those protesters say, you know, from the river to the sea,

[00:32:34] Palestine will be free, that's exactly what they're saying.

[00:32:36] They're talking about genocide.

[00:32:39] And the Israelis have to beat that.

[00:32:42] And just to underline that just a little bit,

[00:32:45] and this is where I do get a little bit angry at people politically.

[00:32:50] Like, people just don't know basic facts.

[00:32:53] Arabs and Muslims are welcome in Israel.

[00:32:55] Arabs and Muslims are members of the Israeli parliament.

[00:32:59] About 20% of Israel is Arab.

[00:33:01] Outside of Gaza and the West Bank, like in Israel itself,

[00:33:04] is Muslim and Arab.

[00:33:07] Israel has no problems with the Arabs.

[00:33:09] It's just the people who constantly try to bomb them and kill them

[00:33:13] that Israel has problems with.

[00:33:16] Well, that's true.

[00:33:17] And you see that on the ground when you go there.

[00:33:20] I mean, I wrote about this quite a bit.

[00:33:22] I've written about this in both books, and the rest is history.

[00:33:25] And the new book, The Iran House.

[00:33:27] The Iran House has several chapters where I go to Gaza,

[00:33:30] and I talk to Muslim clerics, senior Muslim clerics.

[00:33:35] And at one point, I actually meet, I didn't realize it,

[00:33:39] but a future suicide bomber.

[00:33:41] And the ideology, the mindset of these people is just unbelievable.

[00:33:47] There's no way they're going to live with their Jewish neighbors.

[00:33:50] Are you kidding?

[00:33:50] They just want to kill them.

[00:33:52] They just want to kill them.

[00:33:54] And Israel cannot live side by side with a state whose sole goal,

[00:34:01] whose sole motive for existence is to wipe out the Jews.

[00:34:05] We wouldn't do that.

[00:34:08] And so, okay, so in terms of dealing with Iran,

[00:34:12] what, okay, we have a new president coming into power.

[00:34:14] I mean, he was an old president, and you worked with him, Donald Trump.

[00:34:17] What should the new president do to kind of, let's just say,

[00:34:22] I personally want this peace dividend.

[00:34:24] I want to make money these next four years.

[00:34:27] And I think this is the best way to do it, which sounds callous.

[00:34:30] Of course, I don't have a callous beginning to it.

[00:34:33] Like, I really care about the situation.

[00:34:34] But let's just end all this BS now.

[00:34:38] How do we do it?

[00:34:40] Well, I think that's what Donald Trump is saying as well.

[00:34:43] He wants to end war in the Middle East.

[00:34:46] But you don't end war in the Middle East by papering it over.

[00:34:50] You end war with victory.

[00:34:53] So the Israelis have to be victorious in their war against Hamas and Hezbollah.

[00:34:58] And the people of Iran need to be victorious against this horrible, barbaric regime.

[00:35:06] I wrote a policy paper for the America First Policy Institute

[00:35:11] about the strategy that I think that we should take.

[00:35:15] And I call it maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for the Iranian people.

[00:35:21] So I think President Trump, when he comes back into office, is going to go immediately for the maximum pressure piece of this

[00:35:27] because he was already doing it in his first term.

[00:35:30] You limit the oil resources, the oil revenues to the regime.

[00:35:35] By the time he left office the first time in January of 2021, they were only exporting in Iran 400,000 barrels a day.

[00:35:44] That was down from over 2, 2.5 million before.

[00:35:48] Today, because Biden has refused to enforce those sanctions on the books, the Iranians are back up to 2.5 million barrels a day of exports,

[00:35:58] even though it's in violation of congressional sanctions, not just presidential executive orders, but congressional sanctions.

[00:36:06] So I think Trump will—

[00:36:07] So, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but if Joe Biden was asked about this, let's assume he's being asked about this, what would he say?

[00:36:15] I don't have a clue what he would say.

[00:36:17] You know, he'd probably forget that he had done it.

[00:36:19] But his administration did not enforce the sanctions.

[00:36:24] Every—look, if you look at their first couple of days in office, every single executive order was to countermand whatever Trump did.

[00:36:32] If Trump went to the right, they went to the left.

[00:36:34] If Trump went to the left, they went to the right.

[00:36:36] If Trump went up, they went down.

[00:36:38] Whatever it was.

[00:36:39] If he said red, they said blue at the first, you know, couple of days in office.

[00:36:45] You know, whether it's the XL pipeline, whether it was offshore drilling, whether it was Anwar, whether it was sanctions on Iran preventing Iranian oil exports,

[00:36:54] whether it was the Abraham Accords.

[00:36:56] They systematically went out to destroy everything that President Trump had achieved during his first four years.

[00:37:05] And I think it will now be easier for him to put those things back in place.

[00:37:10] But it's really a shame politically for us in the United States that an administration should think that way about his predecessor.

[00:37:17] Do you see any role the military plays in taking down Iran?

[00:37:22] Or is it more just kind of economic sanctions and kind of cutting them off from the rest of the world that will do it?

[00:37:28] Well, it's primarily economic sanctions.

[00:37:31] It's also support for the pro-freedom movement inside Iran, which is civil society.

[00:37:37] How do you do that?

[00:37:38] Well, communications in particular.

[00:37:41] So you allow people when they're protesting to be able to communicate with direct messages, direct messaging apps that cannot be intercepted by the regime.

[00:37:50] It's very, very important.

[00:37:51] Their activists tell us that all the time.

[00:37:54] That's one of the things that they want.

[00:37:56] Now, the military plays an important role because you have to reestablish deterrence.

[00:38:00] I think that's what the Israelis have done over the past couple of months, these two strikes, airstrikes on Iran.

[00:38:07] You have to establish deterrence and make the Iranian regime understand that if they actually take military action against us,

[00:38:15] launching cruise missiles against shipping in the Red Sea, for example, or hitting our bases in Iraq or in Syria,

[00:38:23] we will make them pay a price for that.

[00:38:24] They have to pay a price for that.

[00:38:26] That's a kind of direct military deterrent.

[00:38:30] But the big piece of it, in my view, is not military at all.

[00:38:34] This is not Iraq 2003.

[00:38:36] This is something we've never seen before.

[00:38:38] This is actually empowering the Iranian people to do what they desperately are yearning to do,

[00:38:46] accomplish their freedom, achieve their freedom from this regime.

[00:38:50] And, you know, they outnumber, obviously, the regime.

[00:38:54] But is it too difficult to take down a government that's armed to the health, that has money?

[00:39:00] You know, it seems like you can't really empower the people to have that much power.

[00:39:05] Well, I think you can.

[00:39:06] And we constantly mistake this.

[00:39:10] The Iranian regime has a monopoly of guns.

[00:39:12] Okay?

[00:39:13] So don't give guns to the pro-freedom people.

[00:39:17] They will be outgunned.

[00:39:18] It's a futile exercise.

[00:39:20] This is not a military exercise.

[00:39:22] This is nonviolent political warfare.

[00:39:26] And when you say nonviolent political warfare, most people emphasize the first two words, nonviolent.

[00:39:34] They forget that it's also warfare.

[00:39:37] And in warfare, you need generals, you need captains, you need colonels, you need privates,

[00:39:42] you need all kinds of people because it is war against the regime through nonviolent means.

[00:39:48] And that's something I think we can help them with quite a bit.

[00:39:52] And what are warfare tactics that one can use in this sense?

[00:39:57] When I think of nonviolent, I think of Gandhi.

[00:39:59] I think of MLK.

[00:40:00] But Gandhi, there was a lot of cost to the Indians who were behind him.

[00:40:04] It was a hard 20 years of him doing that.

[00:40:07] Well, it's been a hard 40 years of the Iranian people waging civil unrest against this regime.

[00:40:14] It's been very difficult.

[00:40:15] There have been tens of thousands of political prisoners who have been murdered.

[00:40:19] And they understand that.

[00:40:20] And that's why what they need, what the Iranian people need, is a visible sign of support from

[00:40:26] the United States government and hopefully from other governments as well in the West,

[00:40:30] that they are not alone, that we hear them, that we are with them, and that we will support

[00:40:35] them.

[00:40:35] And we will, especially, this is what's critical, this is what has not been done before,

[00:40:39] we will delegitimize the regime.

[00:40:42] You know, today, if you're an Iranian political leader, you can travel anywhere you want in

[00:40:48] Europe.

[00:40:48] You can go to Russia.

[00:40:49] You can go to China.

[00:40:50] That's just fine.

[00:40:51] Even though you maybe wanted for war crimes or maybe on a terrorism list here in the United

[00:40:56] States.

[00:40:57] You can go anywhere else you want in the war, in the world.

[00:41:00] We have to delegitimize the regime and make it impossible for their leaders to travel, to

[00:41:07] be taken as leaders of a normal country.

[00:41:11] They should not be coming to the United Nations.

[00:41:13] They should not be coming to international forum.

[00:41:16] You bring up the United Nations, and I've actually heard you talk about this before, how

[00:41:20] part of our deal of hosting the UN is to let all these, you know, evil leaders come

[00:41:25] into the US and have parties and then go back to their religious countries.

[00:41:30] But why does the UN hate Israel so much and like never sanctions Iran?

[00:41:38] And October 7th, they never said anything.

[00:41:41] You know, like, you know, even college students deny that October 7th happened.

[00:41:47] And yet on October 8th, we all watched the YouTube videos of Palestinians driving around

[00:41:51] these women that they killed and raped.

[00:41:54] And we all saw them and people going up to the women and the dead bodies and spitting

[00:41:59] on them.

[00:42:00] Like, I saw the videos.

[00:42:01] They weren't fictional videos.

[00:42:03] They were proudly displaying these videos.

[00:42:06] That's right.

[00:42:07] That's right.

[00:42:07] Well, look, the United...

[00:42:09] But the UN does nothing.

[00:42:10] In fact, the UN helped them.

[00:42:11] It turns out the UN helped them.

[00:42:12] Right.

[00:42:12] And UNRWA, the UN agency that's supposed to help Palestinian refugees, has been, in fact,

[00:42:17] a refuge for Palestinian terrorists.

[00:42:21] Hamas has built a number of their command and control facilities beneath Palestinian...

[00:42:29] Excuse me, beneath UNRWA schools or headquarters in Gaza.

[00:42:34] And they have used the UNRWA schools to indoctrinate children.

[00:42:38] And that's perhaps really the saddest part of this whole story.

[00:42:42] When you think of what's really needed for peace between the Palestinians and Israel, it's...

[00:42:49] You need two people who are ready for peace.

[00:42:52] And remember Golda Meir, who said, you know, we will have peace when the Palestinians want...

[00:43:01] You know, what is it?

[00:43:03] When the Palestinians love life more than they love death.

[00:43:08] And when they want life for their children instead of death for their children.

[00:43:13] Today, you have mothers who want to martyr their sons, their young sons.

[00:43:19] They want them to become martyrs, killing Jews.

[00:43:22] The real sad part of this is that you have to wait for that generation to die away.

[00:43:27] And that generation today is three years old.

[00:43:30] The ones being indoctrinated in the United Nations schools in Gaza and the West Bank.

[00:43:51] So what happens?

[00:43:53] Like, what do you predict will happen over the next few years?

[00:43:59] You mean by crystal ball?

[00:44:00] Well, look, I think we saw immediately after Trump's triumphant election, unequivocal election.

[00:44:12] By the way, I think it was so healthy for the United States that it was unequivocal on election night.

[00:44:17] That we did not have a long, drawn-out election as we did in 2020 with all of the questions that were raised.

[00:44:23] And many of them that have not been resolved yet.

[00:44:26] But you saw immediately the day after on the stock market.

[00:44:28] The stock market roared up 3% in one day.

[00:44:32] And it's still going up.

[00:44:33] And it's going up because people realize, lots of people realize, not just Trump supporters.

[00:44:40] Lots of people realize that Trump is going to bring back an era of economic dominance of the United States, of fundamental fairness in the economy for the American people.

[00:44:52] He's going to stop the elite capture of our government and of our intelligence agencies.

[00:44:59] And basically, the country is going to be a nicer place to live over the next four years.

[00:45:08] Well, let me ask you.

[00:45:10] I'm not trying to just play the devil's advocate.

[00:45:15] I'm genuinely curious.

[00:45:17] Why did he do that in his first term, 2017 to 2021?

[00:45:22] I mean, he tried to do it, I guess, a lot of these things.

[00:45:26] Well, gee, let me see.

[00:45:28] How many intelligence organizations are there in the United States?

[00:45:31] 16 or 17?

[00:45:33] Every now and then, there's a new one in there.

[00:45:35] Maybe it's 18 by now.

[00:45:37] But at any rate, there used to be just 16 of them.

[00:45:39] So all of them were dead set against Donald Trump, and all of them worked to subvert him.

[00:45:45] First, we had the Russia hoax.

[00:45:46] Then we had the Ukraine hoax.

[00:45:50] And I cannot – my wife and I talk about this sometimes.

[00:45:54] And she says it's just astonishing that he could even stand up to all of the assaults on him as president,

[00:46:03] the assaults on his family, the assaults on his person, on his integrity.

[00:46:09] Calling him a stooge of Putin.

[00:46:12] How many politicians, American politicians, could have stood up to that and continued to govern?

[00:46:20] So it's remarkable that he got anything done at all.

[00:46:24] And yet he got a lot done up until COVID hit.

[00:46:27] You know, the first step act in the United States, just domestically, in allowing nonviolent criminals to be able to get out instead of serving horrible, long, lengthy sentences.

[00:46:40] The Abraham Accords overseas.

[00:46:43] The talks with North Korea.

[00:46:45] And he was ridiculed for that.

[00:46:47] The talks with Putin.

[00:46:49] Guess what?

[00:46:49] Putin did not invade Ukraine while Donald Trump was president.

[00:46:54] Putin did not seize Crimea when Donald Trump was president.

[00:46:58] That was in 2014 when Obama was president.

[00:47:01] So none of these bad things happened when Trump was president.

[00:47:04] But COVID hit and COVID really taught us things that we will, I hope, never allow government to do to us ever again.

[00:47:17] Yeah, I mean, and this is also where I have to, you know, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.

[00:47:24] I always felt, and people who listen to my podcast remember, I was doing podcasts every day during the first part of COVID.

[00:47:31] I don't think the economy should have been locked down.

[00:47:34] I think that was a horrible mistake.

[00:47:35] Now we realize, just in terms of the number of deaths, in terms of the economy, it seems pretty easy to say that the economy should not have been shut down, or at least the way it was.

[00:47:47] And he was the president then when it was shut down.

[00:47:50] Like, he kind of let them – now, I know it wasn't his idea, but he did let them do it.

[00:47:55] And the buck does stop there with the presidency.

[00:47:57] I think that's the big weak point of Donald Trump's presidency.

[00:48:02] And that's one reason.

[00:48:05] He started out when he started to campaign this season, he started out talking about his successes in COVID.

[00:48:14] And you'll notice he quickly dropped talking about them because I think he was getting pushback from a lot of people.

[00:48:20] His response to COVID was not a success.

[00:48:23] The vaccine – you know, developing the vaccine so quickly was not a success.

[00:48:28] Those things were mistaken.

[00:48:30] And he was profoundly misled by experts he was told he should believe in, like Anthony Fauci.

[00:48:39] Fauci is a serial liar, a serial fabricator, and somebody who has enabled the Chinese communist regime and their bioweapons programs with U.S. government dollars.

[00:48:55] Fauci should be in jail, in my opinion.

[00:48:58] And – but that's another subject.

[00:49:03] You've written books about everything, by the way, so I encourage people to check out all your stuff.

[00:49:07] But after, you know, after you were held – you're just starting out in this whole career in the Middle East, and right away you're kept prisoner by terrorists.

[00:49:17] You're tortured.

[00:49:18] We forgot to talk about that.

[00:49:21] Did you have PTSD?

[00:49:22] Like, why did you go right back to Israel and Palestine and the Middle East?

[00:49:26] Like, did you have PTSD?

[00:49:28] Did you say, you know what, maybe I'm going to be a bird watcher and live in the woods for a while?

[00:49:34] Well, you know, I guess it's the way I was brought up.

[00:49:37] When we fall, we get up.

[00:49:40] And you go back to the place where bad things happened.

[00:49:44] And there's actually a very funny passage in my earlier book, and the rest is history.

[00:49:50] Just one year after I'd been liberated, after I got out from being a hostage from the PLO in Beirut, I go to visit another Palestinian faction in the Bekaa Valley and spend a night with them on a farm, not far from the Israeli border, where they're telling me all their stories of how their valiant attacks on the Israeli military.

[00:50:12] And I'm sitting there scratching my head as we're getting ready to go to sleep.

[00:50:16] And I say, well, how different is this from when I was in Beirut just a year ago?

[00:50:21] A year ago, I couldn't leave.

[00:50:23] Tonight, I suppose I could leave if I wanted, but where can I go?

[00:50:26] It's dark.

[00:50:27] There's no vehicles around.

[00:50:29] And if they wanted to do anything with me, I guess they could.

[00:50:32] But it's the whole difference is, you know, the sky's over your head.

[00:50:36] And, you know, there's air out there that you can breathe instead of being underground and being bombed day in and day out.

[00:50:42] And it's not the season for hostages.

[00:50:45] It is not the season for kidnapping.

[00:50:48] Gosh, man.

[00:50:49] I don't.

[00:50:49] And then you mentioned earlier you have you manage subnets of agents.

[00:50:54] What does that mean?

[00:50:57] Well, so the U.S. intelligence community came to me, as I said, on multiple occasions.

[00:51:03] And they said, we need your help on the Iran target.

[00:51:06] We need your help with terrorism.

[00:51:08] Because we know that you have debriefed defectors from Iranian intelligence.

[00:51:13] We know that you have sources and contacts.

[00:51:16] And can you activate them for us?

[00:51:19] And so that became a network of subagents.

[00:51:22] So I was the agent, if you wish, of the intelligence community.

[00:51:26] I was their co-op team, somebody working as a, officially working as a consultant.

[00:51:35] And then I would run these subagents that they could not talk to.

[00:51:40] They were not allowed to talk to by their hierarchy.

[00:51:43] And so I had to talk to these people and try to vet their information and make sure that it was credible and double source things if we could.

[00:51:54] And so they would come back.

[00:51:56] I had guys who could get information out of the Supreme Leader's office in Tehran.

[00:52:03] That's how we knew about the attacks that were pending or being planned against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad over the Christmas holiday, the New Year's holiday of 2019-2020.

[00:52:17] I actually had a subagent, a guy, who had guys or people inside the Supreme Leader's office in Tehran.

[00:52:26] And we were funneling.

[00:52:27] And the U.S. intelligence group had nobody like that.

[00:52:31] And they told me that.

[00:52:32] We don't have that access, Ken.

[00:52:35] You've got that access.

[00:52:36] We love you.

[00:52:38] Now, you saying this, could you get, could they now identify?

[00:52:42] And could you get that person in trouble who's in the Supreme Leader's office?

[00:52:46] Now, now, now, now.

[00:52:48] Come on now.

[00:52:49] I'm not a young guy any longer.

[00:52:52] And I'm pretty good at figuring out how to lay my breadcrumb trails away from the folks.

[00:52:59] I've been very careful, obviously.

[00:53:01] I have never burned a source in my entire career as an investigative reporter, as a newsman.

[00:53:07] And I've never burned a source even working with the intelligence community.

[00:53:12] And do you think in this next administration you'll do some work with the intelligence community and Trump again?

[00:53:18] I don't know.

[00:53:19] It depends what they want to do.

[00:53:21] I, you know, I have my ideas and I've expressed them quite publicly.

[00:53:27] And I'm sure the president-elect is very well aware of them.

[00:53:33] He knows that Iran is going to be a big problem for his administration.

[00:53:37] I think his natural tendency is to see if he can make a deal.

[00:53:41] But there's no deal that you can make with these people.

[00:53:44] They might want to lure him into a deal, but it won't be a deal.

[00:53:49] It'll be worse than little rocket man.

[00:53:53] You know, Trump might get, he might get a meeting or two, although I doubt that that will happen because the Iranians can't allow themselves to meet with the American president.

[00:54:04] And that's something that most Americans don't understand and cannot understand.

[00:54:08] And I don't think President Trump understands it.

[00:54:11] If an Iranian leader, a senior Iranian leader publicly met with the president of the United States or his secretary of state or his secretary of defense, whatever, they'd be toast inside Iran.

[00:54:24] They would be toast politically inside Iran.

[00:54:26] They cannot do it.

[00:54:28] And because of that simple fact, there's not going to be a deal, not a deal with this regime.

[00:54:38] There will be some strategy, which I have laid out and I'm sure others will improve upon, of helping the Iranian people to get rid of the regime.

[00:54:48] So then you can have a deal.

[00:54:49] You can have a deal with a new regime.

[00:54:51] Absolutely.

[00:54:52] And then what you've mentioned a lot about, and you've written a lot about arms dealers in the, in the Middle East, like what's the role of money in all of this?

[00:55:00] Because there was one point in, I forgot which war they were talking about, but a senior administration official a year or so ago said, Hey, all these wars, this is good for the U S economy because they're buying our bullets and they have to spend the dollars back here.

[00:55:15] And so that struck me as a very weird comment.

[00:55:19] And what's, what's the role of money in all this?

[00:55:21] And how much do arms dealers in the Middle East, these kind of shady brokers in the middle of all these weapons deals, how much money do they make?

[00:55:30] Well, look, the shady brokers make money for themselves.

[00:55:34] Okay.

[00:55:34] They're, they're, they're helping governments make money as well on the side, but they basically make money for themselves.

[00:55:41] Uh, they are not the cause of conflict.

[00:55:45] They're merely the profiteers of conflict.

[00:55:48] And some of them say, well, I would be stupid not to take advantage of this situation, right?

[00:55:53] They see an opportunity to make a lot of money.

[00:55:56] Uh, look, I don't, uh, I'm very happy that we have Lockheed Martin and, uh, Northrop Grumman and our Raytheon and our big defense contractors to innovate and make new weapons systems that will protect Americans.

[00:56:13] It will protect American lives that will protect our troops and they need to make more of them.

[00:56:18] And I think you're going to see a lot of, um, uh, new funding at the Pentagon.

[00:56:22] That's just my personal opinion, but, uh, we are, our reserves are depleted.

[00:56:27] We've sent so much stuff to Ukraine.

[00:56:30] Uh, we don't have enough to fight a war that would last for two months with our own reserves.

[00:56:35] So we need to build up our own reserves.

[00:56:37] We don't have enough weapons in the stockpiles right now.

[00:56:41] Submarines, nuclear submarines, we, you know, the Chinese are going to surpass us by 2030 in the number of nuclear submarines.

[00:56:48] They'll have 76.

[00:56:49] We'll have 66 in that's just six years away from now because we only have, if I'm not mistaken, we have one nuclear submarine, uh, manufacturing facility.

[00:57:00] One, one shipyard left the United States.

[00:57:02] We used to have two.

[00:57:03] We only have one left.

[00:57:04] Uh, we don't make destroyers.

[00:57:05] We don't make cruisers.

[00:57:06] We don't make frigates any longer the way that we used to.

[00:57:08] We make these horrible, literal control ships that don't work and don't serve any purpose.

[00:57:13] We waste money on, on programs, which, which everybody, every person involved in the procurement process will tell you will never work.

[00:57:22] Uh, where we, we, we should be investing in things like drones.

[00:57:26] You know, drones are really cheap.

[00:57:28] You know what's causing the most problem in Ukraine is drones.

[00:57:32] Even the Israelis are getting hit by drones from Hezbollah.

[00:57:35] Uh, and, and, you know, we should be mass producing drones.

[00:57:38] Uh, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them.

[00:57:41] And we're not doing it.

[00:57:43] Uh, so there's lots of things that a new secretary of defense, I think with, uh, who comes with a spirit of innovation to the job will think about, but we really need that, that innovation in our defense establishment.

[00:57:57] Well, Ken Terraman, I mean, you gave me so much to think about and, you know, I still have to wrap my head around the fact that I don't, it's really hard to believe that a president would really, would be as firm as you say, in terms of like love Iran and hate the U S.

[00:58:21] Like I can't just, my brain just can't, even though I, I've seen all, all the same historical events that, that you've seen that everyone's reads in the newspapers.

[00:58:31] It's just hard to believe that their motive was, was bad, even whether I liked them or not politically.

[00:58:37] Um, and I, I, I don't have to really think about this because I can't argue with anything you've said.

[00:58:44] You, you, you, you, you, you have all these, all the facts and, but.

[00:58:51] This is like the one issue of the world that, that really scares me.

[00:58:55] Like I've, I've literally like been up at night thinking about this probably more than any other issue in the world politically.

[00:59:01] Well, let me just issue a challenge to you.

[00:59:04] Come up with another explanation for the behavior of Barack Obama, uh, behavior of Joe Biden towards the Iranian regime.

[00:59:12] The appeasement, the rank, the obvious, the clear appeasement of the Mueller.

[00:59:17] Find me another explanation.

[00:59:19] Um, I'm open to it.

[00:59:21] I've looked at all of them that I could find all of them that I've seen.

[00:59:25] I find no other explanation that makes any sense.

[00:59:28] Yeah.

[00:59:28] I mean, the only thing I can think is, is just that maybe they are think like, Oh, if you treat, if you treat the bully nicely, if you let him cheat off your test in school, maybe he won't bully you anymore.

[00:59:39] Which is a strategy that doesn't work even in elementary school.

[00:59:42] It probably doesn't work on the international playing field either.

[00:59:45] But that's the only thing I could think is that maybe they think, Hey, let's just, you know, be nice to everyone.

[00:59:50] Everyone will be nice back to us.

[00:59:51] So Carter does it.

[00:59:53] Clinton does it.

[00:59:54] Obama does it.

[00:59:56] Biden does it.

[00:59:57] Four times wrong.

[00:59:59] They can't, they haven't learned the lesson yet.

[01:00:01] Yeah.

[01:00:02] I don't, I, like you said, it's a lot of things too, are decisions made politically and maybe they become so, or their advisors say become so addicted to power behind the scenes that that's the only real thing that they, they think about.

[01:00:15] And I don't know, it's disturbing.

[01:00:19] It's disturbing to think about it any other way, but I really hope the next four years, like I said, I'm optimistic for that peace dividend again.

[01:00:27] And maybe Iran is, is shut down.

[01:00:31] Maybe that, and I have met a lot of people, you know, the citizens of Iran, secular people who hate their, the regime that rules over them.

[01:00:39] They're good, smart, intelligent, educated people.

[01:00:42] And I really hope they succeed.

[01:00:44] And, and, you know, there's a saying you either, either trade bullets or dollars.

[01:00:48] And I'm hoping that we get back to trading dollars with, with, with a country like Iran, you know, without their religious regime in charge of them.

[01:00:58] Well, there you go.

[01:00:59] I, I, I, I couldn't agree with you more.

[01:01:01] I mean, I think that's a, it is a hopeful future, but it's one that will take a lot of hard work from the United States as well as the people of Iran.

[01:01:10] But we have to help them.

[01:01:11] We have, I believe, again, it's in our national security interest as Americans to help the people of Iran to get rid of this regime, because the regime is the source of instability, violence, and mayhem, not just in the Middle East, but around the world.

[01:01:29] Oh, you know, last question on this.

[01:01:31] What's the status?

[01:01:32] And you write about this in the book, but what's the status of the Iran's nuclear?

[01:01:36] Like what, what, what's the status of Iran and nuclear?

[01:01:39] Well, gee, and why, why, why should we be so, so happy to see the mullows in power when the International Atomic Energy Agency has told us that they have now the capability, thanks to the Iran nuclear deal from Obama, they now have the capability of building five nuclear weapons worth of fuel, of nuclear fuel in five weeks.

[01:02:06] They can make 15 bombs in five months.

[01:02:10] They couldn't do that in, when, you know, just five or six years ago is because they've been installing these new generation centrifuges secretly under the Iran nuclear deal that Obama negotiated, and they were able to break out.

[01:02:23] And so now they have, they have such quantities.

[01:02:27] Look, there are two, there are two main components of nuclear weapons.

[01:02:31] There's the nuclear fuel that I've just been talking about, and then there are all these non-nuclear components.

[01:02:36] They mastered the non-nuclear components 20 years ago.

[01:02:40] They had the nuclear weapons design 20 years ago.

[01:02:43] So it's really only been the fissile material, the highly enriched uranium, that's been the blockage for them in having a nuclear arsenal.

[01:02:52] I believe that unchecked, the regime will have an arsenal of 20, 30, 40 weapons within a year.

[01:03:02] And if it would take them five weeks, how come they haven't done it yet?

[01:03:05] Well, because I don't think they want to have one weapon, two weapons, or five weapons.

[01:03:10] I think they want to come out all of a sudden with an arsenal.

[01:03:13] So you can't attack us because we've got plenty of bombs that we can launch back at you.

[01:03:18] We don't have just one or two.

[01:03:19] We've got plenty.

[01:03:21] Kind of like North Korea today.

[01:03:23] Right.

[01:03:24] So they're afraid if they make one, Israel will just take it out or the U.S. will take it out, and then they have nothing.

[01:03:30] Right.

[01:03:30] And then we also know that they had one.

[01:03:33] Right.

[01:03:33] And plus, their missiles have not had a great success rate at penetrating Israel's missile defenses.

[01:03:39] So if they put it on a missile against Israel, they have probably a 10% chance that it would actually get through and hit Israel.

[01:03:49] Less than that.

[01:03:50] Yeah.

[01:03:51] Well, I don't know whether to be scared to death after talking to you or hopeful.

[01:03:57] I'm going to stick with hopeful, but I'm still scared at the same time.

[01:04:00] Stick with hopeful.

[01:04:01] Yeah.

[01:04:01] Be apprehensive, but be hopeful.

[01:04:04] And I'm definitely going to read your other books.

[01:04:11] So this one's The Iran House, Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue.

[01:04:17] And the rest is history.

[01:04:20] Tales of hostages, arms dealers, dirty tricks, and spies.

[01:04:25] That is next on my list.

[01:04:26] Right.

[01:04:27] That's next on my list.

[01:04:27] And spies.

[01:04:28] By the way, I can't tell if you're a spy or an arms dealer or a hostage.

[01:04:34] Well, I had been a hostage.

[01:04:35] Or a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, which you were in 2006.

[01:04:39] Right.

[01:04:39] The New York Times called me an arms dealer.

[01:04:41] And I have been a spy, both for the United States and for Israel.

[01:04:47] But it was a very gentlemanly sort of spying I did for Israel, and honorable, trying to help

[01:04:54] them make contact with people in Lebanon who were holding one of their citizens hostage.

[01:04:59] I guess I think of like Cold War spying, like, oh, it was the CIA versus the KGB.

[01:05:05] And then later they would go for drinks and swap war stories.

[01:05:08] I feel like that doesn't exist anymore.

[01:05:10] That kind of almost collegial atmosphere between spies.

[01:05:16] You know, the difference is in the Cold War, the KGB and the CIA weren't trying to kill

[01:05:20] each other all the time.

[01:05:22] They were just trying to figure out what the other was, were doing.

[01:05:26] In today's spy world with the Iranians in particular, they're trying to kill you.

[01:05:30] They're trying to kill you.

[01:05:32] Yeah.

[01:05:33] Well, it's, that's scary too.

[01:05:35] So look, good luck, Ken.

[01:05:37] I hope you stay safe.

[01:05:39] And I hope you're able to give good advice and stop these wars.

[01:05:44] Ultimately, people who are listening to this, forget your politics.

[01:05:48] This man wants to stop wars and bring peace.

[01:05:52] And we all benefit.

[01:05:54] It doesn't matter who's president.

[01:05:55] We all benefit if there's this peace dividend.

[01:05:58] I don't care who is president.

[01:05:59] If we can kind of find peace in this, in this area of the world.

[01:06:02] So, so thanks a lot, Ken.

[01:06:04] And thanks for also sharing all the information and stories you do.

[01:06:06] So I, I really appreciate it.

[01:06:08] Thank you.

[01:06:09] It's been a pleasure to be with you.

[01:06:10] I've had fun.

[01:06:11] Thank you.