Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 348. Syria, Afghanistan, and The Rest Is Classified About this episode It has been thirteen years since Bashar al-Assad triggered a civil war which would kill hundreds of thousands of people and devastate Syria. Recent events have shown just how far his rule has shattered the nation. Today Alastair and Rory are joined by former CIA Syria Analyst David McCloskey and host of Goalhanger’s latest podcast, The Rest Is Classified to discuss them, along with his new episode on the first CIA teams in Afghanistan after 9/11.
To hear the full episode, search The Rest Is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:07 Rory Stewart? Welcome to a special edition of The Rest Is Politics. Me, Rory Stewart.
0:11 Alastair Campbell? And me, Annette Campbell. And the reason it's special is because we've got a guest who is a special guest because he's doing a new Rest Is podcast called The Rest Is Classified, which is going to tell amazing stories from the world of espionage. And it's a very good thing because unlike Rory Stewart, this guy is actually an expuke.
0:35 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
0:36 Alastair Campbell? Welcome, David McCloskey.
0:38 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me on, guys.
0:39 Rory Stewart? I'm really excited to have you. David, one of the reasons why people will have heard of you is that you wrote this extraordinary novel, Damascus Station. But I'm not sure that everybody's aware that that draws directly on your own experience in the CIA, working actually in Damascus, right?
0:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. I spent pretty much my entire CIA career as an analyst, working on Syria and had the opportunity to actually live and work in Damascus just prior to the start of the uprising in 2011.
1:11 Rory Stewart? And David, you picked up, I think, very clearly there, because it's right there in the beginning of the book, just how brutal and unpleasant the Bashar al-Assad regime was. I mean, given that Syria's back in the news at the moment, give us a bit of a reminder of what that regime was like, what it was capable of, what it's done there for the last few years.
1:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, the astounding thing, just in looking at what's happened over the past few days in Syria, is to think that we're now, I mean, 15 years into this conflict. I mean, this regime, over that period of time, has killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of its own people. I believe the UN actually just stopped counting deaths in the civil war a number of years ago. I mean, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people disappeared with essentially a massive amount of evidence to support these kind of claims that the Syrian government's been running detention and interrogation centers and disappearing its own people. You've got a country that's
2:13 Speaker 02 90% probably living below the poverty line, most of the infrastructure destroyed. I mean, this place has been entirely shattered under the decision of Bashar al-Assad and most of the people around him.
2:25 Alastair Campbell? Rory and I on our main podcast this week, we talked about Syria and the recent events that you referred to where these rebels, insurgents, call them what you will, have kind of taken Aleppo and are now on their way to Hamar. We didn't have a sense of this coming. It seems genuinely to have taken the world by surprise. Now, is that a failure of intelligence or is that just that people have taken their eye off the Syrian ball?
2:48 Speaker 02 To be honest, Alistair, I think it's a little bit of both contributing to that. I think we certainly, I mean, you could scan the pages of any major international section of a newspaper over the past, you know, five years and you'll probably see Syria in there as it relates to some foreign government bombing it, right? Or being bombed inside its borders. So the actual conflict itself and the sort of very local dynamics to it, I think have, you know, escaped us. It's also, I think, just a tremendous failure of our ability to even structure a coherent policy as it relates to Syria across the Western world. But I think there were signs that the Syrian regime and its military in
3:33 Speaker 02 particular were increasingly hollow. And so while we probably could not have predicted how effective this attack would be, I think the kind of slow-moving trends around the suffocation of this northwest province of Idlib, which is where this main opposition group has essentially governed over the past decade. And frankly, the just complete wreck that is the Syrian military, those were known dynamics, I think. We might not have been able to foresee exactly how quickly this would happen. But I think the tendency to call this conflict sort of frozen, or even worse, to say that Bashar al-Assad had won, you know, those were lines you'd hear in Western capitals and papers. They're just patently not true.
4:17 Rory Stewart? The episode that's just come out on The Rest Is Classified focuses on the extraordinary story of how Afghanistan was taken in 2001. So this incredible moment where the CIA
4:29 Rory Stewart? Working with warlords managed to topple the Taliban government in a matter of weeks. And it's this very weird story because the Taliban took the country in the mid 90s in a matter of weeks, lost the country in a matter of weeks, recaptured it just now in a matter of weeks. And that seems to echo a little bit with what we've just seen with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's forces and indeed the collapse of the Iraqi forces in Mosul when Daesh advanced them. What is going on in these worlds where suddenly people make hundreds of miles of advances overnight and divisions of militaries flee and small groups manage to capture things?
5:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the collapse of the Iraqi army and security forces in 2014 is a great analogy for what we're seeing in Syria right now because I think what we're seeing are essentially the result of you have a number of kind of slow moving dynamics that are visible, but perhaps over time, everybody, including the people living through them, like the sort of proverbial frog being boiled, are not aware of how corrosive they are. And then all of the sudden, the people on the other side decide to act and you realize very quickly how hollow these structures are. I mean, you know, to take the Iraq example, the Iraqi army had essentially been hollowed out by its own sectarianism and corruption.
5:44 Speaker 02 And I think we're seeing a similar dynamic right now in Syria where it is kind of a paper tiger, right? Someone just sort of pushes after, you know, a decade plus of these dynamics playing out and all of a sudden we have a new reality on the ground, which if you three weeks ago just took a look at it, you'd say, oh, the Syrian regime is doing great. Look at how much territory they control. Well, did they really control it? No, they just had weak military units sitting there and another side decided to come in and push and look what happened.
6:14 Rory Stewart? So David, just give us a quick rundown on what this week's episode is all about.
6:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this week we're going to talk about one of the very first CIA teams inserted into Afghanistan in quite literally the weeks after September the 11th. And it was a very small detachment of CIA paramilitary officers and case officers and linguists and medics. And they essentially had been put in with bags of cash. To link up with Afghan warlords who were fighting the Taliban. And the really interesting piece about this story among many is that this was a period of time in Afghanistan where effectively we were the insurgents against the Taliban government
6:59 Speaker 02 and really linking up with these groups in an attempt to find Osama bin Laden and to decapitate al Qaeda. So it's got this kind of Wild West element to it as well, which is quite fascinating. There's a lot of time on horseback. There are literally a massive gun battle in a gigantic Afghan star fort for its climax. So it is really a thrilling story about these very first CIA officers dropped on the ground after September 11.
7:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that struck me about it was very much the figure of Mike Span, who was a guy that had turned up in Afghanistan in Yakalang, central Afghanistan, just before I got there. And when I remember turning up at the airport and Mike had managed to name the airport after his son, but he was like a figure out of Britain's great game. I mean, the stuff they were doing, the way they were dressed, the way they were moving around in 19th century British iconography, these people would have been legendary heroes. Poems would have been written about them, great films would be made about them. But tell us about the difference between somebody like that, someone like Mike, and an analyst, which is what you were.
8:04 Speaker 02 The team was stacked, you know, unfortunately not with analysts, you know, I gotta say, definitely needed that analytic firepower, you know, in those early days in Afghanistan. But Mike Span, you know, he's a CIA paramilitary officer. That team had folks like him who were essentially had history working in, they'd served in the army.
8:25 Rory Stewart? Mike, I think, had been in the Marine Corps, hadn't he?
8:27 Speaker 02 He'd been a Marine, exactly. And who, you know, were not intelligence officers in the sense that their job was to go out and sort of spot, assess, develop and recruit human sources. But it was actually, in this case, to provide.
8:43 Rory Stewart? Do stuff.
8:44 Speaker 02 Do stuff and to support Abdul Rashid Dostum's insurgency against the Taliban. So you had that, you had linguists, you had medics. This was a very small team that was a lot more, and it was paired up with these sort of Green Beret detachments as well. So this was much more of a fighting force and frankly, a way to sort of. Manipulate warlords on the ground to move them in the direction that we wanted to move them. Now, I was an analyst. I think the way I like to describe it is that an analyst is not unlike, you know, sort of Jack Ryan, you know, no guns typically. We're not out there developing sources. What we're doing is actually more like clandestine journalism in a way. That's the way I would frame it is we are looking at a whole bunch of disparate sources,
9:29 Speaker 02 trying to answer a question that matters to the military, matters to policymakers, matters to the President of the United States and put that together in a coherent way to make sense of the world. So when we talk about Syria, 10 years ago, the stuff I was writing on Syria was probably a lot similar to what these poor analysts are working on today, which is like, what's going to happen to Assad, to his military? What does it look like if the opposition takes over? Those are the kinds of questions you're answering as an analyst.
9:54 Rory Stewart? And I guess, final thing for me. One of the continual themes in CIA's history is putting down warnings on Vietnam, warnings on Iraq, warnings on Afghanistan, warnings even on Ukraine, which are not heeded. I mean, there's fantastic stuff from LBJ where he says, you know, the CIA reminds him of a cow that he had at home that would, its tail would flick the shit into the milk pail. So LBJ really didn't want to hear what CIA had to say about Vietnam. There is a big problem there, isn't there? Which is that you can produce very high quality information. You might even be on the nail. You might even be right that, you know, Vietnam's not going well, Iraq's not going well, Afghanistan's not going to work. But there are all series of bureaucratic incentives for optimism bias, group think,
10:37 Rory Stewart? which means that actually the best analysis in the world just doesn't make it through.
10:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, that is exactly right. I mean, I think from the outside, you can have a tendency to think of the CIA as a policymaking entity, right? I mean, the CIA is out there sort of making things happen. And the reality is... The CIA is feeding a policy process and it is not the one actually making those decisions. So frankly, the Afghanistan example comes to mind, which is there were district level assessments of control that CIA put together throughout the war. And as that picture sort of darkened, the administration, various administrations over time, had the ability to sort of ignore them if it wanted to. And the CIA can't really do much about
11:26 Speaker 02 that. So we can get things right, we can get things wrong. But at the end of the day, it is the president, the policymakers around them who are deciding what happens to that information.
11:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, David, good luck with it. Great to talk to you. You're presenting The Rest Is Classified with a Brit, national security journalist Gordon Carrera, who we know well. And as a special treat for listeners, we've got a little clip here from this week's The Rest Is Classified. Good luck.
11:58 Speaker 02 There is an Uzbek warlord up in northern Afghanistan who has just recently returned from exile in Turkey, and he is a man by the name of Abdul Rashid Dost.
12:08 Speaker 03 Okay, let's talk about him because he is a really interesting character. I spoke to someone who was in Afghanistan at this time, a Brit, and who was saying, A, he thought he was a bit like Attila the Hun, was his was his parallel. And his description of him was evil but likeable.
12:23 Speaker 02 Evil but likeable. Yeah, that is a very fair description, I would say. So he is, I think, he's a Dothraki horse lord, is what he is. Okay, from Game of Thrones. Yeah. So he is, he's a big guy. He looks sort of bearish. He's, he's got this kind of gruff persona. He also smiles a lot. He laughs a lot. He is, has never been allowed to visit the US because of his sort of, you know, allegations of war crimes, right? He has a reputation for being really a, he's a very skilled fighter and politician. He's a brawler. He is a practitioner of the game of Buskashi, which is a sort of polo-esque kind of horse-mounted game in which instead of, you know, you're battling over a headless calf. Right, so he's forty seven in two thousand and one. And the other thing to note about him,
13:08 Speaker 02 other than a reputation for violence, is that he fought for the communist regime in Afghanistan. Right? He's taken money from the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Indians. He's been a partner with a lot of these Northern Alliance ethnic groups, but he's also fought them at various points. And that reputation for brutality is that there's a great story. So many of these are probably apocryphal, but we should probably share them because they've become part of the lore. There's a story that Dostum had a man actually chained to the tracks of a Russian-made tank in a courtyard of one of his forts and actually drove the tank around until it smashed the guy to pieces. There were stories about him actually crushing people's skulls in his hands
13:51 Speaker 02 and that he was known to eat twelve chickens at a time and drink two quarts of vodka in one sitting. So anytime you're a warlord that's got this sort of lore around you, you're probably doing something right.
14:04 Speaker 04 And this is the kind of the guy the CIA are gonna work with? I mean, is, I mean.
14:09 Speaker 02 Yes, the answer is yes.
14:11 Speaker 04 Right, and is that not a little bit awkward, but I guess needs must, is that the thinking?
14:14 Speaker 02 That's right. I mean, he's, he's a, he's not trusted by the CIA at this point. In fact, the CIA has not been in contact with him in the nineties. You know, the CIA.
14:24 Speaker 04 He's too bad, he's too.
14:26 Speaker 02 Yes, he was not, he was not seen as the most sort of trustworthy ally for very good reasons. You know, all the side switching and the war crimes, to name, to name a few. But the CIA after nine eleven, they need to get in touch with him because he is that little patch of terrain that he sort of naturally would own in northern Afghanistan and which he did own and essentially ran as a mini-state in the nineteen nineties is really crucial.
14:52 Speaker 04 How do you get in touch with someone like that if you haven't been in touch with them?
14:55 Speaker 02 Well, clearly you work through a friend who used to work at the National Automobile Dealers Insurance Trust in Washington DC. Yes, because this is, so Dostum, again, has no direct relationship with CIA. Dostum has a friend in the States who in the eighties got sort of connected to Afghanistan because one of his colleagues. At the National Automobile Dealers Insurance Trust was an Afghan politician who had left after the war. So Dostum gets in touch with this guy who puts Dostum in touch with the Pentagon. Dostum gets put in touch with the CIA and specifically with a CIA officer named David Tyson, who's going to be critical for this story to come and who is the only Uzbek linguist at the CIA.
15:38 Speaker 02 He's a Central Asian focused case officer who's been working in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, out of the station there.
15:44 Speaker 03 And he's the one person who speaks Uzbek in the CIA. He becomes a very important person in the CIA at this point, having probably not been the most important person previously.
15:52 Speaker 02 That's right.
15:53 Speaker 03 He's going in then with the team into to see Dostum.
15:56 Speaker 02 That's right. And he gets on the phone with Dostum and says, you know, Dostum, of course, is asking him, well, how many tanks will you bring? And David Tyson says, well, it'll just be me and six or seven guys. But don't worry, we'll bring our sleeping bags. And of course, Dostum in the accounts is audibly taken aback by how light this footprint's going to be. But, you know, he's used to sort of improvising and he says, well, I have no armored personnel carriers or heavy guns. All I've got is horses, mules and donkeys. So I suppose we're even.
16:26 Alastair Campbell? If you want to hear the full episode, search The Rest Is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.
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