.png)
1 hour ago
3
Former CIA covert operations officer Mike Baker gives an inside look at how the CIA, Mossad, and other intelligence agencies are influencing the Iran War, and where the contest between America and China is heading, in this preview from the latest “Signal Sitdown” podcast with Bradley Devlin.
Bradley Devlin: One of the big reporting pieces that we’ve seen kinda come out over the course of the Iran war is not only the differences in the assessments between the Mossad and the CIA or the ODNI, but also the Mossad thought they were going to be much more capable of creating the pressure for regime collapse.
There was that story that the CIA was preparing the Iraqi Kurds to invade from the west. I don’t know if that was a double bluff from the CIA or not, but, you know, you have all of these different wheels churning.
And, you know, [Benjamin] Netanyahu comes in early February and says, “I think we can go forward with this.”
The Mossad chief was in Washington five days after that, or no, somewhere around that time. Point being, weeks later, we’re in the war.
And background quotes reported in The New York Times—so again, for people at home, take it as you will—but [JD] Vance, [Marco] Rubio, [John] Ratcliffe, they were skeptical of what the Israelis were saying about their capacities to actually create kind of a regime collapse.
How do you work out those types of issues, and what’s your read on that entire situation?
Mike Baker: Yeah. The answer is sometimes you don’t, so whoever’s the bigger dog, you know, gets to say. Sometimes you, again, you fall back on, “OK, well, why do you think that?”
Let’s, you know, bring the analysts in. Explain your intelligence, right? And they’ll walk through in gruesome detail, oftentimes what they’ve got, particularly in sort of that environment where the stakes are obviously very high. So you’ll fall back on, again, the quality of the intelligence. And that will help guide those conversations.
Now obviously, you know, someone like Ratcliffe or anybody who’s the agency director will spend more time at giving weight to the intel credibility than perhaps somebody sitting in the White House. You know, they’re gonna be thinking a little bit more on the geopolitical terms or, you know, there’s a gut feeling maybe, whatever it might be.
But there’s no doubt that Netanyahu came into this with regime change as a primary driver, right? That’s what they wanted. The White House, I think Washington in general, is spooked by the phrase “regime change”, right? Nobody likes to talk about it. No one wants to bring it up, right?
It conjures up all sorts of problems from the past.
I think the White House was perhaps a little, in their own way, optimistic or overly optimistic because of the Venezuela experience, right? And I think there were some people that were willing to think that they could lay that same template over Iran and, “Oh my God, look, we’re gonna get, you know …
Maybe we’re not gonna get, call it regime change, you know, but we’re gonna reshuffle the deck chairs and we’re gonna get a government we can work with, right? And that’s just bull—-,
Bradley Devlin: And now you have to know that the guy on the ground in Iran working for the CIA does not think that at all.
Mike Baker: No. No, no, there’s no way. And I think if you had, again, if you had pulled in guys who had spent their careers dealing in that part of the world and with Iran, that would’ve said, “No.” You know, you can kill a lot of these guys—
Bradley Devlin: You’re gonna kill the cleric and the IRGC is not gonna become more powerful?
Mike Baker: Yeah, yeah. Or they’re not gonna land it on the Strait of Hormuz as their only leverage point? Of course they are, right? So I think there were certain obvious things, and I am, you know, I try to be optimistic, so I’m sure that during the course of—and I know for a fact that there were some briefings where it was clearly pointed out that the Strait of Hormuz would become the point here where it all came together. And I think that was, I don’t want to say dismissed outright, but I think there was a willingness to imagine this was gonna go better than it ever did.
I’m shocked that they didn’t have contingency plans well in advance for the Strait of Hormuz.
Bradley Devlin: There is this narrative amongst people who are very pro-war with Iran. They want the president to, quote-unquote, “finish the job.” What that particularly means, we’re not exactly sure. Does that mean finish off the nuclear program? Does that mean finish off the entire freaking thing? We don’t know. But they are saying, “We need to arm the people.”
And there is this bizarre … like, I don’t know if they think that they’re, if they actually think that these are good examples to cite, or if they think their audiences are ignorant of the history here. But they cite Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan as examples—
Mike Baker: Oh, yeah. Yeah …
Bradley Devlin: —of when this has succeeded.
Mike Baker: Succeeded? OK.
Bradley Devlin: And I look at the situation, I say, “Well, [Daniel] Ortega is in charge in Nicaragua. In Angola—
Mike Baker: Yeah, what’s old is new again …
Bradley Devlin: —30-year civil war.
Mike Baker: Let me think about Afghanistan, how did that go?
Bradley Devlin: Afghanistan, how did that end up? Yeah. Well, the Taliban’s still in control, and the Mujahedin, there was this guy in the Mujahedin called Osama bin Laden, right?
Like, there is this narrative that if only we were to arm the people, this could work out. One, what do you make of this line of argument? Two, if these people brought you in and said, “Mike, how would we make this work?” What would you even, like, could you even make that work? Is that even possible?
Mike Baker: Yeah. I heard that very argument today, before this show, with some pundits who just were cavalier about it. “He’s got to finish the job. I’m tired of this. You know, we can’t have this ridiculous back and forth, and the Iranians think they’ve won, and so we’ve got to, we’ve just got to finish the job.”
And nobody said, “Well, how are you going to do that?” And then somebody else in the same panel was like, “Yeah, and we’ve got to get that uranium. That’s what, we just have to go get it.” I’m thinking, “Have you ever …” I mean, I knew the answer, but they’ve never, never had their boots on the ground in a hostile environment.
You want to go in? You want to talk about a complex operation, right? Where you’re talking about being on the ground for weeks, right? With excavators, first of all.
Bradley Devlin: Operation Sapphire took six weeks in the Soviet Union.
Mike Baker: This is gonna be unbelievable. And so, yeah, I get it. People are frustrated, right?
Because they, I think they imagined—and in part the messaging indicated as such—that this was gonna be a quick turnaround, right? And so people’s expectations were up here. They thought this was gonna be somehow easier than it was. They imagined, a lot of people were hoping—and rightly so, I was hoping, right?
Everybody wants this regime gone. I want this regime gone, right? They deserve every bit of ass-kicking that they get for everything they’ve done to the Iranian people over all these years and the number of Americans they’ve killed. And so I have no problems with that. But you also have to be pragmatic, right?
And you have to assess these things at the outset, and I’m afraid that they didn’t necessarily do that in terms of how difficult this was going to be and what they were gonna likely end up with. I think they had people briefing them on that. I don’t think they were paid attention to.
So, if you were to say, “OK, well, you got to finish the job, so how are you gonna do it?”
Well, it’s not gonna be by air-dropping weapons to the citizens of Iran, right? Arming the people of Iran. It’s not gonna be by hoping that a small number of Kurds in the west are gonna somehow march on Tehran, right? Not gonna happen. So, you also, you can’t affect this regime change just through munitions, right?
So how do you do it? You’re gonna have to be more patient, and you’re going to have to completely turn the tap off on anything that goes into that country, right? What does that mean? That’s a terrible—
Bradley Devlin: That is famine. That is—
Mike Baker: That is bad, right? That is really bad. And they’re gonna pass the regime, you know, they don’t give a [expletive] about the people, right?
You’ve already seen that. How many thousands did they kill? So they’re gonna pass that pain down to the Iranian people. So it’s a very unsatisfactory answer. But I think it’s, if you’re just talking from a very pragmatic point of view, how would you do it? I would do it through the economic pressure that you’ve got to be serious about, right?
And that means you gotta get serious with China. You gotta sit there in front of them during the summit and explain what you’re going to do and say, “I don’t care whether you like it or not, but this is what we’re going to do.” And yet, Xi Jinping respects power, respects authority, right? Respects a very direct approach, right?
I would—so I—but again, I—that’s another topic. So I think you have to go after every little bit of revenue that regime can have. That means, in part, yes, a lot of pain for the Iranian people, and that’s a terrible thing, right? Because they’ve suffered a lot. But I think also it means that you would have to have the patience that I don’t think this administration has, or any administration coming up on an election, right?
That’s the primary driver here, right? So if you’re talking about six months, right, of sustained brutal economic pressure to get this regime to finally fracture, crack and fall apart, that’s six months leading up to the midterm elections where gas prices undoubtedly keep going up.
Bradley Devlin: The Iranians are starving. They have it worse, but we have $6 a gallon.
Mike Baker: Yeah, or $7. Yeah. Right? Or $8. And the point being is I don’t think that’s gonna happen because I don’t think they’ve got the political will and patience to do it. But you’re not gonna do it by this bizarre concept of arming the Iranian people, right?
Or just dropping more bombs.
Bradley Devlin: Everyone agrees in Washington that the long-term threat to the United States is great power competition between China. Final thoughts on what this means for this, what has been called an unspoken Cold War—between China and the United States—how Iran, Israel-US war affects that in the coming months and years potentially?
Mike Baker: I think as soon as—because I think we view the relationship with China different than they do. I think they look at us and they already think they’re at war with us, right? And we don’t. I don’t think we like to use that term, and maybe we use a Cold War to some degree, but we don’t even like to say they’re an adversary, right?
We always dance around and say, “Well, they’re a very important partner, you know, in there’s a lot of ways.” And yes, that’s great. And we’re always, of course, we’re just talking about the Chinese regime. We’re not talking about the Chinese people, the history or whatever. It’s a fantastic place.
You’ve got the summit coming up between Trump and Xi Jinping. And they’re gonna be, you would think, talking about a wide range of things, right? I’m sure Xi will bring up Taiwan if Trump doesn’t. Do I think that if Xi views bringing Taiwan back into the fold as his big legacy move, then that will happen sometime before he steps away, right?
And then so now you have to spend all your time—that’s what intelligence analysts do—they spend a lot of time assessing Xi’s relationship with the people around him and the party and his generals, which he’s had some trouble with.
And so I think there’s a great deal to be looked at there in terms of if you want to read the tea leaves as to the issue with Taiwan, which will be the next really big flashpoint, perhaps, then you have to look at it from more of a personal perspective.
You know? What’s Xi’s health like, right? How long does he maintain his grip on power, right? When does he see himself walking off into the sunset? Because then you could say, well, the move on Taiwan—in what other fashion, maybe a soft approach, maybe more of a kinetic approach—will happen during that timeframe.
The Iran conflict, I think Xi will do exactly what they always do, which he’ll talk about, you know, we just want peace. You know, we just want—the nations need to get along. It’ll be a lot of, you know, just talking about nothing. I don’t think anything’s … I tend to be very cynical when it comes to summits, investigations in Washington, committee hearings.
I’m a real cynic that anything ever really gets done of substance during these big moments or events, right? Right. Everything happens behind the scenes. So we’ll see. But you’re right, China is the player to watch, right? There’s no doubt about it. I think Russia—you know, it’d be lovely to talk about Russia-Ukraine, you know, sometime because that is at a fascinating moment right now.
Right? We’ve taken our eye off the ball because we’re tired of it, right? And Zelenskyy is, I think, feeling better about that. You know, I don’t—they’re not quite as desperate for U.S. munitions and weaponry as they were. And again, I always thought we had more envoys. I didn’t know we only had two envoys.
We’ve got Steve Witkoff and we’ve got Jared Kushner. They’re everywhere, right?
Bradley Devlin: Keep the family close.
Mike Baker: Yeah, exactly. So they’re everywhere. I suspect they’re mediating divorces around the country as well.
So, but I think, you know, it’s like, you know, Zelenskyy’s probably saying, “Well, you know, how about us?”
But I don’t think he cares as much anymore. So, but China’s the one to watch.
Iran, I don’t think we’re gonna get out of that, you know, as quickly as the White House would like. And I think it’s going to be messy, and I think it’s gonna be very unsatisfactory in that I think we’re gonna give them some concessions.
They’re gonna end up with assets unfrozen and delivered to them in an effort to open up the Strait. I think they’ve gone—the Iranians have gone—from saying, you know, “This is what we want,” to, “The Strait is now under our control.” So you may see a sea change in the way that they view what used to be freedom of navigation.
So now they’re gonna set up a toll system like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I mean, it’s just a bizarre, messy situation that I don’t think is gonna end with people saying, “Oh, that was worth it.” Because I do think they’re gonna kick that nuclear issue down the road, unfortunately.
English (US)