Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:02
I don't actually want to punch him in the face.
Anne Pellegrino
0:04
Yes, you do. You say it all the time.
Jeffrey
0:10
You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Aaron Stein
0:27
And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
Anne
0:33
And I am Anne Pellegrino, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
Jeffrey
0:39
Also at Monterey.
Anne
0:42
Lovely Monterey. I have my window closed. Open your window. Jesus, Jeffrey.
Aaron
0:46
No, no, don't do that. You'll have wind noises on your microphones.
Jeffrey
0:52
No, his shutters are closed. Basically, Anne is annoyed that I have an ocean view, and then I don't take advantage of that fact. Where do you sit in the office, Anne? Do you have a window?
Anne
1:03
I have a window, but I am tree shrouded, which is still nice.
Jeffrey
1:08
Because the trees shroud her from the busy street below.
Anne
1:13
There's always the same... Dude who skateboards down the road. 9 a.m. Is he vaping? I don't know. I don't look out the window. I like to think he's vaping and eating an It's It. What's an It's It? I just hear his voice.
Jeffrey
1:26
You don't know what an It's It is? I don't know what that is. Oh, my God. You people. An It's It is an ice cream sandwich. It's two chocolate chip cookies with ice cream in the middle. They're made in San Francisco.
Anne
1:38
That's called an It's It? That's called an It's It. I've just usually had the Toll House...
Jeffrey
1:43
No, It's It is a brand. It's a venerable San Francisco thing. So you can do nothing more Northern California than skateboard down the street vaping and eating an It's It.
Anne
1:53
I've only been to San Francisco twice and fleed both times.
Anne
2:01
It's a really long story.
Aaron
2:04
But before this podcast goes off the rails.
Anne
2:05
Think Tenderloin, South of Market. No.
Aaron
2:10
Well, I think that's maybe a story for Brilliant Pebbles. You know, yeah, that's right. What's your view today, Aaron? My view is that All Days is a brick building, and it's actually an apartment building, so I stare into somebody's kitchenette. So, like, this is an ocean view, trees, vaping, and Aaron looking into a kitchenette. You guys have it better.
Anne
2:33
What are they making for breakfast or lunch now?
Aaron
2:35
You know, I try not to look because, you know, I feel like I'm intruding on people's personal space. Single person, couple, children. What's the what's the demo? It's a single person, slightly older, you know, and it's I think it's a male. So bachelor pad.
Jeffrey
2:54
So he's like there in his whitey tighties, scrambling eggs. Well, that's why I don't look.
Aaron
3:00
Well, we have now spent three minutes on our views. I think the listeners are curious what the hell it is that we're going to talk about today.
Jeffrey
3:06
They want our views on other subjects?
Aaron
3:08
Yeah, I think so, because this is the Arms Control Wonk podcast. You guys have been up to some work over there to complement or supplement an oldie but goodie from the Arms Control Wonk podcast, University Missiles in the Middle East.
Anne
3:22
Mm-hmm. We have been hard at work on an interactive map. That looks at programs that aren't just Iran. That's a horrible way to say that.
Jeffrey
3:36
That is true. But it is true, right? Like, everybody talks about Iran's missile program. And, you know, Mike Pompeo has consistently talked about how Iran needs to give up its missile program. And if you just followed the news, I think you would have the idea that only Iran had missiles in the Middle East. And that's not true.
So we built a map that showed probably not all, but a pretty healthy sample of missile production, testing and deployment facilities throughout the Middle East, stretching from Egypt all the way to Iran. Correct.
Aaron
4:16
Yeah, and I mean, I know that this is something, particularly the Egyptian program, but I think we've also talked about the Turkish program before, but something that struck your fancy as obviously interesting because there's a lot more missiles in the Middle East than is generally understood.
Jeffrey
4:31
Yeah, so, you know, It's kind of crazy because we talk about Iran, but obviously Israel was the first country to have a missile development program. Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, now after our little open source find, all have domestic production capabilities. And so the idea that Iran is just going to give up these weapons, like it's kind of like North Korea, Where there aren't other countries around it with missiles, just strikes me as crazy.
And so we kind of wanted to dig into each of those programs. It was really interesting. And I don't know what you found most interesting, but one of the things I really liked about the Iran work was understanding how Iran went about increasing the range of its missiles, because I think it's a technological path that's a little different and maybe a challenge for the MTCR.
Anne
5:27
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, going into this project, I was in the same position where I just thought about Iranian missiles. So looking at all of these other programs was eye-opening. But yeah, let's start talking about Iran, because we can't ignore them, and talk about their newest generation of solid fuel missiles and what we found with the new Zolfgar and the Dezful missiles.
Jeffrey
5:58
But did you enjoy playing with our new toy?
Anne
6:01
Which new toy? The new toy we're staring at! Missile Toolkit! Yes. I, as I explained to you the other day, I still only have a tenuous grasp on this program, but it's pretty incredible.
Jeffrey
6:17
Aaron, do you know about Missile Toolkit? I don't. You have to explain it to me. Okay, so for a long time, we've wanted to model the performance of missiles, you know, because we go through and we measure them, right? Right. And from that, we can estimate how much fuel is in them and from examination, make guesses about how much the whole thing weighs.
But you need like a flyout program. And for like a long time, we used Jeff Forden's flyout program, which is pretty nice.
Jeffrey
6:44
So thanks to a generous donor and a corporate partnership to bring the price down so that the generous donor could afford it, we got STK's Missile Toolkit.
Anne
6:58
It's actually AGI's.
Jeffrey
6:59
Oh, sorry, AGI, right? STK is their other software. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne
7:03
Systems Toolkit, and then Missile School.
Jeffrey
7:05
So it's an export-controlled program for modeling the performance of missiles.
Anne
7:10
Like, had to sign some forms.
Jeffrey
7:13
Threatened to be sentenced to prison if we let foreign nationals hop on the thing.
Anne
7:17
I was a little apprehensive to sign the form. I was like, oh, gosh.
Aaron
7:21
That's actually really interesting. So when you took this thing out for a spin, when you looked at the Iranian missiles, I guess we'll start there. What were you looking at?
Anne
7:31
We were looking at how the Zolfgar, which is apparently a new version of the Fatah 110, or part of that family of missiles, how they basically doubled the range of the missile. And so there were a couple clues along the way that proved to us that Iran was telling the truth about the capabilities of the Zolfgar.
Jeffrey
7:55
Yeah, so the Zolfgar is, like, a little bit bigger than the Fatah 110, but it's not that much bigger. And so one of the things we used the program for is to ask, if you just took the Fatah 110 and you made it bigger, would its range jump from 300 to 700 kilometers? And, like, it doesn't. So a heavy Fatah 110 is still only, like, a 500-kilometer range missile, and so...
Right. That is the kind of demonstration that there is a different technological innovation that then gets you that extra 200 kilometers. Which is where the selfies come in.
Aaron
8:35
Yeah, so talk about that. So how did you guys get to the, because they've used them in combat before, so we know that they fly. Yes, yeah.
Anne
8:42
So the first combat use was July 2017, I think, against targets in ISIS. We should look that up, right? Yeah, ISIS targets in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. Tehran Timi.
Aaron
8:56
And there was a, I believe Tehran Timi was live on the scene for the liftoff.
Jeffrey
9:02
Oh, I want to punch that guy in the face. He has such a punchable face. I don't know why. Yeah. It's the self-satisfied grin he has. Makes me crazy.
Anne
9:14
Yeah. But anyways, the technological advancement we were looking at was using a lighter airframe to make the muscle fly farther. And that is a carbon fiber airframe. Ooh. The selfies that Jeffrey was referring to are a series of pictures that students at Amir Kabir University took with a mock-up of a Zolfgar that was displayed at the university.
And when I was reading some reports, it sounded like some of the student scientists somehow were involved in the Zolfgar's advancement. So it was like, here! Look at what you helped contribute to.
Jeffrey
9:57
Yeah. Like Amir Kabir is kind of like the Caltech of Tehran. So, you know, they produce a lot of students who go into the program and I'm sure that they actually do I'm sure that they actually do relevant research. And so there's a mock-up of the thing that was put there and, and, you know, there are all these Iranians, mostly on like telegram, right?
Aaron
10:21
Yeah, I think that's the big one over there.
Jeffrey
10:23
Yeah, taking selfies. That are incredibly high resolution and, like, close up. So, you know, it's like everything from, like, the, like, Math League hipster, you know, with, like, thick glasses and bad acne and a backpack, like, slumped against the missile to, you know, women in the whole head covering. Like, it's the whole kind of gamut of Iranian society.
But the really high resolution pictures showed that the texture of the airframe was ribbed. And so we think that's pretty decent evidence that it's carbon fiber, which, again, is like the only way that a missile the size of the Zolfgar is going to go 700 kilometers instead of 500. Yeah.
Aaron
11:05
You know, as somebody who studies more closely the nuclear program, carbon fiber is an industry that's actually pretty well developed in Iran, as far as I understand it.
Jeffrey
11:14
Yeah, we actually, a couple of years ago, geolocated one of the carbon fiber plants with the folks at Project Alpha at King's College. They went ahead and got pictures of the building structure while it was being built. And then we matched that to an image of a walkthrough that I guess was Ahmadinejad did.
Anne
11:32
No, it was the former defense minister.
Jeffrey
11:37
The thing I remember is they left the metadata on the pictures so we could pull the metadata and figure out the order the pictures were taken in. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah, so that was nice. So the big takeaway for me from this, though, is that You know, the Fatah 110, when it was produced, was not a very impressive missile.
And in fact, I found an old 2006 paper where an expert was quoting... An expert was quoting experts. I don't know. The author was quoting some people anonymously saying, some experts don't even think it's a real missile at all. Right? Because it's just really... It's so unsophisticated. That...
Anne
12:19
Non-real missile, yeah, showed up in Syria, yeah. probably is in the arms of, jeez, Hezbollah, Hezbollah, yeah. You were gonna say Houthis, were you? No, I was gonna say, I was gonna say hands, and then arms, and I got cross, and the arms are in the hands. Well, there are rumors that the Fatah is, is, is routed via Syria down to Hezbollah, and that's some of the reasons that there are the Israeli strikes.
Jeffrey
12:47
Yeah. But, you know, what was interesting to me is technologically, and this shows a huge challenge, I think, for the MTCR, if you learn how to make a crude Fatah 110, which Iran could export because it's not an MTCR Category 1 missile. Right. If you just replace the airframe, you suddenly have an MTCR Category 1 missile.
Jeffrey
13:13
Exactly. The technological cutoff In the MTCR is a little bit dated. Because it doesn't take into account the fact that a missile like the Zolfgar can emerge from something like the Fatah 110.
Aaron
13:30
Yeah, so you take the innards and you just replace the outers and you all of a sudden have a much longer range missile.
Jeffrey
13:36
Correct. Yeah, and I think the Iranians probably did more to it because they could. But just the kinematics of the thing are... You know, the Zolfgar is just a wee bit bigger, but what it is is the airframe is a whole lot lighter.
Anne
13:51
We were so excited about figuring out the Zolfgar, and then like a month later, Iran announced the Dezful. Which one? The Dezful, which is apparently almost identical to the Zolfgar, but can fly a thousand kilometers.
Jeffrey
14:10
Yeah, they said it's the same dimensions, and it kind of implied it was the same weight, but said it could go 1,000 kilometers instead of 700, so it's... Well, s***, right? Well, and, you know, this is basically that this is all the Fatah 110 being slightly enlarged, going from, what, 610 millimeters to 680 or something?
Jeffrey
14:33
You know, so you're talking a 70 millimeter increase in diameter, which is something, but not nothing. It's something, but it's not much. And then now this has, yeah, manifested itself as a 1,000 kilometer range missile with, like, what did we decide, 500 kilogram payload?
Anne
14:51
It's like 479 is what the Iranians said. Which is, you know, a proper missile.
Aaron
14:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. And again, they felt confident enough to use them, I believe, on two occasions. I think it was into northern Iraq and into Syria, but certainly, definitely on one occasion into Syria.
Jeffrey
15:08
No, no, it's two occasions. In fact, the second occasion was at night. And we have a really cool project that Adam Martin, one of our GRAs, is doing using the sound signature of the launch to estimate the acceleration of the missile, which should allow us to tell if it was a Zolfgar, even though we can't actually see the missile in the launch.
Anne
15:33
Isn't that incredible?
Jeffrey
15:35
That is incredible.
Aaron
15:36
It doesn't work yet. We don't have any of these tools over here. I'm jealous. ... Yeah, no, and that was a Tehran Timmy video, too, if I remember correctly.
Jeffrey
15:47
Yeah, that's right.
Aaron
15:48
Yeah, Tehran Timmy is...
Jeffrey
15:50
I don't actually want to punch him in the face.
Anne
15:52
Yes, you do. You say it all the time.
Jeffrey
15:54
I know, it's just... I wouldn't actually punch him. I would want to ask him where the locations of all these facilities were.
Aaron
16:02
You'd take him out for a tea. And I mean, if you want to jump around a little bit, I mean, where else, when you guys were looking at this stuff, popped out at you? I mean, using this new software and all your geolocation wizardry.
Jeffrey
16:14
Oh. Oh man, I don't know, which one's your favorite, Anne? There are two that I both love.
Anne
16:22
I... Turkey and Israel.
Jeffrey
16:25
Yeah, those are the two I like too.
Aaron
16:27
Which one do we want to do first? Let's do Israel first, and then Turkey, just because I love Turkey, and I want to be held in anticipation.
Anne
16:32
Great, okay. Israel.
Jeffrey
16:39
So Israel doesn't like to show us their missiles, right?
Aaron
16:43
No, no, no. It's actually not all that easy to find pictures.
Anne
16:46
But if you go look at French sources, you can find out all you want about the origins of the Israeli program.
Jeffrey
16:56
Yeah. You know, the Jericho 1 is a missile produced by the French company Dassault. Right. And they produced a beautiful commemorative. It's like a coffee table look. It's a commemorative edition. 50 years of Dassault products. It's got like a full four or five pages on that missile. Oh, really? Yeah. It's even got a picture of one of the early schematics that showed three different evolutions of the design.
And so we know exactly how big the two fuel sections are. And it gives us the precise length and diameter and payload and range and then what was so fun is we took the diagram measured everything scaled it with the numbers Dassault gave added the payload that Dassault said it had and flew it in the simulator and it was like perfect
Aaron
18:00
Oh, so they had the numbers right.
Jeffrey
18:02
Of course. Yeah, I mean, obviously they knew which missile they built.
Aaron
18:05
Right, right, right, right, right. But it's indirect confirmation, of course.
Jeffrey
18:09
Yeah, I mean, when you look at the missile, I mean, it's super clear. And then, I don't know, Anne and I were looking at, and the South African angle is kind of fun.
Anne
18:21
So the South Africans worked with the Israelis on a space launch mission. Version of the Jericho 2, which is the RSA series, yeah. But the three is the one that is now in the museum in South Africa, so you can get pictures of it, right? Oh but basically they tested a couple times from Overbird test range, right.
Jeffrey
18:47
So, I mean, the Israelis have these two missiles that they've never let us see, the Jericho-1 and the Jericho-2, except the Jericho-1 is French, and we have enormous amounts of documentation about that, and basically the RSA-3 is a Jericho-2 sitting in a South African museum. I kind of want to go.
Aaron
19:05
That should be your next ask of a donor. I mean, a two-week jaunt down to South Africa. I'm in there with, like, my measuring tape.
Anne
19:12
But I need to ask a donor to go to Novaya Zemlya first.
Aaron
19:17
South Africa sounds a lot nicer to me, Anne.
Anne
19:19
Ugh, but the polar bears.
Jeffrey
19:21
Novaya Zemlya was Anne's first OSINT love. Yeah. Oh, it's going to be hard to break up with that one, although I hear the vineyards are nice down there.
Anne
19:30
This project is coming in, it's at the top.
Jeffrey
19:34
I had a friend who was an OSD desk officer for South Africa in the 1990s, and so his job required him to go to South Africa all the time, and... He spent a lot of vacation time at the end of those trips tasting South African wine.
Anne
19:48
What a rough life. Although we can't complain because of where we live. There's no clouds in the sky, and Jeffrey still has his blinds closed.
Jeffrey
19:58
I totally want to go to Overburg and get my tape measure out. Actually, if we have South African listeners who might go to the museum at Overburg... I just want a diameter. If you give me a circumference, I can figure out the diameter. Just pi times the radius squared.
Anne
20:17
You could measure the nozzle as well.
Jeffrey
20:20
Sorry, pi r squared is the area. But the point being, if you give me the diameter, we can work it out.
Anne
20:25
And the nozzle.
Aaron
20:27
Circumference, that's the word I'm looking for, sorry. Were you able to find anything actually in Israel through your open source stuff that you were then able to plot on the map?
Anne
20:35
Yeah. Yeah. So in January, I think. Yeah. Netanyahu visited he visited the Israeli Aerospace Industries MLM division, which is apparently where they design and fabricate the Jericho, the Chevy space launch vehicle and the Arrow three.
Anne
21:00
Yeah, so we have a video of him giving a speech, and then he walks over to an Arrow 3 mock-up and pats it.
Jeffrey
21:07
Like everybody has to pat it. We help pay for it. But you know what Marty Pfeiffer would do. That's right. Lick it. Yeah. And then there's the Bet-Zachariah. I can't pronounce things in Hebrew. Bet-Zachariah? Don't look at me. We have a long and storied arms control wonk tradition of mispronouncing things. Correct. You can clearly see solid propellant production and an engine test stand.
Aaron
21:41
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Jeffrey
21:42
Oh, man. And then the launch site, they've done launches from the launch site, so that's easy to ID. Right. Right.
Anne
21:48
Plenty of videos of Shavit launches over the past years.
Jeffrey
21:53
So, yeah, like, it's kind of, like, they're super secretive, but there's, like, actually plenty of information. It's hardly the most difficult target I've ever encountered.
Aaron
22:04
Okay. I mean, so how does that then compare to all of your work in Turkey? Because the Turks like to put videos all up on Twitter, so they're not so hard to find out either. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne
22:16
This was a tough one.
Jeffrey
22:16
Yeah, that was hard.
Anne
22:19
There is a... I guess a similarity with Israel's program is the... program getting jump-started. Oh, who's calling me? Toby.
Jeffrey
22:33
We love you, Toby. Toby Fenwick is a longtime friend and I presume podcast listener.
Jeffrey
22:42
So you f***ed up our pod, Toby, but we still love you. But anyways, you had trouble with the Turks? Yeah.
Anne
22:50
I don't know. Why are you being so polite? Well, okay, because you were the one who did a lot of the open sorcery on this, and I don't know how you want to talk about your source for that, because you've grown cagey with me.
Jeffrey
23:04
Oh, okay. Right, I see. So, you know, the Turkish missile is a Chinese missile. Right.
Aaron
23:12
We talked about it on a podcast before.
Jeffrey
23:15
Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, we know which missile it is now.
Aaron
23:18
Okay, yeah, we're not quite sure.
Jeffrey
23:21
Well, so there's an interview with a Turkish general who was involved in the procurement, and it's pretty clear that the Turks have imported two different generations of the B611 missile from China. So you speak Turkish, I don't, but it's like thunder or lightning. What's the word? Bora?
Aaron
23:53
No, ilderim, ilderim. Ilderim is lightning. Right.
Jeffrey
23:58
So that's the B611. And they imported that like in the early 2000s.
Anne
24:09
No, 98, I think, was when the contract was signed. Oh, they signed it in 98, right.
Jeffrey
24:15
And we see it in like a 2002 parade. 2003? 2004? Something like that.
Anne
24:21
I'll have to look it up. All right. So anyway, they do that. And then the Bora... I have it actually right here. Let's look it up.
Jeffrey
24:27
...is the B611M. 2007 parade. 2007 parade. And then the Bora is the B611M. And then, and these are licensed production, so the specs seem to differ just a wee bit. We think that they're like five centimeters wider, or five millimeters wider than the Chinese article, although the Turks might just be rounding them. But what's fun about that, I guess this is why Anne was being protective.
Anne
25:01
I just don't want to get in trouble with you.
Jeffrey
25:06
A thing fell off a truck. A Chinese thing. I came into possession of a brochure showing the engine of the B611 family. It comes in three flavors. A 600mm version, a 605mm version... And a 650 millimeter version. And what we inferred from that is that the Turks imported the ability to make the 600 millimeter version, and then the Bora, which they export as the Khan, is the 605 millimeter version.
Anne
25:46
So the Bora 2 that has been announced, but there's no details about range, its capabilities, we think that that will be the third engine.
Jeffrey
25:59
Right. We know the Chinese sell a 650 millimeter version that would take the missile to about 360 kilometers. So our expectation is when we see the Bora 2, that's what it's going to look like.
Anne
26:13
But what's interesting is we haven't seen the Chinese version of that either.
Jeffrey
26:16
No, other than in the brochure.
Aaron
26:18
Yeah. So this would be like a specific to Turkey production of what's in the brochure, but you haven't seen in China. This would be the Bora 2.
Jeffrey
26:30
Right. I mean, I think...
Jeffrey
26:32
In theory. I mean, the... Propellant manufacturer has a brochure in which they say the B611 family comes in these three flavors. Right. Like an It's It. Yes. Yes. I like the mint It's It, to be honest. I prefer that to the vanilla. But basically the brochure indicates that there is a third flavor. You know, and it's public, right?
The Chinese are advertising it. Right, it's for sale.
Aaron
27:06
They sold it to Turkey along with the production.
Jeffrey
27:08
Right. Well, we've never seen the third. It's the third one. Right. That would be news to people. So the B611, the U.S., if we ever saw it, it would be probably the CSS9 Mod X3, although I've never seen any evidence that the U.S. has seen such a missile. But if it did exist, it would be a 360-kilometer range missile, which is an MTCR Category 1 system, and I'm guessing the Chinese are not going to admit to selling that.
They're going to make the Turks claim to have developed it on their own.
Jeffrey
27:38
And you know, maybe they will!
Anne
27:39
Maybe it'll look like the Shaheen! The history of co-production will diverge at the third flavor.
Jeffrey
27:46
That's so interesting. That's fascinating.
Jeffrey
27:50
The interview with the General's great. Yeah, no, no, I mean... Because he was also apparently involved in the surface-to-air missile sale with the Chinese that the U.S. successfully pressured the Turks to end.
Aaron
28:01
Yeah, the FT-2000 slash HQ-9.
Jeffrey
28:04
Yeah, I guess he was pretty pissed about that.
Aaron
28:06
Yeah, because the original reporting on that was that they would get full production. My guess, my suspicion was always that it was modeled on the Yildirim program. This was before the Bora really came out. So, interesting. Van, did you find the production facility?
Anne
28:29
Yeah, so they're produced by Rocket Sun, and Rocket Sun's facility is a known location.
Jeffrey
28:36
Yeah. Shout out to Scott LaFoy, who is a friend to all who seek solid propellant plants.
Aaron
28:46
Yeah, I know he's been working on this. We've had multiple WhatsApps and DMs about this going back and forth.
Anne
28:54
He and you were the ones who provided me with the location initially, and the fact that across from Rocket San's headquarters is this whole military production-looking facility that is quite interesting, but we don't quite understand completely. But what I did see that was interesting at the headquarters is what looks like a test stand.
Jeffrey
29:21
Yeah, it really looks like a test stand. Oh, really? I didn't even notice that. Yeah, it's kind of a funny, weird building. So, you know, maybe, maybe not. But, I mean, they have to have a test stand somewhere.
Aaron
29:35
Right. No, no, it makes sense. Anything else that jumped out from you guys on this map? I mean, I know there's so much. Anything else you want to run through?
Jeffrey
29:44
I have a favorite. Go. Go. I'm going to do a little blog post on this. It's totally irrelevant, but I just loved it. Do you remember the Sosan, the North Korean ship that the U.S. interdicted in 2002 that was carrying all those Scud missiles? I do.
Aaron
30:04
I even remember where I read about it the first time. It was on the BART in San Francisco.
Jeffrey
30:09
Were you fleeing the Tenderloin District like a terrified Anne Pellegrino?
Aaron
30:13
No, I was going to visit somebody in Berkeley, and I was reading the Chronicle, and it was on page two.
Jeffrey
30:18
So for listeners, the Bush administration was very disappointed because they interdicted this North Korean ship filled with scuds, And they were all proud of themselves. I mean, they'd had, like, Spanish Marines, they, like, shot out the masts and they, you know, rappelled onto the deck and they'd seized it. And then the Yemenis were like, those are our missiles.
We paid for them. Turn them back over. And the Bush administration legally didn't really have any... Ability to keep them, and they had to turn them back over to the Yemenis, and the only thing that they were able to get from the Yemenis was a promise that they wouldn't buy any more North Korean missiles. Well, fast forward to 2008-2009, the U.S. intelligence community picked up that Yemen was resuming missile-related cooperation with North Korea.
And this shows up in some, you know... And improperly leaked intelligence estimates. And I know from some of the stuff that appeared in WikiLeaks that the Yemeni explanation was that they weren't resuming missile cooperation with North Korea because the U.S. was really mad about this, right? Yeah. That the missiles were defective. And that they were just negotiating with the North Koreans to either get their money back or get the missiles fixed or get replacement missiles that actually worked.
And the Bush administration, you can see it in like the it's like I think it was Nick Burns was one of the people doing the conversation. You know, you can tell that they're like, yeah, sure, that's what you're doing. But it turns out it's true. There is now an interview with the general who was assigned. To go get the money back or get the missiles fixed in North Korea. He's a Yemeni general. he gave this public interview, and the context was he had kept the money that was supposed to go to some Yemeni soldiers who were in rebellion against the government, and he turned it over to the government, and they were basically asking him like You know, why did you turn over this, you know, large sum of money?
Because, you know, like a normal person would steal it. And he was like, that wasn't a lot of money. What a lot of money was, was when the North Koreans offered me $200,000 to sign off on the defective missiles and I wouldn't do it.
Jeffrey
33:01
So he has this whole like outrage thing. And so he was the person traveling back and forth that the U.S. detected that caused the U.S. to think that Yemen and North Korea had resumed missile cooperation. And it really seems like they hadn't. He just was negotiating the purchase of or the replacement of the defective missiles with ones that worked.
Aaron
33:24
That's interesting.
Jeffrey
33:25
I love that story.
Anne
33:26
Yeah. Where's this interview?
Jeffrey
33:29
It's in an Arabic-language Yemeni publication. I had Fabian Hinz translate it. Fabian. Oh, my God. We love Fabian.
Anne
33:38
Doing care hearts.
Jeffrey
33:40
Yeah, we love him. I'm going to make a Kim Jong-un-like finger heart.
Aaron
33:44
I'll erect a statue to him somewhere like in his former cube or wherever he used to sit, shared desk or office.
Anne
33:54
That might be a possibility. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey
33:59
You can do that. Yeah, our hope is to find a way for Fabian to come home where he belongs.
Aaron
34:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you guys put this missile map together. When does it actually come out?
Jeffrey
34:19
It's in review right now. It's in review. It's a product for the Nuclear Threat Initiative. And so they need to sign off on the presentation.
Aaron
34:29
But I mean, I don't know. I love it.
Jeffrey
34:31
Yeah. It's a really visual thing where you look at it and you realize how much infrastructure there is to deploy and produce missiles in the Middle East. You know, it's not just Iran. And I think when you look at the map, you really see that.
Anne
34:48
So hopefully it'll be out either next week or the week after.
Aaron
34:53
I mean, is there anything you want to hit before we wrap up here?
Jeffrey
34:59
No, I think we're just going to have to save Egypt and Syria and the rest of Yemen and the UAE and Qatar and the history of Iraq for some other podcast, although they're all so interesting. We should just do another one when the map actually comes out. We'll just be part two. Yeah, that's a great idea. We could take, like, listener questions, like, why the hell did you put this pin here?
Aaron
35:20
Yeah, that's not a bad idea.
Jeffrey
35:22
Yeah, okay.
Anne
35:23
That's where the facility is. Maybe.
Anne
35:28
All of the locations are accurate.
Anne
35:33
Because I went through and geolocated them or verified their locations myself. Okay.
Aaron
35:42
All right. Well, with that, you know, thank you for... I mean, it's good to get the band back together. I've been traveling, so it's good that we're all back and talking in the same room, or at least, you know, in cyberspace and... I look forward to this project. It sounds like a lot of fun, and it'll be cool when it comes out.
Anne
35:59
Thank you. Yeah.
Jeffrey
35:59
Do you want to tell the listeners about, yeah.
Aaron
36:02
Yeah, and if you enjoyed the show and you want to get involved in our Slack channel where we'll talk more about missiles and we have a separate podcast called Brilliant Pebbles where Anne will talk about her experience of South of Market and other stuff going on. And if you enjoy this podcast, you can head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast where for as little as $3 a month if you are a student or $5 a month if you are not a student, you can get access to both of these things.
The Slack channel where the second podcast is. With that, it's 85 degrees over here on the East Coast, so I'm going to go outside and have an ice latte.
Jeffrey
36:36
I'm going to go pick up my daughter from school.
Anne
36:38
I'm going to go get lunch.
Aaron
36:40
And with that, thank you everybody for listening.
