6. The Real Godfather: Assad’s Syrian Mafia (Ep 1)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did Bashar al-Assad become one of the Middle East’s most feared dictators? What role did Hezbollah play in the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister in 2005? And how did Assad’s rise to ultimate power mirror the ascent of Michael Corleone in the Godfather? As the new millennium dawned, Bashar al-Assad prepared to step into his father’s shoes as the next authoritarian president of Syria. While he enjoyed a smooth ascension to the top job, trouble was brewing over the border in Lebanon as the Lebanese Prime Minister sought to escape the debilitating control of its Syrian master. What follows is a story straight out of the Godfather canon with a mafiosi state fighting for ultimate power and a network of spies working to neutralise opposing gangs. Listen as Gordon Corera and David McCloskey discuss the Syrian plot to assassinate the Lebanese Prime Minister at the turn of the 21st century. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [email protected] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Asad was tall and slender, but there was something very awkward about his appearance,
0:12.0	like he was constructed of random body parts that did not belong together.
0:17.0	Some of the rebel graffiti called Asad the giraffe.
0:20.0	He had a long neck that stretched into a weak jaw,
0:23.2	topped with a faint boyish moustache. His ears looked more elfin than human. But all of his weaknesses,
0:30.0	his appearance, his lisp, the cerebral medical background, played in his favour. For they led observers and enemies to underestimate him. It was a costly
0:41.0	mistake. The president, like all of them, was a murderer. Welcome to the rest is classified.
0:47.4	I'm Gordon Carrera. I'm David McCloskey. And that was a quote from a book called Damascus Stationed by Checks's Notes.
0:57.2	David McCloskey, who'd have thought? How did we manage to get that in there?
1:02.5	Oh, goodness. That was from your novel set in Damascus, based, of course, on your experience
1:09.0	of having been in the CIA and served out there in Syria,
1:13.1	explaining the character of the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
1:17.7	But Bashar al-Assad, as we know, is no more.
1:20.8	We did an emergency pod the other day looking at news of his downfall.
1:25.4	But today, we're going to be looking at a story which talks more about the
1:29.0	nature of his regime, I guess. I mean, what we described as a mafia state. And we're going to look
1:35.2	at the story of the assassination of the Prime Minister of Lebanon back in 2005 and how that really
1:41.3	perhaps changed Syria and the Middle East and what it tells us about Bashar al-Assad.
1:46.1	Well, and I think, Gordon, that this story, although it's going to take place in the early 2000s,
1:52.5	it's going to give us, I think, a picture of really the kind of dark corners of espionage,
1:58.8	gangster spy services, some really kind of human themes around revenge and betrayal,
2:04.7	and family. This is a family story, but it's not a normal family. It's the Assad family of Syria,
	...

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