Compass Points from PBS News

3 years of war and what could have been.

Just before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks, the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the brink of a historic agreement.

Tonight, new details about how close that effort was, the rush to release the Israeli hostages, and where the region goes from here, coming up on Compass Points.

♪ Announcer: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by... the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, the Dorney Koppel Foundation, the Gruber Family Foundation, and Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

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Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

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Thank you.

Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, moderator Nick Schifrin.

Hello and welcome to "Compass Points."

It is an axiom of U.S.

foreign policy that you may try to ignore the Middle East, but the Middle East will not ignore you.

And so it has been over the last decade, from the war against ISIS, the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the October 7 terrorist attacks, and now the war in Iran and the conflict in Yemen.

And one man who has had a front-row seat, whether he liked it or not, to all of it is Brett McGurk, former adviser in Baghdad during the U.S.

invasion of Iraq, special envoy to counter ISIS under Presidents Obama and Trump, and then President Biden’s national security staff coordinator for the Middle East.

And he is the author of the new book, "Brink, Inside the Race to Free the October 7 Hostages."

Brett, thanks very much for being here.

It’s great to be here, Nick.

Thank you.

Schifrin: Let me start with what could have been.

On October the 6th, 2023, the day before the October 7 terrorist attacks, you met with the Saudis about a NATO-like security deal and a civil nuclear deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia, a Palestinian path to statehood, and Saudi normalization with Israel, with a deadline for the end of the year.

Looking back, how close were you?

Well, back a little.

The book starts with President Biden dispatches me right on his first, like, day as president.

And I go to see Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, on day 3 of the Biden presidency, and I’m sitting with the crown prince in a tent in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia.

And I present to him that the new president, Biden, is going to make some changes in Saudi policy.

We’re going to stop certain weapons sales, called offensive weapons.

The crown prince asked me, "What’s the difference between offensive and defensive weapons?"

I said we’re going to lift the terrorist designation on the Houthis, which was part of the conflict in Yemen, as you know.

And we’re going to release the report on Jamal Khashoggi’s death and all sorts of other things.

Schifrin: The journalist’s death.

The crown prince was implicated.

McGurk: Right.

So I had to lay this down with my instructions from the president.

And the president told me, you know, "Try to thread the needle.

"We have to make these changes, "but we can’t rupture our relationship "with this important country."

And it was in that meeting, I describe it in the book, I just kind of got a little testy.

I said, "Where do you want to be?"

I said to the crown prince, "Where do you want to be in two to 3 years?"

And he kind of laid out this, where he wanted to.

He said, "I’d like to try."

He was kind of in full peacemaking mode.

"I’d like to open a back channel "with the Iranians through Baghdad."

We both knew the prime minister there.

I think I can find a way to wind down the Yemen conflict.

But he said, for those things to happen, the U.S.

and Saudi have to be seen as working together.

And then he put on the table, this was after the Abraham Accords, recognizing Israel, diplomatic relations with Israel.

And we talked about that and what it would take.

And obviously, it’s a package deal, defense treaty and all sorts of other things.

But I said, "Look, we got to get through this period first."

And we didn’t really get back to that agenda until 2022.

Schifrin: Right.

- And we lost time.

And by the time, October, but you lost time, but you gained it back.

October the 7th, October 6th is here.

In retrospect, how close were you?

- You had a deadline.

McGurk: By October 6th, it’s after a year of negotiations.

And we’ve done some big, you know, when the president went to Saudi Arabia and Israel in the summer of 2022, we... Schifrin: With the fist bump, which is a whole other story.

McGurk: That’s in the book as well.

But before that, a lot of diplomacy was done.

There was an issue on these Red Sea islands where U.S.

forces had been for a number of years.

We negotiated a deal with Saudi, Israel and Egypt to remove those forces.

Saudi Arabia announced opening its airspace for all civilian Israeli planes.

And then we really got into the negotiations.

So by October 6th, to bring it up to your question, we had negotiated the security agreements.

We negotiated the civil defense agreements.

We put together a package for a Palestinian part of the deal.

People forget this, but a month before October 7th, Saudi almost had no relations with the Palestinian Authority since 1967.

Schifrin: The Saudi delegation going to Ramallah for the first time... Yeah, they sent a senior.

So this is all moving.

And on October 6th, I shook hands with Princess Reema on... Schifrin: Saudi ambassador.

- Saudi ambassador.

We’re going to try to close this deal by the end of the year, all the pieces and roll it out early 2024.

And the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, was traveling to Israel and Saudi Arabia that weekend.

So that was October 6th.

I can’t say if not for what happened just a few hours later, we definitely would have got there, but I think we would have gotten there.

Yeah.

Schifrin: Much of the book is about what happens after October 7th, specifically the effort to release some 250 hostages or so that Hamas took into Gaza.

You acknowledge at times there were chances to release a smaller number of hostages than Israel wanted at different times.

You always had a calculus, and you call this a moral dilemma that was at times paralyzing.

Why?

McGurk: Well, the perverse nature of a hostage deal, Nick, and I’ve done hostage deals with Iran, never handled anything like this, but the hostage taker is holding human lives, and there’s always a price they put on the table.

It’s often an extortionist price.

It’s one that cannot be met with reason, but there’s a price on the table.

And as time goes by, the kind of moral onus shifts to the negotiator because, well, just meet their price and get the hostages out.

And in this case, Hamas’ price after October 7th, killing 1200 Israelis, taking 251 hostages, was we stay in power, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, "I stay in power.

"We’re going to reconstitute our forces "right on Israel’s border.

"And we go back to October 6th status quo, "and release all Palestinian prisoners," including all the hardcore Hamas operatives.

That was basically their demand and that was impossible for, I think, any Israeli government to meet.

Schifrin: Unacceptable for everyone.

And so you had, and on the Israeli side, their core demand was at the end of this, Hamas will never be in power in Gaza again.

So how do you bridge that and try to get the hostages out?

You can’t just say, "Get the hostages home, end the war."

How do you actually do it?

And that’s what this book is about.

And so a few weeks into the war, very difficult negotiation, we had a deal for all women and children.

This included toddlers.

There’s a story, Abigail, the American girl is in the book.

Her parents were killed in front of her on October 7th.

She was taken hostage, 80-year-old grandmothers, and women and children, very clear, in exchange for about 10 Palestinian prisoners for each hostage.

We negotiate this.

It’s a hard fought.

We eventually get it down.

And the war stops for 8 days.

And people forget this, Nick.

The war stopped.

Schifrin: This is November.

- This is November, early on.

Schifrin: Just a few weeks after the war.

Hostages start coming out.

Hamas releases the older women, the young kids.

They release mostly Thai workers, foreign workers that were taken.

And on day 8, and it’s worth pausing on this because it gets to your question, the kind of moral quandary.

Hamas says, the younger women, these are women in their 20s, some early 30s, most taken from the Nova Festival or from their homes, including some young Israeli soldiers.

They say, "We can’t confine the younger women.

"And let’s skip to the older men.

"Keep the ceasefire.

"That’s all good.

"But we’ll get to the women later."

So what do you do?

I describe this moment in the book because I’d come home.

It’s midnight here in Washington, December 1st.

And the older men are in rough shape, too.

So what do you do?

And this is what the hostage taker does.

And I go back to that moment a lot in my head.

And I really reflect on it in the book.

The Israelis were saying, "Look, "just release one woman, one girl, "we’ll keep the ceasefire."

Hamas refused.

And the war started again that night.

And it was the Israeli view, and there was a consensus in their system, as far as we could tell.

We’re talking to everybody, that if we allow Hamas to hold on to the younger women, they’ll never come out.

And Sinwar, again, Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, who was released in a hostage deal in 2011 for one Israeli soldier, a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar, it became clear to me he wanted to hold hostage.

At the end of this crisis, he intended to have hostages in his hands.

Because he held Gilad Shalit, that Israeli soldier, for 5 years.

Two mentally ill Israelis had been there for 10 years when October 7 started.

So anyway, the war started again that night.

And I did not think at the time it would take 14 months to get back to a deal.

I do want to ask one question about the end of the war, or at least the end of that phase of the war.

Extraordinary collaboration between you and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for the Middle East.

And after many months of painstaking negotiations, you had this moment.

That’s you and Witkoff there.

You admit that you wouldn’t have gotten over the line without his pressure.

Witkoff at one point told a Mossad official, "I’m not letting you or Hamas F this up."

Witkoff flew to Israel on a Saturday during the Sabbath to tell Netanyahu, "Stop the bulls-.

"And if you want to walk away, you call Trump."

And at one point, screamed at the head of Mossad, "There’s one thing you don’t do to me or Trump, "back out of an F-ing deal."

Bottom line, would that deal have been made, would that war have ended without his pressure, teamed with all of the work that had gone on that you had done?

Well, I think you have to, and I think that partnership between Steve and I, between the Trump team and the Biden team, which I tell in the book, I think is extraordinary.

It’s unlikely in the polarized Washington.

Schifrin: Yeah.

But when Trump won the election, this is the key point, the whole regional equation had changed.

So Yahya Sinwar, who you’ve been talking about, well, he was killed on October 16th.

Schifrin: October 16th, 2024.

2024.

So just before the election of President Trump, a few weeks before.

Hezbollah.

Schifrin: And Lebanon had been severely... - Israel goes north.

Schifrin: Right.

McGurk: But Hezbollah is about to cut its own deal, which cuts the legs out from under Hamas.

A fundamental change in the entire crisis.

Iran is in rough shape, because we’ve just defeated a second missile attack, and Israel takes out their air defense systems, their strategic air defense systems.

And so, after the election, I called Jared Kushner and said, "Hey, "we might have a chance here "to get a ceasefire in Gaza, "get the hostages out, "start coming out before the inauguration, "but only if we’re working together."

And he readily agreed.

When Biden and Trump met in the Oval Office, they agreed to work on this together.

I met Steve Witkoff together with Mike Waltz, who was Jake Sullivan’s incoming successor as national security advisor.

And we start talking every single day.

Now, the deal itself is a detailed 17-page agreement, which had been put together in a painstaking way.

I went to Israel in early December of 2024.

And we see Netanyahu.

This is with me and Jake Sullivan.

And Netanyahu says, "I’m going forward with the deal.

"All I need is the list of hostages from Hamas."

Schifrin: There’s so many details.

I want to accelerate you, but the pressure was extraordinary, and it was unique from Trump and Witkoff.

When Witkoff came to Doha, we had two issues left.

We were in a ZOPA, a zone of possible agreement, and we had to bridge them.

And there’s a scene in the book where Steve goes to Jerusalem to see Bibi, and I dial in from Doha, I’m with Israel, and dial into the same meeting.

And yeah, without Steve at that moment, given that Trump is about to come in, and I say this very clearly, I think credit goes to both teams.

But, yeah, Steve played a critical role there in the end.

There were so many issues we had to nail down before we got to that final issue.

Schifrin: I want to ask about pressure.

There’s been a lot of conversation since the Biden team left the administration about dialing up or down the pressure on Israel.

In retrospect, do you think that you could have done differently with Netanyahu to prevent some of the destruction in Gaza?

You’ve got 90% of the buildings in Gaza destroyed.

You’ve got 74 000-plus people killed.

And you’ve got recent comments from Vice President Harris, who said "We should have done more, "we had more levers."

Even Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, says the case for withholding weapons from Israel today, this is him talking last August, is much stronger than it was one year ago, citing, quote, "full-blown famine."

In retrospect, do you think there could have been a different approach or a different pressure on Netanyahu?

McGurk: Looking at particular points in 2024 from the prism of 2026, I think is a little bit misleading.

And I really tried to write this book from the immediacy of the moment.

And how to use private pressure, which is very much in the book, about how these conversations went down, versus... Schifrin: Biden telling Netanyahu on the phone, "Look, "there’s no Santa Claus," that kind of thing.

McGurk: Versus public statements and pressure, which you have to keep in mind, there’s multiple audiences here, Khamenei in Iran, Sinwar, who holds the hostages.

And you have to kind of get that calculation right.

I do not think, and I go through it in the book, that there was some key moment in which... I say it in the book.

If there was a shortcut to ending this crisis and getting the hostages out, stopping the war, Biden would have taken it.

I have no doubt.

I mean, there wasn’t.

And to the horror of Gaza, which nobody can deny... Nick, I’ve known you for a while.

I mean, I did the ISIS campaign.

And in the Battle of Mosul, we got a million people out of Mosul before the battle.

But the battle still went on for almost 9 months.

And I went there a number of times.

I was in East Mosul after the battle, and East Mosul was kind of buzzing.

I had a cup of tea there with a number of residents and police officers.

Then I went to West Mosul, where ISIS made its last stand.

Schifrin: Right.

And it was completely, as far as the eye could see, destroyed.

Thousands of civilians died there.

ISIS was defeated.

I’ll never forget standing there.

And in Mosul, you did not have this underground... Hamas built, Nick, you got it?

Hamas built for 20 years an underground military infrastructure, 20 years, under the eyes of the U.N., everybody.

And it was for them.

And it was for the hostages.

Civilians could not go under there.

And so I do not discount in any way the horror of Gaza.

The question is to uproot that infrastructure.

And I say it in the book openly.

But it cannot be done without massive destruction.

The question, how do you get civilians out of the war zone?

Well, you tried with the Egyptians.

Yeah, I went to the Egyptians and others, and unlike every other war in this century, there was, like, nobody could answer this question.

How do you get civilians out?

We’ve got to get civilians out of the war zone.

And the Israelis tried time and again.

But no, it was horrible, but this is the war Sinwar designed.

And I wish it was far less destructive, and I wish it ended sooner.

There’s a lot to talk about there, but I want to get to Iran, because I want to ask about today and what the president has described as his reasoning for launching this war.

The U.S.

has long called Iran the largest state-sponsored terror in the world, a proxy network across the region for decades, including those killed Americans during the last couple of years of the Biden administration.

And this is how President Trump argued about the war recently.

This should have been done a long time ago by other presidents, because, with time, it just got worse.

Got worse.

Does the president have a point when he says this is why he launched the war that no previous president was willing to launch?

So, Nick, there’s a chapter in the book called "Under Attack."

And if you want to kind of really understand what it’s like dealing with the Iranians, that chapter is very key.

And I acknowledge President Trump is the first one to go at the Iranians directly.

And I was in the Situation Room with President Bush, where, our troops are being attacked by these very sophisticated roadside bombs that Iran was pumping into Iraq.

And what do you do?

President Trump, in his first term, took out Qasem Soleimani.

Schifrin: Head of the Quds Force.

And I explained in the book, attacks did not stop.

In fact, a month before Biden came into office, we had the largest attack at the U.S.

Embassy in Baghdad in 10 years.

That’s what we walked into.

So it is true he’s the first president to take it on directly.

And I think there is some merit to that, to finally doing that.

But it doesn’t solve the problem.

And the book, if you read the book, in "Brink," you’re with President Biden as we’re debating how to use U.S.

military force in this maelstrom.

As we’re under attack, we’re taking casualties, took a casualty on Christmas Day, 2023.

Attacks against us, which had stopped before October 7th, Iran turned it on.

And they were under attack every single day.

They’re attacking our living quarters.

The president dispatches me to Iran to see the Iranians, all in the book.

And finally, unfortunately, we have 3 Americans killed in Jordan from an Iranian drone.

And President Biden ordered very devastating airstrikes, including strikes against an Iranian commander in Iraq, which is all in the book.

But President Trump is now grappling with something every president since Jimmy Carter has grappled with, how to deal with this revolutionary ideological system.

And I have negotiated deals with Iran.

I have been involved in kind of military conflicts with Iran.

It’s a vexing, vexing problem.

Schifrin: But the strategic implication of this war, I know, I mean, Yogi Berra says it’s difficult to predict, especially about the future.

But let’s predict a little bit of the future, because it seems to me that, when I talk to regional officials, and you do the same, they are making a chief conclusion that the U.S.

and Israel have failed to knock out the Islamic Republic.

Now these regional countries need to come up with some kind of non-aggression pact or economic integration with Iran.

And at the same time, this map, this constellation of bases, you see it right there, is going to get smaller.

There’s just no doubt that the U.S.

was vulnerable when it came to Iranian attacks.

So how fundamental do you think is this shift that this war has created in the Middle East?

I think the Middle East right now, I mean, I would describe it as kind of a post-World War II-like moment.

It is kind of a tabula rasa, I mean, first principle questions in each capital.

And they’re being looked at differently.

Schifrin: They’re asking fundamental questions, not assuming anything about decades of U.S.

McGurk: Yes, about the future, about alliances, and you have shifting alliances.

That is all happening in a very dynamic, fluid way.

And nobody knows exactly how this is going to play out.

I mean, Iran is also under enormous economic pressure, and they have never faced a blockade.

They have a central command, or military, naval presence has a blockade on all Iranian wars.

It's unprecedented.

Schifrin: And some of the president’s advisers just want to focus on that for the next 6 months and see that see through.

McGurk: I have met experts who believe that this pressure is going to cause Iran to really crack.

Schifrin: But, again, back to those Gulf allies.

Do you see a flip?

Do you see hedging?

Do you see a different future for our allies, who have been there by our side for decades, who see us not accomplish what we aim to accomplish?

- I think it’s still very fluid.

Schifrin: Yeah.

There’s always some hedging.

It’s fluid.

But this, what President Trump in his second term here has used force against Iran twice.

So last year, there was the strikes against the nuclear sites.

I think when you use force, you have to have a clear objective, and that was, I thought, kind of textbook.

The war that started in February, that we’re still in, suffered from a lot of the lessons we should have learned in the past.

You had a kind of unclear objective, almost a regime change objective.

On the first night, you take out all the Iranian leadership.

Schifrin: Yeah.

And just in the last 15 seconds, we have this strategic end we don’t know, but it’s very ambiguous.

And it’s difficult for our allies, right?

McGurk: It is a very fluid, dynamic moment, and nobody knows how it’s going to play out.

And, yes, that leads to hedging, no question.

Schifrin: Yeah, fundamental shift, perhaps.

Brett McGurk, thank you so much.

The book is called "Brink, "Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages."

Thank you so much for being here.

And that’s all the time we have for now.

Thank you at home for joining us.

I’m Nick Schifrin.

We’ll see you here again next week on "Compass Points."

Announcer: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by... the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, the Dorney Koppel Foundation, the Gruber Family Foundation, and Cap and Margaret Anne Eschenroeder.

The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation.

Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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