Inside the Hostage Negotiations - with Brett McGurk

[Instrumental music] Brett McGurk, welcome back to the podcast.

Dan, it's great to be here.

I've been looking forward to this conversation, and, uh, thanks so much for having me.

me.I've been looking forward to it as well, so we are going to jump right into it.

I devoured your book, Brink.

As I told you, uh, as I was reading it over the summer, there are going to be a lot of books about the time in which you served in government.

I think yours will emerge as one of the most important ones.

I take it, it's not the final chronicling of history, but it is certainly a first draft, and it's by someone who was in the thick of it all.

So I wanna just get into it.

You open the book with President Biden giving you essentially two weeks to get a hostage deal before he leaves office.

So here we are, it's late twenty twenty-four, early twenty twenty-five, and he wants a deal.

And we're gonna get to that, but I want you to first take us back to October seventh, twenty twenty-three.

What was your initial understanding of the hostage situation during the first few days of October seventh?

Yeah, Dan, to tell the story of October seventh, you gotta start, I think, on October sixth, 'cause I had the Saudis in my office on October sixth.

It was a Friday, 'cause we had been working on the Saudi deal, and I shook hands with Princess Reema, who's their ambassador here, on kind of a timeframe for closing out that deal.

And the book talks about that package and included, you know, the Palestinians were, like, a part of that overall package.

The Palestinian Authority was working with us, and, uh, Tony was about to go to the region, and that was on October sixth, on a Friday.

And, uh, I came home, you know, that Friday night, and, uh, I put the kid to bed, and I was doing some work, and it was about midnight when I heard from...

We c-first got to get reports from the situation room about rockets coming from Gaza.

Unfortunately, that's not, wasn't totally unusual.

And then I got messages from Mike Herzog, who was the ambassador here, who of course, was one of my key contacts.

The Israeli ambassador to Washington.

Israeli ambassador to Washington.

And then we started getting reports of, uh, incursions across the border, and then I got a message from, uh, Herzog saying, "We're at war." And I was up all night.

My Israel advisor was on her way to, I think, New York.

[Instrumental music] Brett McGurk, welcome back to the podcast.

Dan, it's great to be here.

I've been looking forward to this conversation, and, uh, thanks so much for having me.

me.I've been looking forward to it as well, so we are going to jump right into it.

I devoured your book, Brink.

As I told you, uh, as I was reading it over the summer, there are going to be a lot of books about the time in which you served in government.

I think yours will emerge as one of the most important ones.

I take it, it's not the final chronicling of history, but it is certainly a first draft, and it's by someone who was in the thick of it all.

So I wanna just get into it.

You open the book with President Biden giving you essentially two weeks to get a hostage deal before he leaves office.

So here we are, it's late twenty twenty-four, early twenty twenty-five, and he wants a deal.

And we're gonna get to that, but I want you to first take us back to October seventh, twenty twenty-three.

What was your initial understanding of the hostage situation during the first few days of October seventh?

Yeah, Dan, to tell the story of October seventh, you gotta start, I think, on October sixth, 'cause I had the Saudis in my office on October sixth.

It was a Friday, 'cause we had been working on the Saudi deal, and I shook hands with Princess Reema, who's their ambassador here, on kind of a timeframe for closing out that deal.

And the book talks about that package and included, you know, the Palestinians were, like, a part of that overall package.

The Palestinian Authority was working with us, and, uh, Tony was about to go to the region, and that was on October sixth, on a Friday.

And, uh, I came home, you know, that Friday night, and, uh, I put the kid to bed, and I was doing some work, and it was about midnight when I heard from...

We c-first got to get reports from the situation room about rockets coming from Gaza.

Unfortunately, that's not, wasn't totally unusual.

And then I got messages from Mike Herzog, who was the ambassador here, who of course, was one of my key contacts.

The Israeli ambassador to Washington.

Israeli ambassador to Washington.

And then we started getting reports of, uh, incursions across the border, and then I got a message from, uh, Herzog saying, "We're at war." And I was up all night.

My Israel advisor was on her way to, I think, New York.