Most recently Colonel Hunt served as tactical adviser in Bosnia where he facilitated all national intelligence matters for the commander in chief, as well as coordinating a $350 million National Security Program for the National Security Agency and the CIA.
Prior to this he served as counterterrorism coordinator to the summer Olympics games in Seoul, Korea. His role as a leader began with the special forces operation on detachment of 12 soldiers expanding to command a brigade of over a thousand personnel. Colonel David Hunt. (Applause.)
MR. HUNT: I was about to break the primary rule of a guest speaker. Never, ever, ever be the last guest speaker out of 10, 10 minutes before lunch. But fortunately, I'm the second to last speaker and I'm ahead of a Kennedy which is never, ever going to happen in my life again. (Laughter.)
MR. HUNT: Thank you very much for inviting me and allowing me to chew candy down there at the end, waiting to come up and talk to you.
I had the real privilege during the time of the Shah, some of you were old enough to serve in Iran with the special forces. We did some jumps and some training, some work with the very tough group of people in the mountains called the Kurds, some of us are familiar with. And at the time play games with the Iraqi military was a good operation. I was very proud of it. And jumped with the Iranian special forces and never, ever thought all of these years later I would have a clean sheet in bed at the Willard Hotel and come down and talk to you. It's a big day.
There's some real practicality to whatever all of us have been talking about today and you've been talking about it for years. I was, I had shown to me last night by a friend, it's actually called The Fallen For Freedom. I call it the book of the dead. There's 120,000 people who have been killed, murdered, executed. Families destroyed since the regime in Iran 4 has existed. This is what we know.
You can't, I mean, it's big, heavy. One volume. And it's got pictures of men, women and kids and entire families that were wiped out.
My point of showing you this is that, there's real, besides the rhetoric and the sadness of Camp Ashraf and what it represents, but there are absolute consequences in life and death that you have suffered dear friends but are actually represented in this book. It's staggering to see and it's actually one volume.
So my point to us all is all nice and well and good to have us all here at the Willard Hotel pontificating but there are people really dying because of what's happening in Iran. So I want to make that point.
My point is short, being never want to talk too long before a Kennedy would be this, I'll ask us all to think of what happened, what is tomorrow going to be like? Of course, of course you want to take whatever the word decapitate, remove, vote out, 5 undermine, destroy, kill a leader of a country or leaders of a country who are obviously this evil as what's happening in Iran supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, killing American soldiers in Iraq and on and on and having a camp like Ashraf even necessary.
My point, it is a very, very difficult thing, number one, to do that. From a practical standpoint, it ain't easy to do what we want to do.
If that's not easy, the second point is even tougher and that is you have to have, and witness what happens when we do not, Egypt and Libya being great examples, when you remove a leader or a group of leaders and you do not have the person you want standing next to them to take over, you have a thing called chaos and then chaos, your military organization in this case the intelligence services, or the people worse than the Mullahs, will take over. And you have more death and more destruction and more chaos created.
One of the, this is one of the greatest countries of the world I've been lucky to serve in 30 years of the uniform and I wouldn't want to be any other place. But one of the things we do not do well, United States of America, is think about tomorrow. We're very good right in front of our nose, very, very good at today. We really suck at tomorrow.
And in helping you change your regime, making Iran the country it was when I trained with your special forces up by the Caspian Sea is a very, very difficult thing to do and we have not done well when it came to Iraq and not done well when it came to Afghanistan after the fighting during this nation building things.
Another thing I want to leave with you is this: If the intelligence community is correct and they have never been 100 percent correct, information that was fed to them by some of you in this room, about the number of things, places that Iran has been trying to build and assemble nuclear weapons, if they're all true, that would be the first time by the intelligence has been that accurate.
And secondly, if the Air Forces of Israel and the United States hit every target they aimed at it would also be the first time in the history of any Air Force anywhere that ever hit anything they claimed they were aiming at. If that all works and you could actually penetrate some of the facilities, and some of this has been provided in our intelligence community being built, you would have nuclear buster bombs, you just started a nuclear war. As a small point we may want to discuss at a later time with a country that is probably developing nuclear weapons, but okay, if you could penetrate those 40-story deep, some of you have been in Baghdad, I was, we got to go into some tunnels and buildings that the Iraqi government had built deep in the ground.
We did a shock and awe campaign, whatever the hell that meant, but somebody came up with the term shock and awe. It wasn't, by the way, it sounded good on television, but it wasn't, but those tunnels in Iraq were still fully lighted, fully air conditioned and fully livable after the United States Air Force, which is a great Air Force, I love our brothers in blue, dropped tons of bombs in the tunnels and we walked 8 around, it was lit up as the Willard. Those were Iraqi built tunnels.
The Iranian facilities are better built than the Iraqi tunnels were 20 years ago. So it is not an easy process.
I'm not suggesting eventually it doesn't have to happen. But if all that happens, it's 100 percent perfect and there actually is WFD there, that would be nice. But if it all happens, the Iranian government and the Iranian people have got a capability in Hamas and Hezbollah and the. So tomorrow is critical to what you want to do with this regime and with and with the great freedom fighters in there and the memories of 120,000 people that have been killed. There's a practical aspect to all that's in this room and I would say military standpoint, intelligence standpoint that it's the day after you have to consider. And if we cannot -- by the way, as a government we did not answer what's going to happen tomorrow in Iraq or Afghanistan and we have lost thousands of guys and spent billions of dollars because we did not answer that question. It's still not being answered. If you can't answer what it's going to look like in Tehran tomorrow, you cannot do the action you're talking about today.
Yes, we free these people. Of course the camp has to close. We get them all out. We owe them that. It's a minimum we owe people, we promised their lives as a minimum.
But the larger issue of changing over a country to something that you like has to have in its plan as important as the taking away of the leader what you want to do about tomorrow. If you can't answer that, you can't it today. We just tried it.
Recent history says -- we had a guy, (he says his name I can't understand him) we paid all these millions of dollars. He's going to get off the plane and take over, we didn't even let him off the plane. He was going to be the new guy, no. And we had what we had for all those years in Iraq.
And we have a guy we like in Afghanistan, he talks great English, he's our friend, we used to love him. (Laughter.)
MR. HUNT: Until -- we forgot his brother was a crook. (Laughter.)
MR. HUNT: We, by the way we were paying, the intelligence community were paying his brother while he was a crook.
My point to you is that we have a not very good history, as well-intentioned as we are and as great as our soldiers. For you, you need to learn our lesson, which you cannot do tomorrow; you cannot do today unless you can answer what it's going to look like tomorrow. We take care and respect your dead, our friends, and we take care of the people we promised, but the bigger issue you must answer is what about tomorrow.
God bless and good luck in this thing.