Well, first, Mark, it’s great to be here. I try to just tell this history. It’s chronological, but I really try to bring the reader into the room. The book starts about three days into the Biden administration. President Biden asked me to go see the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia about some significant changes we were going to make in Saudi policy, including cutting off various weapon systems and a number of steps. In that meeting, the Crown Prince kind of put on the table the possibility of recognizing Israel—a kind of big, breakthrough possible deal. We didn’t really pick that up until about a year and a half into the administration, and I describe that as lost time and unfortunate.

But once we did pick it up, we made some real progress on it. We had a package of agreements, including the Palestinian Authority working with us on this deal. And on October 6, you’re right, I had a Saudi delegation in my office with Princess Reema. Tony Blinken was about to go to the Middle East, and we had mapped it out. I still can’t say if, not for what happened a few hours later, we definitely would have gotten the deal—but it was definitely moving in that direction, and we were quite confident. Reema and I shook hands on having this in place by the end of the year, and then talking about the rollout in the first quarter of 2024. And then what happened just a few hours later obviously knocked that issue off the agenda and everything else.

I think it’s tragic, because if you look at what was happening just a few weeks before the events of October 7th—we’re now at the third anniversary—you had things happening that had not happened in 55 years. You had a senior Saudi official visiting Ramallah in the West Bank to see the Palestinian Authority, first time since 1967. You had Israeli officials in Saudi Arabia. I think that package would have set the foundation for what is now in a UN Security Council resolution: a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. That’s what we were talking about. Hamas, of course, does not recognize Israel, wants to destroy Israel, and I would not be surprised if one of the motivations on October 7th was to knock this agenda off the table.

We never saw anything to tie a direct connection. I never saw anything tying a direct connection. But certainly it was known that this deal was moving in that direction. Mohammed bin Salman said in September that this could be one of the biggest deals since the Cold War, transforming the Middle East if it had happened. So it was very much in the air. But I think October 7th had been planned, from what we later learned, for a period of years. This is not something that was just suddenly put together.

I learned about the attack that night around midnight. I got a call from the Situation Room; the Israeli ambassador Mike Herzog also called. It started as rocket attacks and then cross-border attacks, and events kind of unfold. I describe it in the book as a crisis unfolding: you learn in jagged pieces. It still wasn’t clear even by daybreak, when I was at the White House and eventually saw President Biden later that morning, just the scope and scale of what was underway.

We have really looked. We did not have anything in our system that would have been a warning and indicator. No U.S. intelligence of a warning or indicator. I can’t speak to whether the Israelis—still to this day they have not had a commission of inquiry like the 9/11 Commission, which I think made a number of reforms that have helped keep our country safe since 9/11. The Israelis still have not done that. I think they should.

From what I saw dealing with all these guys in Israel—security echelon, political echelon—I think they had an assumption that was deeply ingrained: that Hamas was deterred, assuaged, and was not about to do something massive on any scale like this. I think that was a false assumption in their system, a failure of imagination, and it was tragic. I can’t speak to whether or not there was a specific warning. We did not know of any. The U.S. didn’t know, and the U.S. didn’t warn.

I know Sheikh Mohamed quite well. When something is on his mind, he’ll call. He called me at the White House once. Great respect for him, but we were not aware of a phone call like that. And Abbas Kamel, the Egyptian intel chief, was a main character in the book; I was with him all the time. Again, I never heard—and I’ve checked with a number of my colleagues—of a pre-warning of October 7th from those two individuals.

This is why I think Israel should have a clear investigation of what was known, what was missed at the very top, and also what intelligence analysts might have been seeing that others weren’t, and why that information wasn’t passed up. That’s what has to happen in a situation like this. We went through it. I think Israel should do the same.

I think, when you look back, you will find something similar to the types of warnings that were in our intelligence system before 9/11: nothing of an actionable nature. And remember, Hamas and Israel before October 7th were in a negotiation. This ties into the theme of the book: a hostage negotiation. Hamas had been holding two Israeli hostages—Avivah and Avera Mengistu, one Arab Israeli, one Ethiopian Israeli, both mentally ill, who found their way into Gaza—and Hamas had been holding them for 10 years, along with the remains of some Israeli soldiers from an earlier war. That negotiation had been going on.

Hamas holds hostages to extract maximum leverage and concessions. I think in the course of putting a new demand on the table—Hamas saying “it’s either this or else”—given the assumptions in the Israeli system, a warning would probably have been read as Hamas trying to play for that negotiation. But again, I don’t know what was in the Israeli system and what was known on the Israeli side. That’s why they need a serious commission of inquiry after the next government is formed, to ensure nothing like this can ever happen again.

Yes. What was missed was clearly missed. I think it’s very important for any country to go through something like that after a horrific incident like this.

Qatar—and I go through this in the book—when you’re in this horrific, awful crisis in every dimension, you can’t just say “stop the war, release the hostages.” You have to actually make that happen using diplomacy and leverage. Qatar is the key mediator with Hamas leadership, and that is something we inherited in our administration. It’s been that way. They’ve been in Doha since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, when they moved from Damascus to Doha, again with the basically tacit agreement of Israel and also the agreement of the Obama administration.

Countries will say, “Look, they’re here, they have their offices here, partially for your benefit. Do you want us to get rid of them?” Sometimes they would say that to us, and sometimes, in peak frustration, I said, “Yes, kick them out.” But then the question is: where are they going to be, and how do you actually get something done?

This is what was so tragic. Here we have the worst day in Israel since the Holocaust: about 1,200 people dead, the largest mass hostage crisis in modern history. Hamas knew that by taking hostages on this scale, they would be treated as basically statesmen in a negotiation. That’s how it plays out. The asymmetry there is incredibly frustrating, obviously to the Israelis, and frustrating to me throughout the process.

But Qatar plays a critical role. Sheikh Mohammed, the prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar, was a key intermediary. I don’t think we could have gotten this done without him.

I have a chapter in the book where I lay out the enigma of dealing with Qatar. The Gulf states are very often divided. You mentioned Sheikh Mohammed and the UAE; this gets into relations with political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE completely ban the Muslim Brotherhood, whereas Qatar has a very different philosophy. We have to deal with everybody. Of course, we have one of our largest military bases in Qatar. Qatar also has Al Jazeera. I was in the Bush administration; I remember President Bush railing at the Qataris about what was being played on Al Jazeera.

It’s a chronic issue, something we raised with Qatar very strongly. But when it comes to these deals, Qatar plays an essential role. It’s just a fact. When you’re in the middle of the crisis—trying to get hostages home, trying to manage what could be a broader regional war—we were constantly on the brink of a broader regional war (one reason the book is titled Brink). Without Qatar, we would not have had some very critical channels to try to keep things under control.

I describe Netanyahu; I spent a lot of time with him. As a negotiator, there’s a term of art in the book called a ZOPA, a “zone of possible agreement.” If you line this up: Hamas’s core demand is that they have to stay in power, go back to the October 6 status quo. They stay in power, they reconstitute, they’re on Israel’s border, they want all Palestinian prisoners released, and then they can release the hostages.

Israel’s core demand after October 7th is that Hamas can no longer be in power in Gaza, ever. Completely irreconcilable. The hostages are such a central piece of this, because you’re never going to actually stop the war without the hostages.

There’s a continuum in a hostage negotiation. I’ve done them before, even outside this context, with Iran in particular. The hostage negotiator sets a price. Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish legal theorist, has a kind of commandment—I have it in the book—that there’s no higher commandment for a state or government than the redemption of hostages, of captives. But he also says the price cannot be so high as to basically put the rest of society in jeopardy.

This is the tension: the demand to bring the hostages home, and ensuring that the price is one that doesn’t encourage further hostage-taking or set the conditions for the next war. This is a debate that goes through Israeli society, through the highest echelons of the Israeli government. It plays throughout this book.

Take Keith and Aviva Siegel, who were taken hostage on October 7th in their home. They have a sticker: “Gilad is alive.” That was Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas for five years, released after five years for a thousand Palestinian prisoners, hardcore Hamas operatives, including Yahya Sinwar. Like many Israelis, they supported that deal. And on October 7th, on Sinwar’s orders, the elite units of Hamas approached Kfar Aza, their kibbutz, eventually entering their home and taking them hostage. So where do you draw this line?

Netanyahu was focused far more on the military campaign and ensuring Hamas can never retain power in Gaza, believing the military campaign and pressure on Hamas would lead to a deal that released all the hostages. We were trying to focus on a phased deal: at least let’s get some of the hostages out first. Netanyahu always believed that more military pressure would actually deliver a better deal, whereas Sinwar believed more time would put more pressure on the U.S. and others to deliver him a better deal. That makes this an almost impossible situation to deal with.

I think the U.S. role in all dimensions: we’re trying to stop a war, get the hostages home—the two are completely linked—and reduce human suffering as much as possible in Gaza. Netanyahu, I describe him as obviously very confident in his assumptions. He has a brother who was killed in the Entebbe raid; very confident in his belief in how to deal with these groups. And yet I believe a lot of times there were miscalculations. This is also very, very difficult.

I describe my meetings with him again; I bring readers inside the room. You’re sitting there with Bibi Netanyahu, you’re with the intelligence chief of Egypt, Hamas is on another floor. You get a sense of what this is like day-to-day.

I do not. No one’s been able to point to me a moment in which we could have ended this war without the hostages. I don’t believe the war would have stopped absent the hostages. I think it’s important to go through the history as the book does.

About a month into the war, we had a deal with Hamas. Not easy. It was for all women and children: all women and children hostages are going to come out in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners. We had a ceasefire for eight days, and about 100 hostages came out. I’m talking about this with you here because three of those women did not come out. On the eighth day, Hamas said, “We’re not going to release the younger women.” They released the young toddlers, like Abigail, the young American girl; they released the 80-year-old grandmothers. They said, “We’re going to hold on to the younger women. We can’t find them,” which was completely untrue.

They claimed that, but they said, “Let’s keep the ceasefire and talk about the older men.” In the book, I go through this night—midnight here in Washington, December 1st—and it’s a moral quandary. This is what a hostage-taker does. Hamas is good at this; Iran is good at this. They’re masters at this. They put the moral onus on the other side: “Do you skip the younger women, start talking about older men, keep the ceasefire? Or say no, you broke the deal?”

Three of those women—Romi, Doron, and Emily—came out on January 19th. I was actually on your program and broke the news; I learned about it because I’d been up all night. They came out in the green room here. One was taken from the Nova festival, two were taken from their home in Kfar Aza, late 20s, one is 31 years old. They should have come out in that November deal.

Carmel and Eden, two other women, were later killed in a tunnel under Rafah, together with six hostages, including the American Hersh Goldberg-Polin. I’m very clear in the book: when that deal broke down in November because Hamas would not release those younger women, I thought we would be able to get to another deal sooner. One reason we didn’t is that we came under massive attack in the next two months; we were consumed with that, and I go see the Iranians in Oman.

But no, I do not think there was a way to stop this war without the hostages. It had to be a hostage deal, and it took a lot to get there.

If you read the book, you’re there, and I let readers make judgments: what would you do in this moment? We have a ceasefire for eight days. The guns are silent. You have humanitarian aid flowing throughout Gaza. We have a deal for all women and children. And Hamas says, “We’re going to hold on to the younger women and let’s talk about the older men.” Some of the older men were in their 80s. Do you say, “Okay, let’s skip over the younger women and move to the men”?

Israel was unanimous that they cannot do that, because it would be a death sentence for the women. Given how some of the younger women were believed to have been treated, as you just referred to—why did Hamas want to hold on to the younger women? I think Hamas thought they were their most precious cards in the negotiation. Hamas wanted to hold on to them because they thought they could get the highest price for some of them.

For women soldiers, the “keys”—the nomenclature is “keys”—the exchange ratio for women soldiers was 50 life-sentence Hamas prisoners. Life-sentence Palestinian prisoners often have killed many Israelis. They got the most “keys” for the women.

From both places. Yeah. This negotiation was—I don’t think it was a ratio so tedious and negotiated down to individual names—but there was a ratio for how many prisoners for an older man, how many prisoners for a female soldier. Hamas played with this all the time, all the way down to the very end of the negotiation, where they threw in a wrench at the end. Even for civilian, sick, and wounded hostages, they put a new demand on the table for 300 life-sentence prisoners, which had never been; life-sentence prisoners were the “key” for soldiers, and Hamas changed that at the end.

I bring this back because I think some of these facts have been lost in the horrific nature of this crisis, which is so polarizing and so difficult. But Romi, Emily, and Doron should have come out in November. The deal was unequivocal, and they didn’t. Carmel and Eden should have come out, and they were later killed by Hamas in a tunnel under Rafah. I go back to that November deal a lot: could we have done something differently to keep that on track? It’s very tragic.

But to your question: no, I do not think there was a way to end this crisis without the hostages. I’ve told some of the hostages that have come out, Keith and others: I think Hamas intended to hold on to hostages for many years in order to stay in power.

As you said, I’m very independent. I’ve worked with Republican presidents, Democratic presidents. I was a law clerk for two judges appointed by Republicans, one by a Democrat. Let me bring you into the Oval Office in a scene which I think encapsulates this very issue.

April 4th, 2024: President Biden, it’s his re-election, he’s on the campaign trail, obviously frustrated about the situation, unable to articulate because the hostage talks have now collapsed for a number of reasons I go through in the book. He’s frustrated by being unable to point to how we’re actually going to try to bring this to a close.

We had a horrific airstrike from the Israelis that killed nine aid workers with World Central Kitchen—José Andrés’s organization—an Israeli drone, which was clearly so horrific. So we have a call between Biden and Netanyahu, and Biden is just completely fed up. At the same time, however, Iran is planning to launch—we have intelligence that Iran is about to launch—a massive ballistic missile and drone attack directly against Israel, which is totally unprecedented, and if those missiles get through, you’re talking about thousands of casualties.

This is how everything converges. At that moment, if not for that impending missile attack—which we then had to deploy military forces for, building an unprecedented coalition with Arab partners, European partners, and of course the U.S. military, with General Kurilla putting this together—if not for that, I think at that moment we would have taken some pretty draconian measures against Israel, really.

Cutting off weapons and other things. That was very much on the table. But also at that time, in April, Congress by a massive bipartisan majority approved a $26 billion aid package for Israel, right in that moment.

I try to bring readers into the immediacy of the actual moment and what was happening, but the focus very quickly shifts to: how do we defend Israel from this missile attack? It ended up being 120 ballistic missiles, 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, all launched to land at the same time. I describe that in the Situation Room, what that was like. Ultimately, the United States and all of these regional partners and allies protect Israel from that incoming attack. It was a pretty extraordinary effort.

We selectively talked about it in the Oval Office around that time. After that call, the president stopped all sales and deliveries of heavy-payload munitions—2,000-pound bombs. We didn’t deliver them, and we didn’t approve any other sales. President Trump reversed that immediately after coming into office. We selectively paused weapon systems that could have been used in the West Bank by Itamar Ben-Gvir, given issues there.

So it was a selective use. The question you have to ask—and what I always asked, and a theme runs throughout the book—is: would a certain step, whatever it is, help reduce human suffering in Gaza and help facilitate an end of the war? That is the key question, the key test.

When we did a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire without the hostages, it actually set the talks back. Hamas leaders went to Tehran right after that and basically hardened down. When we increased public pressure on Israel, you could see Sinwar kind of backing off. This is the difference between private pressure, which the president was doing on that call, and much more public measures, because public statements are read by all the other actors in this crisis. The actors are not just Biden and Netanyahu; it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, Sinwar, the Iranian leaders, the Hezbollah leaders—all the players are parsing every word.

And remember, Israel also has one of the largest arms industries in the world. The idea that had Biden gone further on that course it would have stopped the war—I just think the record does not support that.

Yes, actually. So I think you put all this together. I say in the book: if there was an easier path for the president to take to end this crisis, he would have taken it.

This continues to be a live issue now, particularly on the left. It became so politically heated in 2024, and it drew in members of the national security team. In February 2024, the administration sent out to the very key state of Michigan—where there’s a very large Arab-American and Jewish population—the deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer, who told members of the Arab community he was aware of missteps, including a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, and the country values the lives of Palestinians. He said that began pretty early in the conflict. Do you agree that that was a mistake—that Biden didn’t show empathy for civilians, particularly Palestinians, caught in the midst of this horrific war between Hamas and Israel?

I just don’t think Jon would have been talking about that if it wasn’t something deeply felt. I describe it like a tear in your soul, working on this and trying to bring it to a resolution. But the time sequencing is important. Whatever side of the issue you might be on, if you read this book, the reader can make their own judgments of what was happening at particular times.

In February, that’s the time frame you just mentioned: we just had three Americans killed in an Iranian drone attack fired by Kata’ib Hezbollah, their marquee militia group in Iraq, directly targeting our living quarters. It wounded dozens of Americans and killed three soldiers on January 28th. That came after a series of escalating attacks against our people, trying to kill Americans. I went to see the Iranians in January in Oman all about this. The attacks continued to escalate, and President Biden in early February ordered the largest airstrikes since early in the Iraq war, and also ordered airstrikes against an Iranian commander in Iraq.

I document all this and explain it. Just because the crisis in its multiple dimensions was so regional in scope, what the president had on his mind constantly was trying to prevent an all-out regional war. Headlines were “on the verge of all-out regional war.” One reason the book is called Brink is because we were oftentimes on the brink of an all-out war, and I go through those moments.

I can’t speak to exactly what Jon was talking about there.

Jon’s a close colleague of mine. He ran the Deputies Committee meeting. Everybody in the U.S. government had their views expressed in the Deputies Committee meeting. The question always was: how do we bring this to a close, period? You can’t just say “end the war.” You can’t just say “contain it and don’t have a regional conflict. Bring the hostages home.” How do you actually do it? Sinwar is holding the hostages. He will not release the hostages until what? How do you get him to a “yes” on terms that can be accepted also by the Israelis?

I don’t. I think the president—the horror of this war, the horror of October 7th and the horror in Gaza, truly hell on earth—nothing diminishes the lives lost.

You’re talking about the president’s trip to Israel in particular. Let me give an anecdote, because it’s important. I describe this as I’ve never seen a worse backdrop to a military battle ever. Hamas spent 20 years building a military infrastructure under Gaza. I was in the counter-ISIS campaign; I was in Mosul. I saw it up close. Nothing like this.

We immediately said—the president said—“Where are the civilians going to go?” Gaza is 25 miles, very small, extremely tiny. Americans who haven’t been to Israel or been there don’t understand how small everything is. You drop a 2,000-pound bomb, that’s going to have a blast radius that kills civilians. We want to get civilians out of harm’s way. In Mosul, we got a million civilians out. In Syria, six million Syrians left the civil war. In Gaza, there was nowhere for people to go.

I called Abbas Kamel, the intel chief of Egypt, and said, “Look, we’ve got to find a way to allow Gazans at least to come temporarily into Sinai.” The answer was absolutely not. That’s why the president on that trip refused to take them. The president on the trip was going to Amman first, about eight days into the war…