Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. It's going to be a pretty exciting episode. I've been looking forward to it for a while. It connects a lot of the dots of the things that we've been reading about in the news from Venezuela to Lebanon to Iran. Dr. Matthew Levitt is here with me. Dr. Levitt is the Fromer Wexler Fellow at the Washington

Institute for Near East Policy, that's in Washington, D.C., where he directs the Institute's

Reinhardt Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. Dr. Levitt served as Deputy Assistant Secretary

for Intelligence and Analysis. At the U.S. Department of the Treasury, he teaches at Georgetown

University and at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy. It's an impressive resume. But the

key point here is that he is one of the go-to experts for our podcast, but also for other smaller

institutions like the U.S. Congress for things like Chesbalah,

the global reach of the organization called Chisbalah.

He is one of the analysts who have been tracking it, both professionally as a policy person in government

and as a scholar and researcher of the organization.

And Chisbala is a fascinating organization.

In some ways, it is broken by the war with Israel

and struggling to make a comeback and facing a lot of anger and a lot of determination in Lebanon,

more than we've seen in the past at least, to really prevent it from retaking control of Lebanon

and the way that it has been able to control large parts of

Lebanese politics and the Lebanese state in the past, at the same time, it has now begun

to adapt to that reality and to rebuild. And we're going to be asking about that and how all of that

works. Chisbella has a surprisingly strong and important presence in Latin America, in Africa.

It is, of course, very much Iranian.

It is an Iranian proxy that takes money from Iran, orders from Iran.

And so it links a lot of the dots of what happens in Venezuela, that failed state that has

essentially become a kind of narco-terrorist hub.

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