Ray McGovern - Intelligence Activism

Full transcript: Ray McGovern on London Real

11:27 Welcome to London Real. You’re most welcome. That’s quite a CV I just rattled off. And I think I’ve left out more degrees from Harvard and all sorts of other things that you do. I was wondering, before we start getting into the present day and the plethora of issues we can talk about today, whether it comes to Ukraine, NATO, Snowden, the things you’ve done with the Sam Adams award, Gaza, I mean, you know, our friend Annie Snowden, I’m excuse me, Annie Michonne gave me tons of topics that we could talk about. But before we get there, you have a unique asset over us young kids like me in my 40s, and even younger ones that are watching us on YouTube in their 20s, in that you have seen the the buildup of the what used to be called the Cold War before a lot of us even knew what it was. And I was wondering if you could explain what the American-Russian relationship was like in the 1960s before you started the CIA and then you started the CIA, if you can just kind of give us a bit of perspective.

12:28 I remember when I was, say, seven or eight years old, this is in the late 70s, I watched a made-for-television movie called The Day After, where it was this scenario of global thermonuclear war, and I couldn’t sleep for days. And if a child was feeling that, I’m sure the nation felt this tension. And it’s just something I don’t think a lot of people know that existed back in the day. And I thought maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you know of that relationship and what things were like in the 60s.

12:56 Well, it was palpable, you know, the fear, the Russians got the bomb, you know, when I was pretty little. What would we do? Well, we would hide under our desks, as if that would protect us from the bomb, right? And Russia was regarded, and aptly so, as what the Russians call the glavnivrag, the main enemy, okay? Now there’s a whole history behind that, but that’s the way it was.

13:26 I decided to major in Russian, partly because I wanted to see what I could do, as John and Kennedy suggested for my country rather than to ask what the country could do for me. His famous speech, right? Yeah, and a whole bunch of us, still not in Washington. Some of us are still alive. They came down expressly because of his challenge, okay?

13:46 Now I went into the Army because I was commissioned in ROTC College. And in 1962, November, when I reported for active duty down in the south of the United States, Fort Benning, to go through infantry school, there were no weapons to train with. And I inquired, so where are the grenade launchers that you rave about, new weapon, you know? And they said they’re all down in Key West, Florida. They’re ready to go into Cuba.

14:17 This was late 50s, you were there, early 60s? Yeah, this is early 60s, this is November of 62. Okay. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the month before. Was the month before.

14:26 That’s how close we came. And we didn’t learn until much later that those nuclear missiles were active. They were ready, they were, they could have been fired, okay? And John Kennedy and Khrushchev saved us from that. And since then, it’s been a constant sort of pas de jus to see if the Soviets at that point and we could work out a modus fivendi where that would never come that close again to nuclear warfare.

14:58 One of the basic things they did was install a communication line. that didn’t exist, the hotline, before it, okay. That was good, yeah. Before it was like teletypes back and forth? Yeah, it was very primitive, especially by today’s standards.

15:10 So after my army service, it was a natural to go into the CIA as the analyst of the Soviet foreign policy. And very quickly I became the branch chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch in the late 60s, early 70s. And it was really quite energizing times because we were able to persuade Ronald Reagan and before him, Richard Nixon, that we had the capability of verifying arms control agreements. Now, Reagan kept saying, trust but verify. Dovirai, not povirai, is the Russian trust, but verify.

15:59 Right, is that a Russian phrase that he just coined? It is, yeah. And would he say it in Russian to coin? No, he said it in English and that’s just the Russian translation, but it’s used, you know, Moscow. And, you know, that was a big deal.

16:11 I mean, we told Ronald Reagan, look, if they come up with a sensible proposal, give it to us and we’ll tell you how long it will take us to find out if they’re cheating, okay? and that enabled arms control agreements going back to Nixon’s time. I was in Moscow in May of 1972 when the ABM, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, was signed. Big deal. And when the interim agreement on offensive weapons was signed.

16:42 And those were cardinal factors in the deterrent posture that allowed us and the Russians to say, okay, well, nobody’s gonna be able to make a first strike on the other country without risking incredible destruction. And that’s what I’m worried about now. Right, right. And that’s what I’m worried about now. I can’t believe that 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell, that we’re still painting the Russians as an aggressor of nation that wants to take over the rest of Europe when the evidence is quite different.

17:18 And what really pains me is something that I normally point out, and I won’t forget to point out here, and that is that in 51 years in Washington now, counting my military service, I’ve seen a lot of change, you know? You see a lot of change in 51 years. But there’s one change that dwarfs all the others in importance, and that change is that we no longer have, in any real sense, a free media, and that’s bacon. Wow, okay, I wanna get into that more, especially how we are broadcasting here, which might seem to a certain extent independent media, but I wanna hear more about your thoughts on the media.

17:56 Before I get to that, you were able to verify the Russians, the progress that they had or the nuclear capability they had because of a lot of the flyovers and a lot of the intelligence you had. Was it a technical intelligence or was it a human asset intelligence? Well, mostly called national technical means, okay? That means satellites of all descriptions. That means satellites with all manner of capabilities.

18:24 So that was used in the treaties themselves. These will be monitored by national technical means. Those means were not available earlier on, but when they did become available, and when you could actually later do it in real time, the mind boggles, you know? What we used to do, of course, would have buckets of film and the satellites would go over and they’d film for about three weeks and then they’d drop the bucket and our navy would rush to try to catch the bucket before it got into the water in the Pacific, right? Sometimes they caught it, sometimes not, but they could always retrieve the film and they sent it right back to Rochester and about a 30 imagery analyst would go right up there and read it all out and then, you know, tell the policymakers is what we’ve seen.

19:14 I was watching Soviet foreign policy towards China, and we were trying to persuade the, not persuade, just to kind of inform policy makers that they hated each other. They really hate each other, and there were opportunities there for us to play one off against the other, and there were things that the Russians wouldn’t do for fear of allowing the Chinese to steal the march on their relationships with us. And so people were non-believers in that. People say, ah, you’re listening to a Russian propaganda.

19:47 They’re both communists, for Pete’s sake. They have no difference, you know? So we get a bucket of film up in Rochester, develop it. Guess what we find on the Soviet-Chinese border? They’re massing troops.

19:59 15 Soviet divisions. 15. So the trick of intelligence is to target these areas, areas, make sure that the satellites take the photos, now of course it’s very, very quick. But that seemed to be proof enough for us, but not for a lot of people, you know? And you can use this intelligence intelligently by, say, dropping it in a conversation or playing the Chinese off the Russians, and it’s an asset that the US has for foreign policy.

20:30 Well, you know, I’m on my way into Berlin, and there was a terrible imbroglio over a a quarter apartheid treaty on Berlin, you know, so that we would have rights to get in there and the East Germans would be out of the picture because the four powers were supposed to rule Berlin. And not until Nixon and Kissinger had the foresight to go to Beijing, okay, and play the Chinese card, not until then did the Russians come around and say, okay, we can make a a deal on Berlin. And we can make a deal on strategic arms and on anti-ballistic missiles.

21:07 We can do that, you know? So it’s sort of a race. Now, it’s no longer the case. We’ve sort of squandered that. The Russians and the Chinese are much more friendly. When I was watching this, the annual trade was about 200 million between the two. Now it’s something like 80 billion, would it be, okay?

21:28 And that’s one option that Putin has that Russia didn’t really have before, and they’ve signed an agreement with China that’s unprecedented in developing Soviet gas, and Soviet, the Russian gas fields out there in Siberia. So that’s one factor in the calculus here. The Russians don’t have to, you know, don’t have to be subservient to what the US and NATO want to do. They have other economic options, but the reality is that they want to be European. The Russians have always wanted to be European ever since we gave them an alphabet, really, so they could have a written language, and that didn’t happen until the ninth century.

22:11 A.D., all right? A.D., you know your history well. Well, you know, it’s all coming into, because that was Kiev and Rus. That was the Rus, that was the first Slavic kingdom, really, and it was Kiev and the Pripet Marshes. there in Biela, Russia.

22:26 And that’s where a very, very enlightened civilization had their own epic poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but they had no way to record it. They had no way to write it down. So long story short, two priests come up from Macedonia. They construct a language based on the characters in Greek and Latin and some of the Hebrew characters, and they had to construct some of them wrong. They got a language, they got a way to record their liturgy and the rest of their literature, and in the end you get Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Buschkin, and you know, incredibly bright, incredibly gifted people.

23:02 But all the while, the Russians are trying to become part of the West. Okay. And I want to talk more about them and the Ukraine issue. You mentioned briefly the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I guess that’s not, that’s a very, that’s a very, you know, obvious point where Russian and American relations, you know, came together.

23:20 And I was wondering if you could tell me if you remember personally what it was like being in America at that time. And I’ve watched the documentary called The Fog of War, which I’m sure you have watched, which John McNamara, who was the secretary of defense at the time with John F. Kennedy, talked about what was happening in those days. And later he recalls going to see Castro in Cuba, as you mentioned, and realizing that they were actually armed missiles with also the capacity to fire locally, which was flabbergasting to him.

23:51 It’s Casper even said, and I would have fired them as well if he would have attacked Cuba, which, and so one thing McNamara says is that that’s just way too close for humans to become. Can I get your thoughts on what it was like to go through that and then what your thoughts were, well, I guess on the movie and McNamara’s comments? Yeah. Well, John Kennedy is at the centerpiece here. When he came into office, the first thing that confronted him was a very foolish operation run by the CIA called the Bay of Pigs. That was April, 1961.

24:26 �61, and he came into office in �60, or � January. So he’d already been in play. Yeah, Eisenhower had sort of proved it, but he was a short timer. Kennedy looked at this thing and he said, �My God, I’ve got a bunch of ragtag, and my grades are going to take over. Oh, yeah, they’re ripe for revolution. They’re ripe for � I knew counter-revolution really what they’re ripe for and we got it all figured out so Kennedy says very very seriously to them he says look you know I don’t this doesn’t sound like it’s a great idea to me but if I said how I proved it I just realized that if you get in trouble on the beach no US Air Force no US Army no US Navy’s gonna be involved in invading sovereign country okay right to chance he had just a bad idea. So Allen Dulles and Bissell, one of his assistants, who had no real military experience, went ahead in the full expectation that when, as would inevitably happen, those guys got pinned down on the beach, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, everybody else would help out because the president couldn’t possibly just leave them there. Now we know that because when Dulles died, he left some coffee-stain notes, which said, president’s not going to be able to avoid giving us the help we’re going to need. So, you know, it’s not McGovern speculating about this. That’s the plan. He had indicated to the military leaders that they would have some backup.

25:57 Yeah. Well, the military was just as, what’s the word, crazy to prevent any communists and to to defeat Castro, who was such a threat to our hemisphere and so forth, and give the Soviets a bloody nose. So it was Alan Dulles with the military, but John Kennedy was the commander in chief, and he made it very clear, no US forces. So they’d do it anyway. They’d get trouble in the beach, you know, the debacle that happened there.

26:25 And they’d come to Kennedy and say, well, you’re gonna help me? No, I told you, I’m not gonna do it. So he knew he’d been mousetrapped, right? I mean, he’s a bright guy, okay? And so he cans Alan Dulles, who, you know, sort of one of the muckety-mooks, as my Irish grandmother would call him, you know, kind of the upper crust there, he and his brother John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State, they’re partners running the foreign policy of our country.

26:53 And you don’t can people like that, no matter how egregious the mistakes they make. So what happened was, later, when Khrushchev sort of took the measure of Kennedy, they met in Vienna the next spring, and he saw this young fellow that he might be able to take advantage of. Castro was wanting this kind of support. And so Khrushchev decided to put offensive missiles in Cuba. And Kennedy had said, this is going to be crossing a line.

27:27 He can’t do this, but he did it anyway, okay? Now, Kennedy’s faced with this incredible problem. The Joint Chiefs wanna obliterate Cuba and they wanna kill everybody in the Soviet Union. And Kennedy says to them, well, how many Americans would die if we do that? And they said, well, only about 30 to 40 million.

27:48 Because of the nuclear strike, right? Yeah, and Kennedy leaves the room. He says, these guys are crazy. And the population was probably 150 at that point. Yeah, yeah.

27:57 So that’s how close they came, now. And McNamara alluded that in the film that the military was just, they still wanted to go in, even after the crisis was diffused, they still wanted to go in and crush Cuba. Great chance, great chance, yeah. So it was really nip and tuck there and with this great military pressure for doing something about this, Kennedy was, I remember, you asked me where I was, I was waiting to be called on to active duty. November 2nd was when I reported on active duty.

28:30 So around this time, I had just finished teaching. I was getting ready to go in the army and all this was happening. And so what Kennedy did, he did a very measured thing and Bobby Kennedy, his brother, helped him. They talked with Dobrynin, they talked with KGB people and they talked, most important, with Llewelyn Thompson who had been our ambassador in Moscow and knew the Russians, okay. Right, and he, yeah, he knew the Russians pretty, he knew one of them quite intimately, had been to his house, who was?

29:02 Khrushchev. Right, oh, Khrushchev, okay, right. So he, Kennedy had the foresight to always make sure that Llewelyn Thompson was there, right? So at one point, if I recall correctly, they’re just about to launch, they’re just about to do something really foolish when Llewelyn Thompson says, well, look, you know, I think there’s a way outta here. And Kennedy says, what?

29:24 And he said, I think Kennedy has said, what’s wrong with this plan? And Thompson said, well, look, here’s what you have. You have two messages from Khrushchev, right? One says something pretty conciliatory. We can maybe work this out.

29:40 You’re going to have to give some, maybe the missiles in Turkey. And the other one, I imagine, was written with the military breathing down his back, which says, under no conditions will we pull those missiles So what you do, Mr. President, with all due respect, is you answer the first one. Right, and ignore the second one. Yeah.

30:01 And so with Bobby Kennedy talking with Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador at the time, and Kennedy answering it this way, they worked it out. And the implicit thing that wasn’t revealed at the time was we were gonna take those missiles that we had in Turkey out of there. Of course we didn’t need them there anyway, it’s lots of other stuff. So, the point is that the war was avoided. Now, when you get finished with a traumatic event like that, if you have any sense at all, you say, not only, we just say, my God, how do we prevent things from reaching that point again?

30:37 And Kennedy and Khrushchev developed a relationship by talking to each other and by exchanging on the hotline and other means, You can imagine what those are, that the military is cut out of, and some of the CIA guys were cut out of it too. And before you knew it, Kennedy is making incredible speeches like the one at the American University where she says, you know, we should have complete disarmament. This is crazy. We should not have these nuclear weapons, you know?

31:05 And he’s talking not only with Khrushchev, he’s talking with Castro behind everybody’s back through a friend of his who was a journalist, okay? Now military CIA has ways of finding it out all about this, and worst of all, from their point of view, he’s going to leave Vietnam, and all of Southeast Asia has got to go to the, you know who, commies, right? Okay, well, so Russians and the Chinese, we weren’t really, they’re all commies, right? He had issued two executive orders, okay, in October of the year they killed him, and November was 63.

31:46 So in October of 63, the first one said that we’re going to pull out 1,000 troops by the end of this year, 63, from Vietnam. And the rest of them, second order, the rest of them by the end of 65, the bulk of the rest of them, we believe a couple in. Now, that speaks volumes about what Kennedy was going to do. We could have avoided it. But it also speaks volumes about how these troglodytes, same guys that wanted to obliterate the Soviet Union and we only take 30 to 40 million casualties, you know?

32:24 Right. And so in my view, the allen-delices of this world, allen himself at the lead, the military that thought they were rescuing the country from somebody too weak vis-a-vis the communists, did John Kennedy in, and I say that advisedly. I say that mostly on the basis of the best book available on this, it’s called JFK and the Unspeakable. It’s a very persuasive case. It’s written by a person who had no access to grind.

32:54 He’s a Catholic worker in Alabama, okay, but he’s an incredible researcher. James Douglas is his name. So, I’m glad you asked me about that, because this guy can talk about earth-shattering developments or things that change history. that changed history because LBJ came in and you know he, he asked, I don’t remember this, maybe this was in the fog of war. The audio tapes, right?

33:19 Yeah, so McNamara. So was McNamara on the Dulles side or more the Kennedy side? Because you see McNamara in that movie, you feel that he’s pushing the war in Vietnam. He was later in the war in Vietnam. He was on Kennedy’s side as long as Kennedy was, he was very loyal, okay?

33:36 Okay. Matter of fact, when Kennedy faced down the generals in issuing these executive orders to pull out of Vietnam, he had McNamara do his dirty work. He sent him and Maxwell Taylor, the beautiful four-star general out there to Saigon. He said, okay, on your way back, stop in Honolulu and await further instructions. And they did.

34:03 And the further instructions were their report. It was written in the White House. This is the report that you’re going to give at the Cabinet, and it said it’s a lost cause. We got to pull out. So it was all very cleverly orchestrated by Kennedy.

34:20 And at the meeting, what they discussed this, the military was unalterably opposed to this, but Kennedy walked out and McNamara said, you know, bedlam there, you know. So I mean, there’s a circumstantial case, a very strong circumstantial case that did him in. And when LBJ came in, you know, McNamara’s doing this little speech, I think it was February of the following year, and it’s a speech on foreign policy. And he gives it to LBJ, and he said, I’m going to speak on Wednesday.

34:49 And LBJ calls it by Tuesday, and he says, Mac, good speech, but I think you ought to say something about Vietnam. And McNamara very tellingly says, I, of course, thought of that, sir, but what am I going to say? And LBJ says, well, you tell them that we’re training them up. We’re training those folks up, and the training’s going good, and it looks good. Now does that sound familiar?

35:20 We’ve been training the Vietnamese up. We’ve been training the Afghans up. We’ve been training the Iraqis up. You can’t train people up to kill their brothers. That’s what’s going on now in the Ukraine.

35:33 That’s very poignant. Not going to work. So that was, you know, it’s just so sad, really. It’s sort of, I’m over my anger now. But when you look back at this history, when you saw that there was a real chance for a modus preventi and more with the Soviet Union well before the Berlin Wall fell, how much suffering could have been prevented, you know?

35:55 After that, of course, you had the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and all kinds of other indignities that could have been prevented. If people came to their senses and said, all right, they might be communist, but that doesn’t mean they’re up to do you in. When you see a movie like Fog of War, and you see McNamara’s entire reign of Secretary of Defense, one of the longest there was before Rumsfeld, and you see the way he interacts with the executive and with your background in the CIA and briefing people at the White House, what do you see?

36:25 What’s the ultimate bird’s eye view when you see a film like that, that things could have been prevented, that the communication was wrong, that the presidents are trying to pander to the popular opinion, what do you see? Well, I see a candidate who had some guts. He not only had this shibboleth of, well, not shibboleth, I mean, the Russians were a threat. But they weren’t threatening our existence in the way that the military wanted to do them in, right?

36:52 So he had a president that wanted to address these problems in a sensible way. And we had the limited test ban treaty before all this happened. So the Russians were willing to play along, you know? So then LBJ comes in and he doesn’t really quite know what’s, you know, what’s going on. He’s anti-communist and worst of all, of course, he falls under the spell of these fancy generals like General Westmoreland and McNamara is no help to him.

37:20 McNamara is a wishy-washy guy. You know, in Watergate there was that expression coined limited hangout, a partial limited hang out in terms of letting the truth out? Well, that’s the way it was with McNamara when he did his book. It sort of like expiated his sins, but not really because he wasn’t fully candid. And one of the ways I know that is Daniel Ellsberg, who I’m happy to say is a close friend of mine, he said he took a tour of Vietnam with McNamara. And they got a very dreary picture from the people on the ground, you know, the field grade officers, not the generals, you know, the generals, oh, everything’s going fine, and we’re training up real good, right?

38:09 Okay, but the field grade, this is hopeless cause, and he comes back and he writes a little thing for the Secretary of Defense to say, and he says just the opposite, going great, going great. So McNamara, you know, you really do get corrupted by power. He thought that these barefooted people in the jungle, that they were no threat, and so did LBJ. Now, LBJ comes in, and these blue-suited officers from the Air Force, they say, now, Mr. President, we have these new weapons called B-52s, and we have these big, big bombs, and we’re gonna seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

38:46 So LBJ calls the CIA director, and he says, so what do you think about these B-52s, and how about those big bombs? going to seal off the trail, the Ho Chi Minh are going to get up, right? What do you people think about that? Using the CIA exactly in the way that Harry Truman wanted it to be used as a check on what the military said or what the State Department said, what do you guys really think, okay? So we waited a decent interval, maybe two days, and we went back and we told LBJ, look, Mr. President, with all due respect, the Ho Chi Minh Trail doesn’t look anything like I-66 or I-95 or the 5 in California. It’s like 168 trails in the middle of the jungle. I can’t even see it from the air. And even if you could obliterate a lot of it, we know Ho Chi Minh. Sam here brought him into Hanoi on his shoulders when he kicked the chaps out of Vietnam. He knows that Ho Chi Minh is not going to give up. As a matter Matter of fact, Mr. President, almost never does anybody give up just on bombing.

39:55 So if you want to send a half million people there, you can. That’s what the French were going to do after World War II. But even then, they were advised by their own generals, you can send a half million people in there and you still won’t win. So what happened? Well, that’s the sort of the teaching point here with respect to intelligence.

40:13 You can have very prescient judgments. You have people from experience who know not only Ho Chi Minh, but know what the Ho Chi Minh Trail looks like, okay? But the president doesn’t have to listen to them. Right. Still have decisions based on other motivations.

40:27 Yeah, I see. He didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So he went with the blue-suited generals, and he became the first US president. What do you think of these reflection films like Fog of War, like your good friend Rumsfeld’s the unknown known you know what do you think when you see these films of these guys reflecting back I mean do you see guys that aren’t being honest with themselves do you think there’s only so much they can say do you think magnum era later in his life remembers things differently even hmm that’s you know that’s a really good question because you can start to believe your own lies and it often happens especially at the very high reaches of government and that’s why this this public propaganda campaign with the media all marching in order before Iraq, you know, and now before the vilification of Mr. Poutine. Poutine, Poutine, bad, bad, Poutine, no shirt on, sometimes rides a horse with no shirt on, bad, bad Poutine, aggressor, invasion, all of that. You know, it’s, it would be funny if it weren’t so serious if it hadn’t all happened just 11 years ago. My God. So I would come back again to say that most people in this country have no idea as to why Ukraine is a bone of contention now and why the Russians feel that it’s a danger to their national security and are reacting in the way any country in the world would react when a push, when a coup d’etat is orchestrated on their border at an important country by the United States and the EU,

42:04 The European Union. Right. And I want to get to that. I’m just going to bring this a letter along through history. Talk to me about the 81 to 85, when you’re personally going into the White House giving those one-on-one briefings, I guess Vice President Bush was at those briefings.

42:19 What is that like, walking into the White House? How much power do you have as the CIA to, I don’t know, control the narrative or present certain information? What do you remember from that? What did you not like about that and what did you like about it? Well, the President’s Daily Brief is the consummate product we produce on a daily basis, six days a week, and the National Intelligence Estimates were the weighty kind of background documents that would tell the President, what will happen if you send 500,000 more people into Vietnam, that kind of thing.

42:53 I worked on both, but the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, was really the acme of my career. How long is the brief? Is it a page? No, it’s it goes through generations really just goes through changes when when John Kennedy was getting the president’s daily brief We called it the pickle the president’s intelligence checklist

43:18 Yeah pickle and he it was just one page I like little two-sentence things about really important hot spots if you wanted more he’d asked that’s what he wanted When Nixon came in, we did, he was a lawyer, right? So we did a legal-sized PDB, and we talked about things that he and Kissinger needed to know, but sometimes it never reached the president, because Kissinger had no answers, you know, and sometimes he’d write scurrilous little comments, but more than these guys don’t know what they’re talking about, I can’t say what’s up. With LBJ, he read it faithfully, and he liked to have some salacious, hospice sort of things in there every now and then, which we tried to oblige him when we had them.

44:06 But we did our own creditable job with all these people. I served on the PDB staff under Nixon and under Ford. So it was no foreign animal to me, except that we never had, ever, ever had the access that we began to have under the Reagan regime. And that was an accident of history. When he was elected, a couple of people who worked with me, more senior than I, went to the director, who was Admiral Stansfield Turner at the time, and said, you know, President-elect Reagan doesn’t know much about foreign policy.

44:45 We think that he needs some real remedial work and we think that we should give him the President’s daily brief even before he becomes President. And Turner said, good idea, I’ll check with Jimmy Carter. He checked with Carter, Carter said, of course. What happens next? My two friends go out to the Pacific Palisades, have these little CIA ID cards made up, you know, appear at breakfast time at Reagan’s house.

45:13 As ranch in California. Yeah, you go to the Secret Service, our CIA briefing, CIA briefing and the Secret Service. What do we have any worry about? Well, you better check with Washington just then, as luck would have it, while Reagan comes down to steps. What’s going on here?

45:28 CIA briefing, sir. Oh, come on in. Come on in. So that was the accident in history. Yeah.

45:34 So he liked it. He really liked it over breakfast. And so every morning… What president wouldn’t want that direct access, right? Once you taste it. Well, especially when you have a lot to learn, right?

45:44 And the guys that were doing it were really top flight people. These were senior analysts that knew, you know, knew what the score was and would not adulterate anything they told them. So he’s a smart enough guy to know what he’s getting. So he comes into Washington as president and George H.W. Bush as vice president says now, Mr. President, had he wanted us to work the PDB briefings, I think I’d like to, I’d like to get, I’d like to get a briefing too.

46:12 And I think the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Association, they should all get the daily brief now, is that okay? And for instance, well, yeah, it’s just one thing. I think that now that we’re in office, I think I’d like to kind of not have to get up that early. So why don’t you all get the briefings and come see me about 1030 or 11 and tell me So the upshot of that was we very seldom saw the President himself.

46:45 Okay, so the briefing happens when? 7 a.m. or 8 a.m.? Well, depending on the schedule. Usually Schultz was at 7.30, Bush was at 8.15.

46:53 Weinberger was usually at 7.30. There were two of us on this thing. And it was a real high because we were trusted, right? And we had worked on the book, on the PDB, the night before. I remember staying until all hours, quizzing, trying to put myself in Chiltern’s position, for example, and asking the analyst, well, what about this? And why do you say that? What’s your sort? So it was very, it was onerous, but it was kind of, what’s the word? The adrenaline really flew and flowed. And- Because this can change the course of foreign policy quite- Yeah. Well, quite markedly. Yeah. For example, Garbachev. Now, he comes in, right? This is This is right in the middle of my tour of briefing these folks.

47:37 And the big question is, is he for real? He’s criticizing the Communist Party. He’s saying that there should be a better deal with the, a better relationship with the West. Who is this guy? He’s talking about Glasnost.

47:53 He’s letting things appear in Providence. He’s just here that never appeared before, critical of his comrades. He’s talking about Peter Stryker, which is rebuilding the whole kind of mechanism here, which deeply needs rebuilding, is he for real? This was radical at the time. So I have to tell you that our bosses, Bill Casey at the time and Robert Gates, who actually worked for me in the early 70s on Soviet foreign policy, they had laid down the line that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will never, ever, ever give up power without a major bloodbath.

48:33 They’ll stay in power for your life and your grandchildren’s life. And so, you know, all this stuff, you know, forget about it. And they had very good reason to think that. Based on Russian history. Well, you know, not real Russian history.

48:47 You know, if you knew, if you knew what was going on before, I got up at your office and then noted the changes, it was easy. It was actually easy to say, this guy is the real deal. And I knew enough about, that was my whole area, my graduate degrees in Russian history. And I knew the people who didn’t work for Robert Gates and were able to exploit open source media, okay? And they come up with the same conclusions that I did.

49:18 So, for example, here I take a little piece of TOS, the Soviet news agency, into Secretary Shultz. And I say, you’ve just been invited this morning to visit Moscow, talk with Gorbachev, and he looks at it and he looks at me and he says, I suppose these guys are really bad communists. And I look at him and he says, I suppose your leaders there would say, this is all Big Bruce. And I didn’t feel like I had to, or I could, contradict what Gates and Casey were saying.

50:10 But I did. Yeah, I said, you know, this is an invitation. The people that I respect in the agency who are mostly working on open sources but have a wealth of experience far deeper than the other ones that you’re hearing from, they assure me that government self is the real deal, what’s to lose from being open to that. Now it was a real struggle. It was Schultz against Casey, Weinberger was on Casey’s side with the Secretary of Defense, The people in the White House, the Assistant Secretary or the Assistant for National Security Affairs, they were no help at all, you’re not kind of.

50:56 So Schulz was able single-handedly through very deft cultivation of relations not only with Gavrachov but with Reagan to show that these troglodytes, Bill Casey, Bill Casey, a great guy for World War II, right? But, you know, the Russians were not the Nazis. Right. And if Bobby Gates could turn over, figuratively speaking, a rock in Nicaragua and say, I see three Russians there, and then somebody else will say, I see five Russians there. Well, those people got promoted because Casey could say, you know, these Russians are coming up through Mexico to take, give me a break, you know, it’s crazy stuff.

51:41 And yet, the hierarchy being what it was, Casey being able to appoint Gates to do this kind of dirty work, and Gates being able to take people who didn’t know the first thing about the Soviet Union, put them as head of the Soviet division. So it was really very corrupt. And the reason I make that point is because it’s a very sad thing. It takes about a generation to corrupt an agency or an institution of this kind. So that was 1981, right?

52:13 Fast forward to 2002, when George Bush decides he wants to make a war on Iraq. And he decides, and he calls in George Tenet, who was the head of the CIA, he says, George, I want to make a war on Iraq. Give me the evidence of what kind of a threat they are. So the important point here is that evidence that was conjured up, that wasn’t mistaken. That was fraud.

52:38 That was manufactured. That’s the worst, I mean, there’s nothing worse than manufacturing evidence or intelligence to deliberately deceive our elected representatives out of their constitutional prerogative to declare war or otherwise authorize war. And there’s a history of that, as you were saying, this is a thing? This is what happened during Iraq. There was no history of this before.

53:02 See, what I’m saying here is that from 1981 until 2002, 2002 the people who bubbled up and sat around the conference table when Tenet came back from the White House as he did early September 2002 says President Bush Cheney wanted to do a war against Iraq. We have to do a national intelligence estimate now It’s got to come out the way Cheney says it is. He had just made a major speech on 26th of August 2002 saying Iraq’s working on nuclear weapons, they have chemical and biological weapons already, and don’t depend on UN inspectors, that just gives you a false sense of security, okay?

53:43 So those were the terms of reference of this estimate. And Congress was gonna require an estimate before they vote for war, okay? So the idea was do a phony estimate. Now, if, in my day, in my day, yeah, in the old ethos, if the director came back White House and said, okay, now we’ve got to do this estimate. It’s got to come out this way.

54:11 That would have never happened. You’re kidding, right, George? You’re kidding. No, I’m not kidding. So what changed that allowed that to happen?

54:19 Casey Gates, corrupting, really kind of prostituting middle-level managers so that they become malleable enough to care more about their careers than about the truth, and you have several of them running around now with real guilty consciences because these will consequentialize, right, consequentialize weapons of mass destruction, mobile biological laboratories for biological warfare chemical agents, chemical agents, ridiculous things like flying drones the size of, you know, mechanical little airplanes with chemical or biological agent, all this kind of stuff appeared in that estimate. And you believe the structure that made that that happened in 2002, the seeds of that were sowed in the early 80s. Yeah, because I know the people, I mean, I know the people that bubble up to the top. And I know, you know, I know sadly, what they actually allowed themselves to be subborned into doing and that’s the sad part because the operational part of the agency you know they betrayed and lies and deceit and all of this kind of their brand but we we used to try to always get at the truth and we tell the truth without fear of favor and when you go around Washington and you say that I worked for an agency or part of of an agency that had no political agenda, people, their eyes sort of glaze over, you know, and say, right, right.

55:56 Everybody had a political agenda. Well, I have to tell you that we didn’t. The CIA, you were in, didn’t you? Yeah, the, see, there’s really two CIA’s, the operational, that’s another story, but the operational part is separate and distinct. We couldn’t even go to that part of the building.

56:11 Okay? Right. So the analysis unit that is, which is precisely what Truman intended, was hermetically sealed off from the operators. And with the exception of the agents that were collecting positive information, information that we couldn’t get from any other source, we enfolded that in with the mechanical or the national technical means that I talked about before. So we had a full picture of what was going on, except for the covert action.

56:40 Koo in Chile, CIA Koo in Chile, 9-11-1973, I wrote about it in newspapers, and I was on for the PDB that night. Okay, so that’s evidence of that separation. Yeah. You had been retired for 12 years before you heard this start to be talked about in 2002. When did the alarm bells start going off in your head, that there’s problems here, that the organization is not working how it should, and then when did you start deciding to speak up?

57:17 Well, I could see that in 2002, after 9-11, you know, they say after 9-11, everything changed. Well, everything did change. The ethos and intelligence that I spoke about before, speaking truth to power without fear of favor, this kind of thing. It became kind of a tool of the war on terror and a tool of what Dick Cheney wanted to do with respect to oil in the Middle East, with respect to Saddam Hussein, with all this stuff. So what were you when 9-11 happened, and what were your thoughts, you know, minutes afterwards?

57:53 Yeah. Well, I worked down in the inner city now with a nonprofit, and I was in the inner city of D.C. Yeah, I worked for an ecumenical church, actually. They support me. Yeah.

58:05 Very different kind of church. you’re a fascinating man. Well, the pastor said to me, look, we want you to use the church when you have your byline, we want you to identify yourself with the Ecumenical Church of the Savior. And I said, I’m proud to do that, but what’s in that for you? You know what he said? He says, well, what’s in it for us is that that’s what church should be doing. And number two, I want it to be so that But when they come for you, they’ll have to come for all of us.

58:37 Wow, this is where I belong. This has supported me ever since, okay. It’s not a, I don’t need a lot of money to make the difference between my retirement and what I can live on. But just the support of those folks, it’s incredible. So anyhow, they’re working down there.

58:55 Right, 9-11, yeah. And 9-11 happens. We could see, I could sense immediately this is going to change a lot of things. But I didn’t have a clue as to how much change there would be. Did your XCIA brain go into effect when it happened, and were you just trying to analyze what you heard on the news versus what you thought?

59:16 It didn’t really, in all honesty. I was running a school there trying to help people understand how to form nonprofits, how to reach out to people who are impoverished, not by any chance of their own, and how not Not to help them or minister to them, but how to have real authentic relationships with them. And that was wonderful. I mean, I just put all that other stuff behind me until the next, well, the fall. And when we invaded Afghanistan, I began to have my doubts.

59:49 But you had basically washed your hands of anything about Washington or any ex-CIA stuff. You were done with that. Well, I was done emotionally and knowledge based. I didn’t pay much attention, what happened in the Balkans, for example, but in Washington, you never can separate yourself. You always read the Washington Post, so it’s easy to keep up with.

1:00:08 But when I saw the deliberate distortion of intelligence after 9-11, when I saw some of my former colleagues falling for all this stuff and kind of dancing to Cheney’s tune, that’s when I started writing, and I was still head of this servant leadership school or co-director, and so the pastor that I quoted before, he says, Ray, he says, you know, sometimes your call changes and you might be called now not to be running the school but to write full-time and speak full-time and, you know, interview, because people think you know something because you worked for 27 minutes from the CIA. That’s a cachet, Ray, you know? So I said, that sounds right to me and so that’s what I ended up doing.

1:00:51 Now, I remember I was still co-director of the school On February 5th, 2003, when Colin Powell got up at the UN, we knew that he was going to be making a big speech about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, 1030. So I had a board meeting at 1030. So I went to the past president, I got a problem. We have this little fledgling group, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. We agreed that I would do an initial draft.

1:01:23 AFP says to get it out of the wire by five o’clock. And so I really have to watch Call of Power. He says, oh, no problem, no problem. You give me your written report, I’ll cover for you. So I watch Call of Power.

1:01:36 I say, I can’t believe. I can’t believe this is what he’s saying. So we were kind of in all honesty, we were longing the tooth by that time. Can we still do this stuff? It was easy enough to do one on Mao or Stalin or even, you know, hush off, you read the speech and then you write something out before the post hazard of the times.

1:01:59 Could we do this by five o’clock? We did. With the help of email, which was kind of new those days, I did the draft, we got a shop on it, and we got it out, well, it was 5.15, but AFP got it out, okay? Now, what do we say? We said, you know, colon power gets an A for presentation, A C plus, no, a C minus, we gave him for content.

1:02:24 The important thing you need to know, Mr. President, is that even if, and we have our doubts, even if everything he said is true, this doesn’t justify an attack on Iraq. And if there’s an attack on Iraq, our last sentence said, what you need to do before that is to broaden the circle of your advisers beyond those, clearly bent on a war that we see no necessity for. and the consequences of which we expect to be catastrophic. Now, we took a little liberty with our former role of being pure intelligence analysts, because we should have stopped by saying, before saying, this doesn’t justify war.

1:03:13 But here we are all retired. Here we are American citizens, too. And so we said, well, you know, we’ll just do this because we feel so strongly that a lot of stuff is hooey, you know, made up. And even if it were true, this would be crazy, crazy, crazy to start what Nürnberg called a war of aggression. You know, that was serious. You know, I lived through World War II. I was born a week before it started, so I don’t remember much about it, but right afterwards, when I grew up, and I learned about all these things.

1:03:48 And what Nernberg said, how it defined a war of aggression, advisedly so, was it said a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only insofar as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole. medieval, think kidnapping, think torture, think Guantanamo, think prisons, black prisons, think civilian lives squandered, think of all these things. That’s what happened in World War II, and that’s what happened in Iraq.

1:04:23 It was a war of aggression. Tony Blair and George Bush were the ones that were responsible, Dick Cheney, of course, And the fact that they’ve never been held accountable for that is a, there’s a blot on our civilized world. And that still bothers you to this day. Oh sure it does, yeah. I mean, it was very important that we held the Nuremberg trials, very, very important.

1:04:50 And not only were the generals and the admirals held to account, but there was a lawyer, The kind of lawyer that wrote the briefs justifying torture, you know, justifying some of the other things like drone strikes, those kinds of lawyers. And I remember the lawyer who was actually included in those that were hanged, and I don’t like capital punishment, but I could understand it in those circumstances. He said, well, look, I was a professional, and I changed the laws because I wanted everything to be done very legally.

1:05:26 Wow. You don’t have to have a flashback to that to see how the laws were diddled with. Not only the ones just justifying in quotes torture, not only the ones justifying killing American citizens without due process, which Barack Obama now claims to the ability to do, but the ones that justified or or said well the Fourth Amendment really doesn’t apply anymore. or we can snoop on Americans without a court warrant. That, the member, is very, very specific, prohibiting what NSA has been doing for the last many years.

1:06:02 And the real sorrowful thing is that since Barack Obama decided not to hold these people accountable, he becomes complicit in this, and does his own little renditions. The Fifth Amendment says you can’t deprive anyone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Well, then how can the president authorize killing American citizens abroad? Well, they come up with these lawyerly things as well. It doesn’t say judicial process.

1:06:38 All it says is due process. Give me a break. So this brought you out of retirement, basically. Oh, yeah. So Colin Powell’s speech was the one, was that the straw that broke the camel’s back?

1:06:49 And now you’re back. Yeah, we came back full, full strength. And at one point, we had about 65 members of the VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Perfection. Okay, when you say we, that’s the VIPS organization. And can you give me a summary of what that organization is all about?

1:07:05 Sure. To explain it, someone who’s never heard of it. Well, I think it’s first inaugural piece, the one I explained to you, the one that we did on Colin Powell’s speech, sort of pretty much set the ethos that we wanted to follow.

1:07:23 We commented on torture, we’ve commented on various things that we asked the president to hold the people responsible and hold them accountable for the things that they did. Fast forwarding up to our most recent ones, last year when John Kerry got up before the press conference in the State Department on the 30th of August, so almost exactly a year ago, and he said, we know, we know, we know Bashol Assad was responsible for those chemical attacks outside Damascus, and we know that question’s the red line that the president said, we know, we have to retaliate or nobody will take us seriously, and we know, we know, 35 times. He said, you know, okay.

1:08:06 Now, you don’t have to be a Shakespearean scholar to remember, you know, he thinks he doth protest too much, you know? We didn’t know, and to their credit, our former colleagues told us, we’re not gonna do another Iraq, okay? Okay. We don’t know. How do you know he didn’t know?

1:08:22 Because our colleagues told us, and because the British got a piece, got some of this sarin that was used in this attack on August 21 last year, 2013. They brought it to Port Downe where they have this laboratory and they analyzed it and found it not to be the sarin that we know to be in Syrian government stocks. It was kind of a homemade sarin, which we knew the rebels were capable of making. So, you know, a pastel tie and a fancy suit, I don’t know where you know it doesn’t do it for us, okay?

1:08:57 So it was not only us, but it was Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who went to the president and said, you know, with all due respect, Secretary Kerry doesn’t know. He knows he doesn’t know. And when he says it’s going to be an unbelievably short war in the Middle East, sir, there’s no such thing as an unbelievably short war. And with all due respect to Secretary Kerry, he may be real good about steering boats up the Mekong, but that does not make you a strategic thinker.

1:09:32 And the people advising you in the White House don’t know diddly about war, Mr. President. We do. It’s not gonna be short, it’s gonna be very bloody. And what’s planned here is shock and awe number two.

1:09:44 You oughta be aware that that’s what’s gonna happen. And last thing I’ll say, Mr. President, I wasn’t there, of course. I wasn’t even gonna fly on the wall, but I know what Dempsey knew, okay? And I know that he was capable because he’s a good, he’s an honest guy, you know?

1:10:01 I imagine what he said to the President was, look, Mr. President, everyone’s expecting you tomorrow. That would have been the 31st of August, 2013, to say that the cruise missiles are flying from the ships out there in the eastern Mediterranean, and we’re gonna do whatever you think we can do. I’m not so sure, but people are gonna come to me and say, General Nepsey, why could you not have waited two days for the UN inspectors to come back from Damascus and hear their findings as to who perpetrated this thing and what kind of scenario, why could you not have waited?

1:10:37 And Mr. President, I’m going to have to say, beats the hell out of me, go ask the president. Now, we were shocked. 20 hours after Kerry said all these things, lied 35 times. The president got up and said, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff has advised me that there’s no time sensitivity.

1:11:00 That’s the words he used to this operation. We’re prepared to do it now, but we can do it tomorrow. We can do it next week. we do it every month, and instead of doing it now, we’re gonna go to Congress for appropriate authorization. I’ve never seen such a turnaround.

1:11:15 So what’s the point there? The point is that intelligence people are trying to do things right now. They prevented, my former colleagues prevented, a war in Iran back in 2007, when they issued an estimate that was groundbreaking, said Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed work on that weapon. Now, you don’t see that in the New York Times. You don’t see that in the Washington Post or anywhere in Western media, but that was the intelligence assessment, okay?

1:11:50 And that prevented, that was made public, and that prevented Bush and Cheney from doing their last war against Iran before they left the following year in 2008. Don’t take my word for it. read Bush’s memoirs. He talks about this estimate. He says, you know, this was out of the blue.

1:12:12 And it deprived me of the military option against Iran for how could I authorize a strike on a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program? Well, bummer. Okay, so it’s back to working the way it should, is kind of what you’re saying. These are… It can.

1:12:35 Yeah, it can. And this is the essence of your organization, is analyzing this intelligence and making sure it’s used in the right way or make sure it’s not used in the wrong way. Well, that’s beyond our capability to shape how it’s used. What we serve up is unadulterated intelligence. For example, on the Ukraine now.

1:12:57 Okay? Yes. It’s an insult to our profession for anybody to describe those fuzzy pictures that have been revealed 10 days ago as intelligence. What fuzzy pictures are you talking about? These are fuzzy pictures made available by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO, and our own State Department, saying, oh, these are Russian tanks and they’re coming across the border.

1:13:21 And you can’t tell. I’ll tell you what, let’s do a couple minute breakdown here of Ukraine. And we were talking about earlier here in the studio about what happened in 1990 when the wall fell and things were getting divided up and NATO was being checked by Russia, which all that places seeds on where we are now. So for the people that don’t know, can you give us a brief history of that? Because I think it’s very relevant to what’s happening right now.

1:13:47 Sure. And often gets ignored in the media. Yeah, it’s, yeah, ignored is the right word. Well, long story short, if I can make it short, Berlin Wall Falls, November 9, 10, 1989, incredible relief from the East Germans and from the rest of Eastern Europe, which was also falling apart from the Soviet point of view, from the communist point of view. And so the question arises, what’s going to happen?

1:14:20 We know what happens traditionally. We know what happened in 1956 when the Ukrainians were feeling their, not the Ukrainians, when the Hungarians were feeling their oats, and the Soviet tanks came in. We know what happened in 1968 when the Soviet tanks came into Prague. Weren’t you very close to there? Yeah, actually, I was right on the border.

1:14:39 I was on vacation there in Austria. When that happened. Yeah. Went right back. Was that very tense?

1:14:45 Was that very sad? Oh, it was sad. We knew they were going to come across the German border, but just listen to those radios going silent. Because the free radios were signing off, which it would be for 20 years or… Yeah, right.

1:15:02 20 years. That’s how long it took for Smetnod playing there. And the Czech Republic was the most progressive of the entities behind the army. Yeah, there was something called the Prague Spring, which, Dubcek, not the Soviet, the Communist Party chief in Czechoslovakia introduced what got a bunch off introduced later, but it was before the first time. Yeah.

1:15:24 And everybody was all euphoric about the Russians not being able to do anything about it. Those of us who knew Russian history knew that they wouldn’t be getting away with it. Their checks wouldn’t and it was very brutal, very sad. RFA radio for Europe where I was acting as a sort of liaison person at that time was just distraught. You know, they were broadcasting, and of course, they were monitoring the radios there as they went silent.

1:15:48 So, that’s what we wanted to prevent. Here, the Berlin Wall falls, and now, it wasn’t sort of an idle fear. If you look at East Germany, the Russians had 24 divisions, okay? 24 mechanized divisions in East Germany. What’s the size of that hardware, just for people that aren’t military?

1:16:08 Well, that amounts to about 250,000 soldiers. That’s a lot, okay. Okay? So, what does George H.W. Bush do?

1:16:16 He calls up Michael Garabachoff, you know, and he says, Michael, sorry for your trouble there. There may be opportunities here, but I’m not gonna dance on the Berlin Wall. I’m not gonna take advantage of your problems here. And Garabachoff says, well, okay, we’re trying to figure out what to do. And Bush says, well, why didn’t you meet me in three weeks?

1:16:38 Can you meet me in three weeks? Gotta talk this tat-hat-tat. We ought to talk about this person to person. Let’s meet in Malta. Let’s meet in Malta early December.

1:16:50 So three weeks later, they met at a summit in Malta. And how do I know it transpired there? Because Jack Matlock, who was our ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, was there. He recorded all this stuff. And what Bush said was, look, we’re not going to take advantage of you if you permit a reunited Germany, okay?

1:17:14 Now, good. If you know anything about- Which wasn’t obvious they were gonna permit that at the time. No. Because they had those divisions there. Yeah, well they had the divisions there, but the whole history of this thing.

1:17:25 I mean, you don’t have to be a historian to realize what happened in World War II. Right, why would they want a united Germany, of course? Yeah, I mean the Russians lost 25 million, million. I think even Americans don’t even know that figure or can conceive of that figure. So it was the Russians that won World War II.

1:17:42 With the Russian losses in World War II greater than the losses of all. Everybody all put together. Yeah, in all 25 million. Now, we gave them a lot of help. We gave them material and all, but they blunted the Nazi offensive in the Ukraine, back in Stalingrad, Volgograd now.

1:17:57 And so, anyhow, we came in a little bit late. Of course, what we did was good, but the Russians justifiably claimed to have suffered the most and to have turned the tide. So, here’s kind of a chuff, here’s Schubert Nadze, the very enlightened foreign minister, and they’re saying, I reunited Germany, and when I say that, just now, a little hair has to go up in the back of my neck, because I didn’t want to reunite Germany. I lived in Germany for five years. Some of my best friends are Germans, according to phrase, but it scared the hell out of me.

1:18:28 So they’ve been asked now to swallow this pill. So what does Bush say? Now look, we’re not gonna take it. Let me send my secretary of state, James Baker, over, let’s get him there two months. Can you be ready in two months?

1:18:41 Yeah, we can, so it’s got to be tough. Baker arrives the first week of February, 1990 now, okay? Jack Matlock, our ambassador, still there, takes part in all these discussions. So what does Baker say? He says, well now, we know that it’s a bitter pill for you to swallow, but let me tell you what we envisage here.

1:19:04 We’re gonna cooperate East Germany into a reunited Germany, but we’re gonna keep it in NATO, okay? That means they’re not gonna develop their own nuclear weapons, for sure. We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen, okay? And to sweeten the pot here, you can be sure that we’re not gonna move NATO one inch farther east than Germany, okay? You can take that to the bank, okay?

1:19:30 So, Garbachev says, and Matlock has told me this, personally. He says, well, okay, I need to talk to my people. Let’s get together tomorrow. Again, this is early February 1990. And so what happens is… Oh, well, Matlock permits himself a little bit of glory here. He says to Baker, I think they’re gonna accept. With But with that promise, I think they’ll accept.

1:20:02 And sure enough, God of itself comes back the next day and says, all right, it’s a deal, okay. Now, the quid, reunited Germany, the quo, not moving NATO, one inch, as Baker put it. Later, the Mekong said leapfrog over, we’re not gonna leapfrog over, east, over Germany. And would pull, the Russians would pull those mechanized divisions out of East Germany, which they did. Right.

1:20:28 So what happens? Well, it looks like there’s a major chance for peace in Europe. I mean, I have to tell you that after the Berlin Wall fell, and I could see George H.W. Bush adopting this enlightened attitude. You’re a fan of him in his measured approach.

1:20:48 Well, I know a little bit more about him now than I did, but I am a friend of his, although what I know now about his role in the Iran-Contra and other things, it’s really, really hard to digest. But anyhow, we had this close relationship and when I watched him even in retirement act in the sensible way and say as he did in Mainz, Germany six months before the Berlin Wall fell, we need, we have the opportunity for Europe that is whole and free, whole and free from Portugal to the Ural Mountains, okay? Now that sounded, you know, sort of like Pollyanna at the time, but the Pearl One falls, he acts sensibly, and there was a chance, there was an authentic chance for that kind of Europe.

1:21:39 Now what happened? We reneged on that promise. Before you know it, we had 12 new NATO members, 12, count them, 12, there were only 12 to begin with, all right, 12 new NATO members to the east of East Germany. why? Because we could. Aren’t we allowed to change our foreign policy when it when it suits us?

1:22:00 Well, a promise is a promise. Is it? Well, it should be, you know, I mean, this is this is not little promises. This is big stuff. Okay, reunited Germany and a pledge. Now, the problem was that Jack Matlock says, you know, in my first book about all this, I never dealt with the prospect that NATO would move to the east, because why? Why? And the second book, of course, I dealt with it, but it was possible in those days to say the Warsaw Pact has dissolved.

1:22:35 NATO, what do you need NATO for? You don’t have a bugaboo. The Soviet Union has imploded. There is no more Soviet Union, but the interests that existed at the time, not only the emigres in our country that were deemed necessary to be the part of the voting block for Bill Clinton when he came in, but also the grandiose plans of people like Madeleine Albright that Clinton appointed to be Secretary of State. We are the sole indispensable country in the world, and we have this kind of divine right to make sure that other countries, be they in Eastern Europe or even Russia, they kind of adopt our liberal mechanisms in our corporate, you know, in our free enterprise, all this corporate stuff.

1:23:25 So it’s a combination of that plus simple money because the people who make the arms and the people who sell the arms can’t make a real, real killing if there’s no enemy. And so long story short, whereas George H.W. Bush was willing and invited Russia into this Europe hole and free, Clinton and the rest of them said, no, no, that’s not good for business, that’s not good for the arms trade, it’s not good for, you know, if they come in, they come in as liberal democracies in our model, okay?

1:24:03 Crazy stuff. So if I feel strongly about this, because it is the, probably I would describe it as is the largest, saddest disappointment that I had in watching all this stuff very closely, a prospect, an authentic prospect for peace, blown by all this avarice, by all this close thinking that now, now, now, we can’t have the Russians in here. We have to keep excluding them. Okay. Will there not always be tension on borders?

1:24:33 I mean, will not always the Russians be looking for more or us be looking for more? Will there not always be that? I mean, is there really an eternal peace? And I’m just asking this objectively, or will there always be people with interests that will be fighting? Will the Chinese always be fighting over the South China Sea?

1:24:48 And will Argentina and Brazil always be fighting over their border? Is this not just something that will happen? Well, that’s a good question. You know, there’ll always be tensions between countries, but there was a modus vermendi between the Soviet Union and us, and then, you know, under Kennedy and Khrushchev, The Soviets didn’t do anything about Vietnam or anything like that They were arms controls agreements and then when the Berlin Wall fell there was a golden opportunity for peace Yeah, that sounds crazy, but there was so yeah, there it was and it was fruited away. It was kind of Squandered really sorry by this NATO expansion by us. Yeah, and Relative peace for 20 years, but it was constantly encroaching. Yeah, and of course the Russians One necessary aspect to mention is that they were on their backs economically and they had no real military, but now they’ve built back.

1:25:42 So you need to fast forward now from the Berlin Wall to 2008. Now we had already expanded with 12 new members of NATO. Now the Ukraine was next in line and Georgia out there in the Central Asia. Were they actually going to be part of NATO or were they just being talked about as being part of NATO, was posturing from America? That’s my question.

1:26:04 Yeah. Were they ever really going to be part of NATO? Well, the answer to that is, if we had our druthers, yes. And the proof of that is what happened. We know this from WikiLeaks.

1:26:14 This is kind of interesting. On the 1st of February, the Soviet, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was the same guy now, okay. He called our ambassador in, and he said, look, there’s a lot of rumors about you guys want to embrace Ukraine and to NATO yet you understand yet yet means yet if that happens is gonna be civil war in the Ukraine we’re gonna face the difficult decision is whether we have to intervene this is our backyard is strategically significant to us it isn’t for you and so yes so he actually threatened civil war at that time we applied no it didn’t apply it he said this is what likely will happen if you okay so so what happens well ambassador burns who now is deputy secretary of state he he puts this title on his cable that we have courtesy of WikiLeaks and he says yet means in yet a lavro warning about embracing Ukraine in NATO okay pure as simple reported its rate okay that’s the first of February Now, there’s a NATO summit, just this, you know, there is twice a year, the last one is in Wales, and they get to get…

1:27:35 Which you’re going to this week, right? Yeah, right. So they’re going to Bucharest in Romania now, okay, and they all meet there, and what do they do? They decide in their final declaration, and I’ll quote, Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO, period. So, you know, the warning was made, it was duly reported, but we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff.

1:28:02 We’re the sold indispensable, you know, the Russians, they lost the Cold War and they’re going to pay the price, you know. Why? Well, just because we can. So what happened after that, of course, was there a whole, well, the first thing that happened is this guy, Sakashvili, the guy in charge of Georgia, decides, well, he give the Russians a bloody nose, because now, you know, I’m going to be a NATO partner. Do we know who started that conflict?

1:28:27 Yeah. It was Sakashvili, egged on by the neocons who thought that, you know, maybe the Russians could be given a bloody nose. Well, they should have known better. He should have known better. It was never reported.

1:28:38 I didn’t know if everyone ever knew who fired the first shot over that border. He did. Okay. Yeah, he did. All right.

1:28:45 So the Russians go in, in August of 2008, and they, obviously, NATO has no help. the US comes to know they can’t, it’s on their backyard. So that happened in Georgia. Now, in the Ukraine, there’s a whole section of corrupt governments and some of them said that NATO is off the table. Most of them said it’s not really a live issue until, and this is the proximate cause, until the European Union and the US, in their wisdom, went to Yarnukovich, the president of the Ukraine up until February 22nd and said, look, we want you to be part of the West here.

1:29:22 We’ve already invested $5 billion in helping your Western aspirations. This is money under the table. And so we want you to become kind of part of the EU system. And he said, well, let me look at it. Of course, the IMF will require all kinds of austerity measures and all that in the fine print.

1:29:45 So the Russians learned of this, And they are from a better deal, $17 billion right off the bat. So this goes with the Russians. Well, this causes all kinds of artificially stoked dissidents and riots on the square in Kiev. On the February 21st, the foreign ministers of Poland, France, Russia, and Ukraine got together. And they said, look, we’ve got to do something about this.

1:30:10 Yanukovych, you’re out of here. I mean, nobody likes you. but we’ll have early elections by the end of the year. So let’s do it that way. Let’s agree to disagree and go to elections.

1:30:25 That was the 21st of February. Nobody knows that, but that’s on the public record. That’s what happened. 22nd, what happens? All of a sudden, the people in the square start getting shot.

1:30:36 Not only the police, but the demonstrators. And the bullets are from the same weapons. We don’t know exactly who fired the bullets, but they were provocateurs for sure. And the commotion was such that the dissidents rated the government offices, Yanukovych had to leave, and they took power, and they put into four key ministerial posts proto-fascists. I say that advisedly because the UN has actually said Some of these guys were proto-fascists.

1:31:15 Who fired these bullets? Most people think that it was the people who wanted to stir up the insurrection, the coup, which happened that day and, well, the next day. So who’s that, George Soros, the American CIA? I don’t know if it’s George Soros, but, you know, one way we know it might do in the past, I mean, that is there. You know, who was responsible?

1:31:41 It really, I don’t know, but what happened, happened. And that’s, you know, we have an intercepted conversation between the Estonian foreign minister and Catherine Ashton, who up until now has been the sort of foreign minister of the EU, okay, European Union. And the Estonian foreign minister is saying, did you know that the people being taken into these hospitals in Kiev, that they bear the same bullets, they bear the same wounds on both sides. It’s clear that the snipers were shooting both sides.

1:32:18 Did you know that? And Eshin says, oh no, well that’s interesting. I’ll have to look into it. Well, she never looked into it. So I don’t know who did it, but that was the coup d’etat.

1:32:30 Now the first thing they say, we’re gonna ban Russian. One thing I noticed about those protesters in Kiev Square, and this is just an aside, I have no background in the CIA, but they had Bitcoin addresses on their shields in the square. And I thought to myself, what a fascinating way for any party to fund this protest here. You wouldn’t have to say transfer a black bag to some guy in Langley to get him to fly out to somewhere to put it under the thing. You could just transfer Bitcoins to support him.

1:32:57 And then I was thinking, wow, even Putin could do that or anyone could do that to do whatever. And I thought, what an amazing way to foment a digital revolution. Anyways, I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that. We use the latest technology. Right, and it’s untraceable, technically.

1:33:11 It could be coming from either side, any provocateur. I haven’t heard the thoughts about the sniper bullets from the same time. Mind you, it’s not only the CIA, it’s people in Poland. The bit more of the Ukrainians to begin with, the people who helped the Nazis during World War II. Or any interested party, not to mention Mr. Soros’ name again, or any provocateur for any reason.

1:33:33 But the point is that that’s what happened, and one of the first things these new people who came into Kyiv said was, we’re going to ban Russian as an official language throughout the Ukraine. Well, that law never got completely passed, but… And half of the Ukraine has Russian passports, is that roughly true? Yeah, almost. Well, I think 30, 40 percent is the last time, I think, at least they speak Russian language first and foremost.

1:33:58 So you can imagine you’re out in the eastern and southeastern Ukraine, you’re looking at this and you say, well, what kind of group is this? And then you know that it’s the right sector, it’s sloboda. These are the rightest parties that are really proto-Nazi, proto-fascist parties, you know? And there’s a certain history to fascism in Ukraine, especially the ones that cooperated with the Nazis. So you get real fears in the East and the Southeast, and they’re saying, well, you know, how should we react to this?

1:34:27 And then you see what the Ukrainian government is going to try to do. And so there’s a revolt in the east of Russian-speaking people. Now, they’re described as pro-Russian separatists. They don’t want to be part of Russia. Russia doesn’t want them to be part of Russia.

1:34:45 They’re anti-Khu Federalists. What they would like is a little autonomy so that they can have their own budget and they run their own affairs out and sort of like the Federation, sort of like the United States or other… But the Peninsula of Crimea did want to be part of Russia. Yeah. Well, that was, you know, see, that was what when the Russians were looking at this to say, my God, you know, there’s no telling what’s going to happen now.

1:35:13 And Putin has actually said this explicitly. He said that we decided our decision to accept the results of the plebiscite, the referendum in Crimea, was largely a factor of our fear of having a NATO base in Sevastopol in Crimea, where NATO base where now we have our own warm water port, the only warm water port we have in Russia. But that wasn’t going to be a NATO base any time soon, was it? I mean, he’s playing politics too, isn’t he, Mr. Putin?

1:35:49 Putin, I mean, everyone’s playing politics here a little bit. Well, I mean, that was a strategic acquisition for that. Yeah, you can, you know, you can say, well, you know, come on, Putin, you know, these are exaggerated fears, but that’s not the way it works, you know? You have- They did annex the peninsula effectively. Yeah, what happened was these little green men who were already there, They had 20,000 troops there already under an agreement, okay?

1:36:18 Okay. But they had some new green men with some great new high-tech weapons that kind of came in. Well, yeah. But to speak of a Russian invasion, the plebiscite happened before any Russian invasion. They say, oh, Putin now admits that he sent troops in there.

1:36:33 Yeah. After the plebiscite, he didn’t have to fix the referendum. Those people wanted to be part of Russia. I have no problem with it. They want to do it.

1:36:41 They can do it. That’s fine. have a problem with this kind of thing, but you can understand these kinds of things. When your national interests, when your strategic interests are at stake, you’re going to do this thing when you’re provoked. Explain the current status quo in Ukraine.

1:36:58 There’s so much media. There’s the Fox News and the likes in the States, with Putin without the shirt. There’s Russia Today, which has its own fascinating ideas of what’s happening over there. The world, you say separatist, I say nationalist. So what don’t we understand that’s really going on there and what’s your point of view?

1:37:21 Well I paid very close attention to what’s going on in the ground there, okay. How can you do that when every media source is tainted? Well because there are alternative media sources. the soccer vineyard, for example, an incredibly intelligent person who has got incredible sources there in southeast Ukraine, and nobody knows about except those people who are interested. He’s been reporting pretty objectively about what’s been happening there.

1:37:52 And there are some people on the ground, but not too many. Do you watch Vice? Do you watch Vice News reports? No, I don’t. Okay.

1:38:00 They’ve had some cameras on the ground. Yeah. And long story short, I’m convinced that the so-called separatists, let’s call them separatists, are better led, in some cases better armed, and are defending their homeland really. The Ukrainian troops are poorly led, not so accomplished or well trained in the use of these armaments that they have. And they’re being asked to kill their brothers.

1:38:35 Kill their brothers just because they speak Russian. And Ukrainians were not at loggerheads before all this happened. And it’s a lot to ask somebody to kill a brother or their cousin or somebody across the line, imaginary line. So what happened is this, in my view, about two weeks ago, just as all the media who was reporting from Kiev that all of these Iranian army, I think the Ukrainian army was doing a great job. They were mopping up in Donetsk and Lughansk and everywhere.

1:39:11 And it’s just a matter of time before they get this under control. Well, that was 180 degrees away from what was happening. The separatists were getting the upper hand. They had surrounded hundreds of Ukrainian troops. The Ukrainian troops were thoroughly demoralized.

1:39:27 A lot of them had defected. A lot of them had defected to Russia. And a lot of them were encircled. Now, this was not welcome news. How is the Western media going to explain this?

1:39:40 Guess how? The Russians. The Russians came in. The Russians are coming. There were Russian tanks coming across the border.

1:39:48 And what they served up to show this were these grainy photographs of Russian tanks, which were proof of nothing. I couldn’t believe that Rasmussen at NATO and the NATO military, I guess it was a Dutchman, the Dutch are pretty much in our corner there, would pretend that this was conclusive proof that the Russians are coming or that they came. And so it was all an attempt to explain why the Ukrainian troops were taking it on the chin. It couldn’t be that the separatists had gained the upper hand, but they did.

1:40:26 And then it happened about 10 days ago, and this whole business about the Russians coming in there. Where’s the meat? Where’s the evidence? Ungers-Foch-Rasmusian is not a reliable reporter. So it’s a propaganda war.

1:40:42 This is a proxy war of the America and Russia. Well, you don’t necessarily agree with that. But this feels like a country that’s being torn apart by interested parties that don’t necessarily live there. That’s right. Ukraine is crucial to Russia’s survival with Ukraine in the Western powers, you’re what?

1:40:57 In 100 miles to Moscow, it’s also, it’s crucial for that entire entity to survive. Several hundred. Several hundred, okay. It produces a lot of the agriculture. I mean, the Russians will support the independent Ukraine, right?

1:41:15 They will. Well, you know, the Russians have been very careful. Lately, the last reports are the Russian, Putin used the Russian word for statehood. This has to be talked about with respect to southeastern Ukraine. And people made a big thing of that, even though his press secretary immediately came out and said, he didn’t mean anything more than talking about the future or how they fit in with the Ukraine, OK?

1:41:41 So they made a big din about statehood. Oh, does he want to have a separate state? Well, he has already turned down the separatists. Twice they voted for having their own little mini-state there. And he said, no, no, that’s not what’s going to happen.

1:41:58 So they don’t want to incorporate the Ukraine. The Ukraine is just a basket case economically. They just as soon have the EC or the EU now take care of it. All they want is not to have NATO on their borders. And when you talk about Sevastopol, the native base, that’s a strategic concern.

1:42:19 Because A, NATO has said that they want to embrace Ukraine into NATO, right? So you get a naval base there in Sevastopol, and you put US defensive missile systems in there. Then what you have is a change in the whole strategic equation, because Soviet Russian ICBM sites come under, they become vulnerable to a first strike attack. Now, what does that mean? That means that the U.S. might get the idea that they could strike on all these strategic bases and escape with impunity.

1:42:58 That is a destabilizing factor that has not existed since the early 70s when we signed those treaties that I mentioned before. And Putin has said, look, it was this kind of fear that led me to accept the plebiscite, the referendum in Crimea. Sure, we’re welcome to back in. So he didn’t want US or NATO troops having a base there in Sevastopol. He wanted it to be the way it is now.

1:43:26 The more so, since these defensive missile systems, so-called, are now gonna be placed on ships, not so much in Poland or Czechoslovakia, but on ships. And that, you know, that means launch on warning, okay? People need to know what that means. Okay, once, it’s a matter of perception. Deterrence is a matter of perception.

1:43:49 If the Russians believe that our military thinks that they can take out all their offensive weapon systems, or most of them, in a first strike and survive before the Russians can retaliate, what will they do? they will launch on warning. What that means is, as soon as they get some evidence, no matter how tenuous it might be, they don’t have any time to decide. They already take out those submarine bases in Scotland as a kind of a demonstration, right? Okay, they’re not gonna hit the US right away.

1:44:24 They’ll say, this is what I’m gonna do if you don’t stop, you know? So that’s a terribly, I mean, this is. Are we getting closer, is this Ukrainian situation going to get us closer to nuclear war? That is why it’s important. The answer to that, I hope, is no.

1:44:42 I place most store in the fact that there are some sensible people around. First and foremost, Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov have played a pretty statesmanlike role in all this. They’ve not brandished their weapons, they’ve not made any threats. They have appealed very much for a ceasefire, which they’d really like to see, and so have some of the Western people, Merkel, for example, and Hordan in France. Now, with respect to the U.S., if Obama is really in control, that’s a good thing.

1:45:24 Because even this one day when the NATO and other, even the State Department were crowing about these photos, the Russian invasion, the Russian invasion, he had a press conference. And they said, what about it? And he said, well, I don’t see this as anything new. I see this as kind of a natural progression over the last several weeks. So he was deliberately tamping down the rhetoric of Samantha Power at the UN and other key officials.

1:45:53 So I think he knows, basically, that he doesn’t have to rattle swords. He doesn’t have to risk this kind of thing. What will be interesting is what happens in Wales at the NATO summit, whether people like Angela Merkel will speak some sense. We VIPs wrote her a memorandum. Right.

1:46:14 You wrote an open email today to Angola, which has been translated in German. That’s right. Yeah. It’s really gotten some resonance and not in the United States, but over here. So she will know that at least 10 former senior officials of the CIA and other intelligence agencies consider that she should be, you know, faucished.

1:46:35 She should be very careful about accepting intelligence. And we probably shouldn’t have said this because we’re not diplomats, but we did point out that her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, as chancellor, would not buy the phony intelligence on Iraq. And he would not let Germany, it was the same with France, they didn’t join the Coalition of the Willing. They became known as old Europe, you know, old standoff people, but that, you know, that was big. That was a big deal.

1:47:07 That was the first time Germany stood up to the United States since World War II. What needs to happen now is Merkel has to adopt that kind of attitude. We know what happened on Iraq. She knows what happened on Iraq. This time she needs to say, okay, I was wrong.

1:47:21 I supported that attack on Iraq. I’ve learned from that, and I’m not supporting this. In other words, the German chancellor needs to grow up and act like an adult. Okay, point made. Where can people read that email?

1:47:33 Is that on your website, the VIPS website? It’s on my website, raymcgovern.com. It’s also on consortiumnews.com and uppetnews.com, and we’ve made sure that it’s gotten to the chancellor in Berlin as well. And you’ll be in Wales for this meeting? No, actually, I decided that I go to Berlin instead, because Wales is just gonna be a whole bunch of demonstrations and so forth.

1:47:57 I wouldn’t get near the summit, but in Berlin, I’m gonna be speaking at Unter den Linden, right near the Brandenburg-Gator, and I hope that maybe I can expose German citizens to a little bit more truth than they’re seeing in the media. I always watch Merkel. I’m always fascinated with the Germans because they do a lot of business with the Russians. They require the natural gas of the Russians, You know, they’re in the more Eastern side of Europe, and it’s always fascinating to watch how they take a measured stance when you have the US shouting things over here, and then Merkel, she seems very intelligent, and so I hope she reads your email.

1:48:34 I gotta ask you a couple things before we finish up, because people will kill me if I don’t. You know, you made a famous confrontation with Donald Rumsfeld in that public forum about the WMD. What made you do that? Were you surprised by his reaction at all, and what was that all about? Well, I was down in Atlanta to get an award from the American Civil Liberties Union.

1:48:59 It was a very nice award. Coretta Scott King had won it the previous year, and I was really honored. And then I found out that Donald Rumsall was gonna be there in the afternoon that I got the award in the evening. What year was this, Robert? This was 2006, May 4th, I think.

1:49:15 Okay. So I tried to get myself a ticket to see Rumps. I couldn’t buy a ticket on this. The think tank that was running this was an extremely male, white, wealthy, defense-favoring, elderly think tank, OK? Very receptive to defense ministers or secretaries of defense.

1:49:43 And on their website, they didn’t show you how you could get a ticket to this. It was just a bit of an invitation only, but some very clever women in Code Pink and the world can’t wait. They said, we can get your ticket ready if you want. So we got a ticket. I got there an hour early and I saw that there were microphones on both aisles and so I sat as close as I could to the microphone and started preparing my own speech for that evening.

1:50:09 And luckily I was preparing remarks that related directly to what Rumsfeld ended up saying. So, before we started speaking, there were some demonstrators with these great big placards, you know, and one lady had to, you know, Rumsfeld, war criminal, you know, so they were really kind of shoot out by the crowd, much less the police, you know, so it was pretty tense. And Rumsfeld gets up there and he says, you know, I have to tell you that the respect and the trust of the people are necessary for the orderly progression of government.

1:50:46 And for people to say, the president’s a war criminal, I’m a jester, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, those baddest to say, they say, Rumpfels, a war criminal, you know? But he knew that the cameras were trained on him and he couldn’t see, well, anyhow, so I’m saying, wow, you know, trust. So he makes this little speech and so I said, well, you know, I, I should ask him some questions and quote him back to himself. And then I had this little debate with myself.

1:51:15 I was two people away from the, the first designated speaker was there even before I arrived, so he was gonna ask the first question, but I said, I’m saying, Ray, you know, you really got him, you could really, and I don’t know, look at this hostile audience, and then, you know, and then I said to myself, you know, what would Cindy Sheehan, what would Medea Benjamin, what would Anne Wright do? You know, would they be having this debate with them? No, they’d be up at that microphone without hesitation.

1:51:46 What kind of a wusser are you, McGovern? I get up there, second in line, and then I quoted him back to himself. I said, you know. And people didn’t know who you were there. They weren’t like, okay, here comes XCAA, Ray McGovern.

1:51:56 No, but you know, I identified myself right off the bat. I said, I’m Ray McGovern, a veteran intelligence professional for sanity, and you can see, excuse me, and I quoted him back to him about the trust of government. But then I asked him about the weapons of mass destruction and his claims that there were operational ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Those were the two reasons that you used to justify the war. And at one point he says, well, there apparently weren’t any weapons of mass destruction.

1:52:27 So I interrupted him. I said, well, you said you knew where they were. I did not. I said, we think they were suspected. I said, no, no, no, you said you knew they were.

1:52:37 You said they were near Tikrit and Baghdad and east, north, south, and west. Those are your words, okay? Now, the beauty of this whole thing was this was one o’clock in the afternoon. It’s in Atlanta, you know, with CNN and everything. It’s C-SPANs running it, and nothing else in the whole world happens that day.

1:52:55 Perfect. So, I’m on all the TV things, you know, that evening. But the good questions, Paul is on, comes on. She says, how long have you had this animus toward the Secretary of Defense? Why did you follow him down from Washington?

1:53:11 There we go. So you were on the news that night to talk about that question. Yeah, yeah. And of course, old women did a really good job because they had time to fact check. And of course, Rumsfeld said exactly what I said he said.

1:53:23 And he denied it. And the same thing with operational ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Rumsfeld had said there was bulletproof evidence of that. He denied it, and of course the involvement says that’s what he said actually in Atlanta just two years before. So because the pressure got on the back of that, that was a win for you because it didn’t expose something or show something.

1:53:44 Well, it was just, you know, it was a chance to show that the guy is a liar, you know? And Americans didn’t have a chance to do that very much, they don’t even see that. And it was also a chance for me to have first-hand experience of what the media is like, okay? Now one little vignette, I’m coming out of the thing and I’m sort of shell-shocked, you know, it was pretty emotional sort of thing. And then I see all these black-clad SWAT team, which weren’t there when I arrived that hour before.

1:54:18 And, you know, it might have given me equal pause there that, anyhow, I’m going out, phone rings. Mr. McGovern? Yeah, there’s Anderson Cooper here. Oh, hi, Anderson.

1:54:30 Well, you’re causing quite a stir down here in Atlanta. That’s not what Anderson sounds like. The rest of your impressions are very good. OK. Go ahead.

1:54:37 Well, let me do my best. You’re causing quite a stir down here in Atlanta. And I’d like to have you on my show. But I want to ask you first a question.

1:54:50 Weren’t you afraid? No. As I said, it was kind of shell-shocked. I said, well, that’s a normal question. And I said, well, no, Anderson.

1:54:59 You know, I briefed Secretary’s defense before, and I thought, wait a second, wait a second. That’s Andrew Cooper, he’s the heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, he’s a pretty guy on CNN. He’s not gonna be out with his hat on a sidewalk. And so I said, Anderson, let me really candid with you. It was a real high, you know?

1:55:24 I did my homework, I asked him a question that I knew would be very difficult for him to answer because he had lied the first time. Let me just suggest to you, you might want to try to do that sometime. I tell you, it’s a real high, ask him a real question and you’ll see what it, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, from my point, I’ll have my people get in touch with yours. I said, here’s that, I don’t have any people. Just give me a call back.

1:55:46 So I was on with him, I was on CNN, with Wolf Blitzer and all these people, but most of them were out from my head, you know, why this animist? I mean, of course. That was the topic, wasn’t the lie. was why are you so… Yeah, why am I so, you know, and I asked him, the whole thing is a pretty decent, I did interrupt him a couple times, especially when he did non-sequiturs, but it was very respectful and it was for a matter of fact. So they had to conjure up something and they did a job on it. John Stewart did an incredible thing three days later and my kids watched John Stewart and so they said, yeah, he’s got you on there and he’s doing a number on the treatment you were were subjected to by the mainstream media.

1:56:29 So you learned a bit about media then. Yeah, firsthand. Had you given back your intelligence commendation medal at that time? No, what happened was when Porter Goss became the president, after the president, the head of the CIA after George Tenet left in ignominy, And he let himself be persuaded by Dick Cheney to go down to John McCain’s office, overtly, press was right there, and argue for an exception for the CIA from legislation preventing or prohibiting torture.

1:57:13 It was overt. It was very clear McCain wanted everybody included in this legislation, not only the Army, Navy, Air Force, but the CIA. And here we have Cheney and the head of the CIA going down there and saying, no, no, no, we have to be able to do this. And of course I knew it would have been going on up until that time. And so I said, no, that’s too much.

1:57:35 So this is really- This was 2006 where he went to do this. Yes, it was a really nice medallion, sort of like this. And so I took it into the The House Intelligence Committee gave it back to Hoekstra, who was the chairman at that time. Sort of a footnote to that. Two months later, he inserted into the Defense Authorization Bill a provision which would allow the head of intelligence to revoke the pension of anybody who was considered to be, you know, talking about classified information or doing.

1:58:10 So luckily, there was a continuing resolution that year, so the legislation never got changed. But that’s how vindictive these guys are. Wow. This is Peter Hoekstra from Michigan. He was the head of the House Intelligence Committee.

1:58:23 Is that just potentially teaching a lesson to any future CIA members? You got it. So you still have your pension right now. I do, thank God. Yeah.

1:58:30 Okay. Was that hard to give that medal up? I mean, was it? It was, yeah. It was more than just a token for me.

1:58:36 I mean, this was, as I put it in this little note, I mean, I felt that I needed to dissociate myself from this place where I had been nurtured, where I had actually learned a lot, where I had contributed, because I didn’t want myself to be associated, however remotely, in retirement, with an agency openly identified with torture. I wanted to be able to say, when my grandchildren get old enough and they say, Grandpa, so you work for the CIA, Well, what’s it like to torture people? I wanted people to say, look, I did what I could, symbolic though it may be, to dissociate myself from that.

1:59:17 And I’ve tried to expose these kinds of things. And I’m very remorseful that our president is elected not to hold anybody accountable and is still playing the role of this little duet with John Brennan, the head of the CIA, who he’s given power to redact that Senate Intelligence Committee memorandum which gives chapter and verse about how the torture was done, who did it, and the fact which most Americans don’t know is that Zippo, Zero, Nada, Nietzsche, nothing has ever come out of torture that was helpful. And we knew that, and this is a little vignette that probably should be told, the head of Army Intelligence.

2:00:05 Of Lieutenant General. When he learned that George Bush and Dick Cheney were gonna appear on the White House lawn, this is September 6th, 2006, and they were gonna brag about these enhanced interrogation techniques, about how fruitful they were. A fellow named John Kimmons, Lieutenant General, US Army, head of Army Intelligence, made his whole career on interrogation techniques, okay? He get up and he said, and I quote, no good intelligence has ever come from harsh interrogation techniques.

2:00:41 History shows that, and the experience of the last five years, hard years, also demonstrates that period, end quote, five years, 2006 minus five, 2001 is when it started, with John Walker Lind, an American citizen. So Kimmons laid it all down, told the press two hours before Bush told the press across the river that these things are wonderful, they really work. The last thing I’ll say about that is, did you know the derivation of enhanced interrogation techniques?

2:01:17 No. It’s a direct translation of Velschafta fernemung, right out of the Gestapo manual. I have the manual. Guess what? Not only is the title the same, the Schaffte-Fenemung enhanced interrogation techniques, the techniques are the same.

2:01:39 Now there are a few enhancements that were U.S. added after World War II, but the techniques are the same. Now, most people don’t know that, but I know it because I grew up right after the war and I knew about the Gestapo. And so you have the Gestapo experience And the Germans should be aware of that. You have the Stasi experience in East Germany, but even the Stasi weren’t doing enhanced interrogation techniques anymore.

2:02:07 We did, to our shame. But the CIA was being directed by the White House, but they still should take some of the, some of the blame for that. Well, you know, Nuremberg was very clear on, you know, it’s not a defense to say, I was only following orders, right? I was following orders. Now, what happened was right after 9-11, And then we know this because Richard Clark wrote a book about it.

2:02:29 The evening of 9-11, George Bush met for the first time in the bunker in the White House with Cheney, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, Rumsfeld, head of defense, and Richard Clark. There may have been others there, I don’t know. How do I know that? As I say, Richard Clark wrote about it. And what happened was when people started talking about it now, we can go against Iraq, you know.

2:02:52 And somebody said, well, yeah, it’s a little tricky because Iraq, international law doesn’t allow you to go against a country that wasn’t guilty of this. And Bush said famously, I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we’re gonna kick some ass, okay? Quote unquote. Now that’s from Clark. So what happens?

2:03:17 Bush is gonna go into Afghanistan. He calls George Tenet, has a CIA, and he says, you got some guys that can, you know, we capture these guys and we can find out, I guess some guys can do that stuff. And if Tenet were, I’m sure he replied, no we don’t. We didn’t have any, like the closest thing we came to were lie detector operators or security people that gave you, you know, when you departed the agency, warned her about not divulging classified information.

2:03:45 So I don’t, we don’t, but we can get some. And of course, you had the whole alumni from Vietnam. You had the people that could contract with people who could do these things. And you had those weird Mormon scientists out there that thought you could do other techniques. So what happened was we started to kick some ass in George.

2:04:04 And the first person was John Walker Lind. And I think you’ve had Jess Lynn Radick on here. So we know that story. But so that’s the way the torture was implemented. It never was, and of course, 24, that TV program gave a false sense of the success you could have with torture techniques.

2:04:27 They never worked. The only time, you know, people will say to me, well, Ray, hello, if they didn’t work, what are we doing? And the answer is simple. As General Kimman says, you can’t get reliable information from enhanced interrogation techniques, But you know what? If you want unreliable information, you can get that.

2:04:48 They work like a charm. If you want, for example, to get somebody to say that Saddam Hussein was training Al Qaeda operatives in chemical weapons or explosives, you can get somebody to say that. And that’s precisely what they did. Fellow named Al Libby. Point made on that.

2:05:08 Did you watch the unknown known Rumsfeld’s documentary, made by the same guy that made Fog of War with McNamara. You know, I didn’t have the stomach to read though, to watch the whole thing. I’ve seen excerpts of it. You know, the man is, I mean, I don’t think anyone is demonic, but people do do demonic things and people can become so totally corrupted, corrupted you know like Lord Acton said you know power corrupts and total power corrupts absolutely the fellow is a menace and the fact that he’s still able to get interviews and still you know be able to push his book it’s I suppose part of our first amendment rights but it just pains me to see somebody like that not held to account, because he was the fellow that was diddling everyone, including George Tenet.

2:06:11 When I challenged Trump’s fellow, he says, well, I don’t have anything to do with intelligence. No, he just controls 95% of the intelligence budget, but he blamed it all on Tenet and on Powell and that kind of thing. Yeah, I got the impression from that film, which I liked and didn’t like. I didn’t realize how prolific he was at writing these memos, and I didn’t realize that was all going on. Snowflakes.

2:06:35 Snowflakes. Yeah. Which it’s like you said, it’s fascinating to get into someone’s mind like that. And it can be almost for them, a self-fulfilling prophecy of them being right. And you get into that feedback loop where you’re never wrong.

2:06:47 And then you’re at the top of these power structures where you have to make the hard decisions. And I could see how he went there, but you can also see how he was probably controlling everyone around him, including to some extent, Bush, maybe even Cheney. I mean, Bryce, you know, a lot of that. That’s an important point because not Bush and Cheney, okay? And the proof of that is that Rumsfeld went wobbly on the war.

2:07:11 Right, and he mentions that, doesn’t he? Yeah. Okay, yeah. And they had to get rid of him because he realized, all his field commanders were saying, look, for God’s sake, we got to retrench. The training is not going real well.

2:07:25 And the last thing we need is to put more troops in there because we’ll never get the The Iraq used to realize that they have to fix their own, put their own house in order, right, okay? So please, in September and October of that election year, that would have been, what, 2006, I guess, the generals came back and said, look, Senate Intelligence Committee people had said it from forces, look, whatever you do, please don’t give us any more troops. More troops, they’ll never learn, they have to do, okay.

2:08:01 It’s like, what happens? George Bush, Cheney go to their advisor, say, what happens if we don’t reinforce? And the answer is, you lose the war on your watch. How do we prevent that? Well, Rumsfeld’s no help anymore.

2:08:16 He’s gone wobbly on it. What we need to do is get a new secretary. Oh, we got a pretty guy named Petraeus. He’s got a real, he’s got 10 rows of men. He’s willing to go in there and prevent us from losing the war in 2008.

2:08:30 So yeah, that’s what we’ll do. So they get Bobby Gates come out of being president of Texas A&M, invited him to Crawford where the president of course had his home and said now, Bob, we need to replace Rumsfeldt. He’s gone wobbly in the war And we’re going to search Jack Keene, General Jack Keene, and others who figured we could put 30,000 more people in there, we could turn it around. What do you think? And Gates says, you mean I could become Secretary of Defense?

2:09:12 We said, yeah, that’s the deal. You go in there, you don’t have to really do much except go and make sure that General Every state is cashier. General Casey will give him a Cinecure, and Petraeus will do the rest. He’ll go out there, he’ll get the troops together, and we’ll prevent you from losing the war. He says, I know Gates, you work for me. He says, wow, okay, I’ll do that. And so the whole conventional wisdom. James Baker, the senior statesman, we referred to him before, the Iraq study group, the generals, everyone was saying this is a feckless exercise and the surge was put in there and what was the result of that? We lost a thousand more troops, we gave some time for Bush and Cheney to ride off into the western sunset, not having lost a war, and look what Iraq looks like now. So it was a, the worst kind of political reinforcement that I had seen up till then and of course Obama did the same thing with respect to Afghanistan. It’s all political and don’t they care about those young men and women out there? I guess they don’t. And how’s this going to play out right now with ISIS and going forward or is it really hard to say? Well what nobody mentions is this that the reason this the reason that there are so many jihadists needs to be addressed okay. Now during Iraq right before this reinforcement the interrogators were asking why all these foreign jihadists were coming in to Iraq and the answer nine out of ten gave was Abu Ghraib

2:10:57 And the other torture things and what was going on with the US defense of people like the Saudis and the you know the invasion of Iraq and so forth. So my point is simply this that if you don’t address the root causes of this then you know the only people profit are the people profiteering on the war because the war on terror will continue forever. Terrorists is an endless supply of terrorists okay. What you do when you want to defeat terrorism is the same thing you do when you want to eradicate malaria, right? Now malaria, you find the mosquitoes, right? Okay, and you trace them back to where they breed. Okay, that’s a big swamp, big swamp there. Okay, so you find the swamp, you seal the mosquitoes, and so you line up three platoons of sharpshooters, right? Try to hit all the mosquitoes as they leave the swamp, right? Wrong! What you do is you drain the swamp. That’s what has to happen. You have to drain the swamp of these legitimate grievances that these people have. Our support for people like the Saudis, dictators all around, our support for Maliki and all those folks, there’s got to be some sort of reasonable expectation that the U.S. will act in a reasonable way and take into account these grievances. That never gets addressed. When John Brennan was asked that as assistant to the president for anti-terrorism, he said, well, they just hate us. They’re hard-wired to hate us. And Helen Thomas says, yeah, but you know, let’s never say why. He said it’s

2:12:35 Just that they, well, they have this Islamic thing that they distort, but they hate us. And she said, yeah, still don’t tell us why. He said, well, it’s a long story. Well, they need to tell us why. And unless they tell us why and form their policy to take into account what really is driving these folks, it’s going to continue. I didn’t mention Israel, But that, of course, is one of the main bones of contention that these Muslims have.

2:13:03 And when General Petraeus, bless his heart, when he included in one of the briefings he gave to Congress a little paragraph which says, the inability to resolve the Palestinian Israeli conflict is feeding terrorism, that was going too far. I was judged on the borderline of anti-Semitic. And so he didn’t say it in his oral testimony. And still, people picked up on it. And what did he do?

2:13:33 He got in touch with Max Boot, one of the neocons, and said, uh-oh, I didn’t say it, but it’s out there. What can I do? And Max says, no, no, it’s OK. I already did an op-ed saying, Petraeus is not anti-Semitic. And we have this in an email exchange, which portray us inadvertently loose to a fellow on the West Coast.

2:13:54 He said, well, is there anything I should do? Like, you know, I’m gonna have lunch with Elie Wiesel next week and I just attended a Holocaust celebration. And he said, no, no, cool it, says Backspoot. Cool it, you’re right. You’re not anti-Semitic, we’ll let the whole thing down.

2:14:10 Now that was all occasioned by a simple comment that the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute endangers our troops and it does but you can’t say it gotcha and that’s a major issue oh it’s a major one okay a couple quick more questions yeah is is Edward Snowden a hero and what is that no he’s not a hero is no yeah you know when you say guys a hero you know sort of like Dorothy Day the Catholic worker head she said don’t call me a saint you know don’t pedestal eyes me you know call me a saint they said well she’s a saint I you know can’t aspire to do what she does similarly with heroes he’s not a hero he’s a patriot okay now what people don’t know although it’s been in Forbes magazine one of his co-workers in Hawaii I’ll say she’s a woman I don’t know so she said to Forbes the guy she said you know I don’t know whether what Edward Snowden did was right but I really resent all the characters assassination you should know that he had a copy of constitution on his desk and every now and then he whipped that thing out he’d say you know I’m really bothered I’ve asked my superiors but they don’t seem to be but how about you guys feel about the Fourth Amendment is it sort of extinct does it not apply it is what we’re doing consonant with the Fourth Amendment protections and would say and for God’s sake you’re making six figures you like it here in Hawaii forget about it forget about it so in that sense he’s a

2:15:44 Patriot because he wouldn’t forget about it. And he decided on the basis of what treatment had been accorded, Chelsea Manning and Tom Drake, that the only way for him to achieve his mission, that is to tell his fellow Americans what’s happened to the constitutional rights, is to get out of Dodge. Get out of Dodge in a direction where they can’t get you immediately, where there’s no extradition treaty, where you have some prospect of being able to do the deed, transfer whatever they were the you know the information to reliable reporters which he did and then you know this is something people don’t really advert to but there’s Ed Snowden here’s Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and you know they’re journalists they’re not social workers right they get the material they’re up there to write it all up and there’s Ed Snowden. So what happens? Julian Assange, to his great credit, gets one of his chief lieutenants, Sarah Harrison, she happens to be in Australia, he says, Sarah, get your rear end to Hong Kong right away, get this guy a ticket down to Cuba and wherever they give them asylum in Latin America.

2:17:02 And she does. She saves them. The press reports say they had some help from the Russian consular officials that helped him get on airflow to whatever airline it was and then you know the rest of the story his citizenship where his his you know his privilege to leave the country was denied they want him back and I’ll say one other thing here that people don’t really think about now Putin is is denounced for being a former intelligence KGB guy right okay right like you yeah former intelligence well fair enough, okay? But think about what that means. Here’s a former intelligence guy, right? Former KGB official. The last thing he wants is to be in the position of giving asylum to a guy who released the family jewels. It’s not violated the the letter of the law by taking all his highly sensitive information and making not available to the world.

2:18:09 And now, here’s Putin, faced with the decision, do I condone this by giving him asylum? And he decides, well, international law requires me to do that. And I don’t really like John Kerry coming up and saying, you must, you must. I know there’s no extradition treaty here, but you must give him back because blah, blah, blah, blah. I could see Putin sitting around with his advice and, who is this guy?

2:18:35 I must, I must. In any event, he did the right thing. But what I’m trying to point out is here, it was counterintuitive to him to appear to be rewarding somebody who had violated the main tenet of intelligence work and that is keep it secret. I see she’s a former intelligence guy. Okay, I see what you’re saying.

2:18:53 It was ultimately a political move for him and a fantastic one, you know, whether it was serendipitous or not. You are at the Ecuadorian Embassy tomorrow, I guess you’re gonna see Mr. Assange. How is Julian, how has this whole past year been for him, in your opinion, or even the last two years for him? It’s been awful. Can you imagine being caged up where you can’t even get any sunshine flop?

2:19:19 I mean, I admire what he’s been able to do, you know, in exile. I mean, WikiLeaks is still coming out with some really, really interesting stuff. He has a lot of support, and that’s why I go see him, just to show him that there’s a lot of people that highly respect what he’s done, and we’ll support him to the degree we can. But it’s been really hard, and, you know, when you see the Swedes and you see the British acting in such a kind of in an obsequious way, just because the U.S. says you have to act this way, violating or changing various laws to allow them to do the U.S. bidding.

2:20:07 Is that what my country has become? Is that the continuing leverage that they have over other older and more established democracies? Well, the answer is yes. That’s why it’s so sad. It saddens you that they can enforce that pressure that just changes things slightly, makes people behave or adhere to laws to the letter and let others go.

2:20:34 And I can see what happened in Sweden, you know, I think some of my former colleagues had something to do with getting those women to make those charges. I mean, the whole thing smells to high heaven. Really? They said they weren’t contacted. But is he going to have to go back?

2:20:49 Is this what’s going to happen? Or is it decisions he’s going to have to make? He’s been in that embassy for two years. Like you said, it’s no cakewalk there, it’s been holed up there, I’ve been by there. Yeah.

2:21:01 Well, right now, it looks hopeless, but things do change. Right now, he’s not in the brig like Chelsea Manning, he’s not in a minimum security prison like John Kiriakou, who I visited two months ago. He’s in prison, but he’s willing and able to function in a way that he wouldn’t be if he were in a real prison. So, it is possible to sort of suggest that there’s a, it could be worse for him. It’s ironic that Ed Snowden has more freedom.

2:21:41 It’s ironic that he has a freer life than Assange, and Assange, but what the fellow stands for, that is uncovering the kinds of secrets that normal citizens of the world really need to know. And with some discretion, he’s got a bad rap when people accuse him of indiscriminately releasing all this stuff. When Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was asked, you know, what about this incredible damage to our troops out there in Afghanistan and Iraq? And because he had made that claim, he came back to Senator Levin and he said, well, you know, those fears were significantly overwrought.

2:22:32 In other words, there wasn’t any damage. And even with Ed Snowden, he’s taken measures to make sure that he gave these very sensitive information to reputable, honest reporters who will check, and they have been checking with the government’s concern, is this to, probably most people don’t know that, but they check on this stuff, and they say, now we have this, should we name these people? Okay, you don’t want the names, and they do react to it itself, it’s just a, what’s the word, a responsible way to proceed, because they don’t have to do damage to these folks or to these governments even, they’re out to tell the truth.

2:23:13 And you know, we have an old expression that comes from the Bible, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Amen to that. Ray, we ask everyone that comes here a few questions at the end. I’m gonna hit you with these questions. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Ray McGovern and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him?

2:23:34 Where was he, by the way? 20 years old, I was in college, Fordham University in the Bronx. And you were in ROTC at the time, so you thought you might be going into the arming after that? Oh yeah, well I know that those days it was a requirement, you either got drafted or you studied to be an officer. You could escape it, but there was no, you know, I don’t regret having majored in Russian, I don’t regret having been in the ROTC, I think some military experience is something And it gives me a leg up when I look at all these people in Washington that never served.

2:24:11 And I was a little naive about what the CIA was really all about, but the part that I worked in was good duty, the part that I worked in right up till the very end. We told the truth almost always, and our advice was often ignored, but at least we were able to do that. And when I tell people that I had career protection to doing that. That’s true, but it’s really hard for them to believe because that’s not the way things usually work in Washington. Career protection means that you wouldn’t be, you wouldn’t be what, prosecuted after the fact under different rules for things that you did?

2:24:47 No, no, no, I mean, I mean career, like here I am telling these generals with four stars that you can bomb the hell out of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and not gonna make a damn bit of difference. Ho Chi Minh is not gonna give up. You can put another 100,000 people in there And it’s not going to help. Now, they get pretty angry about that. And they would go to my superiors, and they’d say, you’ve got McGovern, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

2:25:11 And my superiors, to their credit, would say, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s just the way we look at it. That’s what we’re telling the president. That’s what the president wants from us. Now, that’s big.

2:25:23 That’s really big. You can’t imagine how big that is. And when I was briefing the president’s daily brief, it was the same. And they knew that I would tell him the truth. And George H. W. Bush also knew that I would never vote for him.

2:25:38 I didn’t laugh at the appropriate times, and I told him the truth. And I think he respected me more for that than for anything. So this is a kind of indispensable, or kind of an invaluable, is the word, asset to have credibility. But when somebody asks you the question, you say, well, if you don’t know, you say, I don’t know, but I’ll find out the best answer I can. If you do know, you tell them what you know, and they believe you.

2:26:10 Now they might not act on that belief, but that’s big. You can’t get any better than that. And that’s where I worked for 27 years, up until right till the end. And I was glad to leave. I had reached age 50.

2:26:24 I had served enough time abroad to qualify for early retirement. I could get an immediate annuity, greatly reduced, of course, at age 50. I wanted to work in the inner city. My favorite country, the Soviet Union, had imploded. It was the time to leave, all the signs were right there.

2:26:44 On that same note of the advice, what is the best advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I had ever received came from my Irish grandmother, okay? And when I entered the CIA and I saw on the marble wall of this newly minted headquarters building, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Chisel into the wall, I thought of my grandmother who always said, Raymond, be truthful and honest and then you won’t give a damn what anyone says about you.

2:27:18 I’d say, Grandma, if that’s true, no pun intended. If that’s true, this is going to be a good place to work. And it was. So your grandma, in some way, led you to the CIA? Well, she led me to a lot of things.

2:27:35 But yeah, she put a big premium on truth and she came out of a bitter experience in Ireland. So she gave me a sense for what it’s like to be on the downside of things and how one uses one’s education and opportunities to try to make things better for all folks, but especially for people who have been suppressed. I don’t hear people talking about the truth much these days, not in those direct terms. You know, I guess we’re doing it in a way by talking about the leaks and these kinds of things, but I haven’t heard it put that way.

2:28:10 On a final note, to the 20-year-old, It’s around the world listening to us somewhere. They could be in Russia or China or Brazil or Mexico. What advice do you give to them? What if they want to get into the intelligence community? Or what if they just want to become more aware of things that are happening in Ukraine?

2:28:28 Or I don’t know, just become better global citizens? What do you tell them they should do? I speak at a lot of colleges and universities. Inevitably, somebody will come up afterwards. They’ll sort of loiter in the back, and then there’s something.

2:28:40 I was thinking of the playing to be an analyst at CI, but I don’t know. And I have two questions. I say, well, do you have integrity?

2:28:52 Well, do you have courage? Yeah, I think, well, of course apply. We need people with integrity and courage because if you get into a situation where you can’t morally subscribe or you’re being overruled and telling the truth, then you have the courage to quit. You’re young, you can go somewhere else. And even the retirement benefits are fungible now.

2:29:13 So yeah, by all means, if you have integrity and courage, do it, OK? Now, the other thing is, how do you keep up? Well, the fourth estate is dead. I mean, the major media, that’s dead. You can’t get informed for the fourth estate.

2:29:27 You can get informed by the fifth estate. And that’s, I don’t know, that’s an ether, right? That’s what we’re doing here. We’re doing, yeah. And luckily, the younger generation It doesn’t read the newspapers, I say luckily because there’s not much in the newspapers, but they do tune in to websites.

2:29:46 So find out websites that you can rely on. I have one, raymcgovern.com, I published by things first on one called consortiumnews.com and that’s run by one of the best investigative reporters in our country, his name is Robert Perry. been doing it since 1996, when he had to leave AP, Newsweek, Frontline, because they wouldn’t let him tell the truth, OK? And so his son said, hey, dad, you should have a website. And he said, what’s that?

2:30:17 And the story is that he’s got the first investigative website, investigative journalist website, created 1995. I guess it was 1996. And I’m very privileged to work with him, because he and I check each other. I’ve learned a lot about journalism from him. He’s learned a little bit about intelligence from me, but he knew the chapter and verse before.

2:30:40 And not only that, but sometimes when I serve him up a sow’s ear, he makes a silk purse out of it. And I just look at it and say, well, Bob, if I get a Pulitzer for this, you know, I’m gonna say, well, not only my mother and father, but I thank Bob Perry for this as well. So explore the fifth estate is your advice to them. Oh, yeah, yeah. Get informed.

2:31:00 And they were great, I mean, there’s common dreams, there’s antiwar.com, there’s opednews.com, which is really good. There’s one that has an incredible selection of all manner of things that appear elsewhere. And that’s information IHS, information,

2:31:25 Gosh, information housing service or something. It’s really, really good. Yeah, if you can put that in the notes. Put that in the notes. Yeah, definitely.

2:31:35 Information clearinghouse. I see. Okay. Ray, I think I could talk to you for another two hours, but we’ll save that for the next time. What’s next for you in the next year, next two years, next three years?

2:31:46 What’s on your agenda? Well, I became 75 last week. Congratulations. Thanks. That’s three quarters of a century.

2:31:53 You look at that great. Well, thanks. Give me something to aspire to. Well, I’ve had cancer. Really?

2:31:59 Yeah. What kind? Luckily, they have a real good treatment for that. So that’s gone. Wow. I’ve been free for six years now Congratulations, that’s scary stuff. Yeah, I take it also had some heart things which have been you know unblocked so I’m just feeling incredibly blessed and lucky and And I just feel this call to use the experience that I’ve had Whatever wisdom I’ve gained over over the years to keep working with my colleagues in veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and trying to get the truth out there and not being depressed by the fact that this really really hard and the states to do that when I come here come elsewhere it’s a little easier and I’m hopeful that by the time next year rolls around that we’ll have more more of an exposure I hope that the Ukraine thing will have simmered down and that people come to their senses and have a more reasonable attitude toward the world because it doesn’t have to be a hostile place, you know. What really should be paramount in the world, in my view, was love. And a lot of people that know that, it’s just that, you know, sort of not in vogue, it’s sort of like truth.

2:33:17 You know, you talk about love and truth, and you say, whoa, you know, that’s where it’s at, in my view, and the way you get at that is tell the truth about what’s going on and try to solve the wounds of the oppressed and let the people go free. And that’s a tall order, but we can do a little part on it. Well, you’re obviously having an effect, right? You know, you’re on television, on RT, you’re on all sorts of other networks that are contacting you. So it seems like it’s a tough uphill battle sometimes to fight that fourth estate, but it sounds like it’s happening, whether it comes to the publications, it seems like it’s getting out there, and people like talking to you, Alex Jones has you on a lot of times.

2:34:02 So you must see a little bit of, that must make you feel good, it must make you keep on fighting when you see things like that. Well, yeah, you know, it’s easy to focus on the bad stuff. And I’ve encountered this American trait. Maybe it’s everywhere, but people say, well, what can I do? Americans in particular, I think, are reluctant to embark on anything, on any major endeavor, unless they’re reasonably certain that they’re going to be successful.

2:34:41 Who likes to be laughed at? Who likes to say, why are you standing up there with your back to Hillary Clinton, get so beat up? Come on. Well, you know, right you did that and yeah, you got arrested for that. Yeah. Yeah arrested put in prison for a while. Well jail They beat up pretty bad. What year was that? That was That was three years ago, February of 11 and you turned your back at a speech over that you were she was giving and they cleared you out of there Yeah, she was talking about respecting dissenters in Iran It was Kafka all over the place really, but you know people say well, what are you?

2:35:17 Why don’t you, look, you got nine grandchildren, Ray, for God’s sake. Enjoy life, you know? I do have nine grandchildren, but I also have this kind of call or this imperative to try to do things, not because I’m going to be successful, but because I want to be faithful, okay? There’s a big difference. And one of my heroes, Dan Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who so effectively opposed the war in Vietnam, you know, after he did his actions, he said, you know, I tried to ask myself, this was a big action, was it justified? And then I said to myself, said, Dan, you know, the good is worth doing because it’s good. And we’re not in control of what happens after that. We may be just sowing seeds for the next generation. But he said, I took great great solace for that, sitting in the only federal building there in Catonsville, Maryland, when the FBI guy comes in, you know. And Dan Berrigan’s a poet, so he’s describing this in his memoir. And he says, just then, as I sort of pieced this all together, in came a jut-jawed paradigm of an FBI inspector. And he came in the room and he looked at my brother Phil, and he said, are you again? I’m gonna change my religion. Dan quotes, he says, you know, I could think of no higher tribute to my brother Phil, and that’s how I feel. You know, religion, that kind of added to, you know, I’m a Catholic. Of course, Phil was a Catholic priest, Dan too. You know, the core of religion is to take care of those that are oppressed,

2:37:05 And that’s what Dan and Phil were doing there with respect to Vietnam. If I can make a modest contribution toward that, that’s fine. If I don’t, at least I’m being faithful to try and the good is worth doing because it’s good. I think it is and it really comes through in your character and the way you talk and I think the motivations, the reasons that motivate you come through in what you do and I think it’s nice to see. It brings a lot of gravitas. You know when I’m sitting there listening to you.

2:37:34 I’m talking to a guy that isn’t trying to fight back because he was specifically wronged or did this wrong. I think you’re genuinely trying to change things for like a greater reason. And like you said, you might not actually have the effect but it might put something into place that’s gonna happen a generation or two. And so I see that. Thank you so much for being here today.

2:37:53 You’re welcome, Brian. It’s been a real honor. We’ve had a really nice conversation here. Maybe it will be your fog of war someday. You know, people can play this back and learn about you.

2:38:02 We have some great moments there. I just want to thank Annie Michonne for hooking us up. We had an episode with her that you can watch, as well, from about a year ago. And then we had other members of your crew, which is Jesslyn Radick and Thomas Drake, were on about six months ago. Another fascinating episode.

2:38:17 If you want to just round yourself out as far as getting an idea of some of the different things going on. And you all have a very different perspective as well, which is really nice. And it’s great to hear it from different angles, because it starts to. It’s like a Venn diagram, you know, some things are starting to hit the center as truth. So, yeah, you know, I feel completely honored and humbled at the company I keep now, you know, it’s a different company than I used to keep.

2:38:44 And again, my Irish grandmother used to say, Raymond, show me your company and I’ll tell you who you are, okay? I look around at Thomas Drake and Jess Lynn Raddick and Colleen Rowley and the I rest in my mind saying, my God, Grandma, how’s this? She was a smart lady. And she’s saying, all right, Ray, it was good. They say, show me your friends and I’ll show you your future, so you’ve got some good people around you.

2:39:14 Fantastic. All the best with your time in Germany, with Merkel reading this statement that you made, you can go get that at raymcgovern.com. You’re on Twitter as well. So if you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can actually see our faces and get to know, see how extremely good looking you are for 75 years old, and me for 43. And that’s it.

2:39:37 Please forward this to a friend if you’re liking our conversation, subscribe, et cetera. At London Real, we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours, Ray. And thanks so much. It’s been an honor.

2:39:48 You’re just so knowledgeable, and it’s just fantastic to get to talk to you for the last two hours. And yours, Brian. Thanks. All right. Take care.