07/06/16 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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Scott Horton Show.
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All right, introducing Ray McGovern.
Way back when, he was the chief of the Soviet Division of Analysts at the CIA.
He worked there for 27 years.
He was the morning briefer for H.W. Bush, vice president in the Reagan years.
And he is the co-founder of a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And ever since the dawn of the terror war, they've been putting out these memos, kind of open-sourced, retired intelligence professionals urging our government to mostly stop doing the wrong thing and sometimes start doing the right thing.
And they got a new one like that.
It's published today at antiwar.com.
Merkel urged to temper NATO's belligerence.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
And you just got back from Russia, am I right?
That's right.
Tell me all about it.
Well, we were the first U.S. delegation to visit Crimea since the coup in Kiev and the annexation of Crimea to Russia.
Even though we were a completely unofficial and unblessed delegation, we made quite a splash in the Russian newspapers and we were able to celebrate there in Yalta, in that historic place, the 75th anniversary of the Nazi attack on Russia, which resulted in 25 million.
I say again, 25 million people killed, 12 million of them civilians.
So World War II is still an ever-present reality there.
And we had, yeah, it was a pleasure.
We met five World War II veterans and one Afghanistan war veterans from the Russian side and it was just really, really very moving, the whole thing.
And we lightened it up a little bit.
Elizabeth Murray, one of our veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, was along and she's a terrific swimmer.
So she spent a lot of time in the Black Sea and persuaded four of those five World War II Russian generals to join her and others of our delegation for a swim for peace and friendship, which was just really, really great.
And there's a good video of Russians and Americans jumping into the Black Sea to sort of celebrate the end of terrible things and hopefully a new beginning.
Yeah, well, that's great.
I really appreciate the effort.
And I think that, you know, things like the Committee for East-West Accord and groups like yours going and doing these kinds of things are so important right now.
Obviously, you agree that's why you're doing it because so much is coming between the U.S. and Russia these days.
And you know, I had an interview with Joe Lauria the other day about these issues as well and we talked about just how powerful the narrative is, how difficult it is for someone even like you to say, hey, look, I'm the former chief analyst of the CIA's USSR division.
And I'm telling you that some things are kind of messed up here.
We need to take a look at the American side of this equation and what our leaders are doing that are making matters worse, not better, that kind of thing.
And yet to break through the official narrative that Putin is Hitler or Putin is a czar or Putin is Stalin and he's intent on conquering all of Eastern Europe again and this, that, the other thing is so powerful and so kind of uniform and bipartisan and all the different adjectives that keep consensus in D.C.
What do we do about how can we really break through this and get people to recognize?
Because after all, Ray, what we really need them to come to grips with is that our side started it.
But man, no one in media, no one in power, in think tank land, in government ever wants to admit that other than, you know, on the very margin.
You're talking about the current wave of tensions that began with the coup in Kiev.
Sure.
Yeah.
Or you could even go back to the overthrow of the orange coup of 2004 if you want.
I mean, the whole Cold War of the Bush Obama years has certainly I mean, if you want to just go back to 14 for the most recent wave of conflict.
But ever since Putin was the first person to call George W.
Bush on 9-11 and say, I'm at your service, we've been picking a fight with them.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Scott, let me go just spend one more minute on the history of all this.
When you ask an American, you know, who won World War Two?
Well, we did.
And how did we win it?
We invaded Normandy on June 6th, 1944, and we beat the Germans.
Now, they don't have any idea of the fact that the Soviet Union, with some help from Studebaker factory and and other people creating and making arms for the Russians, that was the Russians that turned back the Nazis in Stalingrad, where they lost two million people.
Stalingrad, the Nazis only only lost one, only one million at Stalingrad, but they lost.
OK.
And they had to tuck tail and move back.
And we finished them off.
Sure.
But it was the Russians that lost all those casualties.
The other thing is that being in Sevastopol, which is in the Crimea, it's the major Russian naval port.
It's the only one that's ice free all year.
It was set up by Catherine the Great, same time as our revolution.
And Putin was not about to let that go, to become part of NATO.
Now, what I'd like to point out is that Sevastopol was attacked in the first years, the first days of the Nazi attack on Russia.
They surrounded it because it was a very powerful naval battery and took a long time for them to subdue them.
But then the Nazis left several hundred thousand people there to die of starvation.
Last thing I'll say is that we were in St.
Peterburg, used to be Leningrad, and we all know, or again, that's a that's a false statement.
We all don't know that the siege of Leningrad by the Nazi forces continued for 900 days.
I visited the cemetery there with 2 million, 2 million parts of various bodies, or I should say, 2 million bodies with various parts are buried in these heaping, heaping mounds.
Now, Putin had a big brother.
He died during the siege of Leningrad.
And that has to say something to Putin and to people of his age group about the realities of war that are completely lost on someone like Obama, someone like the sophomores that are advising him.
And that's very dangerous because if you don't have any sense of what real war is like, you can't make judicious decisions when you sabre rattle and do other things along the Russian border.
So that's that's the background of all this.
And what we tried to do in this memorandum, and, you know, this is the second time we addressed a veteran intelligence professionals for sanity memorandum to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of the Chancellor of Germany.
Last time was two years ago.
And we knew it was coming because the Wales NATO summit, which took place, took place four to five September 2014, was right in the wake of the coup in Kiev and the annexation of Crimea.
And there were lots of lots of people trying to persuade everyone that we had, you know, up the ante and meet the Russian threat.
What comes through very clearly and what we point out in this memorandum is that for NATO leaders, recent history in Central Europe begins on the 23rd of February 2014.
Now, why do I say that?
Because never, never is it mentioned that on the 22nd of February, which my subtraction is still good, is one day before February 23rd, there was the most blatant coup in human history, termed that by George Friedman, who's no slouch on these things.
Why was it the most blatant coup?
Because it was advertised two and a half weeks in advance on YouTube.
Now, you've heard people say, well, the revolution will not be televised, right?
Well, this coup was YouTube-ized.
What was it?
It was the audio of an intercepted conversation between the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Victoria Nuland, and our ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt.
And what Nuland says is, we've got it all wired.
It's all glued.
Yats is our guy.
Make sure Klitschko and the others wait in the wings.
Yats knows about Central Bank.
He knows about austerity measures.
Yats is our guy.
Okay.
Now, that's posted on the 4th of February 2014.
Now, when I saw that, I said, well, there's probably going to be some sort of coup, but at least Yats is out of the running.
You know, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
In the old days, when we talked about overthrowing governments rather than just regime change, okay, that would sort of disqualify somebody.
So I wake up on the 23rd of February 2014, and they turn the radio on, and there's been a coup in Kiev, and the new guy is Yats.
And Yatsenyuk is his last name.
So I immediately wrote an article, perhaps you remember it.
Yikes.
It's Yats.
Now, the whole point was that the US recognized this new government immediately.
And the first thing he said was two things.
I think we'll ban Russian, the Russian language, as an official language in our government, and it might be a good idea to join NATO.
Now, that was a no-no.
Ukraine is not going to join NATO.
It never will, because it's on the doorstep of Russia, and Putin has made it very clear, this is just not going to happen.
So what did happen on the 23rd of February?
Well, it's very clear now, since there was a video shown on Russian television, that Putin gathered his national security advisors on the 23rd and said, my God, they're talking about joining NATO.
We have all our eggs in one Sevastopol basket there in our naval port in the Black Sea, what are we going to do?
And somebody very sensibly suggested, well, maybe we ought to ask the people who live in Crimea what they want.
They've been watching TV, they've been watching what's going on on Maidan.
They see the neo-fascist forces that took over.
Let's see what they want.
And so a plebiscite was held.
Now, 96% of the Crimean people voted to rejoin Russia.
Now, people in the West say, ah, ipso facto proof that it was rigged.
Well, it was internationally supervised, and we spent three days in Crimea.
We couldn't find one person who voted against annexation, okay?
We found one who just didn't vote because his father's Ukrainian, he just couldn't bring himself to vote one way or the other, but that's a real figure.
And so on the strength of that plebiscite, Crimea was subsumed again in Russia, as it always had been before Khrushchev, without any plebiscite, mind you, just simply gave it over to the Soviet Union.
So what's the point here?
The point here is that the borders of Ukraine were changed.
Now, do I like that?
No, I don't like that at all.
Does that violate the so-called Budapest Memorandum?
Yeah, it does.
Okay.
But there were three provisions in the Budapest Memorandum.
This was the one that was signed between Britain, France, US, and Ukraine, and Russia, that provided that the territorial limits of Ukraine would not be changed.
And in return for that, Ukraine would give up all the nuclear weapons that were left over when the Soviet Union imploded.
But the first stricture was neither side, East nor West, would take advantage, unfair advantage of the economic problems that were due to happen, that were bound to happen in Ukraine.
So what happened at the end of 2013, 2014?
Blatant intervention in Ukrainian affairs by the West, by the EU, by Victoria Nuland, who bragged about investing $5 billion, billion with a B, dollars in satisfying, quote, Ukraine's aspirations to join the West, end quote.
Long story short, the coup happened on the 23rd, the day after, Putin, as any responsible leader of Russia would have done, gathered his advisors.
What are we going to do about a naval port?
And you know what the rest of the story is.
Now, the last thing I'll say is that Putin has this sense of humor in the most bizarre circumstances.
After the re-annexation of Crimea, he had one of these three-hour marathon press conferences where he had libs for three hours from people all over Russia.
And at one point he was asked, well, how do you feel about NATO encroaching on the Black Sea and maybe taking over Sevastopol and your naval port?
And what he said was this, he said, now I'm sure, I'm sure that those NATO sailors and airmen, I'm sure they're swell guys, you know, and I'd like it to be so that we don't have to request permission to visit them in their naval port in Sevastopol.
I'd much rather have it be the way it is now, where they're free to ask for permission to visit us in our port.
Okay.
In other words, net means net.
You're not going to join NATO and you're not going to subsume our major naval facilities and air facilities in Crimea anytime soon, as long as Putin is around.
So that's the background.
And what we're trying to do is say, if you don't realize the background, if you start on the 23rd of February, which our ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lutey, a former general, he made a big speech three days ago and he said, history starts on the 23rd of February, 2014 for phase three of NATO's existence.
Come on, you know, I put that in bold italics, you know, emphasis added.
History starts at 23.
No, no, no.
The last phase started on 22 February with the most blatant coup in human history, one that has caused all manner of trouble for the Ukrainian people and for the people who are resisting the Ukrainian government out there in Eastern Ukraine.
I want to go back to what you were saying about Crimea and World War II.
I mean, really, even if you just finished reading about the Civil War, you still don't have any idea about the level of destruction of World War II on the Eastern Front there.
It's just it's basically impossible to imagine just from the description.
But, you know, Eric Margulies on the show made an analogy that I thought was pretty powerful for people when I guess maybe I had brought up the Alamo or something or maybe he had brought up the Alamo, but then basically calling it Russia's Alamo in the sense.
And I don't even remember.
I'm a Texan.
I don't even remember how few dozen men died at the Alamo.
But what a big deal that still is to Americans.
But as Margulies pointed out, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Russians died protecting Crimea from the German Nazis.
And then I didn't even realize, as you said, that even after the Nazis had been beaten back, they laid siege and starved everybody, you know, who remained and that kind of thing.
Americans just can't relate to that kind of trauma.
You think about how obsessed we are.
What if someone tried to come and take Houston or San Antonio away from Texas or the USA?
How we would feel about that.
But we never had anything like the kind of trauma the Russians lived through in order to hang on to Houston or the Alamo.
You know, we could never compare that tight of a bond to a piece of land to what they've been through.
And, you know, Crimea goes way back.
I mentioned Castle in the Great.
You know, we're talking 1775 around there.
But then there was the Crimean War.
You remember, forward, the light brigade, charge for the guns, he said, into the Valley of Death, rode the 600.
Now, those were Brits.
They shouldn't have been there, but they were.
They were trapped.
And I was in that valley.
We were, our whole delegation combed through that valley.
It was it was the most, well, it was the most foolish valley to pick to try to get into Sevastopol.
It was almost as bad as what we're doing in Afghanistan right now with the train factor.
So this has a long history and it speaks to Russia's final expansion into what is now Russia proper.
And that didn't really happen until we had long since been out of the Renaissance and into the modern era.
So that's why they feel a couple of centuries behind us.
But now they've caught up and they need to be respected and their interests need to be respected.
And that's what hurts.
They don't want to, they don't want to be, you know, a second class citizen.
They want due respect and, and whatever honor is due them for having fought the Nazis to a standstill and then drove them back into Western Europe.
And if you don't have that kind of sense of history, then you don't realize why it is that Putin and his generals, when they look at what's going on along their borders in Poland, 31,000 troops, 31,000 troops, 17,000 of which were US, 2,000 troops in Ukraine itself.
My God, you know, put yourself in Putin's place, which is, that was my stock and trade.
We had to try to think like the Russians did.
Well, you know, there would have to be some sort of rationale behind that.
And Putin's not going to get off telling his generals, Oh, this is just rhetoric.
This is just the military industrial complex trying to make more money and that they're making it hand over fist.
Don't worry about it.
We've got a nuclear deterrent here.
He can't do that.
He's got no option to do that.
His generals have to protect as all generals do against what they don't understand, namely a buildup that is not justified by anything that the Russians are doing.
The last thing I'll say, I was just piecing this together this morning in my own mind.
Last time, two years ago, when we warned Angela Merkel about listening to people like General Breedlove or Strangelove or whatever his name is, Breedlove, I guess it is, who was head of NATO forces up until two months ago.
You know, he made all kinds of outlandish claims not supported by any intelligence.
And we told her that, be appropriately suspicious of what Breedlove is saying.
Now we know, you've probably seen it, The Intercept has done a wonderful series on Breedlove's emails.
Somebody hacked into his emails.
Oh, are there follow up stories on it?
Yeah, well, The Intercept broke the story based on the hacking that was done by this unknown site.
But the most recent thing is Breedlove acknowledges them as genuine and tries to defend them, whereas they're patently designed to go behind Obama's back to people like Colin Powell or Wesley Clark or some of these neoconservatives in town and get Obama to start a war with Russia.
It's very clear.
It's in the emails.
Okay.
So we seize on that to say, look, Chancellor Merkel, we tried to warn you last time and you did, you did act responsibly in rejecting, rejecting Washington's plan to send lethal weaponry to Ukraine.
Now be prepared for it again, because that's what seems to be happening.
And now we know it was worse than we thought.
Breedlove was actively, actively advocating, lobbying for war.
Now, why?
Well, two years ago, it was possible to prove that he was lying.
First, he embellished, you know, fuzzy photographs and all that kind of thing.
Then he lied about divisions, tanks and everything coming into the Eastern Ukraine from Russia.
It was patently false and Germans, the Germans intelligence service told Merkel that.
Now, I asked myself, what's different?
Well, this time around, they're not even fabricating intelligence.
They're just saying Russia sieged Crimea.
Russia started this whole thing.
Russia's threatening the book.
None of that is true, but they don't even adduce even, even, even doctored evidence, even outlandish claims, such as the ones that Breedlove clearly did.
So it was really, really hard for a person like Putin to say this time, they're not even adducing a dodgy evidence.
They're not even adducing any evidence.
All they're saying is Putin bad, Putin very bad, Putin sometime, sometime ride horse with no shirt on, Putin.
And everybody, well, not everybody, everyone, but you and me, Scott.
Well, let me ask you this real quick.
I'm sorry.
We're I, I, I usually go way over time and interview you for a full hour when I can about this stuff.
But I got another interview I got to run to, but if I can ask you one more thing real quick.
You write in your, um, in your note to Merkel here about, uh, the danger that the Minsk two agreement could fall apart.
And especially because of the position of Andre Peruby, the Nazi inside the government, he's now the speaker of the parliament there.
And I wonder whether you think that there's a real danger that the peace deal could fall apart at this point.
Well, there is fire, I guess it's not really a peace deal.
The thing that, uh, the only hope I have really is that when push comes to shove, as was indicated yesterday, when the Kremlin released, uh, pretty much the essence of a telephone conversation between Putin and Obama, when push comes to shove at the highest level, they can talk these things out and make cooperation work to an extent on very delicate issues like Syria.
That's the only good news.
The other is all very, very, very negative.
And again, it's, uh, even the German foreign minister said artificially stoking, artificially saber rattling on, on the border with Russia and Poland, building up troops to, to the point where not since the Nazis invaded on 22 June, 1941, not since then, have there been so many troops on the Polish Russian border?
That makes no sense at all, says Steinmeier.
And that's one reason we wrote to Merkel.
We think that Steinmeier and Merkel will be a moderating influence on what happens in Warsaw tomorrow and the next day, and we truly hope that's the case.
I have one more thing here for you too, Ray.
Can you imagine if it had been Hillary and not Obama that Breed Love was trying to push into this thing, her entire incentive and the entire structure of what she needs to do in her head is based on whether she can get this or that general to personally like her or not, uh, you know, in a George W.
Bush kind of way to, to be the last person in the room to talk to her and where Obama resisted, I can't imagine her resisting.
Well, you know, WikiLeaks has issued another treasure trove of emails from Hillary and Larry Johnson, one of our veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, who writes his own blog at no quarter.
You ought to look at that because he has examined these and shown Hillary to be the war, war monger that she is trying to take credit for what happened in Libya before it all fell apart in utter chaos.
Yeah, I'll definitely take a look at that later today.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm over.
I got to go here, Ray, but, uh, I really appreciate you coming back on the show.
As always, you're a very wise man.
You're most welcome.
All right.
So that is the great Ray McGovern, 27 years at the CIA, a Soviet analyst there.
He's now a co-founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
You can find this one miracle urged to tempered NATO's belligerence.
It's a consortium news.com and an anti-war.com today.
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