Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Alright you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org.
4,000 and something interviews going back to 2003 for you there.scotthorton.org.
And, you know, I'm doing a Q&A thing now in the old whole show feed.
It's scotthorton.org slash show for the Just Me stuff there if you guys are interested in that.
Check out all the latest interviews.
They get posted up at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshowfirst.
So off you go over to libertarianinstitute.org.
And follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Alright, introducing our friend Ray McGovern.
For 27 years he was a CIA analyst.
Now he gives anti-war speeches with an organization called Tell the Word.
And he is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And, well, what they do is they write memos to the presidents saying you shouldn't be doing the things that you're doing.
You shouldn't be believing the things you claim to believe.
And they do really important work.
Here he is again.
Oh, I should say raymcgovern.com for his own personal website.
You can often find him at consortiumnews.com.
And this one, all of them are reprinted at antiwar.com as well.
This one is called The Surveillance State Behind Russiagate.
And it's co-authored with William Binney.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Great.
Hey, listen.
Glad to hear that.
I interviewed Bill Binney on the show just a few weeks back.
But maybe some people didn't hear it.
Can you remind us who's Bill Binney?
Yeah.
Bill Binney was the technical director for the National Security Agency, NSA, before he retired.
Well, retired in protest after 9-11 when he saw that the vacuum cleaner type, the dragnet, the bulk surveillance that had been instituted violated all our rights under the Fourth Amendment.
So he quit.
He retired together with three other whistleblowers.
And they are an incredible asset to our veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, our VIPS group, because, well, because their expertise just won't quit.
Bill devised.
He devised the systems that NSA is still using to collect all this information.
The difference between Bill and General Hayden, who overruled him, was that Bill had a mechanism where U.S. names would remain encrypted, remain encrypted in all these intercepted conversations so that no one could get them.
Hayden decided, no, no, he'd build a much more expensive system, several times more expensive, which was devoid of any protection of the true names.
All this business about masking, minimizing, all that kind of stuff.
There is some that goes on, but the bottom line here is that not only NSA, but the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other people who pretend to have intelligence units have access to what NSA collects, even when it has to do with Americans and their top officials have access to the raw data, namely the names of American officials or American names of Americans.
Now, what does this mean?
Well, that means, or this means, that toward the end of last year...
Well, wait, wait, wait.
What it means is, when you co-author this article, it means that with a guy like Bill Binney, or with Bill Binney specifically, it means that you're not just going off of what you guess may be going on here because you read some Snowden documents and some Greenwald reports.
You're going, you have as your co-author, the guy who built the NSA's global intelligence infrastructure in the first place signing off on your assertions here.
So that's kind of a big deal, I think.
Yeah, he's more than signing off.
He's giving me the wherewithal, the technical expertise, where I can confidently say the things that I know to be true.
Now, do we pretend that this analysis is irrevocable or indisputable, like Colin Powell did at the UN on the 5th of February 2003?
No, no, we're human beings.
We don't pretend, particularly when there's so much fog going on here.
But there are realities that we know about, and that has to do with these technical systems, what they're capable of doing.
And what I just told you, of course, is what Bill Binney told me before we drafted this thing.
The real, it's hard for me to import the sense of, well, the enthusiasm that I feel in having people like Bill Binney at our beck and call when we veteran intelligence professionals want to write something.
It's very much like my role, well, one role I played at the CIA when I was working in a community-wide capacity.
We were called national intelligence officers, and what that meant was that I could tap any expertise throughout the intelligence community.
I would know enough by that time I was pretty senior who the most honest guys and the most expert guys, and I could just reach out and say, okay, on a secure phone, look, we need this by tomorrow.
Give me, tell it to me straight, and we'll incorporate it in this memo for Kissinger or for whomever.
Now, and then, of course, we use fax machines and secure stuff that took a long time.
Now we can get together remotely or in the blogosphere here, and I can say, Bill, look, we're being led down a primrose path here about this Russian, quote, hacking, end quote.
What are the chances that the Russians could hack this material and get it to Julian Assange in WikiLeaks and not be detected by the systems you devised?
What are the chances?
And Bill Binney says, no, chances are zero.
Well, that means a lot.
So a lot of this stuff is just a lot of smoke with no fire under it, and all I can say is that Binney has not been wrong on any of this, and he's unparalleled in his expertise, and even the people who still are at NSA know him by reputation, regret his absence, and concede that, yeah, he was the brightest guy around.
That's why he could do all these things.
So I'm glad you started out with Bill Binney.
He and I collaborated on this piece.
It's not the first time we collaborated.
We did a joint piece in the Baltimore Sun very early this year.
We took pains to describe the difference between hacking on the one hand and leaking on the other.
The difference is immense, and we are convinced for a lot of reasons, not only technical ones, that what Julian Assange got and what he put out with respect to the Democratic National Committee emails and Podesta's emails were gotten through a leak.
Someone was so appalled seeing what was going on at the DNC and with Podesta that they put a thumb drive in a machine.
That's how you leak, right?
You put a thumb.
That's how Chelsea Manning, that's how Ed Snowden got all this stuff.
You put something in a machine, you don't throw it, you don't put it on a network because NSA gets everything on the network.
So the technical aspects of this thing persuaded us that, you know, you have to look at these things closely, and when the preferred narrative is that the Russians did it, the Russians did it, the Russians did it, and when even Amy Goodman and, oh God, you know, even David Corn and Michael Isikoff and people that I used to think were— Jeff Stein.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's just so—I mean, I think somebody put something in the water here in Washington.
I really think that.
Well, it's the partisanship, man.
It makes people just completely retarded.
I mean, I don't know why it is, but for some reason it's just an incredibly difficult challenge to ask someone, hey, is it okay if you hate 100,000 things about Donald Trump but not all these lies about his ties with Putin because they're not true?
And they're incapable of that.
You're either pro or anti-Trump, and if you're anti-Trump then you believe any lie about him because why not?
And you know what?
In fact, this is my question for you.
You and I have been talking about, not just I know that you know, but you and I have been discussing America's renewed Cold War against Russia for more than a decade on this show, Ray.
I know that you know better when it comes to who's picking the fight here, who's the world empire, and who's the rump state what's left of an old one from 25 years ago.
Okay, there's no question.
Breaking the promise to Gorbachev, expanding NATO east, overthrowing the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years and a lot more color-coded revolutions too, but maybe that's your problem.
Maybe you understand too well the actual reality of the background context here, and so your confirmation bias is leading you to believe that, yeah, but we know who's the aggressor here.
It's the USA, and we know that all this spin about the rise of Russia and the new Russian empire and Putin's expansionism and all this, you know that's not true.
So then debunking the rest of this stuff about the hacking and etc.fits right into your, you know, you're on a roll debunking stuff.
You have been.
So maybe you're wrong.
Maybe you're not being fair to the other side like Isikoff and Jeff Stein and these other people, and maybe that they actually have an open mind enough to see what's really going on here that Vladimir Putin decided that he would do anything to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming the president.
Ray, what do you say?
Well, you know, I'm open to that thought.
I just wish that someone would engage us.
Now, we have an enviable record of 47 very well considered and well presented memos since, well, since Colin Powell's speech at the UN on the 5th of February 2003.
We have a record.
We stand on that record.
We were right.
Okay.
Now, that should count for something.
But do I get on Amy Goodman?
No.
Who gets on Amy Goodman?
The people like Isikoff this morning.
I mean, I couldn't believe it.
Yeah, I know Mike.
He writes really good books.
He wrote a great book called Hubris together with David Korn three years after the brouhaha about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Where were they?
Where were they before the attack on Iraq?
Now, it's one thing to write books, and, you know, there's a really good book, Hubris.
But it's another thing to be a journalist.
That's what I was at the CIA.
I wrote for daily publications.
I didn't have a lot of time to sit back and talk to everybody and write a book.
And so the journalism profession, which I'm happy to say I learned a lot from Bob Perry about, who runs ConsortiumNews.com, is much more demanding, much more, well, you know, you do the same thing, Scott.
You need to pronounce now before the Washington Post or before the New York Times screws it up.
And so all I'm saying here is that we deserve to be, if the mainstream media won't let us on, then Bill Moyers should or Amy Goodman or, you know, we should get on some of these programs and we're just ostracized.
Why?
Well, I don't know, but it's not because we haven't been right.
We have been right.
And in this instance, we have expertise that won't quit.
Bill Binney is just one example.
There are three other whistleblowers from the NSA, Colleen Rowley from the FBI, people from Defense Intelligence Agency.
We have a glut of expertise.
And when we want to write something like Bill Binney and I did two days ago and appeared yesterday, well, then we select out the people who have been following it most closely and the people who have the most expertise in this subject area, and we publish and we do that.
And we did that yesterday.
And what I've just written a little note to Amy was, you know, writing for AOL should be considered a little bit different from writing for the president or for writing as Bill Binney and I do based on our expertise.
It's very frustrating because we could put a gloss on this thing.
And when people say, oh, you're pro-Putin, you know, that's just really silly.
That's McCarthyism.
We're not pro-Putin.
What we're saying is that Donald Trump, my God, he lies to his teeth.
But even a clock, you know, a broken clock is right two times a day.
And Trump is right about Russia.
There is no reason why we couldn't work out a decent relationship with Russia.
This goes back to my question.
So you just hit on Putin's motive for this entire thing.
Maybe he didn't hack the DNC and the Podesta emails, but he must have done something, Ray, because TV says that Putin wanted Hillary to lose.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, let me address that.
Okay.
I counted up the years, the years since I decided to major in Russian at Fordham University, which had an excellent program in those days.
Okay.
There are 59 years there.
50 years since I started working for the government as the chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch.
40 years since I worked in this intelligence community capacity where I had purview over many sensitive issues and could call on the resources of all the agencies in the intelligence community.
And what, 30 years since I used to brief one-on-one Vice President Bush, Secretary of State Schultz, Secretary of Defense Weinberger.
So I had a lot of experience about all this.
Okay.
Those were the times when Gorbachev was coming to the fore.
Now, it was similar in some ways.
I'm just thinking aloud off the top of my head.
Gorbachev, a commie.
He became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
My boss, Bobby Gates, who was head of analysis in those days.
We're talking the 80s.
And his boss, Bill Casey, was saying the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will never, ever give up power.
Never, ever give up power.
So Gorbachev, he's just a more clever commie.
And you, McGovern, and you other people are being taken in.
Okay.
Now, that was how they looked at Gorbachev.
I was able to draw on people who I knew were honest analysts.
So when I briefed Secretary Shultz, for example, and he would say, Ray, I just got this invitation to go to Moscow.
It's just out on task this morning.
And he'd look at me in a kind of funny way.
And he'd say, now, your bosses would say that's a foolish thing that these guys are all commies and I shouldn't deal with them.
Well, what do you think?
And I'd say, sir, you've got an invitation to visit the Soviet Union.
And he'd look at me and say, you don't agree with your bosses.
And I'd say, sir, it would be beyond my portfolio to say I don't agree with my bosses, but I don't agree with them.
It was bizarre.
So I was in this incredibly trusted position to tell the truth.
And even though my bosses were telling Reagan and Shultz and the others the untruth here, or maybe they believed, maybe they believed it.
But we saw the evidence that he was for real.
Now, what does that mean?
We see the evidence that the notion that modern European history began on the 23rd of February 2014 to be deliberately misleading.
February 23rd, 2014 is when the neocons accused Putin, in this instance, of conveying his military advisors and saying, how are we going to invade and seize Crimea?
Well, it was a meeting on the 23rd of February 2014, but nobody ever mentioned what happened the day before.
And what happened the day before was what many people have called now the most blatant coup in the history of mankind.
It was advertised on 4 February on YouTube in the form of an intercepted conversation between our Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and our ambassador in Kiev, Jeffrey Payet.
And they named the fellow who would be the new prime minister.
They say, we'll get it all glued together.
And the EU doesn't like it.
They use the F word for the EU.
And so this was a legitimate intercepted conversation for which Nuland apologized with respect to what she said about the EU.
But there it was advertised ahead of time.
Yachts named as the new prime minister.
And sure enough, on the 22nd of February.
So the day before modern European history starts for the neocon on the 22nd, we overturned the government in Kiev.
Yachts became prime minister.
First thing he said is, yeah, I think we might want to think joining NATO.
Second thing he says was, I think we ought to bar Russian as an official language in Ukraine.
And then the proto-fascists who led the charge at the Biden in Kiev, they started taking over the key ministries of the Kiev government.
And it was then, it was then that the people in the eastern Ukraine, Russian stock, Russian speaking, who saw what was going on, said, you know, we don't want to accept this, this coup regime.
We want some regional autonomy so we can not have to deal with these proto-fascists.
Now, what are they called in the Western media?
Pro-Russian separatists.
Hold on, let me interrupt your narrative real quick, just to add one point that I only recently learned this and I apologize to everyone for missing it in the first place, but your colleague, James Carden at consortiumnews.com pointed this out to me in an interview a week or two ago and sent me the footnote too.
And it's the footnote is from an investigation by the British parliament, by the way.
And then the footnote is on March the 1st, 2014, three former Ukrainian presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Victor Yushchenko called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv agreements.
And that was the deal that allowed Russia to lease the base at Sevastopol.
So in other words, it's not just that Putin thought, ah, geez, they might threaten the base at Sevastopol.
It's that they had already threatened the base at Sevastopol and whether Russia would be allowed to keep it or not.
You know, there are a few things clearer than written documents and history.
And it's a real luxury that the neocons and others indulgent to be talking irrespective of history.
Now, what do I say history?
Well, Sevastopol in Crimea is the only, only ice-free naval port that Russia possesses.
It has not only incredible naval facilities, it's got air facilities and the whole Crimea has got very strategic significance.
Catherine the Great, who was great for extending Russian rule down that far at the time we were having a revolution in this country, she gave immense importance to the Russian fleet that's down there.
So here's Putin and he's looking at what just happened.
The noises are being made then and shortly thereafter that, yeah, yeah, we ought to revoke this agreement we have for, I think it was a 50-year lease that the Ukrainians leased Sevastopol and the whole of these military bases to Russia.
And so here, here's Putin having suffered a coup on his own doorstep while he was in Sochi.
That's important too.
He was out of town.
He was doing everything he could to prevent a terrorist event at Sochi during the Olympics.
Okay.
So he comes back into town.
His neighbor has been overthrown.
Well, and even the Sochi Olympics themselves were a giant publicity stunt to show just how Western and white and democratic and Christian and part of our global community Russia is or is trying to be as opposed to say, for example, you know, building up his tank forces for a threatened invasion of Eastern Europe.
Well, you know, that's the truth.
And again, in a historical sense, the Russians have always been playing, playing under a handicap and trying to become accepted, respected in the West.
And for your listeners, they need to know some rudimentary Russian history.
I'd start simply with the fact that as we, the West were coming out of the dark ages into the Renaissance, right?
What were the Russians doing?
They were battling two and a half centuries of rule by what they call the Tatarskaya Yaga, the Tartar yoke.
Genghis Khan and all those people ruled Russia for two and a half centuries.
Okay.
And so when they finally came out of that, when they beat, beat the Tartars back, they were invaded by the Poles, by the Lithuanians, by the Hanseatic League, for God's sake.
All right.
From the West.
Finally, it was actually Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible, who kind of consolidated people and got the boyars, the nobles together.
And they, and they got Moscow to be head of this, this confederation.
But they're already two, two, two centuries behind.
Peter the Great comes in around 1700 and he says, you know, and people don't know this either.
What did Peter the Great do?
And before he became czar, he decided he wanted to find out what the West is like.
And so he spent two years, right?
Two years incognito working on the wharves in Rotterdam.
Really?
Yeah.
And he comes back and he says, you know, these, these people have it right.
We don't need absolute monarchy here.
We need to westernize.
And so what he does is in typical Russian form, he outdoes himself.
He says, all right, shave off your beards and use scythes rather than sickles.
You know, this, well, he had a lot of opposition, but that started the westernization of, of Russia.
And they're being played, they've played catch up ball ever since.
They see, they see their, their future with the West.
They don't want, as much as they've improved relations with China, and this is very significant, they don't want to be a raw material supplier to the biggest, the most powerful country in the world, which will be China.
They would like to be part of the West and they see the West is doing everything from Napoleon, from, from Hitler, from just about everybody, trying to prevent them from, from, from coming into their own as a very talented, very imaginative, very, very smart people.
So that's the background to all this.
And, and with specific respect to, to Ukraine, well, this is kind of interesting because it, it shows a lot of interesting aspects.
What happened was that Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister for Russia, who is still foreign minister, but in 2008, okay, 2008, just toward the end of the Bush administration, W. Bush, what happens?
Well, there are rumors all going throughout the West that NATO is about to invite Ukraine and Georgia to become members of NATO.
Now what happened on the 1st of February, 2008, Lavrov calls Mr. Burns, Burns was the name of our secretary, our ambassador in Moscow.
He says, Mr. Burns, I need you to come to, to the foreign ministry.
So he does.
And he says, Mr. Burns, do you know what Nyet means?
Bill Burns says, yeah, I think.
I just want to make sure you know that Nyet means Nyet.
There are rumors going around that you intend to incorporate Ukraine as a member of NATO.
Please, please tell your people in Washington Nyet means Nyet.
This is the red line for the Kremlin with respect to Ukrainian membership in NATO.
Red line.
Understand that?
Nyet means Nyet.
Now, how do I know all that?
Two reasons.
There was a fellow named Chelsea Manning, Bradley Manning at the time, who decided to release a lot of State Department cables.
Now, if I've seen one cable from Embassy Moscow, I've probably seen about 10,000.
It's genuine.
It's literate.
There it is in its pure form.
And Burns played it correctly.
The title Nyet means Nyet, Russia's red line with respect to NATO, including Ukraine and Georgia.
And then he says, Lavrov told me, if you do this, there will be civil war in Ukraine and we in Russia will have to decide whether or not we have to intervene.
This would be bedlam.
This would be chaos.
There's no good reason for it.
So, please, Nyet means Nyet.
That's Bill Burns giving an accurate, to his credit, an accurate account to Wells, Cordelia Rice at the time.
So that's the 1st of February 2008.
Thanks to Chelsea Manning.
Now, and of course, Wikileaks.
Now, what happens next?
Well, two months later, on the 3rd of March 2008, there's a summit.
Top leaders of all the NATO countries in Bucharest.
Their declaration, quote, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, period, end quote.
So that's 2008.
Now it took the neocons, let's do the math here, 2014.
Well, it took them six years, but they mounted that coup.
They facilitated what happened there.
They overturned the government.
All I can say is that Cornelisa Rice is not the sharpest knife in the draw, but she pretends to know something about Russian history.
She should have known better, or maybe her surrogates, Victoria Nuland and those folks, maybe they wanted Russia to react in a very violent way.
Let's face it, this is at the bottom of all this, Scott.
Peace is very bad for business.
Now, wait, you're talking about the first coup 10 years before the maiden coup, the Orange Revolution in 2004?
No, I'm talking about that Maidan thing.
That's when it really hit the fan.
Okay, but that wasn't Cornelisa, though.
That was in the Obama years.
That's right, yeah.
So, yeah, I did that mental leap, but I'm talking about what Bill Burns...
Well, there's so many different overthrows of the Ukrainian government, sometimes it's hard to keep track.
And I think Victoria Nuland did work for Cornelisa Rice back in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, so that would count, actually.
Yeah, well, Nuland, of course, she worked for a fellow named Richard Cheney, so that's where she got her stripes.
So it is a continuity, it's just that this was one regime change too far, and if whoever was running U.S. policy in 2014 didn't understand that, Susan Rice was also not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
She studied at Stanford, and I suppose that's supposed to give you a lot of credits, but she never studied anything about Russian history, or at least she didn't remember it.
So all I'm saying here is that in the bottom line here, the analysis really has to not precede from the major considerations, and the major one is that if there's a reasonable degree of tension with Russia, if it looks like it could flare up in the Baltics or in Syria or anywhere, even though the tension is stoked by our side, it's very good.
It's very good for what Pope Francis called the blood-drenched arms traders.
Those are his words, and he said that to Congress a year and a half ago.
I remember them all standing up.
Oh, clap.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And then they sat down, and I saw some of them look in their vest pocket, make sure their latest envelope from Lockheed was there in the back pocket from Raytheon.
It was giving hypocrisy a bad name.
That's what's driving this, and it's not just the U.S., it's these global corporations that are making lots of profit from the kind of tension that is now trying to be stirred up by those who oppose, of all people who oppose Trump.
On the one sensible initiative, it's the one sensible, but it's of transcended importance to have a decent relationship with the Russians because then the big risk there is that peace might break out.
Peace is very bad for business.
Yeah, well, you would think that liberals might second-guess themselves a little bit when they see Dick Cheney and John McCain up there all day.
You know, well, I guess McCain all day and Cheney just once now, but saying, yeah, this is an act of war, them rigging the election against Hillary.
It's terrible.
We should bomb them.
Whose interests are y'all serving now?
You know what I mean?
Come on.
Snap out of it here.
Again, I don't think there's any single thing to like about Trump.
I mean, he hadn't even pretended.
He hasn't even said the word freedom once.
Like, hey, what we need is freedom because it never even occurred to him to lie to us and pretend that that's what he thinks.
That's how horrible this guy is.
He's never uttered the word once in three years of campaigning and presidenting here.
And yet they want to pick on him for wanting to get along with Russia, the other power in the world that has 6,000-something nukes at the ready.
I mean, how easy to manipulate can grown adults be?
It's completely ridiculous.
Yeah, they come out of a different generation.
You know, I remember when Russia was a real threat.
As a matter of fact, I worked very hard with my colleagues to put a lid on the competition.
Yeah, me too.
You know, I was just a kid in the 80s.
I was, you know, a child.
But I remember the Cold War.
I remember, you know, being taught about it in school.
And, of course, Ronald Reagan, to me, it looked like, you know, it was the end of detente.
I didn't know the term detente, but I knew that it was the renewal of brinksmanship and that that was really dangerous and that I had been reassured that nobody wants nuclear war.
So there's probably not going to be one.
But there could accidentally be one with all this tough guy talk and all the, you know, intervention going around the world.
And it was a dangerous time.
And I remember the palpable sense of relief when it all started coming apart and when the wall came down and the people started fleeing west and then ultimately Christmas Day 91 when Gorbachev resigned.
I mean, this was the miracle of miracles.
That the whole USSR would come apart without a war?
That it would just be over?
The difference, the night and day difference between Cold War, brinksmanship, MX missiles and all of this crap versus, hey, look, it's over, was, you know, I guess, like you're saying, people don't remember that.
Yeah, it was just slightly less exhilarating in the 70s.
And I'm a little older than you.
And I was chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch in the 70s.
And it wasn't Nixon.
I'm sorry, it wasn't Reagan.
It was Nixon who first talked about, if I trust, can you guys in CIA verify?
And we said, well, you know, what do you mean?
He said, well, you know, if we limit the number of ICBMs or SLBMs, sea-launched or, you know, the bombers, can you verify that the Russians aren't cheating?
And we said, well, how soon would you have to know?
And, you know, the answer came back, well, what do you think, two weeks, a month?
And we said, yes, sir, we can.
Now, I was in Moscow in May of 1972 when Nixon came over and signed what we'll call the SALT agreements, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement.
I had three people in my branch working on that, one with the delegation that negotiated it, one working from the military side, and one reporting to Director Helms and others about how the negotiations were going.
And I was there when that agreement, the main agreement being the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty Agreement was signed.
Now, what did that do?
That put a lid on the strategic confrontation because it said, look, you know, if one side thinks that they can make a first strike on the other and get away with it, in other words, there would be no retaliation worth fearing, well, that's very, very unstable.
And so let's do this.
Let's ban missile defense.
Now, we're at work on it and we have already the rudimentary system.
So let's just ban it to two missile defense sites in each country.
Now, two missile defense sites in each country can never give anyone the idea that they would be immune from retaliation.
It's just too big a country and they'd never work.
So let's limit it to two.
And they did.
And that was the only treaty that was signed in May of 1972.
But it was a biggie.
Why?
Because it created this balance of terror.
Now, nobody likes terror, but I like balance.
OK, now what happened?
Fast forward.
2001, George W. Bush comes in.
What's the first thing he does?
He revokes the treaty.
He says, we're out of here.
I think there was a six month window where you could legally get out of the treaty.
And he did that.
So.
Take this back to Ukraine.
Here's Putin.
He's looking at these little missile defense emplacements in Romania, in Poland, in the Black Sea, in the Baltic Sea.
They're surrounding Russia with these missile defense units.
And Putin says publicly, why are you doing this?
Why are you doing this?
And they're saying, well, because Iran, Iran might have a strategic missile.
We need to defend everybody.
Now they have a 10 year agreement with Iran where can't possibly get that capability.
So what's it against now?
Well, maybe North Korea.
Scott, look at the globe.
I mean, North Korea is going to attack Poland.
So Putin is trying to get people to understand.
Look, it's not paranoia.
We know that this is being built against us, but we don't understand exactly why.
In fact, if you go back to when Bush said all this, everybody just laughed.
Nobody even took it seriously.
You had even I think European leaders were on video laughing at.
Oh, yeah, we're pretending that this is about Iran or something like that.
And it was a joke.
And Putin laughed about it, too.
And then Obama came and said the same thing.
And everyone pretended to be all somber.
Yeah, we really have to protect the Poles from their, you know, legendary timeless enemies, the Persians.
Yeah.
So, you know, just kind of bottom line on national missile defense.
There was great opposition.
Guess by whom?
By the reathons, by the Lockheeds, by all defense institutions to quitting the anti-missile defense regime.
And so there was great pressure on us.
And I remember this really well in the 80s to say that the Russians were violating the ABM, that they were doing the kind of experimentation and analysis that was violating the ABM.
Well, they weren't.
It was all based on the use of one Russian word in a Gretschko, the defense minister's speech.
So we laid that aside.
We were able to convince the policymakers that they couldn't tell that from the rhetoric.
And then what happened?
Whoa.
They found a great big installation in a place called Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.
And my friends, the imagery interpreters said, Ray, this looks like an anti-ballistic missile radar forbidden by the ABM treaty and its and its codicils.
So we looked at that really close.
Two weeks, two weeks, we went to Reagan and we said they're violating the ABM treaty.
Now, what did Reagan do?
You know, in the old days, this may seem arcane.
Reagan reached out to the Russians and say, you know, we think you're violating the treaty.
And oh, no, no, no, we're not.
Well, here's some photos.
Take a look at them.
It took three years, three years to negotiate with the Russians.
And what did they do?
They tore it down.
OK, now, did we were there people pressing to obliterate that site?
Of course, there were all these guys in the blue suits that can do these wonderful things from the air and incur no danger to them.
So they're there.
They want to blast that thing away.
But Reagan, to his credit, said, no, let's we have a treaty.
Let's pursue it.
Let's get them to admit what they did was wrong and get them to destroy it.
And they did.
So what's happening now?
Well, Putin is looking at all these these installations going on the periphery.
And he says, look, the the U.S. says, well, these missiles can't really threat our ICBM capability because they can only go a thousand kilometers.
But we know and they know that in three years they're going to be able to go two thousand miles.
It's the same launchers, but they'll be able to go two thousand kilometers.
And then five years after that, five thousand kilometers.
And that will, in fact, put our retaliatory capability at great danger.
We'll be back to where we were before 1972.
The term of art was launch on warning.
So you've got these people really on tenterhooks.
You've got you've got a flock of geese coming over from Norway and they're misidentified as some sort of ICBM from the U.S.
And you've got the end of the rest of us.
Now, that's not an exaggeration.
You mentioned before accident.
Well, there was almost conflagration in 1983 because there was a false alarm.
Now, things were able.
Archer, you're talking about.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Man, you got a good memory.
Let me let me reconstruct it from my memory.
I was briefing the president's daily brief at that time.
And what happened first was on the 1st of September, the Korean airliner KL 007 was shot down over Siberia.
Now, was it in Russian airspace?
Of course it was.
It had gone astray.
Did the Russians realize it was a civilian aircraft?
No.
And we know that now.
No.
Did the U.S. know that the Russians mistakenly shot that down?
Yes, we knew.
Did the Russians know we knew?
Of course they knew.
We knew.
Yet we went to the U.N. and we we aired intercepts that completely obscured the fact that the Russians did this by mistake.
Even Shultz, you know, this was the bandwagon.
You defamed Russia no matter how you could, even though you knew that your charges were dishonest.
The tension went way up.
I think Andropov was the head of the party in those days.
And what happens next?
Well, just a couple of just a month or two later, the Reagan administration.
Well, actually, it was the Defense Department runs this incredibly genuine or accurate or simulation of U.S.
Soviet in those days that conflagration are about to you know, it was it was a real life scenario where the Russians mistook it for the real thing.
Now, what happened?
Mel Goodman, a colleague of mine, was one of the leaders of Soviet analysis.
And he could see that Bobby Gates, who was the chief of analysis, was letting this happen.
So Goodman went directly to Bill Casey and he said, Mr. Casey, I don't know if you are aware of this, but the Russians think this is the real thing.
Would you go down and tell the White House to knock it off?
Tell it.
Tell the tell the Defense Department to stop encrypting everything.
So the Russians think the worst of this.
And Casey, to his credit, to his credit, this time went down to the White House and said, hey, you know, the Russians really think we're going to attack them.
Would you knock it off?
They knocked it off, you know, not very long before the Russians were going to, you know, kind of launch on warning.
So that was 83 at a period of very high tension.
The KAL shoot down on the 1st of September, 83.
Very similar to the MH17 shoot down over Ukraine.
Blamed on the Russians, but without any convincing proof.
Hey, is it true that is it true that the Russians had a spy inside NATO who had reassured them, don't don't freak out, it's OK, it's just an exercise, I swear to God, and had talked them down?
I wouldn't have been in a position to know that it's entirely conceivable.
And so we owe a debt of gratitude to him as well.
What I do know is that we're really close to the brink.
I also know there have been several other instances.
So we've been incredibly lucky.
And this launch on warning thing where, you know, what it comes down to in practical terms is that if Putin realizes that with these enhanced crews and other missiles that are supposed to be for missile defense, when he realizes and his generals realize that they have the capability of obliterating his ICBM force, at least the near ones there in near Siberia, then he's got he's got to adopt this launch on warning situation.
And, you know, we're all cinder.
It's it's that serious.
And there's no real.
So so, you know, your listeners are probably saying, well, McGovern, come on.
So why why are we building this thing?
Well, let me go back to one other historical thing.
And that is when when Reagan met with Gorbachev and in Reykjavik.
OK.
And Gorbachev said, hey, look, why don't we.
Yeah, that's an idea.
I'm willing to destroy all my nuclear weapons if you do the same.
And now Reagan, he had a sort of simple outlook on life and that sort of appealed to him.
And so he went to his advisers and he says, you know, why don't we do this?
You know, the other countries, we could verify that they were complying with that.
Why don't we do this?
And he was like, no, no, no.
That will risk your Star Wars project.
We are going to be able to defend the whole country from from any attack.
So why should we buy into this thing?
Now, that was Fritz Ehrmarth and other people working at the National Security Council.
An incredible chance for nuclear disarmament was blown.
Why?
Because Lockheed Raytheon, to which many of these advisers ended up working, working in, didn't want to give up all the money they would make on this missile defense system, which has been accurately described as the most blatant corporate welfare system ever devised by man.
OK, billions and billions of your and my tax dollars a year.
Now, one last thing here.
Two years ago, this came up at Valdai.
Valdai is the kind of big seminar that they invite academics and government officials and news people in near Sochi in the Black Sea area of Russia.
So Putin is up there on the dais and there are other people up there, including our former ambassador, Jack Matlock.
Now, Jack is a friend of mine.
He's among the brightest guys in the world.
He did an incredibly good job under Reagan, under George H.W. Bush in trying to work out a peaceful arrangement with Russia after the Berlin Wall fell and Russia imploded.
He was the second to last ambassador to the USSR, right?
Well, he was the last.
I interviewed him.
He told me he was second to last.
There was one more for like two or three months.
Oh, yeah, that's after the USSR.
OK, yeah.
So anyhow, he's there.
And the subject of George W. Bush opting out of the ABM Treaty, which I explained before was the kernel force for mutual assured destruction and therefore some balance of power.
Gorbachev, I'm sorry, Putin asks Matlock, hey, if you didn't agree with leaving the, you know, rescinding your part in the ABM Treaty, well, how do you feel about it now?
And Matlock says, and this is kind of embarrassing for him, he says, well, you know, you're misinterpreting it.
It's not really designed against Russia.
And Putin looks at him and Matlock says, no, it's it's basically it's a jobs program.
Right.
You know, I wish that I wish that someone would explain to Putin that this whole Cold War is put on.
You don't need to launch on warning because really it the whole thing is a jobs program for executive vice presidents at Lockheed, not for schmucks.
But still, it's corporate welfare first and foremost and doctrine later.
Yeah, they would argue that, you know, not only the CEOs, but all these people need jobs.
So Putin says, Mr. Ambassador, can you persuade me that there are no other needs for your economy for all this money and for this?
This is a jobs program.
It was just so unfortunate because I'm sure Jack.
Right.
He should have just said no.
See, the Congress doesn't consider the national interests at all whatsoever.
They've never heard of it.
They're only their own interests.
And that's the that's the key to this encryption, this puzzle here.
They don't care about us.
That's the answer.
Wait, let me ask you.
Let me ask you one more thing before we go here, because I got to let you go in five minutes.
But I haven't asked you about your article yet, which is about the deep state, the surveillance state behind Russiagate.
And who it is in America.
And this is sort of a nice little segue here.
Right.
The same people who are fomenting this Cold War, who are behind this whole snow job on on Putin and Trump and the election in 2016 and all of the rest of this.
So go ahead and tie it all up for us, Ray.
Well, you know, in all this business about Russia being responsible for everything, including Trump.
And that's the key here.
Everyone should realize, you know, that Hillary Clinton could not have possibly won because she was a deeply flawed candidate.
No, no, no, that couldn't be.
It's got to be something else.
And who could the Russians?
OK, that's the first thing.
There's blind hatred.
Blind hatred for Trump.
And that's coloring the the analyses of many people who in the past got it right.
That's really hard, but it is blind.
OK, so that's the big thing.
The other thing is Trump wants to deal with the Russians.
And we already talked long enough about how that hurts the the blood drenched arms traders.
So what do we have here?
We have a new wrinkle into all this, namely that Trump tweets that he's been wiretapped by the previous administration.
Now, was he wiretapped?
No.
Wiretapping went out about three decades ago.
Nobody wiretaps anymore.
What do they do?
They have blanket surveillance, electronic surveillance.
The NSA knows everything.
Intercepts.
I know this is mind boggling, but it's true.
They intercept everything over the over the system, over the network.
They know what's going on.
So is it true that that Trump was surveilled?
Yes.
And this is the key.
Everyone, everyone, all caps is surveilled.
So is it true that people in the intelligence community as a basis, as as a result of the surveillance, were able to get the true names of people working with him and for him and under the campaign and him himself?
Yes, that is true.
It's it's it's very true.
Ask Bill Binney.
And so is it true that they get these names in a minimized, in a masked way, or as in my day, razored out of these transcripts?
No, that's not true.
The heads of the FBI, the heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the heads of the CIA, as well as NSA, get true names before they are encrypted.
And so what's the point of all this?
John Brennan was able to give dirt from these very sensitive intercepts.
You got to tell him John Brennan, the most recent head of the CIA and at the end of the Obama administration.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so he gave them to the New York Times, the Washington Post.
Matter of fact, the Wall Street Journal was irate.
They complained openly and loudly.
Brennan doesn't talk to us.
He always just talks to the New York Times.
So for these three months, October, November, December, Brennan was releasing this information as a way to defame Trump, as a way to say the Russians have him in there, as a way to say that without the Russians, Trump would never have won, to delegitimize him.
And after the Electoral College did their deed, despite attempts by the administration to interfere with that, then it was a case of making sure, making sure that Trump is so hindered from reaching out for a decent relationship with the Russians that he can't do it.
And that's worked so far.
But I do know that Trump behind the scenes is working with the Russians to prevent what could happen in Syria, for example, as we jointly go out against ISIS and to reduce tensions to the degree they can be reduced until such time as he can get out under this superimposed cloud and get people to realize that there is, I'll say this twice, there is no reason in God's heaven, no reason in God's heaven, where if he reached out to Vladimir Putin and said, look, we don't need a lot of these extra troops in the Baltics or in Poland.
If we pull them out, will you pull out your troops?
And Putin, in my view, would say, absolutely.
No problem.
You put them in first.
We're reacting.
No problem.
And there would be lots of room for a detente, for a rapprochement and for the kind of deals that we talked about before, first and foremost, the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
Right.
And even better than that.
Right.
I mean, this is the thing that just I don't get it.
You know, this is the one place where Trump's at least instincts, I don't know if you can characterize them as thoughts, really, but his, you know, his leanings are toward, hey, let's work something out.
But now he's in this political jam where he's being accused of all of this BS.
And he keeps trying to tweet out, hey, Americans, don't believe it.
It's all a lie.
And he's right.
But he's up against the entire media consensus and and the military industrial complex and the liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton sore losers and everybody else.
And I think they're winning on the narrative.
And yet he's the president.
Why doesn't he just invite Putin to dinner?
Come on, man.
Come to D.C.
I'll take you to the opera.
We'll go and we'll do the thing, whatever.
We'll go and and you can have the penthouse suite at the Trump Tower.
And we'll do a giant arms reduction pact and we'll stick it in the face of all the haters.
Right.
Oh, you think I'm a traitor, huh?
Watch this.
I'm going to reduce our nuclear arsenal by 70 percent or why not?
I mean, it's still more than enough nukes to kill us all.
Leftover.
He could do that and it would be, you know, good politics.
Use judo on him.
Kick their ass.
Outflank the left from the left.
Be more anti-nuclear weapons than any liberal in politics in America.
And watch him choke on that.
Right.
Do something smart.
And instead, what's he doing?
He's just sitting there taking it.
Well, he's not actually.
And he has a big ally in the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
Now, this is the story.
And I would really be unashamed to recommend that you read what Bill Binney and I wrote yesterday and published on ConsortiumNews.com.
It's also on my RayMcGovern.com.
And Antiwar.com.
No longer young.
Now, did Halbarjee ever get any recognition for that?
No.
Everyone covered that up because it was the Israelis that killed 34 sailors, wounded 171 others of a crew of less than 300.
What happened?
Everything was suppressed until 2009.
Terry Halbarjee was a constituent of Devin Nunes in the Central Valley of California.
And Devin, when he learned about this, he said, yeah, you know, this is awful.
I'm going to I'm going to see what I can do.
He got a Silver Cross awarded to Terry Halbarjee many years after the event.
I was there.
I was incredibly impressed by this congressman's courage in stepping out from all the Congress, stepping out from the U.S. Navy, for God's sake, and giving this guy who was responsible for for the Israelis for being prevented from sinking the ship and leaving those survivors, which was clearly what they intended.
We know that from the intercepts and giving him this award.
So I have a little history with Devin Nunes.
I know that he did this.
I know that he had courage to do it and I know it was the right thing to do.
And that that helps me understand why he's doing this now, because he's been given.
And it's not the White House that given this stuff.
My guess is there was somebody with the intelligence community that said, hey, you know, all this all this hate Trump stuff is really, really bad.
And when Trump says he's wiretapped, well, literally speaking, the petty foggering lawyers will say, oh, no, no.
But is he surveilled?
Of course he is.
Here's the proof.
I'm going to tell an honest guy.
I'm going to tell Devin Nunes.
And the way I'm going to tell him is a secret way.
And if he wants to tell the Democrats on his committee who are going to sabotage everything he does, he can.
In the event, of course, Nunes went and saw this information and said, my God, Trump needs to know this right away.
And he went to Trump.
I do not fault him for that in the least.
What really counts here and what Michael Isikoff with Amy Goodman this morning wouldn't address is what was in that information.
What is that information that's going to come out now?
It's going to come out gradually.
But we'll see.
We'll see.
And my bet is that Nunes, rather than being some sort of co-opted White House person, is a person he was discharging his oath under the Constitution of the United States, the same oath we all we all take to defend and protect the Constitution.
Against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I mean, honestly, no one should care whether he warned Trump, even if it was for the most crass, self-interested political reasons.
Ambition must be made to check ambition.
And this is the only hope we have for any check against the power of the permanent deep state is congressmen saying, you can't arrest me.
I'm leaking this truth.
Yeah, well, you know, just to be really clear here, my guess, and it's based on all kinds of circumstantial evidence, is that Nunes learned and wanted to tell Trump immediately, look, Comey, this Admiral Rogers from NSA, they're playing with words.
They're doing semantics.
They're saying, ah, we know he wasn't wiretapped.
We know he wasn't wiretapped.
But Mr. President, here's the proof.
That we have that you were surveilled up the, you were surveilled, blanket surveillance, like all Americans are surveilled.
And that John Brennan took these true names, gave them to the New York Times, Washington Post, in hopes of sabotaging your election, sabotaging your election by the Electoral College.
And then now sabotaging your, your, your credibility as a freely elected president.
You're not that, of course, you're a Russian stooge.
And not incidentally, preventing you from creating a more peaceful relationship with the Russians.
So here's the proof, Mr. President.
I have it.
It's in black and white.
We need to incorporate this in a way that the Democrats don't sabotage.
And I'm going to cancel the rest of the meetings this week.
And I'm going to talk to James Comey, and I'm going to say, Comey, were you playing with this word wiretap?
Yeah, you're right.
Trump shouldn't have said wiretap.
He should have said surveillance.
Is that, was that going on, Comey?
You tell me now.
Was that going on?
Are you, are you playing with these words, in other words, to fit in with the, with the indigenous here, to fit in with the prevailing wisdom, such as it is?
So I think Nunes will be vindicated here.
I think it's gonna be really tough for him.
But I have, as I say, this, this experience of him having courage in the past, and some, some integrity.
So I thought that Bill and I should get this thing out yesterday.
And we were hoping that people like Amy Goodman would go to us.
But of course, she went to an established guy like Mike Isikoff, who writes books, really good books.
He's not real good on things like weapons of mass destruction, or on journalistic issues like this one.
Yeah, I don't know what's up with her.
I mean, I think, well, I don't know, I never really watched her show religiously or anything.
But it used to be pretty good from time to time, there'd be breaking news and really good analysis on there.
And some of my same favorite guests like yourself and that kind of thing.
But I think it probably started back when she sided with Juan Cole on attacking Libya in 2011.
That was when I started hearing more and more people saying, geez, you see Amy Goodman lately.
So I don't know.
Business is business, I guess.
Yeah, in her defense, I would say she is excellent, unparalleled on things like Standing Rock, on things like the problems that people of color are having in our country.
I think she's excellent.
I watch her, I do watch her every morning that I can.
On foreign affairs, she's, she's in over her head.
She doesn't have really good people advising her.
And she is, I would suggest, blinded by hatred for Trump, and willing to buy in, oh, you know, big story.
She's a big supporter of Hillary that came out in her reporting before the election.
So, you know, this is really hard to, even for a professional, even for a very admired in my, from my perspective, profession like Amy Goodman, you're all susceptible to this kind of sickness of not being able to see that there could be some, some good in these hated characters.
And it's a very, very unfortunate thing.
Who's left?
Well, I think we intelligence analysts and analysts, I was saying just the other day, I prepared the President's Daily Brief, not only, not only for Reagan, but for Nixon, and for Ford.
Now, maybe you have an idea of the mental gymnastics that my colleagues and I had to go through, to make sure that we weren't prejudiced by what Nixon was doing.
We were just during Watergate, that we weren't that we were serving up pure, unadulterated, unadulterated, factual evidence that we could support irrespective of how much we hated what he was doing.
Okay.
So I have a lot of experience in this.
Maybe, maybe that really helps us to be kind of divorce ourselves from, from how much Trump is, is rightly criticized in other areas and say, well, in this one, could he be right?
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Ray McGovern, 27 years as a CIA analyst, head of the USSR division and all of that.
Briefer for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Reagan years, and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
If you want him to come and give an anti-war speech to your group, preferably somewhere on the East Coast, I think, contact Tell the Word.
Read him at ConsortiumNews.com and at RayMcGovern.com.
Oh, and Antiwar.com as well.
Thank you very much, sir.
Most welcome.
All right, y'all.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out ScottHorton.org slash interviews for the interviews slash show for the Q&A stuff.
Email me Scott at ScottHorton.org or tweet me at ScottHortonShow if you want to ask me questions for the Q&A stuff.
Otherwise, find all the latest interviews posted up at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow first.
Thanks.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause, or campaign, and you need stickers to help promote, check out TheBumperSticker.com at TheBumperSticker.com.
They digitally print with solvent ink, so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old-style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold TheBumperSticker.com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it, and there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me, too.
Let TheBumperSticker.com help you get the word out.
That's TheBumperSticker.com at TheBumperSticker.com.
