5/11/18 Grant Smith on Black Cube, the Iran Deal, and who stands to gain

by | May 24, 2018 | Interviews

Grant Smith returns to the show to discuss The Black Cube, a private intelligence firm for hire. Smith and Scott discuss who might be behind the Black Cube investigations into prominent supporters of the Iran Deal, including friend of the show Trita Parsi. Smith then shares the details of the Free Trade Agreement and discusses NEWMEC, which began in the 1960s when Israel stole weapon’s-grade uranium from the United States. Finally the two discuss the reality of Israel’s nuclear weapons and “qualitative military edge” in the Middle East.
Grant F. Smith is the author of a number of books including “Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America” and “Divert!”. He is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen CashThe War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.LibertyStickers.comTheBumperSticker.com; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott.

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I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it.
I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came.
He saw us and died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our good friend Grant Smith.
He wrote the book Big Israel about the Israel lobby and a bunch of books before that all about the Israel lobby and their power and influence and criminal activities in America.
Like eight or 10 of them, literally, seriously, figuratively, something right around there.
And he writes regularly for antiwar.com.
This one is called Israel uses intelligence cutouts to target the US.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Grant?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me back again.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, you know what?
I didn't mention the name of your organization.
Our organization is named IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.
That's the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
You might even do just search site.pdf and just see what you get.
You never know what you might find.
Okay.
You can get content all the way back to 2003.
This is not a new organization doing research starting yesterday.
It's been around a while.
Yeah, this is good news.
And how many books is it now in the lobby?
I wish you hadn't asked me that, but it's at least five just on the lobby.
Well, there are a couple of others on trade specifically and a couple on just neoconservatives, which I guess you could say that's about the Israel lobby since one of their core elements is advancing Israel.
So yeah, let's say between five and 12.
The great Grant Smith.
So, now, who did what?
What's a Black Cube?
I don't know the thing.
Tell me the thing.
Well, Black Cube is a new cutout that has surfaced twice in the popular press, or the mainstream press mainly.
It's doing what is called private intelligence.
So it's out there for hire.
You can hire Black Cube, which doesn't have any presence in the U.S. as far as anyone can tell, to go after your enemies.
And they will create pretexts to contact your enemies and try and get any sort of damning information about them that can be used to get them out of whatever problem they're causing for you.
This Black Cube first surfaced, oh, and by the way, they're heavily embedded with Mossad, former Mossad officers from Israel.
So you can hire Black Cube to do private intelligence work for you.
And the first time it really came onto the radar was when Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced producer, had hired Black Cube to try to shut up all of these women accusers that were going after him and outing him and trying to get them minimized before any stories could come out about him.
Well, the stories came out ultimately, and the company's basically out of business at this point.
But Black Cube also went after Ben Rhodes, one of the former Obama administration national security advisors who helped usher through the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA.
And it even went after Trita Parsi, who's on this show constantly talking about U.S.-Iran relations because they wanted to get some dirt that would help them with their drive to keep Americans or change American opinion about the Iran nuclear deal and believe it's every bit as bad as the Trump administration says it is.
So that's Black Cube for you.
They do the bag jobs.
And who exactly do we know hire them to do this job on Rhodes and Parsi here?
Well, that's unclear to me.
But what is clear is that the interest, the who benefits question is answered.
Who benefits?
Israel.
Who else benefits?
The Israel lobby.
Why do you point to them?
Because they've been the two principal forces against the Iran nuclear deal.
Well, and the Trump administration as well on this one.
I mean, he's pushed on the rack when it comes to this issue, leading the parade.
Right.
But where did he get the idea?
I really think that when you look at his three financial benefactors.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, no question about that.
But I'm just saying in terms of who could have been behind hiring them, it could have been the White House themselves or their cutouts doing it rather than necessarily Israelis.
It could have.
But they were invested in the idea by whatever point, right?
That's what that's what some are saying.
I don't find that to be as plausible as thinking that it could have just been the Israeli government or Netanyahu's office in particular, because what's Black Cube?
You know, it almost self identifies as an impenetrable box that you're never going to really find out who hired them.
Who's going to subpoena Black Cube?
You can't.
I mean, they don't even have a U.S. presence.
But to your point, yes, that's what people are saying.
And of course, with the frenzy, if it goes anywhere, it's not going to go toward Black Cube.
It's going to go back toward the Trump administration as far as attempted accountability.
I guess it was.
And you know what, man?
I'm so sorry.
I've been so far behind on everything.
There was this story in The Guardian here by Julian Borger, who not only did I not read this whole article, I didn't, I did read part of it, but I wasn't able to get him on the show about it.
But I guess his reporting was that it was the Trump guys that that had hired him to do it.
Aids to the president.
Right.
Yeah, I'm aware of that story.
So that's what I was referring to that I meant to say.
Well, and now you see this is piled on to, oh, gee, the Trump administration is hiring, you know, basically foreign spies to go against Americans who are for this deal.
You know, OK, but until he puts out some names and canceled checks, I mean, again, I think we're all free to.
Well, in either way, which is worse, seriously, I mean, the Israelis intervening in this way or the president himself intervening in this way are just about as bad.
And you know what?
For whatever reason, Ben Rhodes, I guess, has been made into this big lightning rod for being, you know, not for, you know, all the worst things that Obama did, but for trying to usher through the Iran deal and things like this, that people would demonize him.
But if you just look at it, if we're talking about ex-presidents, National Security Advisor and the Israelis running an op against him or this, you know, pseudo private spy agency spinoff of Mossad basically working, whether they're working for Netanyahu or whether they're working for, you know, actual GOP party headquarters or whoever, that's, you know, it would seem to me to be crossing a line in terms of at least the symbolism of how this system is supposed to operate.
Right.
Well, you know, this this reminds me of a case near and dear to both of our hearts, I think, which was, you know, the the documents that came out about the Niger uranium, which were forgeries and someone had broken into their embassy in Europe and carefully concocted some fake documents to implicate Iraq before the Iraq invasion.
Cutouts are active everywhere and you never really get to know who hired them.
I mean, at some point, a story comes out that makes people throw up their hands and say, oh, well, you know, someone just hired this sort of shadowy broker in Europe to do the Niger documents, which just happened to provide the pretext that the Bush administration wanted, which just happened to be aligned with Israeli policy and the lobby's policy, although they weren't totally out public about it.
And you're just supposed to just forget about that.
And for that whole imbroglio, the FBI files have not even yet been released.
I mean, people have been trying to get them, but, you know, there's a finality to the whole story of that cutout operation.
And people just let it go.
They say, well, that's just what happens and move on.
But this stuff is important.
And that's why I link it back to the subject of one of my books, by trade, the whole FTA, which is probably the only case where you can say, OK, folks, this is how much the cutoff the cutout operation costs America.
Yeah.
So talk all about that.
The FTA.
Right.
So this free trade agreement is sort of one of the ongoing stories that I follow, along with New Meck and a number of others, total size of the lobby, whatever.
But the free trade is the book.
Nice pun there.
I see what you did.
That's good.
Right.
Well, you know, it is spying.
It's trading as well.
In the mid 1980s, Israel really needed to fix up its economy.
And one of the ways to do that was to juice exports.
And they managed to spur exports by getting the U.S. to near unilaterally lower all of its tariffs under the moniker of America's first free trade agreement.
And it's not popular, particularly if you are of the belief that comparative advantage works, which I am.
It's not popular to be against free trade agreements.
But this is not a free trade agreement.
This was, again, something that basically locked U.S. exports out of Israel and allowed them to export to the U.S. with less barriers.
So how did that free trade agreement come about?
Well, there was intense, near unanimous opposition by U.S. industry, Monsanto, Sunkist, labor organizations.
Everybody who was exporting to Israel was saying two things.
Number one, we don't want a free trade agreement with Israel.
Number one, it's an inconsequential market.
And number two, this will just be a Trojan horse for doing other policy giveaways under the guise of trade agreements.
So we don't want it to happen this way.
And that put AIPAC in a bind because they were lobbying for Israel, as they always do, and wanted the free trade agreement to pass.
And so what did they do?
They got a cutout, which was Dan Halpern, Israeli minister of economics, who acquired all of the classified information that the industries had supplied to the International Trade Commission, which is a U.S.-based outfit, which was in charge of free trade agreement investigations, kind of like the GAO, but for trade.
All these industries had submitted classified, or what information that was government classified, saying, here's why we don't want a free trade agreement with Israel.
Halpern acquired a copy of it, gave it to AIPAC, AIPAC copied it and used it to lobby against each specific concern that the U.S. Bromine Alliance, the orange growers, canneries, industrial goods makers, pharmaceutical companies, all of them to overcome their opposition.
And they did get the free trade agreement passed.
And why you can calculate the damage assessment is you can simply look at a chart, which we handily provided in the article at antiwarded.com today, which is, again, called Israel uses intelligence cutouts to target the U.S.
It reversed a formerly somewhat balanced trading relationship, and it's become nothing but pure bilateral deficit for the U.S.
If you do the math and adjust for inflation, there's $170.72 billion deficit with Israel since the trade agreement was enacted.
And that's more than any other bilateral trade deficit to date.
And so this is another story that nobody else follows, but the consequences of allowing the cutout to just get away with this kind of activity and letting AIPAC just get away with this type of activity, the FBI investigation went nowhere because the cutout was able to plausibly threaten to claim diplomatic immunity.
These things have costs and consequences.
You may be talking in a few months, the U.S. is in a war with Iran, Black Cube, the cutout would have played a small role.
And we don't even know what their full mandate was to target and discredit the JCPOA.
It may be far broader than anybody knows.
But the point of the article is these things have costs and there should be a lot more reporting and follow up than simply, oh, was there, you know, was it this?
This particular person in the Trump administration?
No.
Why is a firm like this allowed to even participate in this type of event?
And I think you've joked about it.
I've joked about it.
Many people have.
This is Israelgate.
This is a far bigger story than Russiagate.
And the problem is Israelgate has been going on since 1948.
And again, nobody follows the story.
Nobody wants to touch this because they will get backlash pressure.
It's not a career enhancing move to report on this sort of thing.
But it's absolutely vital that people know about it.
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Hey, I know about an Israel cut-out influence operation.
Tell them about NUMEC, Grant.
I don't know the NUMEC situation.
Well, NUMEC is important because it was, according to the CIA, an Israeli operation from the beginning.
And if you go to israellobby.org slash NUMEC, you can see the quotes from the CIA officials who publicly said that, something they'd never do anymore.
But NUMEC was a front company that got itself into the business of receiving U.S. weapons-grade uranium for processing into naval fuel and diverted enough fuel to manufacture a dozen atomic simple gun-type weapons, shipped it to Israel.
There's absolutely no doubt that NUMEC uranium wound up at Dimona because the CIA took samples and told the Department of Energy that's what had happened.
And it was a case, I'm not sure I would call that a cut-out, more of a front company operation where the plant owners, three of them were connected to the Zionist Organization of America, one of them was connected to Israeli intelligence, the others were going there every month.
They clearly invited in the Lakam, which is like Mossad, except they did economic espionage for the nuclear program, invited them into the plant, eyewitness accounts of Zalman Shapiro, the plant owner, overseeing shipments of highly enriched uranium to Israel at Dimona.
The story is never present in any discussion of the U.S. stance toward proliferation in the Middle East.
The fact that Israel actually stole weapons-grade uranium from the United States to build their weapons, that's an unspeakable, you can't preserve the narrative if you lay that on the table and just say, oh yeah, and by the way, back in the 1960s, Israel did in fact pillage a plant through a front operation, and we never did anything about it.
Yeah, and left an environmental disaster behind, because who cares about any long-term consequences when the whole thing is a front operation anyway?
That's true, and there are people in Pennsylvania who are very exposed, who just don't want to know about the Israeli connection, so you've got the local paper just saying, oh, we don't think they were actually an Israeli front company, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and you've got environmental people saying, well, whatever happened, you know, we just want to clean up the mess, and the people who've gotten cancer, they need to be compensated.
Well, none of those things are happening.
You know, you could do a damage assessment kind of like we did with the free trade agreement and just say how much in terms of cancer deaths, infections, diseases, plus the cleanup costs, which are going to be, according to the U.S. Corps of Engineers, up to $250 billion when they finish it in 2025, you know, that, how much is that going to cost?
Well, that's going to cost more than the free trade agreement, that's for sure.
It's going to cost U.S. taxpayers, but even though the Americans who have been adversely infected by this have gone to court trying to seek compensation, the judges turned them down, they won't even admit that the plant caused their cancers, and this beautiful hamlet, which I visited, I gave a talk about, New Meck, you know, just a mile away from New Meck, people are concerned about this, they're interested in this story, but if the CIA were ever to release all of its documents and we went to court to get them, these people would have a real case.
They could not only sue, you know, what they're doing now, the plant owners who bought this thing sort of haplessly, thinking it was a legitimate company, they could sue Israel, they could say, you know, we actually want you, we're going to get our compensation out of this massive aid that you're getting every year, we're going to resolve this problem.
And so everyone's kind of on the take in this situation, everyone is not being forthright and accountable about the smuggling operation.
We spent more than two years in court trying to get the most sensitive CIA documents on this, and they would not release them.
I'm sure they would have rather burned them like they did the torture tapes and released them publicly.
All right, so now back to today's point, though.
These guys picking on my man, Trita Parsi.
That's not okay.
Yeah.
No, it's not okay.
So tell us about that part of it.
Well, I don't know much about that part of it other than what Trita said on Democracy Now!
, which is that there were actual transcripts made of his conversations.
He, you know, he takes a lot of inbound calls from journalists.
One of these black cube people called him and tried to, you know, pretend to be a journalist and get the story.
And he gave his standard, you know, assessment of what's going on with a nuclear deal.
But then they tried to pivot toward incriminating things like, hey, do you know these people, you know, do you have any feelings about this?
And they obviously recorded the call because someone alerted Trita Parsi that there was a transcript circulating.
And he's obviously somewhat worried about what he said, but he probably doesn't remember everything he said.
But he said, well, I know they recorded the call.
You know, they're not recording my phone line.
My response to that is, you don't know that either.
You know that they were trying to hurt you.
They may well, you know, they're an intelligence operation.
By the way, I mean, I guess I should have said Trita, for those not familiar, he runs the National Iranian American Council that works really hard on rapprochement between America and Iran.
And he worked really hard on helping to promote the Iran nuclear deal back then.
That's why I like him so much and interview him and the guys that work at his agency all the time.
I would say he's almost Gareth Porterian in his ability to keep everybody up to date.
Yeah.
Oh, and I should say he's a great author on this subject as well.
Exactly.
They've both nailed it.
You know, Gareth, I like his position a little bit better, which is manufacturing crisis.
This whole manufacturing of pretexts and fake intelligence and all this, which, again, is not covered in the mainstream media.
It's, you know, it would affect the narrative.
There would be no narrative if Gareth Porter's work or Trita's Parsi's work was commonly understood among the mainstream.
I mean, they're there, they have a certain voice and prominence, but none of their work.
You know, it's important enough to launch an intelligence operation against.
And that was the point.
It's an extremely important work.
Yeah, it certainly is.
And yeah, that's the whole thing.
I mean, there's been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu's presentation about Iran's supposed nuclear weapons research, saying, hey, come on, this is all old news and this is all, you know, past work and now it's all put to bed because we got the JCPOA and so it's great.
But of course, you know, Gareth Porter's reporting, i.e. the truth, is a much stronger argument, which is, no, the whole thing is really a scam cooked up in Tel Aviv and everybody, you know, and in fact, you know, at certain times, even David Albright has been the one debunking the lies in that, you know, supposed smoking laptop or whatever.
You have to go back and check the history very carefully.
But we know that this stuff came from the Israelis and was funneled through the Mujahideen cult, communist terrorist cult, and that the documents amounted to a lot of pretty good educated guesses about what Iranian nuclear weapons research might look like, but at the end of the day, did not hold up.
Right.
With fatal flaws, obsolete missile diagrams, etc., etc.
And you both covered that and people who listen to your show know this, but, you know, John Q. Public knows that Giuliani is at an MEK rally saying, next year in Tehran, we're going to go to Tehran.
Can you imagine?
Wouldn't it be funny if they actually parachuted Myram Rajavi into Tehran to see what would happen?
Yeah.
He'd be like Ahmed Chalabi wandering around in a black t-shirt.
He'd look ridiculous.
But I mean, that's what we have.
That's what we have as consumers.
And I really, you know, again, I really think that there needs to be a conference or a giant program just called Israelgate, what you need to know.
And everyone who talks about this and can take it from that perspective needs to come up and just say, look, this is what Israelgate has been doing since 1948.
And if you want to live in the world formed by this narrative and this framing, here's what's going to happen to your kids.
They're going to need a lot more people if they want to go to Tehran.
On the other hand, if they want to preserve the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, they need to drag Netanyahu off the stage at CNN where he's saying, no, I'm not going to talk about that and just say, look, we know that you have a nuclear program and now we're going to start implementing the Arms Export Control Act.
No more money for Israel until we can get your nuclear program out in the sunlight.
And then we'll have the credibility to talk about nonproliferation.
But as it is now, it's kind of a cesspool of misinformation and lies, and nobody has any credibility on the side anymore.
Yeah.
Hey, no, one thing is, too, is doesn't it seem like maybe if everybody just had to fess up that Israel's sitting on a bunch of H-bombs, that that would really undermine the case that America must always protect Israel, no matter what?
Because no one's going to try to really take them on if it could cost them their capital city, and so they won't.
No.
But those, I mean, that arsenal and that program is so ...
Oh, and counterpoint, free money.
So keep it unofficial that they have nukes so they can keep pretending that they're threatened.
I agree with you.
The whole premise of quantitative, qualitative superiority, QME, Qualitative Military Advantage, or whatever it is, which is pumped out by the Israel lobby, the whole premise of that is that Israel needs military superiority because look at all these countries that want to wipe it off the face of the map.
Well, if you put the nukes on the table, then QME vanishes, and there's no longer any justification really for saying- Which even if they didn't have nukes, there's no ...
I mean, they have so many F-16s, and modern military equipment, and transportation, and targeting, and every kind of thing.
Every kind of conventional weapon that they could get from the U.S., other than long-range bombers, they've got them, and including submarines and all this kind of thing.
Right.
But this is another cost, and we could calculate this, too.
This is another lie of omission that has a gigantic cost.
U.S. taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for QME when you don't even put the nukes on the table, and so it's just another example of the way that the entire argument has been so debased by errors of omission, well, purposeful omission, that you can't have an informed debate.
Congress never debates this stuff.
Whenever the subject of Israel's nuclear weapons comes up, they do not want to deal with it, and they won't deal with it.
Yeah.
There's a wonderful video of Chuck Schumer that Sam Husseini got him to finally spill the beans and say that, yes, he knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, and so find that video and watch it.
It's interesting.
It's like, there should be, like, light beaming down on Chuck Schumer as he says, yes, Sam, we know that Israel has nuclear weapons, but they don't want to talk about it.
Yeah.
I was just tweeting back and forth with Mordecai Venunu the other day.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, in fact, I should go ahead and say this, because people probably heard me mention this numerous times.
If you heard my interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Ellsberg told me, and I'm sure it was just a mistake in recollection, I don't know exactly what the explanation is, I haven't talked to Dan since then, but he's told me multiple times, because I asked him multiple times to make sure that I heard him right so I could quote him right, that Mordecai Venunu had told him that Israel had as many as 600 nuclear weapons, including H-bombs, and so that came up.
And so I asked him on Twitter and said, you know, can you verify that that's right?
And he said, no, that's not right.
And then he said, you know, he referred me back to the original London Times story about it, which says, you know, an estimate of approximately 200, which is the number that we always hear.
And so I quoted that back and said, so that's what you're saying?
And then he liked that.
So that's good enough, I guess.
So that's what passes for confirmation in today's digital age.
That's right.
A like.
From the original Israeli nuclear weapons whistleblower.
Well, Mordecai Venunu is just a heck of a guy.
And I wish he could come to the United States and talk.
But of course he can't.
He's a political prisoner.
So it's it's sad, really, that you can't have someone like that traveling the world as an advocate for nonproliferation, for as an advocate for disclosure.
But the cost would be too high again.
Would it benefit Israel?
No.
So is it going to happen?
It's not going to happen.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Where's the line on Israeli COINTELPRO ops inside the United States?
Where's the FBI counterintelligence division on this?
Yeah.
Well, here's what you need to know.
There used to be a mandatory report to Congress from the DNI, Directorate of National Intelligence.
It was due.
And the Senate Intelligence Committee and the DNI got together and they said, you know, this thing costs a lot of money and we're not sure that you could really take any action on it because we've got to really take out so much stuff.
So how would it be if we never do another report on economic espionage, which, by the way, Israel always figured prominently somewhere in the top three every single time they printed it?
How would it be if we just never printed that report ever again?
Would that be OK?
And the answer was, yeah, sure, forget about it.
So those reports are gone.
They're going to keep talking to Jeff Stein, though, but that's all we got now.
Yeah, well, Jeff Stein, he's great, but you can't be a spy talker, which is his Twitter handle if you've got nothing to talk about.
So, you know, there's got to be some information.
I mean, the agents themselves will complain.
But yeah, you're right.
It's a lot easier when they have a report to bring to his attention, which makes it official.
Right.
Well, we've got a FOIA into the DNI just saying, well, we know you don't do a report anymore, but how about just giving us.
You must have something internal that, you know, you can release.
No response yet.
I'll keep you posted.
Yeah.
I'll hold my breath starting here in a few.
Yeah.
Well, I don't advise it.
OK.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Grant Smith.
Thanks very much.
Come back on the show, dude.
All right, Scott.
Take care.
Very good.
The great Grant Smith ear map.
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Ear map dot org.
And the latest book is Big Israel.
For that, Spy Trade, about the trade shenanigans and spying and lawbreaking that he mentioned there.
And then, also, Divert, about Pneumek and the Israeli theft of weapons-grade uranium from their cutout company in Pennsylvania there.
All right.
Thanks.
All right.
So, you guys know the deal.
Fool's Errand dot U.S. for the book, Scott Horton dot org, and YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show for all the interviews, 4,500 of them now, going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at Antiwar dot com and at Libertarian Institute dot org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.

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