For Pacifica Radio, July 5th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I am the editorial director of Anti-War.com and the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And this week, I have a new article at Anti-War.com relevant to today's discussion, The Russian Bounties Hoax.
That's at antiwar.com slash scott.
And introducing Ron Enzweiler.
Now, he used to be with the U.S. Air Force, I guess in the U.S. Air Force, and then he worked for U.S. Aid and then the U.S. State Department.
He was in Iraq, World War II, and Afghanistan, and he wrote a book called When Will We Ever Learn, if that gives you an idea of where he's coming from here after all that experience.
And he's been writing for us at antiwar.com.
Thank goodness.
This one is called Who to Believe on Afghan Intelligence, CIA, NSA, or Pentagon, or maybe none of the above.
I don't know.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ron?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be back on with you again, and hope things are going well for you.
And your listeners here as we delve into this issue.
Yeah, man.
So it's a big one, story of the week for sure.
And maybe more than that, those dastardly Russians put bounties on American Marines and Army in Afghanistan, and they must have been killed.
And according to the New York Times, they even know who was the middleman and all of these things.
And of course, there's all politics wrapped up in it.
What did Trump know?
And when did he know it?
And why didn't he nuke Moscow in response yet?
And all these kinds of things.
I'm less interested in that angle, which is, you know, the big one for everyone else, because they're kind of running with the idea that this is all true.
But I'm still at step one of whether to believe any of this or not.
And as we talked about, you have quite a bit of experience in the government inside the national security state, and particularly in Afghanistan.
So please tell me everything you know, and think about this, sir.
Okay, well, as I point out in my article, the initial stories, even for this Russian bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan narrative, it came out pretty quickly that three different parts of our government, the CIA, the National Security Agency, also called NSA, and the Pentagon all had conflicting levels of confidence in whether this was really a story or not a story.
And that got spun by the media, as you mentioned, particularly the major publications, the New York Times, Washington Post, even the Wall Street Journal, plus the course networks, spun this thing as if it was, like you said, Scott, hard, solid intelligence that needed to be acted upon right away.
And, you know, the administration was negligent for not doing that.
And we got to take some affirmative responses.
And, you know, just to, I'll get into the, my assessment of that and these different sources of intelligence.
But we both have to step back and admit, Scott, it looked like these guys are, these guys who planted these stories and spun this thing towards a stay in Afghanistan forever mantra, are, you know, are winning the argument right now, given the fact that there's new legislation being added to the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, where they're trying to tie Trump's hands, or any president's hands, on removing troops from Afghanistan, on the allegation that this Russian story is true, and it shows some problem for the U.S. But we'll get, maybe we can sum up when we get to that.
But getting to the case here, and I've reviewed the various stories, including the, mostly the New York Times ones.
And again, as you said in your article that you published on antiwar.com, I think a day ago, there's just no solid, there's all these nebulous, anonymous sources that presumably link Russia to this payment scheme in some way, shape, or form, although there's never any solid evidence about doing that.
Matter of fact, there's a lot of contradictory evidence, just even in what is told in the stories.
But sticking with the CIA for the moment, it appears that they got involved because initially, as the story goes, some captured Taliban fighters were interrogated, probably first by special operations people.
And then they presumably brought in CIA people to interrogate them about the fact that they were actually being paid bounties by the Russians to attack U.S. soldiers.
So the CIA narrative relies on human intelligence, interrogating prisoners, which is kind of, you already got a credibility problem right there.
By the way, nobody speaks Pashto, which is what the Taliban speak.
So obviously, there's a translator involved, and he has his own spin on things in terms of how to interpret stuff.
I mentioned in my article how that commonly was a problem when we tried to deal with people in Afghanistan and even, for that matter, Iraq.
You know, you got that intermediary that distorts facts and stories, and you really don't understand exactly what you're being told.
So their story is kind of weak on that point right along.
It's just human intelligence, battlefield reports that got filtered up probably through both the military and the CIA channels and started looking.
And this presumably been going on for a long time.
So it's like there's nothing that I can tell from the various articles.
There's no real change in the facts or the situation, at least in the last 19 months, which is when this story first presumably surfaced in March of last year.
But the other articles talk about Russia and other countries being involved in Afghanistan affairs going back multiple years, which has always been true.
No change in that.
But this latest spin is kind of a new element to that.
So I think when you look at what the CIA came up with, they probably have the weakest intelligence sources on this.
And I know from my own experience that these U.S. military fatalities are very carefully investigated when they occur, and all aspects of the causes and circumstances of that fatality are looked into.
And I've never saw any reports.
Of course, I wasn't there in the last two years, but I've never seen anything where there was solid evidence of a foreign involvement in a U.S. fatality would have been documented in some after-action reports and other interrogation reports.
And it's not really clear from anything those things ever got past the first level of review just because of the source of the information and probably the unreliability.
And that gets into the fact that the other agency that weighed in on this is called the National Security Agency, which operates signal intelligence intercepts working out of Fort Meade and Maryland.
And they monitor almost all communications within Afghanistan, cell phone traffic, other sources of signal intelligence.
And apparently, because they strongly dissented with the CIA on whether this was really any link to Russia or a real bounty payment program tied to any of the money that's moving around over there, would cause me to believe that they have a higher level of surveillance and understanding.
And I mentioned in my article, I actually know three or four of the guys that work there because they used to work for me when I was in Afghanistan.
These Afghan nationals, they're multilingual.
They speak all the languages of the region.
So they actually listen to the conversations in languages that they are fluent in and can obviously directly understand what's being said and the nuances.
And the fact that the NSA came out with strong dissent caused me to believe that there was no real corroboration about any involvement, direct involvement by Russia or any other third party, foreign party, in any of these deaths of American soldiers.
They would know about it just because cell phones are very commonly used at all levels in Afghanistan.
There are these cheap Nokia phones where you buy a prepaid card and everyone has them and talks to everybody all the time.
There's a lot of that stuff going around.
And it's a very verbal society where they speak to each other.
They don't really write things down.
So that's kind of how things are communicated and deals are made and stuff like that.
So again, the fact that the NSA, which has my own personal knowledge, very competent Afghan nationals working there, intercepting phone calls, trying to pin down facts from fantasy, would make me think that's probably why the CIA and whatever involvement the military had in terms of military intelligence got kind of shot down once they could not corroborate anything.
And this will probably shock you, Scott, and your listeners.
But guess who agrees with me on that point?
I saw this guy on TV yesterday, Lindsey Graham.
He called the whole thing BS and said that the agency that has the most reliable surveillance capability, intelligence capability, has shot this down.
And he was going with that, which may be a first for your podcast, Scott, where you and your guests can actually agree with Lindsey Graham.
But anyhow, he's agreeing with us.
That's all.
But go ahead.
That's right.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
You're right.
I mean, as I said, I mean, you know, so that tells you right away what you want to know.
And then, like I said, in the military, it's not really clearly you pointed this on your article when the CIA got involved and took over from the military interrogators, this sort of thing.
But they probably would have been involved at that.
The military had some initial involvement.
But again, they operate over there because I've been on these calls myself where the commanders call around each other every day.
They talk about actionable intelligence.
They talk about six reports on significant action.
What went wrong?
Why?
How do we avoid that from happening again?
I mean, they're just really proficient in doing that.
I got to give them a lot of credit for that.
So this idea that the Pentagon then, as you know, Scott, comes out and says, I think it was on Tuesday.
Let me just get the exact quote here.
They came out on Tuesday and said the Department of Defense has no corroborating evidence at this time to validate recent allegations regarding malign activity by Russian personnel against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
And that very declarative statement, not all the if true and could be or maybes, they just flat out said we don't have any corroborating evidence, any of this is true.
And like I mentioned in my article, the DOD has no reason to hide facts on this case, because as you know, they have to report the facts and circumstances of each soldier's death back to that family.
And they're not going to lie to the family if they have any pertinent facts about why the soldier was killed and the facts around it.
I just don't believe that they would hide anything here because the public, everyone now who's had a service member killed over there in the last last two years, I think it's like 30 of them, roughly.
They're going to be wondering, gee, was my son or daughter or friend or whatever killed because of some Russian hit squad going on?
And the simple fact is, well, the DOD say, I know that we don't we can't corroborate that.
I mean, and in fact, those families might very well be calling their contacts inside the military this week and saying, was this my Johnny that got caught up in this?
And then they are owed a real answer for that.
Exactly, Scott, and that's why I think this this story is harmful for that reason alone.
You put more angst into the grieving of people who families and relatives who have members killed over there, which, by the way, we already know that the super majority, though, is not every single one.
I guess, you know, there have been some random roadside bombings, but virtually all of the Marines who have died have died fighting the Taliban down in the Helmand province.
And the Green Berets who have died have died fighting ISIS, supposedly at least in the Nangarhar there in the east.
You know, so there's not a big mystery about what's happened to them or the motive of the people they've been in firefights with.
Well, there's some facility gets bombed and you kill maybe a soldier and 15 Afghan nationals, which it's kind of hard to say they're targeting soldiers when they kill, you know, tons of Afghan nationals in the same attack.
And of course, the insider attacks, which are the most deadly thing facing the Marines in Helmand probably is, you know, their own guys that they're training, turning on them.
That's been going on since 2009 or so.
Thanks very much.
So that's the Taliban that does that.
You don't need the Russians to come up with that.
Yes.
So I did.
And when you parse through the stories, there's just just jump to the idea that Russia's involved.
I mean, there's some reporting of various cash payments being made and money being here and there that the Taliban have gone up the.
I wanted to ask you about that, because, you know, the the CIA was apparently somewhat I mean, I guess I'm inferring that it was CIA officers that talked to The New York Times.
And I guess their third piece where they kind of elaborate here, OK, here's how we know it's this guy who built a highway for us once upon a time.
And now he works for the Russians as the middleman paying all this money.
And we're really sure.
What do you think about all that?
Well, let me let me let me jump to that, because you're right, this this guy's name is Ramallah Azizi.
He lives up in presumably doesn't conduce, which is a northern province area because they rate he's the he's the alleged middleman in the third story.
I think they put out a fourth story and he presumably I'll read exactly what it says here.
U.S. intelligence reports named Mr. Azizi as a key middleman between the GRU, which is the military intelligence unit that presumably was commissioning these hit squads and the militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks.
He was among those who collected the cash in Russia, which includes intelligence files described hundreds of thousands of dollars.
OK, Scott, there's another article that says that one of it says they intercepted wire transfers from Russia to some Taliban bank account.
OK, well, Azizi wouldn't have been involved in that because, you know, if they're wiring money straight to the Taliban, it's nothing to do with these hit squad payments allegations because presumably this Azizi guy was the middleman and, you know, he had the cash in his apartment, his villa, apparently.
OK, there's a big flaw in that fact, too, because they later on and go on to talk about the money was collected cash in Russia.
They probably should have said they don't really move the money as a cash payment.
They reference the Hawala system, the wallow system in that part of the world and other parts of Middle East.
It's basically it's a bunch of they call them a lot lotteries, sort of these broker, these independent guys that move money for people on a promise and a payment.
In other words, cash never really moves through their wallet system.
But the fact is that this guy was up and conduce, let's say, commission a hit job on some soldier in Jalalabad.
How's he going to pay that soldier, the Taliban guy that, you know, presumably carries out the attack?
Well, he would use the whole system if he was doing it.
That means he wouldn't have cash in his apartment.
He would just have he would just tell the guy in Jalalabad, OK, we now owe this guy some money and the money gets sent that way through and through the whole while that's holding this money somewhere else.
In other words, money never really moves except for the last person that gets it.
So it makes no sense that this guy with the cash they found in his villa up in conduce, it used to be a true story.
Tons of, you know, shady business guys have stashes of cash in their house.
And if it's U.S. dollars, you almost know where that came from.
They come from Russia.
It came from U.S. contractors, you know, being paid and, you know, money being dispersed to the U.S. government.
So, well, I mean, any critical eye looking at that New York Times story will notice that all the corroborating evidence all through the article that fills out the article is all just neighbors saying, yeah, he's had a lot of money lately, but none of them are tying it back to any cause and effect here at all.
They're just saying, yeah, I can vouch for the fact that he has a new Porsche or whatever it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and there's all sorts of, you know, shady characters run around there.
There's drug money.
There is, you know, bribe money.
There is, you know, extortion money for, you know, getting trucks through certain parts of the country.
Well, it's widely agreed that outside of Washington, D.C., it's the most corrupt city on Earth, Kabul.
And a lot of that money just goes straight to the Taliban because, you know, when they bring all their we bring all the fuel up and all the military stuff up from the Karachi port on the Indian Ocean, they're up through up through Quetta, which is a big, you know, Taliban Pashtun area.
Then you go into Kandahar.
Guess who?
Guess who gets all the money for the security of all those trucks?
There's like a billion dollars a year of diesel fuel and aviation fuel going up that route.
The Taliban runs all those rackets to shake down, you know, the truck drivers and, you know, cause security and all that sort of stuff.
So like you said, we're paying the Taliban to fight against us, so to speak.
So there's just so much of that going on.
It's just hard.
You know, you can go through this.
Read my article, other articles out there.
It just it just smacks too much of political opportunism is the real motive behind this thing on the on the anti-Trump, the Democrat side.
And again, it gets back to what we were what we wrote about, what I wrote about in the article that we did together back last September for your Libertarian Institute.
We talked about the fact that this it always gets back to just one of the key Bagram Air Base as a military permanent military installation for the U.S. and that part of the world and all the all the agenda here with all the people on the both political sides in Washington supporting that.
That's kind of what I think this narrative on Russian paying bounties came up, Scott.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Well, and you know what I'm just kicking myself or I have been ever since I read the sentence or two in your article where you make it plain what should have been obvious to me right away was this is and this is speculation, but it's pretty clear that this leak, coordinated leak, is a response to the trial balloons about Donald Trump pulling the American troops out, not at the end of next May, but before the upcoming election.
And this is clearly a response to that.
And, you know, liberals and progressives and leftists should recognize this.
It's COINTELPRO.
And remember what that stands for?
Counterintelligence Program, right?
And this is exactly what they did against.
This was what Russiagate is.
Russiagate has always been a counterintelligence operation against the president of the United States.
First, the candidate Donald Trump, then the president elect, and then the president to try to prevent him from quote unquote getting along with Russia.
As they even told the FBI counterintelligence division told CNN, we want to if we can't get rid of him through the 25th Amendment and all this, then at least with the special counsel investigation, we can hem him in.
And so that should be the presumptive frame of this entire event.
Trump wants to end a war, a war that Obama promised would be over by 2014, six years ago, by the way.
And this is the military trying to stop him, right?
It's got you.
It's a double whammy, as you just mentioned.
They get the Russiagate, you know, the Putin, Russia, Trump thing all ginned up again because they that sort of fizzled out months ago.
And they get the idea they're creating an environment where it'll be politically infeasible for Trump to follow through on his request to the Pentagon, which, by the way, it's kind of interesting.
The article, the there's a May 27th article, The New York Times, where it basically says Trump wants to get out of Afghanistan before the elections.
He asked the Pentagon to draw up a plan.
So, you know, so from that point to a month later, they come up with this story to try to derail that program that he's putting forward for the Pentagon to speed up this exit because he probably really wants to get election credit, you know, credit for it in the election coming up, that he fulfilled his promise to his base to do that.
And the counterplay by the deep state and the military industrial complex is to trip him up on this with this idea that he's just cowering to Russia again.
It's even worse than that, Scott, because last night, two nights ago, the House Armed Services Committee marked up the Defense Authorization Act pending for this year.
And Liz Cheney and this congressman from Democrat congressman from Colorado called Jason Crow put in an amendment that passed 45 to 11.
Can you believe that?
Almost all the Democrats voted for this.
That would, in fact, require that before Trump or any president, but Trump reduces troop levels in Afghanistan below 8000 and then again below 4000.
He would have to all certain conditions would have to be met.
And if you look at what these conditions are, they're basically impossible to meet.
It's stuff like administration has to certify that taking troops out would not compromise the U.S. counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, would not increase the risk to U.S. personnel there.
We've done a consultation with allies and is the best interest of the United States that even added in the fact that they have to write a report or analysis that says the drawdown will not create a threat from the Taliban, that it will maintain the status of human civil rights.
There'll be an inclusive Afghan peace process and the capacity of Afghan forces will be maintained.
And the effect of malign actors in Afghanistan will not be of Afghan sovereignty.
Would you stop?
Please, you're killing me here.
You talk about a poison pen.
I mean, this is it.
They're trying to, I said in my article, make it politically infeasible.
They're now trying to make it illegal under U.S. law in terms of the Defense Appropriation Act.
This is Nancy Pelosi's Democrats passed this in the House yesterday.
Yes.
Now, back up one second.
That's not exactly true.
This is what's coming out of committee now, the House Armed Services Committee.
It will go to the full floor on the Democrat side.
And you know what?
You know what?
I got to say, Ron, I admire the fact that just the ridiculousness, I don't know why I use the word admire.
I enjoy that they do this outright inconspiracy with Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz, who is the absolute worst hawk in the U.S. Congress, who you would think could extort somebody into doing this for her or something.
But no, takes the lead with the Cheney brand and everything.
And these Democrats step right up and it sails right out of committee.
It's just amazing to see.
I mean, it's shocking, but not surprised, I think.
But Scott, you know, who knows what happens when this goes to the full floor?
And of course, the Senate has to pass a version of the NDAA and there's a reconciliation, et cetera.
But it's they're definitely firing some shots out there trying to make sure that Trump realizes Congress does not want troops to come out of Afghanistan.
But by the way, they also put in the same sort of conditions on taking troops out of Germany, a whole separate subject.
But in other words, they just don't want they want the endless wars and the four deployments around the world, you know, to not be restricted.
And the president authority would be now starting to be restricted by how they write the NDAAs, which is something they've never done before.
So this is a whole new level where Congress is trying to take control of foreign and military policy that was previously the province of the president.
You know, he had discretion on how, where to put troops and where to bring them home and stuff like that.
So they're trying to curtail that.
And they're just waiting for the days when Biden gets into office, if that's what happens, because they know he's got some of the most hawkish people, Scott, on his team to try to staff up the national security state apparatus in his administration.
And he's already vowed to stay.
He's vowed to stay in Afghanistan and even expand into Pakistan because he's still stuck in the year 2009, where we're doing the AfPak strategy again now and all this craziness.
Totally.
He's got Susan Rice on his high list of authorities.
He's got a woman named Averill Haynes.
People probably don't know her name, but she was behind the scenes person who ran the drone program.
She was deputy CIA director under Obama.
And she run the drone program where she approved all the kills and hits on that program.
So she is, along with Tony Blinken, the other neocon on Biden's staff, they're basically trying to turn the Biden administration into a continuation of the endless wars and all the Clinton-Obama policy that will just roll forward and never bring these troops home from the Middle East or certainly not Afghanistan.
So that's kind of the agenda behind this, is to set the attitude out there by the electorate.
And by the way, Scott, if Trump now does override this or doesn't get in, he brings troops out, they'll just use that as a wedge against him in the election, saying that you just cowered, you got out because you couldn't stand up with Putin and got chased home.
So, I mean, it'll cut either way.
It'll cut against.
Of course, Barack Obama can start a war in Libya and in Yemen without any authority whatsoever.
But now they want to say that Donald Trump can't end one when, of course, he absolutely has the constitutional authority to pull troops out of anywhere.
Congress can't stop him from doing that.
Even if they try to say he's forbidden from spending money on withdrawal, he can just do it anyway.
What are they going to do about it?
They want to impeach him for that.
I say go for it.
I think you hit it, Scott, because I do think that's what Trump will end up doing if this goes through.
He'll say, screw you.
I'm just going to get those guys out of there because I got elected to do that.
And before I'm out of office, I'm going to get it done.
I think he's got enough gumption to just do that.
And like you said, every other president has done similar things and it just won't fly.
Yeah.
No Trump supporters here, but the man wants to end one of our seven wars.
Let's all take it.
Thank you.
You know, come on.
You know, they're going to try to tell leftists and liberals that, see, if you support peace, that means you're a tool of the Russians.
You're a tool of Donald Trump and this kind of thing.
When the leftists need to shove that right back down their throat and say, no, actually, in fact, we know exactly what we believe about the war in Afghanistan.
And you absolutely are forbidden by us from being to the right of Donald Trump of all people on this issue.
If he wants out, you have to want out 10 times faster, not attack him for that.
And don't let anybody get that twisted in your brain.
We all know what's right about the war in Afghanistan, and that is canceling it immediately.
Of course, you and I are in complete agreement on that.
I've written several articles and, you know, support that having been there, having seen personally how we're hurting the Afghan people.
I mean, there's no constituents to this in Afghanistan, except the people getting rich off all the money, all the crooks in the political government.
You know, you pointed this out that, sure, the Afghan government, the Ghani government with Abdullah, you know, was the second president.
They're just giving money off the 45 billion that gets spent on the Afghan war effort.
Not all the money spent on their country, but probably about half of it actually is.
So there's a lot of money floating around, and the guys getting rich off that are just the ones who are probably making up these stories about the Taliban being paid by Russia and things like that.
So when you analyze the motives and the agenda of the various players involved here, it's a very disappointing situation for those of us who have been over there, been exposed to the wars in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and just realized what a ripoff of the American taxpayer.
It's undermining our country's standing in the world.
It's creating tens of thousands of civilian casualties.
You just kind of wonder, Scott, doesn't anybody in Washington have a conscience?
And can't they stand up to the, you know, the military industrial complex, the money and the power that is exerted on that side of the equation that just so far hasn't been able to be reined in by anybody, really?
All right, you guys, that is Ron Enzweiler.
He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
He used to work for U.S. Aid and the U.S. State Department in Iraq, World War II, and in Afghanistan.
And he wrote the book, When Will We Ever Learn?
I'm pretty sure that's how you're supposed to enunciate that.
The title of his recent piece at Antiwar.com is called Who to Believe on Afghan Intelligence, CIA, NSA, or Pentagon?
And of course, the answer is the naysayers among the three.
That's so, thank you again, Ron.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Talk to you later.
All right, you guys, and that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find my recent piece at Antiwar.com slash Scott, The Russian Bounties Hoax, it's called, and find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM every Sunday.
We'll see you next week.
