For Pacifica Radio, July 12th, 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'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and 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 introducing this morning's guest.
It's the great Gareth Porter, author of the new book, The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, but he's not the CIA guy.
It's co-authored with John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower.
That's the reference there.
But Gareth, of course, the great expert on Iran.
Previously, he wrote Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and 10 Million Articles for Interpress Service and Truthdig and Truthout and antiwar.com and now writing for The Gray Zone, where he's got this really important one, How the Pentagon Failed to Sell Afghan Government's Bunk Bounty Gate Story to U.S.
Intelligence Agencies.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back in your show, as always.
Very happy to have you here.
So the big Russia hoax, the CIA and The New York Times jerk America's chain and they fall for it again, huh?
Well, that's a good short version, I guess, of what we're up against at this point.
Yes, they've gotten away with a huge abuse of the power of the national security state here in league with their clients in Afghanistan, is the way I would portray it in one simple sentence.
And of all the stories that I can think of that I've done, this is just about as a terrible scandal as I can recall.
I mean, just in terms of the degree of dishonesty involved in this.
Well, it's just another Russiagate story, right?
Well, it is another Russiagate story.
You're right.
And in that context, it seems less radical than it would otherwise.
I agree.
Yeah, but that, you know, Russiagate is the Mount Everest of all hoaxes.
I mean, so this is, as a part of that, we shouldn't grade it too badly on a curve because you're right.
But this itself, it really is huge.
And in fact, let's just start with the fact that they handed it to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post at the same time and said, get them and sent them off to go and attack the effort to withdraw America from that war.
Yeah, this is really about using particularly The New York Times to create a storyline that was explicitly intended on both the side of the Afghan government and on the side of the U.S.
Pentagon, in particular, to keep the U.S. war in Afghanistan going beyond 2020, which is, of course, it was a problem for both the Afghan government and for the Pentagon because Trump, despite all of his horrible sins, and there are many, does in fact want to get out of that war, and he's made it clear during his time in office that he wants to accomplish that as soon as possible.
And in fact, he stepped up that effort in late 2019 and early 2020.
And I think it's quite clear that it was that factor that really prompted the Afghan intelligence agency, the Afghan government, to create this false storyline about Russian bounties being offered to kill American forces, American troops in Afghanistan.
And so now, is there a reason do you think that the CIA took the lead on this?
I guess they say that the story originally came from the Special Operations Command and well, and the Afghan government, but you know, your headline says.
It was originally portrayed by the New York Times as being brought to the attention of Washington by both Special Operations people and the CIA, or they weren't explicit about it, but that was the implication.
It was the CIA.
But I mean, your headline here, Gareth, your headline says, How the Pentagon Failed to Sell Afghan Government's Bank Bounty Gate Story to U.S.
Intelligence Agencies.
But they did sell it to the CIA.
SOCOM sold it to the CIA and the Afghan government did, but everybody else begged off of it.
Is that it?
Well, it turns out that it was carried.
I mean, the Afghan Intelligence Service has two major allies.
I think the major one is the CIA, of course, because the CIA always partners with its local intelligence outfit.
In this case, of course, the NDS in Afghanistan, but they also passed it to the special forces who are also partners with Afghan intelligence on various operations.
So it was two separate channels through which this was passed to the United States government.
I think that in fact, it was probably undoubtedly more important that the CIA station in Kabul passed this on to the CIA.
That's what gave it much more currency in Washington than special operations forces passing it on to their people in Washington.
So I think it's right that the CIA was the main one.
So we know now, it's been a couple of weeks, that in fact the NSA, the DIA, the Pentagon overall, I guess, possibly just, I guess, deferring to DIA, but also the head of CENTCOM, General McKenzie, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before the Congress that, yeah, can't confirm this.
No one can confirm this, low confidence, but don't know what else to tell you.
Well, of course, this sort of somewhat less of an endorsement of this notion of a bounty gate, as it's sometimes called, the idea of Russian offering of bounties to rather shady characters, unidentified characters in Afghanistan.
This idea is clearly, it's not only unproven, but the intelligence community, generally speaking, rejected it.
And I think that's really the most important bottom line of this story.
Of course, there's a lot in between that we need to explain further, but what happened was that the White House, which has, under Trump, which has brushed aside the intelligence community consistently in a series of episodes over the last year and a half in particular, particularly those involving Iran, because they were peddling under Pompeo and Bolton.
They were peddling a series of notions that were totally untrue and they did not want any objective or even semi-objective assessment by the intelligence community.
So the intelligence community didn't really play a role at all in that.
Now, of course, the White House has a very clear interest in sort of fighting back against this effort by the Pentagon in particular to force its hand to keep the war going in Afghanistan, which is what this is really about.
And therefore, they encouraged, not only encouraged, but they instructed the new Director of National Intelligence to ask the National Intelligence Council, which is essentially the most objective part of intelligence you're going to find because it represents all of the intelligence agencies and it represents people, it has people on it who are experts on various issues that are under discussion.
And therefore, this is the best place to go to try to get the most valid assessment of whether this story was true or not.
And as we've just said, the intelligence agencies, particularly the NSA, National Security Agency, and the CIA, both gave it very low grades.
Now, we can go into more detail because it's been misreported by The Times and by other corporate news outlets that have sort of downplayed the response of these agencies suggesting that, well, it wasn't that bad.
It was it wasn't overwhelming confirmation.
But in fact, what happened was that NSA gave it a low score in terms of low confidence specifically.
And that means that they didn't think that it was worth, you know, it shouldn't be passed on.
It shouldn't be used at all.
And the CIA gave it medium confidence, which is really low confidence, meaning that this could be interpreted in different ways.
So this is the important point is that out of everybody, the CIA were the ones who were out front on this in terms of inside the government.
They had the firmest belief and it was only medium confidence.
In other words, yeah, could be but not confirmed, but they can spread a rumor and then The New York Times can confirm that there's a rumor going around and they can run with that.
Well, that's absolutely the way they operate.
No question about it.
But let me just point out one thing that we haven't mentioned yet about this specific issue of how the intelligence agencies dealt with it.
The CIA has both an analytical side and a covert operations side.
And the station in every country is generally dominated by covert operations.
Why?
Because that's where most of the money is and, you know, that's where the interest is.
So, you know, the station, the CIA station in Kabul passed this on and then it went to, you know, the CIA headquarters in Washington.
Well, you know, the intelligence community obviously means the analytical side of the CIA, which does not share the same vested interest as the covert operators in Kabul.
Not always anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, the covert operators in Kabul had a rising role in cooperation with Afghan intelligence and with special operations in carrying out operations against the ISIS people and probably against Taliban as well.
They're continuing to operate against the Taliban.
So they had a vested interest in keeping the war going, definitely.
But the analytical side doesn't have that vested interest unless they're forced by the chief of the CIA, the director of the CIA to come out on one side or another or not forced but put under pressure.
They're going to call it much more objectively.
And that's what we see in this case.
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All right.
Now we need to take a moment to shame Charlie Savage and Warren Strobel because you know a reporter like Eric Schmidt, meh, he does nothing but recycle whatever the government wants him to lie about all the time, but Charlie Savage and Warren Strobel, those guys have done really important independent journalism and here both of them were carrying water for this obvious propaganda campaign this against the president's effort to get us out of this war, but Strobel gets partial credit at the Wall Street Journal there because apparently his NSA sources read his article and said that's nonsense and called him and told him this isn't true.
So when you say they gave it low confidence, what does it say when they immediately went to the Wall Street Journal and said we contradict that Warren print that pal and then he did give him credit that he came out and said, well, the NSA says my story from yesterday's garbage.
So take it for what it's worth America, but nobody noticed the climb down.
The polls say the Americans totally believe this is true.
We should absolutely acknowledge up front here that we are up against a huge front of agreement among the National Security State agencies and the corporate news media and Congress on this issue.
And you know the fact that the intelligence agencies basically rejected this is not going to apparently cut much ice with regard to Congress.
And as you've undoubtedly seen and you know by now a lot of people recognize 60% of the public in the most recent poll have said they believe the Bounty Gate tale.
So this whole thing is continuing to create political havoc hysteria politically in this country.
And so I think we have to recognize that it's likely that they've succeeded.
They are succeeding up to this moment in blocking any progress toward getting out of the war this year or even next year.
Yeah, it's just amazing.
I have no idea where the CIA might have won this reputation for honesty or Valor or giving a damn about protecting the American people or anything along those lines at all.
Aren't they the ones who tortured Sheikh Ibn Alibi into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein taught him how to make chemical weapons?
Absolutely.
That's the operations people at work, right?
I mean they were carrying out the orders of the White House Vice President Cheney and and his war on terror and they were going to they were determined that they were going to be stars at it.
They were going to be the ones that would make the biggest contribution.
But you know, I mean again, I just emphasize the difference between the analysts and the operations.
Well, in fact, yes, speaking of Alibi, it's in the Senate reports that the analysts didn't believe that it was true, right?
The operations people reported it and that was good enough for Colin Powell and good enough for the American people, but it wasn't good enough for the analysts who secretly objected where the American people couldn't hear them.
Yeah.
Yeah, but the CIA analysts have in fact often contributed to, you know, false narratives as well.
I don't want to give the idea that they've always been on the right side by any means, but definitely in this case this this distinction between analysts and and covert operators was very important.
And let me go back to the Times.
The role of the Times played in this is really quite astonishing.
They had nine stories and they just they went all in on this.
This was their big story.
And so it's not surprising that the best that the Times had to put in there were cowed by the corporate interest that was made clear to them in what they want from this story.
I think that is the character of the New York Times and the corporate media generally that even relatively good journalists will turn out to not tell the truth under circumstances where they know what the line is supposed to be.
Yeah, and sorry not sorry for making it personal because that's the only accountability we have is shame.
What else are you going to do?
Everyone knows Michael Gordon's name is mud.
Michael Gordon is a liar.
When the Wall Street Journal prints articles by him, you know, it's lies because he's the guy that said that Saddam Hussein was making atom bombs.
That's all we can do.
Same thing for David Sanger.
Now same thing for Charlie Savage and for Warren Strobel, too.
Right, you know, how dare they print this garbage?
I can tell you from my personal experience covering the last phase of the negotiations on the JCPOA in Vienna where I met Michael Gordon in person.
He is a madman.
I mean, he is unbalanced.
I mean, I saw him twice.
Yeah, I saw him twice just blow up and start, you know, attacking people savagely who he disagreed with politically.
It's, you know, quite incredible that he's able to.
He was the leader on the EFP hoax of 2007 claiming that every bomb set off by a Shia in Iraq had been sent by the Iranians and never provided any evidence whatsoever because there wasn't any because it was a lie.
You have a good memory, Scott.
Well, there's just certain reporters at the New York Times I hate a lot.
That's all, Gareth.
It's my job, you know, but listen, so let's talk about the Russians motive here.
Okay, because one thing I thought this was hilarious.
I don't know if you noticed this that one of the New York Times reporter ladies was interviewed on MSNBC where she said, well, the Russians apparently have just been sending this money and it's, you know, through many connections.
We believe it must be to the Taliban, but even that part is not proven.
But she says it wasn't tied to any particular deaths and the money didn't go when, you know, in response to any particular deaths and no one was reporting any deaths back to them.
And then when there weren't deaths, the money kept coming anyway, and then Scott Ritter says, yeah, well, that's not how a bounty works, is it?
Exactly.
It's not at all.
And this whole thing, what you're talking, what you're talking about, Scott, is I think Kalamachi is your name.
Yes, exactly.
You're wrong, but I think what you're seeing there is another case where a journalist, she's a good journalist and has done good work and she's under pressure to contribute to a story that she understood, I'm quite sure, was false.
So she's kind of making clear that it was not her fault, is the way I would interpret it.
What a terrible job to have.
Look at me, mom.
I made it to the New York Times.
Yeah, it really sucks.
They try to make me print lies all the time and I have to, but anyway, I'm famous.
Hey, but so why might the Russians be sending money to the Taliban who are, after all, the mujahideen?
It's America that switched sides in the Afghan war, not Russia, but maybe now they are funding the Taliban, Gareth?
There are two separate questions here.
One is whether the Russians have been making up with the Taliban and there's no question that that's the case, that they have formed working relationships with Taliban leaders.
They've invited the Taliban to come to Moscow for peace talks with other Afghans and they have clear interest in befriending the Taliban, not just because they know that it's inevitable they're going to at least share power in some fashion in the future, but because the Taliban are, at this moment, the most effective force in fighting ISIS.
And what do the Russians care about in Afghanistan more than anything else?
It's very clear that what they care about is the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism, which they're afraid, for obvious reasons, will infect both the Russian territory itself and the various stands that are abutting Russian territory.
And so, I mean, that's been for many years now, the primary concern that the Russians have about Afghanistan.
Yeah, people may not understand because of all the propaganda that the Taliban are ultimately an extremely conservative force in almost every sense of that term.
In other words, they're not territorial expansionists.
They're on world revolution.
And, you know, bin Laden and those guys, they're right-wingers, but they're radical rightists.
They're almost Leninists in a way, would burn the whole dang world down and start over at year zero, like Pol Pot kind of thing or something.
Right.
This is not the Taliban's worldview whatsoever, never has been.
And so then, as you're saying, yeah, of course, they're the obvious hedge.
It's just like the awakening movement in Iraq, right?
You hire the local Mujahideen to isolate the foreigners and drive them out, and the foreigners who, by definition, are the more radical ones, which is why they're there.
So the Russians, you know, have an interest in relationship to the Taliban.
But do they need, want, favor the idea of using Taliban to kill Americans under these circumstances?
That's crazy.
I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever.
And furthermore, I'm not even clear that the Russians have been providing any arms to the Taliban.
I mean, they don't need to.
The Taliban have plenty of arms.
This is not even a controversy.
People who've followed this closely understand that the Taliban have been getting all the arms they need from Pakistan.
They have lots of money.
They have more money than they know what to do with already.
And so from both sides, from the Russian side and from the Taliban side, this whole story just makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah.
By the way, check it out.
I just got in the mail this book that I only found out existed after I was done with my book about Afghanistan.
There's so many Afghanistan books.
I didn't notice it, but it's called Funding the Enemy, How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban by Douglas A.
Wissing.
And I looked him up and he's a very established, credible journalist with a decades-long career, too, and many books.
And this is, of course, as I do write about in the book, just not based on this one, America paying taxes to the Taliban.
They've ruled, you know, at least a third of the country for more than a decade here.
And to transport all those convoys through, they've had to hire the Taliban to provide security or at least to bribe them to leave our guys alone as they resupply.
And it amounts to billions of dollars, not just hundreds of millions, billions of dollars that America's paid the Taliban.
We're probably even more than Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
America is their number one source of income.
It was a story that I wrote about 2010, I guess.
Yeah, I'm sure you did.
I probably, I'm sure if we can find the interview in the archive, too.
So now here's the thing.
Let's talk about this timeline because when you go through these different New York Times stories and these kinds of things, it becomes apparent that the Afghan government originally came up with this line back last fall when they were trying to...
Go ahead.
Yeah, let me talk about that because it's very important for people to understand just how far removed from reality the Times, the initial Times stories were.
They were being informed by their sources that somebody, they weren't identifying who, had captured these militants and criminals and were interrogating them and they had gotten this information about the bounty gate, quote-unquote, from these interrogations.
Well, of course, it turned out that the people who had been detained, arrested and detained, it was not U.S. military forces, certainly not the CIA.
It was Afghan intelligence by itself, which they didn't report initially and then ended up having to report a few days later.
And so Afghan intelligence captures these people and in fact, it turns out that it was relatives and business associates of a guy named Azizi who had been a small-time drug trafficker, apparently into Iran, initially at least, and then made his real money as a contractor for the U.S. in Afghanistan building roads.
So it was very far removed from the initial story that they told and they kind of back, they walked it back, but they never really acknowledged that they'd been misled.
And so the whole story just reeks of a cover story from the very beginning.
So let's just quickly reconstruct the timeline here.
This really began to take shape in Afghanistan with the Afghan intelligence people carrying out these operations in January.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that they were doing this precisely because of the fact that the negotiations had reached a point where they knew that unless they had some way of intervening, they were facing a situation where there was an inevitable push in Washington to end the war.
And so these arrests were taking place in January.
They went to the CIA station and to the special forces at the end of January or early February, and then it took a few weeks for this to go through the bureaucracy in Washington, and then it went into the CIA brief at the end of February, just two days before the signing of the agreement.
Now, why did it go in then?
Well, you know, it was highly irregular as Ray McGovern, who used to be the one who worked on the presidential daily brief many years ago, told me, you know, they don't do raw intelligence that hasn't been really confirmed or assessed by any other intelligence agency into the intelligence brief, you know, unless there's some very special circumstances, obviously, and in this case, it wouldn't have qualified for that.
And secondly, normally, it goes into the presidential daily brief the same day that it goes into the CIA's major publication of all intelligence, much longer publication, with a larger, longer account of each of the items.
In this case, it didn't go out on the wire.
And that is another indication that it was highly irregular.
It only went out in May in the wire.
So we know that this was a special move by the CIA for political purposes.
What was the political purpose?
It was clearly serving the national security state's interest in putting pressure on Trump.
He knew when that went into the brief that it could be leaked to the press at any time.
And so they were hoping that Trump would be turned around.
He would not, he would hesitate to push forward on his demand for withdrawal of troops.
To me, that's a very logical conclusion to reach.
Right.
And again, and very quickly, there's no partisanship here.
It's just a fact that this is one war that he just does not believe in and he really did give Zalmay Khalilzad a very powerful neoconservative Mandarin, the full authority to negotiate a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, which they did do and are trying to do.
And here, Joe Biden is saying he wants to stay and he wants to even send troops to Pakistan.
He's stuck in 2009, crazy town.
The reality here is that this is a very unpopular war.
Most Americans want it ended.
They've wanted to end for quite a while now, for years.
And Trump's own constituency is very strongly in favor of ending the war and he knows it.
And one thing you can say for Trump, even though there's many things you can say that would be very true that show him to be a very unsavory character, he cares about his constituency and he's worried about doing things or failing to do things that would turn his constituency against him.
So there's no doubt that he is motivated to do something about the Afghan war by that factor, that highly political factor, right?
And at least it should go without saying.
We hope it's all true that if Donald Trump's base wants out of Afghanistan, then every single person to the left of them, which is every other person in America wants out of there even more than that, right?
Everybody.
Right, of course.
Yeah, actually that as you and I both know, that's not true.
Unfortunately, the liberal center is down with whatever the news media and the national security state tell them, it seems, that the elite, the political elite in the liberal center, at least let's put it that way, and public opinion seems to be tending to go along with them at this moment.
Yeah, right.
And I'm sorry, we're so over time and got to go.
But everybody, this has been the great Gareth Porter.
Thank you again for your time, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be on.
All right, you guys.
And you can find his great article at The Gray Zone and at Antiwar.com, how the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government's bunk bounty gate story to U.S. intelligence agencies, and mine from a week ago is called The Russian Bounties Hoax.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Find the full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Thanks, y'all.
See you next week.
