For Pacifica Radio, June 20th, 2021.
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.
An author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, I'm happy to introduce our good friend Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and for a time was the head of the Soviet Division.
Used to brief Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush back in the 1980s and early 90s, and has been a heroic anti-war activist the entire 21st century long, so far with his veteran intelligence professionals for sanity that he co-founded and his thousands of great articles for all different places, including antiwar.com, where his latest is Trust Lacking at Blah Summit.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Great.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
So Blah Summit, I guess it could be worse.
I'll take Blah over Absolutely Terrible.
Can we start with the good news from Joe Biden's meeting with Vladimir Putin?
Sure.
There were some baby steps taken toward a more decent relationship.
Diplomats will be returned to their posts.
The two did agree on starting talks on strategic arms and, more important, iterated that it is a mistake to think that a nuclear war can be fought and won by either side.
That goes back to Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev.
That's big because you have people like the SAC commander.
When I say SAC, I mean Strategic Air Command, now called STRATCOM.
But the head of that, some four-star admiral, has said, you know, it's not at all unlikely that we'll have to use nuclear weapons.
So in a word, we'll have to watch to see if the SAC guy is sacked, so to speak.
The STRATCOM guy is sacked because you can't have a four-star head of one of our main triad of offensive weapons saying things that Biden and Putin just said is impossible.
That's more than just a footnote here.
That's big.
And whether these negotiations succeed or not, or whether they even start in a meaningful way, is dubious.
A good sign is that Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov said, actually early this morning, that he's ready to appoint his people and they want to get started quite soon.
The point I make in my piece is that what you need in these negotiations and in these arms control efforts is a modicum of trust.
OK, now, how do I, what do I say that?
Well, I say that out of experience.
Here's Ronald Reagan in early 1983 saying, you know, the Soviet Union is the evil empire.
And then we have U.S. exploitation of the shootdown of a civilian airliner at KAL-007 around Labor Day.
Did the Russians deliberately shoot that aircraft down?
Yes, they did.
Left unsaid was they thought it was a U.S. spy reconnaissance aircraft.
That's very clear.
But everybody left that out.
And so the Russians were blackened.
Fast forward to the next two months, November, the Able Archer strategic exercise that the United States was running to include participation by the vice president, for God's sake.
The Russians thought it was the real deal.
And it was only at the last moment that they realized because we told them, no, no, this is an exercise.
Please don't don't end life on Earth.
So what I'm saying here is that after all that in 1983, the next year they got together and they decided that they could trust each other.
My God, how could you trust people who are blackening you all the time?
Well, you can because you have to.
OK.
And how do you how do you justify that trust?
Or how do you make it explainable or or a good idea to the American people?
As you say, we can verify these agreements.
OK.
It was a doverai, not proverai, trust, but verify.
Now, that was that was not new with Reagan.
That was done way back in 1972 with the first SALT agreement.
When I was involved in that, Nixon and Kissinger would say, all right, two questions.
Is this a good deal?
Can you verify Soviet compliance?
And we would say, well, yes, we can, sir.
And then they would say, how soon?
And we'd say, well, a week to 10 days at the most.
They would say, OK, we'll do it.
And that's the story of how they were able to sign this agreement with a modicum of trust because we could verify.
Now, did the Soviets cheat?
Yes, they cheated.
They cheated 11 years later by building a monster, a monster radar, an ABM type radar way out in Krasnoyarsk in the middle of Siberia.
We had photos of it.
Did Reagan call the Soviets on it?
He sure as hell did.
He said, look, what's going on here?
This is a violation of the treaty.
You've got to tear that thing down.
Just like echoes of tear that Berlin Wall down, right?
OK, now it took six years.
But in 1989, the Russians tore it down.
That's the way we used to do things.
In other words, we could trust if we could verify.
And in this case, which is a really good example, the Russians finally said, all right, you're right.
We see the pictures now.
So we'll destroy it.
And they did.
Now, that's lacking now.
Biden actually said in his separate press conference, this is not about trust.
This is not about trust.
This is about self-interest.
OK, this is a direct quote.
It's not about trust.
It's about self-interest and verification of self-interest.
Now, my God, because I have to say, you know, we'll know in three to six months whether the Russians are serious.
Well, that turns trust but verify on its head, doesn't it?
In other words, we want to verify that the Russians are going to do what we asked them to do.
And then maybe we'll trust them.
That's not that's not the way a successful negotiator is going to work.
And so we'll have to see whether these arms negotiators get to first base, given all given all the opposition they will face from the military industrial congressional intelligence media complex, which has grown like topsy beyond the military industrial complex that Eisenhower spelled out for us 60 years ago.
OK, so we're going to have to see whether or not the Russians are going to do what we asked them to do.
And then maybe we'll see whether or not they're going to get to first base, given all given all the opposition they will face from the military industrial complex that Eisenhower spelled out for us 60 years ago.
And then maybe we'll see whether or not they're going to get to first base, given all given all the opposition they will face from the military industrial complex that Eisenhower and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org.
LibertasBella.com.
All right.
It's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, now veteran intelligence professional for sanity, regular writer at AntiWar.com.
And Ray, so it's kind of confusing, although I don't know, is it just, you know, Ronald Reagan had the only Nixon can go to China, tough guy, anti-communist Republican thing going so he could afford to shake Gorbachev's hand as much as he wanted, whereas somehow there's that much more pressure on Joe Biden, even though the Soviet Union has been dead and gone for 30 years to act all tough like this.
It seems so ridiculous compared to the actual relationship or the obvious what ought to be status quo relationship between the United States and Russia at this point.
Well, it is hard to understand unless you appreciate who is running things in our country, and it's not President Joe Biden.
It's this gargantuan defense industry, what Pope Francis called the blood-soaked arms traders, and the media was very much in on this since they're all owned and operated by the blood-soaked arms traders.
So that's the long and short of it.
The other thing is that Biden, you know, he's not the sharpest knife in the draw.
You know, I'm willing to believe that he assimilates the drivel that comes out of the New York Times every day or virtually every day about the big bad Russians.
I mean, one of the things he says was, you know, Russia had a chance after the Soviet Union imploded.
They had a chance for peace and progress, and they blew it.
Now, that's ahistorical.
That's counter-historical.
What happened was that Gorbachev trusted us.
We blew our promise not to move NATO to Russia's borders, and then the Wall Street boys came in, the guys from Harvard as well, and plundered what was left of the Soviet economy.
The mortality rate in Russia in those years, in the 90s, in five years, it went down about six years.
So Russia really suffered.
That's what happened when Russia imploded.
They expected us to help them, and what we did was plunder their economy.
The other thing that Biden said was, you know, Russia, you know, they got problems.
They're being squeezed along their very long border with China.
Squeezed.
And so they have to, you know, have to look toward us and others.
They have to have decent relations.
Give me a break.
The relationship between Russia and China has been avowedly closer than ever before.
Indeed, as the summit was going on, 28, count them, 28 Chinese bombers and fighters were violating Taiwan air defense space in that same day.
In other words, look, what Putin and Xi are saying is that, you know, we have a virtual military alliance.
It's not written down in paper, but you mess around in Ukraine, or if you mess around with respect to the Seventh Fleet and Taiwan, you might expect a two-front hostility kind of thing.
Do you really want that, American military leaders?
Of course they don't.
Last thing I'll say is that the chief, the chief of the equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief and general staff of Russia in uniform was a participant in the wider talks where Biden and Blinken were allowed five others, as was Putin.
That speaks volumes.
And it suggests to me that he was given five minutes to brief those assembled that, you know, these hypersonic missiles that we have, you know, that some of them that fly at Mach eight, Mach eight.
Here's a, here's a video show you how quickly they destroyed fake targets out there in Siberia.
In other words, the Russians do have incredibly modern strategic weaponry.
Jake Sullivan, before they left Washington for the summit, conceded that we're really worried about improvements in Russians, Russia's strategic capabilities.
So that's a real deal.
They have their uniformed chief of staff there to explain it all.
And I think that's one of the reasons why Joe Biden decided, well, yeah, let's have this joint statement on the fact that nuclear war is no longer possible.
No one wins.
And then let's start arms control negotiations.
What's to lose?
So there is a glimmer of hope on that score.
The other thing, of course, is Ukraine and more regional conflicts.
That, of course, is why Joe Biden asked for the summit in the first place on that famous day, April 13th, when the Russians said, yeah, we have two armies and three airborne formations right on the Ukrainian border.
We can't guarantee their safety.
You better not do that.
Well, Biden turned those ships around and called Putin and said, oh, well, let's talk.
Let's have a summit.
So there is some reasonable expectation that talks, not only on strategic arms, but on regional conflicts will go forward.
And that, of course, is a good sign, counter indicating that what will happen is this military industrial complex.
There are a lot of people that thrive, that profiteer on tension with Russia.
And they're not going to stop telling Biden, look, you can't do this.
No, you can't trust them.
Make sure they do what we want before you trust them.
That's the way we verify whether you can trust them.
Turning trust, but verify on its head.
Now, usually we all say that everything in the world is Woodrow Wilson's fault.
But in this case, it really is George W. Bush's fault.
Isn't it, Ray, that he put us on?
He and Dick Cheney put us on this path.
The policy was, I believe, the Reagan agreement of mutually assured destruction and mutual recognition of mutually assured destruction through Bill Clinton.
And it was W. Bush who said, no, let's ditch the anti-ballistic missile treaty and let's build up the capability for a first strike and the ability to shoot down any retaliatory strike and cancel MAD.
And that was the reason, then, that the Russians embarked on this massive secret program to develop their new nuclear torpedoes and their new heavy missiles and all of their hypersonics and the rest of this stuff that Putin described in his State of the Union address, whatever they call it there, what, back two, three years ago, right?
That's basically correct.
Yeah.
And isn't it funny how, you know, we talk about maybe possibly on the sunniest day, sometime, there's a possibility maybe that we could get back in the INF Treaty or the Open Skies Treaty under Biden.
But nobody's talking about going back to the anti-ballistic missile treaty that W.
Bush abrogated.
Yeah.
Now, I am of a certain age.
I was in Moscow in 1972 when the ABM Treaty that we gave intelligence support to was signed.
OK, you have to appreciate someone like me who used to hide under his desk at school in elementary school thinking that maybe if the Russians bombed us, well, maybe we wouldn't be radiated.
OK, now, I strolled around from that time until 1972, always looking at big buildings going up in cities and so forth and saying, my God, don't they realize that, you know, one miscalculation, one missed guess that the whole place would be incinerated?
Then I got to Moscow.
Not only was I very gratified that the intelligence support turned out to be essential, but they reached this deal.
The deal was that since we're building up offensive arms, we're trying to limit those.
But the only way to prevent the other side from thinking that they could do a preemptive strike, in other words, take out our retaliatory capability, would be to limit the number of anti-ballistic missile sites that each site could have, that each side could have.
Now, they started out with two, one around capitals and one somewhere else in the country.
Then they narrowed it down to one.
My God, that was the cornerstone of stability, because with one ABM site, you couldn't possibly defend the country.
And so for 30 years, 1972 till 2002, you're quite right.
When Bush got out of that treaty, that destroyed the expectation that neither side could possibly think that they could wage a nuclear war or they could knock out a nuclear facility without expecting massive retaliation.
Mad, massive assured destruction once again.
Now, when that happened, Putin, to his credit, said, you know, this is crazy.
Let's get together and talk about this because, you know, there's no way that your ABMs will not be interpreted as threatening our offensive missiles.
After all, you're putting them in Romania.
You're putting them in Poland.
You're putting them in the Black Sea.
Now, we know what you're doing.
They're not cruise missiles.
These things have the range or will have the range to knock out our ICBM force, most of it in Central Russia.
So, you know, you got to stop this.
Now, what did the defense minister, our defense secretary say?
Robert Gates said, well, it's pretty clever that we put them on ships in the Black Sea.
I never saw my duty as to make sure the Russians feel comfortable.
You know, that was the attitude.
They tried to pretend to that.
Oh, no, this is to protect Poland from their historical enemies.
Iran.
What?
And when Bush said that, I don't remember if it was at a G7 meeting or what anymore, Ray, but Bush one time said that in Europe and everybody just started busting out laughing because they knew how ridiculous it was.
And then when Obama said it, everyone nodded solemnly like, yes, of course, we have to protect Poland from Iran.
Well, it was not only to protect everyone from Iran, which doesn't have any nuclear weapons and is still not working on a nuclear weapon, as the intelligence community continues to say, but they mentioned North Korea as well.
Now, I took a globe out of my office and I looked at North Korea and I looked at Western Europe.
So it was all a sham.
Now, while this was all going on, Putin held a press conference with Western press around and it was an unusual press conference because he lost his cool.
He says, don't you understand that we know when these missiles will go into these holes?
We know when the U.S. Air Force and Army will think that they can preempt.
We know the date when that's going to happen.
We're going to have to do something to preempt that or at least counter it.
Don't you know that?
And Western journalists were all asleep.
OK, well, as you pointed out, that's when they started developing these hypersonic, incredible weapons, which Putin advertised in 2018.
Now, are they real?
They're real.
Why doesn't the U.S. press handle them?
They don't know how to handle them.
OK, now what's going to happen?
They are now in existence.
And that's one reason why Gerasimov, the general who leads the general staff of Russia, was at those talks.
I'm pretty sure that he said, look, guys, we don't want to get into a nuclear confrontation, but here's our capability.
Your ABM systems, such as they are, are null and void.
They're not worth, certainly not worth the money put into them.
They don't work.
They're obsolete.
So please, please, if you want to spend more money on ABMs, that's fine.
But realize that we have a deterrent that can't be stopped by any ABM, any conceivable ABM system.
Last thing I'll say about that, Scott, is really important.
You know, someone put in Ronald Reagan's ear that we could have this impenetrable ABM system.
We could defend against any and all missiles the Russians would send our way, right?
That was ridiculous from the outset.
Real serious scientists and engineers told us, no, you can never do that, OK?
But the ones that are making all the money got Reagan's ear.
Now, how did this translate?
Well, at Reykjavik in 1986, it was, Gorbachev said, look, Ronnie, let's eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Let's do it.
Let's go big here.
And Reagan said, oh, gosh, that sounds really good.
He goes back to his advisors and what do they say?
Mr. President, that would, that would nix Star Wars.
That would nix the ABM system that we assure you can protect against any and all Russian missiles.
So if you want to do that, fine.
But that would, you know, say goodbye to Star Wars.
Ronald Reagan goes back and says, no, sorry, it sounds good, but we can't do it.
So that's how important it is that the ABM system was considered so important by the U.S.
And now at this final negotiation or this final summit yesterday, it's been made very clear to Biden and everybody else that ABMs are not worth, not worth anything.
And that we can, and this is the way, look at this video, Mr. President.
See, this is the way we can, this is how fast we can go.
Remember Mach 1?
That used to be pretty fast in your day.
Now we do Mach 8, Mach 9.
Yeah, well, or at least they claim.
But, you know, they also claim to have a nuclear-powered cruise missile that has essentially an unlimited range.
So it could just fly around any radius of any anti-missile defense system.
And they also claim to have a new missile that they would launch that would go around the South Pole.
And that in their cartoon, they showed it hitting South Florida and coming from the South.
Another entire direction on the map that American missile defenses do not point to.
And of course, I know from my friend Gordon Prather, who used to make nuclear bombs for a living for the U.S. government, that you really want to take out incoming ICBMs.
You need H-bombs in space, enhanced radiation devices, which we just don't have that.
We're trying to shoot down a bullet with a bullet and with decoys everywhere on the multiple reentry vehicles and all of this kind of thing makes any real missile defense, if possible, extremely expensive.
And to the degree that we don't have an effective one for all the hype.
That's for sure.
Now, I'm sorry, because we're almost out of time.
But then so to the real, real point here, then, you're telling me that Biden's government has now canceled Bush's policy and we are going back to forget about a first strike.
We got to admit, they got us, they have a gun right to our head, just as bad as the old days.
Any advantage we had has been blown.
And so now we're going back to a nuclear war must never be fought because it cannot be won by either side, which is, in fact, a really big deal, not just some blah word spoken, as you say in your title here.
Am I right?
That was an official joint statement, about the only official joint statement that came out of the summit.
So that can be considered big.
Yeah, I'll take it.
You know, there's so much bad news here.
And listen, I'm sorry, I got to let you comment on this before I let you go here, Ray.
Quote, Biden, let's get this straight.
How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it?
What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in, Putin?
It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.
What do you think?
You know anything about American-backed coups, Mr. CIA man?
Well, you know, there are secret coups and there are disputed coups.
But the one I think about was the election of 1996, where our drunken friend Yeltsin was sure to lose until the U.S. arranged some IMF loans and put in lots of Harvard boys and advisors, turned that election around and ensured four more years of plunder of the Russian economy under this drunk and assured Russia would have to play catch up for four more years.
All Biden needs to do is look at the cover of Time magazine in 1996, where Yeltsin is seen half drunk and the title is something like, Yeltsin won with our help.
So would this be the same Yeltsin that appointed Putin to be prime minister and his successor?
Yeah, you know, that's an anomaly.
Yeltsin, maybe his last...
A little bit of blowback there, huh?
Maybe his last sober act was to say, well, you know, I really screwed up here among my friends in Russia.
Maybe I'll appoint Putin who will maybe straighten things out after I leave this planet.
That's exactly what happened.
And that's exactly why the U.S. and a lot of the rest of the West hates Putin.
He did clean up the act.
He got rid of the oligarchs, a lot of them.
And he stood up for what he considers to be Russia's rights.
And that really is the key, isn't it, Ray?
That just like North Korea or Cuba or Iran or Syria, it's not that they actually threaten the United States.
It's that they have figured out one way or the other how to maintain their independence from us.
And that's what makes them the enemy.
Yeah, that's verboten.
And if you take the egregious example of China, my God, China doesn't do what we tell it to do anymore.
China has 1.5 billion, billion with a B people.
They have an increasingly efficient strategic arms setup.
And they have a virtual military alliance with guess whom?
Russia.
Yeah, well, and they've just been named by NATO in their recent meeting this same week, that last week, that they're the new threat because as I'm sorry, I forget who I'm plagiarizing, put it on Twitter, because the Germans and the French just cannot be convinced that the Russians are coming.
They need something else to pretend because they wouldn't be able to put that to their populations in that way.
But China's far enough away that they have that as their new enemy.
Think about that.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now going to defend itself from China and the Chinese threat, as they would put it.
And with that, I'm sorry, we're out of time.
I'm just ranting over your interview, but that's how it ends.
Ray McGovern, trust lacking at Blah Summit.
That is at antiwar.com slash blog.
And we're also running it in the viewpoint section and in the top of the page there at antiwar.com.
And thank you very much for your time again, Ray.
Great to talk to you.
Most welcome.
All right, you guys.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director at antiwar.com and author of the new book, Enough Already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
