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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to this thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my radio show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org.
More than 2,700 interviews now, going back to 2003.
And our next guest, no, our first guest on the show today is Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org, which just goes to prove that they were really on the ball the day that internet URLs went up for auction.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
How are you doing?
No, I'm doing great.
Nice to be back, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And, you know, most libertarians don't write much about Cuba because they don't know too much about it.
But you sure seem to know a lot about it.
And you've got this great piece, Alan Gross and regime change in Cuba.
And so I was wondering if you could take us through it.
Let's start with who's this Alan Gross?
Well, he's a guy that lives in Maryland, I think, a senior citizen type.
And he decides to go.
Well, the official story in the beginning was that he was just an American who was just innocently passing out some cell phones to some Jewish groups there in Cuba.
And the Cuban government had him arrested for trying to do things that would subvert the Cuban state engaging activity along those lines.
Hey, nothing wrong with that, right?
Well, under Cuban law, there is.
And they indicted him.
Well, they didn't indict him, but they accused him and they charged him and tried him and convicted him and gave him a 15 year sentence.
And, of course, you know, the U.S. government was just outraged and said, oh, freedom, freedom entitles people to pass out cell phones.
And this is outrageous and so forth.
Well, finally, what happens is Gross has been in jail for two or three years and it looks like the Cubans aren't budging because they're interested in a trade with a group called the Cuban Five that we can get to get into a lot if you like.
But so Gross is really upset over this.
So he sues the company that hired him to do this.
So he wasn't just an innocent American passing out cell phones.
He was actually on contract.
In fact, a contract that was paying him in a neighborhood of, I don't know, 300 to 500 thousand dollars.
And so he sues the company for not having trained him sufficiently for this dangerous mission.
And the company discloses all these documents that showed that this was actually an operation of USAID, which is, I'm sure you know, has traditionally been a front for CIA.
So it's obvious that this wasn't just some American going around passing out cell phones to the poor.
This is just standard regime change operations that the national security state has been engaged in in Cuba since 1959 when Castro took power and refused to become a puppet of the U.S. regime.
And you say in here that it was very sophisticated technological and communications equipment.
It wasn't just cell phones.
It was what?
Can you say specifically what we're talking about then?
Yeah, it was that what happened was that the employer, gross employer, actually attaches to their motion to dismiss the case based on national security, all these documents to specify exactly what the equipment was.
But it was in the nature of like sophisticated satellite type posts for transmitting messages.
And it wasn't just cell phones.
It was actually technological and communications equipment that would facilitate communications in the event that some nice regime change operation was taking place because of Castro's death or, you know, chaos in the country or whatever.
This was sophisticated equipment that he was passing out.
So it's not a very sophisticated op, though.
I mean, it sounds like Castro's exploding cigar here.
They haven't figured out yet how to do this on the sly in Cuba, of all places.
Right.
And really what I'm writing about and have been writing about is that what gives what is it with this obsession, you know, that here this country, Cuba, has never attacked the United States.
It has never engaged in any terrorist attacks on the United States.
The U.S. has been the aggressor the entire time.
And hardly anyone questions the assumption.
They say, well, Castro is not pro-U.S.
He's a communist.
That is, he's a person that in his mind holds socialist views.
And therefore, that gives us the right to assassinate him, to invade the country, to engage in these regime change operations.
Where do they get that?
I mean, like, you know, and hardly anyone questions this.
Here is one big nation aggressing against another nation that hasn't done anything to the United States.
And hardly anyone questions it.
Of course, we're questioning it here at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Well, you know, the crusty old conservatives used to joke that Castro got his job in the pages of the New York Times, you know, like it was a want ad.
And that, you know, they try to remind us that the American establishment and I don't know the details of this.
I'm sure you probably know a lot more about it than me.
But apparently the CIA and the State Department were all for Castro coming to power.
They just got mad when he didn't want to go along with them after that.
Well, there's a lot of truth to that, that, you know, the dictator before Castro was a Fulgencio Batista, and he was your classic Latin American crooked and corrupt dictator.
But he was pro-U.S.
He would do whatever the U.S. wanted.
And of course, the U.S. national security state has had this obsession with controlling Cuba since at least World War II.
But even going back to the Spanish-American War, I mean, we've had troops occupying Cuba and so forth.
I mean, people in the U.S. government, the status have always treated like a little vassal country.
And so Batista was just one of our dictators.
So there was sympathy when Castro ousted this guy from power.
I mean, he deserved to be ousted.
He was brutal.
He was crooked.
He was corrupt.
And so there was a lot of hope that, hey, well, maybe Castro would be a much better, honest dictator that would be pro U.S.
But Castro took the position that, look, you know, enough is enough of the U.S. controlling Cuba.
This is a sovereign and independent country.
It should have been this back in the Spanish-American War when the U.S. refused to let Cuba have its independence after, you know, it helped it gain its independence from the Spanish Empire.
So Castro says, no, enough is enough.
We're not going to kowtow to this country.
We're not going to submit our decisions to your approval process.
And that's when things went sour, that the U.S. national security state said, hey, we can't have an independent Cuba.
We've got to get in there now and put our man back into power, either Batista or some other dictator.
And so begins this long, obsessive sojourn trying to affect regime change in Cuba.
And Gross is obviously just part of this process.
You know, despite the big messes they've made, Scott, in Iraq, Afghanistan, all the people they're killing in Yemen and Pakistan, it's amazing that they have time to come over here and say, hey, let's continue our regime change operations in Cuba.
Yeah.
I mean, especially when, well, I don't know, does Kennedy's promise to the Soviets still stand that we won't do a regime change there?
I guess not.
In fact, they were still pushing for regime change and doing everything they could right up until the time that Kennedy got shot in the head himself.
Well, Kennedy had promised no invasion.
And, you know, it's an interesting question as to whether that promise is still valid.
But certainly it's been honored, much to the chagrin of the Pentagon and the CIA.
And some of the Cuban exiles.
But, you know, under what moral or legal authority did the U.S. invade the country in the first place?
I mean, like I say, you know, that this notion that because a person in another country is a communist, in other words, that he holds in his mind a certain philosophical perspective, that that entitles the national security state to go in there and invade the country and assassinate that guy and impose a brutal embargo against the Cuban people that has absolutely squeezed the lifeblood out of them, that to me is so shocking and appalling.
And very few people except libertarians challenge that notion, that just because a person's a communist or holds communist or socialist views or liberal or progressive views, which are very similar, how is that entitled somebody to go and murder that person?
It's incredible.
It's incredible mind mindset.
Right.
Yeah.
You could have an argument about, well, geez, I don't know, you know, maybe we should have regime change here, regime change there.
But it really is.
You have to go to libertarians here.
Someone say, yeah, but you don't have the right to do any of that.
You know, it's not about whether just, you know, utilitarian arguments about whether it's a good idea or not to invade Mali.
But, you know, the right to tax one innocent person to kill one innocent Malian, you know, that kind of thing.
It's just that simple.
But for the left and the right.
No, no, no.
This is just a question of policy to be determined by a bunch of experts on C-SPAN, not you.
Right.
It's only the libertarians that bring up the whole moral argument.
I mean, it's like it's like the state is both conservatives and liberals have no moral compass at all that, you know, if a guy holds a different philosophy than yours up, you can go and kill him, murder him, assassinate him.
I mean, and then a lot of these people are for us to be Christians and very devout and stuff.
And they say, well, of course, you can go kill somebody if he holds a different economic philosophy than yours.
I mean, that's incredible.
You know, shocking.
I was raised to believe.
Well, let's see.
My dad was at UCLA during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one of his professors actually was gone for two weeks and came back.
And he had been in D.C. helping to advise Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I don't know the guy's name.
That's perfect.
So I knew the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the time that I was very little kid.
And oh, and then the end of the story is when the professor came back, he said, kids, there's no such thing as closer to thermonuclear war than that.
That is the absolute brink.
You're getting closer than that.
You're burning.
Simple as that.
So that was, you know, the the peak of the Cold War as far as the brinksmanship there.
And I read this Ivan Ehlen piece.
I linked to it in the Just Ramando column the other day, this piece by Ivan Ehlen about Ted Sorensen died.
And Ivan Ehlen said, hey, let's go back and revisit Ted Sorensen story here for a minute and whatever.
And Ehlen makes it a very clear case that Kennedy actually didn't care.
And and neither did McNamara.
They agreed that it made no difference whether there were nuclear weapons in Cuba or not, because after all, the Soviets could still wipe us off the face of the earth in half an hour.
It's not like we had a missile defense system.
They have plenty of hydrogen bombs to take out the whole East Coast and whatever they wanted.
So it really didn't make any difference whether there were nukes stationed in Cuba or not, except for the upcoming congressional elections.
And because of the Berlin crisis and a couple other things, the Republicans were attacking Kennedy for being soft on the commies.
And so he outright said there's direct quotes of him saying that it doesn't really make a difference for the country whether there are nukes in Cuba or not.
But it does.
But I already went out on the line and said it absolutely may not, you know, must not be allowed to stand.
And so then that was his motivation for bringing the world to the absolute brink of nuclear annihilation.
The end of the human race was simply for the upcoming congressional elections.
I saw the same thing.
And they pointed out that the Soviets had nuclear submarines that could launch right offshore anyway.
But, you know, we've always been inculcated with the notion that it was the Cubans and the Soviets that were trying to install weapons in order to have a first strike on the United States if they wanted war and so forth.
The real truth is that after the Bay of Pigs invasion, where the U.S. is invading a sovereign and independent country for no other reason than a communist guy who's independent of the U.S. is in charge.
So they invade this country.
Well, it obviously was a failure.
But from that point on, in the fall of 62, I guess, all the way into the spring and summer of 63, leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe in 61, 62, there were rumors that the U.S. was going to do this again.
And in fact, the Pentagon wanted to do it again.
And so did the CIA.
And that's, you know, I think it was in the spring, as it turns out, that the Pentagon unanimously, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, present Operation Northwoods to Kennedy, where they're calling for fake terrorist attacks, which kill innocent Americans, and they're going to blame it on the Cubans as an excuse for invading the country.
So Castro sits there and says, you know, I can withstand an attack by Cuban exiles.
No problem there.
But if the U.S. Army invades this country, I don't stand a chance.
I'm dead.
And my country is going to be subjected to U.S. government control.
And so he figured the only chance I have to deter such an attack is by having the Soviets put some nuclear weapons over here.
So it was the actual national security state that brought about the conditions for the installation of those Soviet missiles.
They were always defensive to deter a U.S. invasion, which is exactly what the Pentagon and the CIA wanted to do.
So it's just another legacy of the national security state.
Yeah.
And then I'm not exactly sure of the very details, but I know, well, I think I know that they already had operational short-range nuclear bombs.
And I think Castro, at least at one point, had been given from the Soviets, had been given the command authority to use them on his own beaches in case of a U.S. invasion.
And I don't know whether they would have retaliated and tried to hit Florida with them, too, or what.
But then that would have been it would have been, you know, to paraphrase Rand Paul, that would have been considered an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union.
Yeah, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that Castro was given authority over.
But the commanders on site were definitely given battlefield command authority to use them and in the event of an invasion.
That's right.
And the Americans didn't know that.
They thought they were only looking at medium range missiles that were still being put together.
They didn't know about the already operational short-range missiles, correct?
That's absolutely right.
And those missiles that if the U.S. had invaded the country, which is what the Pentagon, the CIA were advising Kennedy to do, those battlefield commanders in Cuba, Soviets, would have the authority to defend themselves with those nuclear weapons, which, of course, if they'd been fired, would have led to a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and then a retaliatory strike on the United States.
And you're right.
They didn't know that they were operational.
They didn't know that those commanders on the ground had that authority.
If Kennedy had not backed down and said, OK, I'll take the missiles out of Turkey.
I mean, that was a deal.
You know, people think, oh, well, the Soviets just backed down.
It was both sides that backed down.
And Castro demanded, I mean, Khrushchev demanded that Kennedy get the nuclear missiles out of Turkey, which was perfectly logical because, you know, that was right next door to the Soviet Union.
We had our missiles pointing at him.
And then he had the promise never to invade Cuba, which is direct proof that that's what the purpose of the missiles were in the first place, to deter a nuclear attack on Cuba.
And, of course, that raises the notion as to why the military and the CIA and the Cuban exiles hated Kennedy, because he had betrayed them.
He had sacrificed their long dream to effect regime change in Cuba through a military invasion.
Kennedy put the quietus to that.
That's why they said he was a traitor.
He betrayed his country, betrayed the Cubans and so forth.
And the Pentagon never looked on Kennedy as a hero for having diffused the nuclear crisis.
All right.
Now, to bring it back to the current subject here in this current piece, Alan Gross and regime change in Cuba, just to make sure that I understand your story here, Jacob, what you're telling me is there's this American who was busted and the Americans and his defense in Cuba during his prosecution was that, hey, he's just some nice old guy passing out cell phones to people or giving them, I guess, to Jewish groups in Cuba.
But it turns out, no, he was working for USAID, aka American Intelligence, on a covert mission to bring in sophisticated communications equipment, something to do with somebody's plot for regime change there, it sounds like.
And you know this because, as you link here, the documents have been posted at the National Security Archive.
I don't know who screwed up and let that much through.
But in other words, he was as guilty as the communists prosecuting him said he was.
Correct?
Do I understand correct the story here?
Well, he's working for a private contractor.
I forget the name of it.
It's a little deniable, I guess.
Yeah, DAI.
Well, DAI was a contractor for USAID under this contract to go in there and distribute these things in Cuba.
So Gross is like an independent contractor working for DAI.
And it wasn't a screw-up.
What DAI, according to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, is doing is engaging in a bit of gray mail here on USAID and possibly the CIA that they released these documents when Gross sued them.
Now, Gross is obviously in jail in Cuba, but he's filed a suit in federal court over here against DAI.
And DAI responds to the suit by saying, here are some documents that we're going to use to defend this.
And if this case goes to court, we're going to release a lot more information here.
Well, what Gross is trying to do, at least it seems pretty clear to me, is he's trying to force the U.S. government into negotiating a deal for his release.
Well, the only deal that can possibly be made is an exchange of Gross for the Cuban Five.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, the Cuban Five are a group of five Cuban agents that came over here many years ago to try to ferret out attacks, terrorist attacks, against Cuba before they took place.
Well, they were caught and arrested, and the U.S. National Security State said, oh, you're spying.
You're spying.
And well, but they're not spying to prepare for an invasion of the U.S.
They're spying to ferret out terrorist attacks by the U.S. against them, including private groups.
And in other words, it was all defensive.
Well, the federal judge threw the book at them and said, you all are bad people for doing this.
You know you're not supposed to oppose anything the U.S.
National Security State does to Cuba and so forth.
And so they got really high jail sentences, like 10 to 15 years, and they're still in jail, most of them.
And so what the Cubans are proposing is, look, we'll give you Gross.
You give us our Cuban Five.
Let the Cuban Five come back to their families.
And the U.S. has steadfastly said, no, there will be no trade.
And my hunch is that what Gross is doing with his lawsuit is saying, you better negotiate seriously for my release, or I'm going to disclose a lot more information about what's going on here.
Yep.
And now, you know what?
There's so much to talk about, and I want to ask you so many different things here.
I want to ask you about the Cuban Five, but I also wanted to ask you about the repatriation of gold, because you wrote this great thing about that.
Let's talk about that.
We'll do the Cuban Five another time.
Tell us about Germany, and then I think now the Swiss, too, are saying they want their gold back.
Jacob, is that right?
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Is this the crack-up boom?
Is it on now, or what?
Well, it could be, except that they're taken out over a long period of time.
But they store their gold, the Germans did over here in the United States, to kind of diversify their portfolio, keep things stored in other countries, keep it safe.
Well, they're obviously not feeling too safe anymore, because they know that the U.S. seizes foreign assets whenever they get mad at somebody.
You know?
I mean, like, Venezuela took their gold out a long time ago, so did Iran and so forth, because everybody knows that if the U.S. gets mad at a country, they'll just seize everything they have of them.
So the Germans are saying, well, we've decided that we would prefer to keep our gold over here.
Now, they don't say that they don't trust the U.S. or anything, but it's obvious they don't.
So they're extracting, I forget how much gold, but, like, tons and tons of gold from the New York Federal Reserve.
And I think it has to be done on ships, because it's so heavy, and it's going to be done over, what, a 10-year period of time or something?
But to me, the message is clear.
We don't trust you.
And, I mean, sure, there's good relations between Germany and the U.S. today, but who knows what the future holds?
What if Germany says, we want all your troops out of Germany?
You've been here long enough.
World War II is over.
And Cold War is over.
Get out.
Well, that could create tensions.
And so I think the Germans are saying, we would prefer to have our gold over here if such tensions were to arise.
So you think it's more about that than just if there's a financial crisis, that the Americans will just seize it for their own purposes, for something like that?
I think that's part of it, too, especially with a worldwide financial crisis.
But I think it's much harder to justify.
Because the way it works, right, is that almost all the central governments that have any gold to speak of, they keep it at the New York Fed for some crazy reason I don't understand in the first place, right?
That's the gold we're talking about here.
They keep it in the basement on pallets, and they wheel it back and forth to make their exchanges from cage to cage and all that, right?
Yeah.
But, I mean, I just can't imagine if there's just a domestic crisis that they would, you know, that they would ever say, we're going to take other people's gold from around the world to satisfy us.
But I wouldn't put anything past these people.
But let's face it, if there's a huge economic crisis here, like Great Depression, there's probably going to be a worldwide crisis.
And, yeah, I think your point's well taken.
And if it's a worldwide crisis, I could easily see the U.S. saying, well, we're going to have to put a freeze on all assets here.
And, oh, we'll replace it with bonds.
I mean, you know, they seized Americans' gold in the 1930s.
They confiscated, nationalized it, just like, you know, socialists were doing all over the world and have done in the 20th century when they nationalized businesses and industries and so forth.
That's what they did with gold.
And so, yeah, I think people recognize that, that, hey, you did it once, you could do it again.
Right.
I mean, in a way, this is what Nixon did when he closed the gold window, because all those dollars were golden tickets that said, you know, this piece of paper is worth a piece of gold.
And what Nixon said was, I'll no longer give you gold for your tickets.
So that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?
Absolutely.
You're absolutely right that those were essentially like gold certificates that said you can- If you were a foreign government, right?
Not if you were an American citizen, but if you were a foreign government, they were.
Well, that's right.
And before Roosevelt nationalized gold in the 30s, they were for Americans, too.
Americans stood in no different position than foreign regimes up to the time Nixon closed the gold window on them, too.
They always practice on us first before they take their empire overseas, you know?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Because they know that Americans are meek and submissive and will go along with it.
And that's exactly what they did in the 1930s.
I mean, imagine gold had been the official money of this country under the Constitution for over 100 years.
And then all of a sudden, you're a felon if you happen to get caught with it.
It's absolutely incredible.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's at FFF.org.
They got a brand new badass website.
They got 23 years, approximately, worth of being right about everything on that site.
Please go and check them out.
FFF.org.
One of their newer writers at FFF is Tim Kelly.
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That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at FFF.org.
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