03/01/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, March 2nd, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
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Today's guest is Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA and ended up being advisor to Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Reagan years.
And then on the eve of the Iraq War, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And has been a great anti-war activist ever since then.
Of course, writes mostly at Consortium News.
But you can also find his own website with all of his writings at raymcgovern.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Listen, we don't really have time to get into this too much, but I wanted to thank you very much, at least here at the start, for giving the Sam Adams Award to Chelsea Manning sitting in a brig right now.
And I know it was important last year to give it to Snowden because he really needed that boost while he's in exile in Siberia and all that.
But Chelsea Manning, you know, Julian Assange is such an intriguing character, I guess, that he sucked up all the attention when Chelsea Manning was the one who took the real risk and is doing the hard time for it.
I mean, not to talk down Julian Assange, I like him too, but Chelsea Manning is sitting there in a brig right now.
And it was very good of you and your group to give the Sam Adams Award to her for that leak, that heroic leak of Iraq and Afghan war logs.
It certainly was well-deserved.
With respect to Julian Assange, Scott, you should know that we wanted to give Chelsea, or then Bradley Manning, the award in 2010.
And of course, he was cooped away by the Marines there undergoing torture.
And we discerned that since he hadn't been tried yet, it wouldn't be so good for us to award him for doing what he's being accused of doing.
So we offered it to Julian Assange.
And he said, no, I will not accept this unless you make it clear that I accept this on behalf of my sources, first and foremost, of course, Bradley Manning.
So it was Julian Assange in 2010 that we gave the award to, the Sam Adams Award for Integrity.
But it was only under those conditions that he would accept them.
So to his great credit, he feels very strongly about Chelsea now and was very supportive of our offering this award to Chelsea.
And as you probably know, Ed Snowden, too, did something very rare, and that is he recorded a statement which we played at the Oxford Union on the 19th of, gosh, it was just the 19th.
A week ago in Oxford, when we gave Chelsea Manning's good friend from Wales the award that he so richly deserved, and his friend gave a very moving talk.
It was quite an evening, and thanks for mentioning it, because one should not forget that Manning sits there in Leavenworth and needs to be corresponded with, needs to be borne in mind, needs not to be forgotten.
Right, yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, everybody, you can find the video of that, that whole ceremony is there up on YouTube, I believe.
Yeah, or you can go just to my website, RayMcGovern.com, it's up there, too.
And let me mention that we have a website for the Sam Adams Associates, and it's SamAdamsAward.ch, as in Charlie H., as in hotel.
C-H, okay, SamAdamsAward.ch, okay, great.
Right.
Alright, again, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I got Ray McGovern on the phone, and back when you were a CIA analyst, you were a Soviet specialist, correct?
I was, yeah.
And so, well, good, I can tell when I'm reading your latest piece here at ConsortiumNews.com.
One regime change, too many.
I think, I think, really, to sum up just the first couple of paragraphs here, yes, too many.
They've already, they, the American imperialists, have already pushed it too far.
And the Russian response thus far, the, I guess, you know, sewing up of the Crimean Peninsula there by the Russians, is the very predictable response, the check, to their attempt to run off with Ukraine.
That's exactly right, Scott.
You know, it was sort of like a no-brainer, that that's how the Russians would react eventually.
And when this little push, coup, succeeded against Yanukovych two weeks ago, well, the Russians are not going to hang around and do nothing.
So, when you're, when you're messing around with the, what the Russians call their, their near frontier, and of course, at one point, the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, you're messing around with fire, and that goes in spades for their southern soft belly.
So, the Russians have ample cause to feel sort of diddled way back in, you know, way back 24 years ago in 1990, when there was such hope.
Do you remember?
Maybe you were too young, Scott.
I was young, but I was paying attention.
I knew what a big deal it was.
I mean, it was incredible, with the Berlin Wall falling down, and Gorbachev turning out to be the real deal, as some of us suggested he was, against Bill Casey, head of CIA, and Bobby Gates, head of analysis.
They were all saying, no, no, no, he's just a clever commie.
Well, you know, the big thing was always, what would happen to Germany?
And the Russians, having lost between 25 and 30 million, that's million with an M, people in World War II, and having suffered all kinds of deportations at the hands of the Germans over the centuries, you know, the big thing was to keep Germany divided.
I mean, that was post-war policy, not only on the Russian side, but on the Western side.
All of a sudden, East Germany is up for grabs, and there's something like 20 Soviet divisions there, you know?
So, what's going to happen?
Well, what George H. W. Bush did was send Jim Baker over to Moscow and figure out, well, okay, is it okay if Germany becomes reunited?
And we got a bunch of, yeah, but, you know, let's not make it part of NATO.
Oh, no, we'd like it to be part of NATO.
Well, long story short, the Russians pretty much acquiesced, not in writing, but in paperwork we can see within the German foreign ministry and our own, they acquiesced in the notion that, okay, there could be a Germany, a united Germany, that would be part of the West, part of NATO even, but no more, okay?
No more.
Let's not let the other former Warsaw Pact countries become part of NATO.
That's a little bit too, you don't need that.
We don't need that.
There's no threat from us.
Let's make a gentleman's deal.
And they thought they had one.
All of a sudden, well, you know the rest of the story, they didn't have one.
And NATO and the EC have, in Russia's eyes, encroached eastward steadily through the last couple of decades.
Well, they've incorporated everybody except Ukraine, basically, at this point, right?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, and so the Ukraine was always a bridge too far, in my view.
And it takes somebody totally insensitive to Russian strategic interests to think that they could overthrow a government in Ukraine and the Russians wouldn't do anything about it.
But we know what they've done.
For your listeners, this is pretty recent.
Putin, the Soviet president, the Russian president, asked for permission from the Russian Duma, the parliament, to deploy troops into Ukraine.
And he was given that permission earlier on Saturday.
And they had already done that in Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, but which sits on top of the Black Sea and houses the main base for the Black Sea fleet, the big one the Russians have, and the others, very, very key strategic military facilities.
So what the Russians did, even before Putin asked the Russian parliament for permission, was to seize the two airports, two large airports in Crimea, and seal off some of the highways and the installations that the Russians, of course, the naval base that the Russians depend on.
And earlier on Saturday, we got word that he asked for permission to do that.
And guess what?
The Duma, the Russian parliament, gave Putin permission.
And so now he has permission to deploy troops not only in Crimea, but in Ukraine writ large.
Will he do it?
Well, you know, I think he wants to have that option.
And if push comes to shove, he will.
But he's got lots of other tools in his toolkit there.
Economic leverage.
Ukraine depends heavily on subsidized prices for oil and natural gas and all kinds of things that the Russians have been giving them just because of their dire economic situation.
So the Russians can fool around with that.
They can do all manner of things.
Their secret police, their KGB successor is at work, of course.
And then they're just going to sit by idly and watch people like the neoconservative Prima Donna Nuland work with the Ukrainian government that has been installed two weeks ago and drift them back toward the West like so many of the other satellites.
And now, of course, Ukraine was a constitutive republic of the Soviet Union.
So it's not going to happen.
But if you just look at the map and look at the strategic relationship that Ukraine has always had with the former Soviet Union, now Russia, there's all kinds of leverage that Moscow can bring to bear.
And Putin's not going to be reluctant to do that.
Now, if in their zealousness, their zealotry, the neocons persist in trying to undermine or trying to fortify this interim government that they've installed in Kiev and try to wean at least the western part of the Ukraine away from the country itself and from some Russian influence, then Putin has all manner of things which he's already displayed.
One of the things that Putin will have to put into his calculus is, you know, what kind of reaction can he expect from our president, Obama?
And that's pretty clear because Obama got up yesterday and, you know, at the end of Friday when news isn't all so good or isn't all so paid attention to, and he did what the neocons wanted him to do.
He said, now this would be costly.
There would be costs if the Russians interrupted this flow.
But, you know, he spoke in the subjective mood.
He said, you know, if the Russians use their military or if the Russians do this and that, well, you know, maybe he gave the day off to the White House Situation Room, but they had already done those things.
Well, you know, Rice and Power, the National Security Advisor and the U.N.
Ambassador have both been out talking smack to varying degrees, making somewhat veiled threats.
And, you know, the irony of the whole thing is that the U.S. role is so transparent here, you know.
I compared it back to 1968 when I was in Munich and I was advising the head of Radio Free Europe.
And we both thought that the Russian tanks were going to roll into Czechoslovakia to put the kibosh on the Krak Spring.
And we were a minority of two, really.
Everybody else was euphoric.
No, no, no, the Russians will never do that.
No, they'll take a black eye.
No, no, no.
Well, you know, on August 20th, 1968, that's precisely what they did.
Now, what I'm drawing here is a contrast, because then the Prague Spring, you know, the spontaneous, widespread, popular revolution that Aleksandr Dubček led, was such that nobody in the world believed that the CIA or MI6 or anybody else needed to be behind it.
It was very, really and truly spontaneous.
Now, look at this situation with respect to the Ukraine.
Here we have, you know, not circumstantial evidence.
Here we have Victoria Nuland, a prima donna neocon, who now is Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.
And she's talking to the U.S. ambassador there in Kiev.
And this is very early this month, well, very early last month, very early February.
And it's put on YouTube on the 4th of February.
It's what she says.
I mean, now, Yats, Yats is short for the fellow who is now the Prime Minister of Yatsin.
I'll remember his name in a second.
Anyhow, she says, Yats is the guy.
He's got the economic experience, the government experience.
He's the guy you know better than the guy you don't know.
Now, Yats will need all the help he can get to stave off the collapse.
He is warned that there is an urgent need for unpopular cutting of subsidies and social payments before Ukraine can improve.
I guess they're going to cut the food stamps there, too.
Anyhow, here she is in an intercepted, open, that is, unencrypted telephone conversation with the U.S. ambassador, who happens to also be a neocon pilot is his name.
And he's saying these things, and now it's on YouTube.
So, hello, who becomes the interim prime minister?
But Yats, Yats, Yats is Yats, I say in the subtitle here.
The same fellow that she named in this conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev.
And who is he?
He's the former head of the Central Bank.
I wonder who he's friends with.
Yeah, he's a former economic minister, and he knows what needs to be done.
And his name is Yatsenyuk.
And he's clearly New England's guy.
So, surprise, surprise, he came out on his feet there.
And he's calling for, quote, responsible government, end quote.
One that's willing to commit, quote, political suicide, end quote, as he puts it.
Because they're going to have to take unpopular social measures.
Because the IMF wants them to.
Because that's how they're going to enter into the fellowship of places like Greece and other countries that are basket cases in Europe.
So, the Ukraine has a choice, really, between going west or going east.
Neither is without its flaws.
But this notion that this is a civil rights or a democratic revolution is so far from reality that people need to start reading what Robert Perry has been saying for the last couple of weeks.
This is clearly a neocon overreach.
And Obama himself doesn't have his heart in it.
You can tell by his body language.
You can tell by his reluctance even to pronounce the word Yatsenuk or Yats because it's so, in Europe and elsewhere where people have real news, it's openly known that Yats was our guy and Yats is in power now.
Well, Putin's not going to stand for that.
And he doesn't have to stand for that.
He's got all kinds of cudgels that he can use until such time as it may seem necessary for him to send still more Russian troops in there.
And they've already warned.
They've already gotten permission.
You know what, though?
I mean, I have been reading Robert Perry's work on this lately at Consortium News.
And he makes great points about what the neocons are up to.
But I don't see how that's necessarily exclusive of the will of the president of the United States.
He's the one who sailed the Navy into the Black Sea under the excuse that they're there in case they need to evacuate for terrorist attacks at the Olympic Games.
That was the pretext there.
And he's the one who hired Victoria Nuland and gave her all this money to foment this thing.
She gave a speech, I'm sure you saw, to the Chevron people or whoever it was, talking about America's funneled $5 billion into Ukraine over the last I'm not certain how many years to promote pro-Western or at least they wish pro-Western forces there.
Gentle line pockets, yeah.
Well, you know, she's a menace.
So the question is whether Obama is foursquare behind these guys or whether he accepts them as kind of a necessary evil.
In the final analysis, it doesn't much matter.
He's beholden to them.
He doesn't have the guts to stand up to them if he does disagree with them.
But I saw his fainthearted attempt to assuage their feelings.
Yesterday in that very brief press conference where he wouldn't answer any questions, I saw that as sort of a sop to them pending his coming down hard and saying, look, you know, enough is enough.
We do expect some Russian cooperation on real important matters like Syria, like Iran.
And we know that you neocons want to put the kibosh on that as well, but we're up to your game.
This is it.
No more fooling around with, you know, 35 or 65 national endowments for national education, whatever endowments there are.
These NGOs that are sort of the successor to what we used to call covert action in the old CIA.
Right.
Can you talk to us a little bit, Ray, about the nationalist right as part of this coalition that fomented this coup or this pretty illegal impeachment it looks like?
This is something that Robert Perry has been very good on over the last few weeks, and Max Blumenthal did a great write-up for Alternet about it, by the way, as well.
Some of these guys, I've seen some of these pictures where these guys are wearing SS lightning bolts, and they've got iron crosses on their poster signs that they're holding up.
You know, it's scary stuff, Scott.
I mean, if you have any sense of history and you know how much cooperation certain segments of the Ukrainian population gave to the Nazi invaders, there are real, real problems in the populace there in Ukraine because people know who they were and they're still around.
And worst of all, they've had a really essential hand, sort of like being the backbone of some of these thugs that actually succeeded in waging this putsch two weeks ago where the parliament changed and they got Yanukovych out of there.
He's in Russia right now.
And, you know, it's a little bit mysterious why it is that these neocons think that this is a good bunch of people to cooperate with.
But, you know, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and they're doing the same thing with respect to Syria where you see them in bed with some of the worst kind of al-Qaeda types simply to get rid of Bashar al-Assad.
Right.
Yeah, well, they're apparently willing to do anything in the short term to accomplish seemingly the creation of nothing but more crises to do more terrible things about later on.
But, I mean, so it goes.
It's amazing, though, to see Nuland and all these others releasing all these statements about, oh, we're really moving forward now and this is all great news and, you know, the fall of the president here.
And just completely ignoring, and along with the entire American media, just completely ignoring the fact that you have actually like a fascist brown shirt army out there on the street making sure that this thing goes their way.
You know, let's not talk about the Nazis, okay, everybody?
And then they all agree and don't.
Well, yeah, that's the problem in our media.
More broadly, you know, you have popularly elected governments like, let's say, in Cairo and, let's say, in Kiev, and we're supposed to be democratically principled and we support these kinds of governments as long as they're popularly elected.
There are periodic elections.
And yet when Cairo gets overthrown by the military, oh, we don't call that a coup.
No, it can't be a coup because we want to give arms still to the people who overthrew the popularly elected government.
Yeah, no, that's a restoration of democracy.
Yeah, right.
What happens in Kiev, you know, we kind of aid and abet it and then say, well, now, you know, this is real democracy.
These people really want to make sure that the human rights are protected and all.
And then you look at them as you see all these Nazi insignia on them, and you wonder, you know, what's really in their heads?
Are they just trying to get rid of Putin?
Lots of luck on that, you know?
Putin's there for the duration.
Well, and that kind of nationalism isn't going to cooperate very nicely with the EU either, you know?
Well, the EU, you know, has a stake in this thing.
I mean, they depend so heavily on Russian gas and oil to a degree and on other things, trade with Russia, but, you know, they're not as immune to pressure from Russia as we are here on this side of the Atlantic.
And besides that, you know, they have ample reason to be ticked off at us given all those revelations about NSA eavesdropping and other things that are indignities that they really weren't aware they were suffering before.
So I see a distinct change in the transatlantic relationship.
The Brits, well, they'll always stay with us, but the rest of them are starting to get more than a little ticked off.
And while most people thought this was a transitory thing in the beginning, I think it's done, what's the word, permanent damage to the relationship.
And I think that when it's clear that Victoria Nuland uses words I can't use on the radio to say what she thinks about the EU, then, you know, they'd like to return the compliment, I'm sure.
And I think the U.S. is really suffering and going to suffer more in terms of damage to the relationship and more freedom for people who used to just follow our lead willy-nilly, no matter where it led.
And now, Ray, I know that the Empire itself, as a project, as a government agency, is sort of what the military calls a self-licking ice cream cone, but it's hard for me to imagine what interest these people even imagine that they have in Ukraine other than they want to be able to put, you know, Lockheed weapons systems that much closer to Russia on every board or something like that.
But, you know, again, that's the sort of self-licking ice cream cone thing.
Is it just their pipelines?
They want to be able to put pipelines through Ukraine, maybe import some heroin through Ukraine without having to go through Russia?
And so, you know, they need to limit Russian influence for that.
Or why do they even really care?
Well, I think it's this megalomania, this thought that we are the indispensable country of the world, that we have all the power.
We emerged from World War II and from the fall of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe 24 years ago as the only big person in town.
And to the degree that we earlier resorted to negotiations and give and take, we don't have to do that anymore.
And so Ukraine is ripe for plucking, and we'll try to pluck it.
The degree of unreality, the degree of historical stupidity that these people evidence is no more clear than what they've just done two weeks ago in removing the newly elected government of Yanukovych in Kiev.
They could have at least waited a year until the next election.
Right now, they had to do it now.
So I just see this as, you know, the new realm expanding and creating conditions where they can dictate where that oil and gas goes.
Israel, of course, is a big part of this thing.
The more the U.S. is involved in the mainland of Asia and Europe, the better it is that the Israelis see that it is for themselves.
And many of these neocons, of course, are extremely pro-Israeli.
So that's another element of it.
It's kind of strategic overreach, strategic omniscience, and strategic stupidity in the long run.
All right, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Ray.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right, everybody, that is the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, journalist and columnist at ConsortiumNews.com, and his own website is—oh, and he also is part of that Sam Adams group that gave the award to Chelsea Manning.
And you can find his own website there at RayMcGovern.com.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton here for Anti-War Radio every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there.
See you next week.
I'm Scott Horton.
Have a great week.
Bye.