09/08/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Well, I've got a special surprise guest I'm working on getting for the last half hour.
Might want to stay tuned to that and we'll see what happens.
I don't know.
I also got a special surprise guest right now.
It's our friend Ray McGovern, who I didn't know was going to be on the show today until just now.
Hey, Ray, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us from far away.
Where?
I'm in Moscow.
You're in Moscow.
What are you doing in Moscow?
I was speaking this morning at something called the U.S.-Russia Forum, which is run a couple times a year, once in Moscow, once usually in New York or Washington.
It's a group of people who are mostly academics, business people, an intelligence person every now and then, talking about what's happened to relations between our two countries and how we might contribute to restore them or improve them or prevent them from getting out of hand.
Great.
So, tell us the news.
Who was there?
Who spoke?
What progress was made?
What's the big deal?
Sounds interesting.
Well, it really was, yeah.
I very seldom get personal contact with these folks and have only been in Moscow twice before in my life, so this was a really good chance to rub shoulders with very interesting people.
I learned from the editor-in-chief from Komsomolskaya Pravda, which is their mass circulation newspaper, the biggest one, that they printed the entire text of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity memo to Angela Merkel last week, where we warned her, look, Mrs. Merkel, all that fuzzy photography that is supposed to prove that the Russians have invaded Ukraine, well, kick the tires.
We didn't say kick the tires, we said a German idiom for, you know, hey, take a close look at that, because that kind of evidence reminds me or reminds us of the evidence that used to justify an attack on Iraq just 12 years ago.
Not mistaken intelligence, but rather fraudulent intelligence.
So that memo, which was only three pages, eight of us signed on to that, that made it big time.
It was also in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, which, well, until recently was the best daily newspaper in Europe.
So we got some good play.
We're even pretty sure that Angela Merkel herself received a copy of it before she went off to Wales for the NATO summit.
So that's unusual playback for that.
You know, I always wonder about that.
You title these things as open letter memos, basically from kind of a shadow, you know, group of CIA analysts in a sense.
And I always wonder about, you know, the efficacy of that.
And I actually kind of thought that, yeah, I'd give it like a 51 percent chance that that helps it come to the attention of, you know, I don't know if Obama reads them right, but I wouldn't have doubted that someone would have pointed out to Angela Merkel that, hey, listen, these retired CIA guys have written you a thing.
You might want to look at it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Süddeutsche exposure, and Süddeutsche was only about seven of the German newspapers that carried a report on it, makes it pretty much a certain thing that it would have been brought to her attention.
And I think it's really important because, you know, what I've been saying, particularly in the interviews that I've given German TV channels, is that it's high time that Germany grew up, you know, World War II was a long time ago, and Germany still dances to Washington's tune.
Angela Merkel doesn't need to do that anymore.
As a matter of fact, Germany's interests here with the sanctions and natural gas that they need from Russia, her interests or German interests are not identical to those of Washington, whatever Washington's are.
And so we thought we'd just brace her with this, say, now grow up.
And besides Mrs. Merkel, 12 years ago, when there were all kinds of reports and foggy or hazy photography, such as has been used to show that the Russians have invaded Ukraine, 12 years ago, that kind of stuff was used to argue for war on Iraq, a war that by any definition, or at least by Nuremberg's definition, was a war of aggression.
Now, her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, stepped up to the plate on that.
He said, you know, we know, we know what a war of aggression is.
And you know, if you're looking for a coalition of the willing, you've got an unwilling coalition here as far as Germany is concerned.
France did the same thing.
Do you remember how Donald Rumsfeld railed out against them as the old Europe?
And you know, there was a congressman that didn't want French fries to be sold at the congressional cafeteria anymore.
They had to be freedom fries.
It really reached ridiculous proportions.
But of course, the French and the Germans were right on.
They were exactly right.
And you know, when you think about the seriousness of this, Scott, you know, Nuremberg after World War II, and I was around for that, I mean, I was real little, but at least I remember in the aftermath when the Nuremberg Tribunal came in, they defined a war of aggression as the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only insofar as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.
Now you think torture, think kidnapping, think black prisons, you know, think of the infringements on our liberties here in this country and elsewhere.
There's a whole lot of accumulated evil that stemmed from that.
Gerhard Schroeder in Bonn at the time, who was in Berlin yet, he knew how to, well, it's almost Berlin, yeah, he knew how to face into that in that case.
And so we're saying to Angela Merkel, look, we know that you're on the conservative side of the spectrum, but think about German interests and think about the interests of peace in Europe this time.
And you have precedent for acting courageously.
Why don't you try it?
You might like it.
Yeah.
Well, now, I don't know.
This is stupid, Ray, but aren't you an American patriot?
Why are you over there telling the Germans to stop doing what the American government wants them to do?
No, I'm just telling the truth, you know, I don't tell anybody to do anything or avoid doing anything.
I just point out that as an intelligence professional, those fuzzy, fuzzy images that have been shown to implicate, you know, the Russians in doing dastardly things, they are an embarrassment to an intelligence professional, that the U.S. and Russia have far better evidence.
Why they don't, why they don't produce it with respect to the U.S., at least on Russian invasion, makes me think that they don't have any better than that.
And so that makes me think that this is all a convenient excuse.
You see, maybe, maybe your listeners are not aware of this, some of them at least, but three weeks ago, if you'll recall, the media was full of reports that the Ukrainian army was making great strides.
It was pretty much a mop-up campaign, those rebels, which are called pro-Russian separatists out there in southeastern Ukraine, they were on the verge of being wiped out, right?
Now, let me correct the pro-Russian separatists, that ain't what they are.
What they are, are anti-coup d'etat federalists.
They don't like the U.S., NATO, the EU coming in and mounting a coup d'etat against the duly elected president, in that case, Yanukovych, and putting in their own little clients, YATS, Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko.
They don't like that.
And so they're anti-coup.
And are they separatists?
Do they want to join Russia?
I don't know what they don't want to join, right?
They just want a federal system where they have a degree of regional autonomy.
I hear some music starting there, that you, that you're...
Yeah, yeah, we got to go out and take this break, Ray.
But thank you for your patience.
I'll put you on hold here and we'll be right back, everybody, and talk more with Ray McGovern about America and Russia's relationship and, of course, the crisis in Ukraine, the ceasefire, the end of it, NATO expansion and rapid reaction forces and the rest.
Former CIA officer, Ray McGovern, from Moscow.
When we get back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Live here at LRN.
FM, the Liberty Radio Network and affiliates.
Noon to three Eastern Time weekdays.
Full interview and whole show archives available at ScottHorton.org on iTunes and Stitcher.
On the line with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst turned veteran intelligence professional for Sanity.
You can find virtually everything he writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at AntiWar.com.
And right now he's in Moscow, and he's there for the Russia Forum, gave a speech and meet with people there about trying to heal America's relationship with Russia, which is in crisis right now because of the American-backed coup d'etat in February in Kiev and the war by that government against rebels in the East who have refused to accept their rule since.
And Ray, before the break, you were making the point that, I think at least you were about to make the point that even when they voted for their autonomy, they didn't really vote to secede from the Union necessarily.
They just, you know, apparently want more local control than before.
It was pretty kind of loose language in the vote.
It was not a vote to secede.
And of course, the Russians have made it clear, we don't want you.
So you're not going to be the next new state in the Russian Federation.
You're going to stay in Ukraine.
You're not welcome in the first place.
And so that's, you know, a very important couple of points to make contrary to the narrative here.
I mean, you can elaborate on those if you want, but oh, and I think also you're going to talk about, you know, the reason that they came to the terms they came to was because the locals were winning against the Kiev government.
That narrative fell apart too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing how the narratives fall apart and what you just described as a situation with respect to the, quote, pro-Russian separatists, end quote, is separatists is not quite the right word.
Pro-Russian, perhaps, because many of them have Russian roots.
But the Russians don't want them.
And there's no indication that most of the, what I call the anti-coup federalists, that they want anything more than local autonomy, control over their budget, the kind of regionalism we have in this country, in the United States.
So we could dispatch with that.
Now, with respect to the Russian invasion, so-called, when the narrative became severely dented by reality, the narrative being that the Ukrainian government forces were winning, it was due to the incredibly poor leadership by the Ukrainian army, by cousins that didn't want to shoot up their cousins, by people who were running out of ammunition and food and running back home to Western Ukraine and writing their moms and saying, this is terrible, these colonels and majors don't know what they're doing, and leaving their weapons behind and being encircled by the so-called rebels.
Well, that's bad news.
And all of a sudden, there was a different story.
So how do you explain all that?
The Russians are coming, the Russians have come, the Russians turned the tide.
And what do they use to prove that?
A bunch of fuzzy photographs.
Well, you know, I'm sure there are Russians fighting there in the southeastern Ukraine, but I don't think there are columns of tanks pouring in.
The Organization for Peace and Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has monitors down there, has deliberately contradicted the Kiev government's account and the U.S. government's account that the Russians have come.
It was used as an excuse to explain the fact that these are poorly led, poorly trained, not really dependable Kiev forces.
Now, Scott, before I forget, at conferences like this, there are golden opportunities to meet really, really interesting and important people.
And I include in that a professor at Moscow State University now called Viktor Kuvaldin.
Now, who is he?
He was one of Gorbachev's chief advisers between 1989 and 1991.
Wow.
Really?
Wow.
Those were the critical years.
Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev meets with George H.W. Bush in Malta for a summit, first week in December.
And then James Baker goes over to Moscow to talk with Gorbachev and Shepardnadze and does that deal.
The quid being a reunified Germany, the quo being NATO not moving one inch to the east.
So here I had this opportunity to say, this is the next best thing, to ask Gorbachev himself, which of course several people have done, and he's explained that what we say is correct, that what we analysts say, namely that the U.S. reneged or welched on the deal, is absolutely correct.
And I said to Kuvaldin, I said, Professor, why was that agreement not written down?
And he said, Mr. McGovern, you have to go back to those times.
Gorbachev just wanted to get this behind him.
He was seized with immense domestic problems, and he trusted Baker.
There was no thought on our part, the part of us Russians, that you would want to move NATO any closer to us.
We were falling apart.
We wouldn't have a military worth the name in another decade.
And that's of course what Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Russia at the time, told me.
He said, you know, the thought never occurred to me that once the Warsaw Pact sort of dissolved and just went away, that NATO not only would not go away, but would double in size and then want to add Ukraine as well.
So this was really an interesting thing to have a chance to talk to this, Gorbachev, one of his major advisors here.
And he confirmed a lot of the things that I was thinking.
And he and Matlock are both, you know, sort of distraught that it wasn't written down.
But number two things, it was just an incredibly busy time for them.
And number two, they trusted us, they trusted us, and they trusted us.
It never occurred to them that with the Soviet menace gone, that the United States and NATO would do what George H.W. Bush promised not to do, and that is take advantage of that.
And of course, that's what we've done.
And that, of course, is that the taproot, you know, the real basic reason why the Ukraine situation is so delicate.
And we had a chance to talk about all that today, too.
It was really, really interesting with the Soviet scholars and former officials and of course, a smattering of U.S. scholars and Western scholars from other European nations.
It was really a golden opportunity, Scott.
Yeah, I talked with Jack Matlock on the show last week again, actually, and he talked all about that as well.
They didn't even want the Soviet Union to come apart, which, I mean, that to me blows my mind that they were trying to convince Belarus and Ukraine to stay in the USSR.
But anyway, let me ask you real quick here, because we're almost out of time and I need to ask you about the current ceasefire and, you know, the militias, perhaps on both sides who can still ruin it.
There are claims on both sides of interruptions.
Is there enough central control of either side to actually mandate a ceasefire?
Can we move forward from here?
What's going to happen?
Well, as usual, Scott, you're asking exactly the right question.
The BBC asked me that question at six o'clock this morning, Moscow time.
I told them, look, this time you have Poroshenko and you have Putin.
They're both trying to make it work.
They're both bragging about what they achieved last Friday and Saturday.
So that's a biggie.
Okay.
Now, what's the problem?
Well, the problem is that Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, they both dance to the tune from Washington.
And so if Washington wants to continue this struggle, wants to make this still a civil war and pursue its own aims, then there's a good chance that if not Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk who has always been way out in front, and the support of the proto-fascists out there, the right sector and the Svoboda people, that they can make the kinds of provocations that will have the war get underway again.
What weighs against that is they're going to get a really, really bloody nose.
And in my view, probably the anti-coup federalists are going to take Mariupol.
And that would be big, because that would be a major giant step toward having a land bridge between Russia and Crimea.
So there are two things that are hard to control.
One of the folks in Kiev, and then even if you get the people in Kiev under control, there's some real question as to whether they can control the rightists in that part of the Ukraine.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we got to stop there.
We're out of time.
But thanks very much for your time.
Great to talk to you again.
Thanks for having me back.
Glad to be with you, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at raymcgovern.com, at consortiumnews.com, and at antiwar.com.
And right now he's in Moscow trying to forge peace.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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