Hey guys, I'm giving speeches.
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All right, y'all welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys on the line, I've got Ray McGovern and of course, former CIA analyst, former chief of the CIA Soviet division back when, and he spent this whole century long being a peace activist.
Of course, he's co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and regular writer for us at antiwar.com where his latest is called Peeking Past the Paul, Put Over Arms Talks with Russia.
Welcome back, Ray.
How are you, sir?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today to follow up on a recent conversation and, you know, essentially to catch us up since the talks that happened this week between the Americans and the Russians.
So, um, I guess go ahead, break it down.
What were the major issues at play in what all, if anything got accomplished?
Well, there are two, uh, tracks here.
One is the, uh, demand that, uh, NATO close its doors to Ukraine and Georgia.
Uh, that of course is, uh, what is being painted as a Putin's primary objective.
Uh, that of course is what is being emphasized, but, uh, it's a red herring.
Uh, if Putin thought that NATO would agree to that, having dismissed it as soon as it was voiced, uh, he's not the, uh, the cagey statesman that I believe he is.
So that was the maximalist, uh, demand.
Uh, what was, what was Putin really trying to do?
Well, I think you have to look at why he called Joe Biden or insisted that Joe Biden and he talk before the talks in Geneva between US and Russian negotiators.
And it's very clear what happened.
Um, he said, uh, look, uh, we need to, to talk and we need to agree to personally supervise all this.
And, um, and the, the Russian readout hours later said, uh, Joe Biden, Joseph Biden is what they call him, Joseph Biden, uh, uh, emphasize, you know, get this, that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine, end quote, well, that came from the Russian readout, but was it true?
Well, the U S uh, did nothing to deny it.
Uh, when Jake Sullivan, who gave a backgrounder on the December 30, uh, telephone call, uh, when he was asked after a very, very general and uninformative briefing as by one, one of the journalists there, well, is there anything at all, anything interesting that, uh, uh, that happened here in that telephone call and, and Sullivan's stroke, this chances, no, no, no.
So what's the bottom line here?
The bottom line is that, uh, Biden told him, look, we're going to play this very close to the vest.
We're not even going to tell our pet, uh, correspondents, our pet journalists, what's going on here.
But it's true.
And, uh, you know, fast forward to this week when Wendy Sherman was, uh, uh, was our, our delegate there.
She talked about progress.
Uh, she said, look, there can be progress and there is progress.
And we're going to talk about the emplacement of missiles, confidence building measures, like keeping troops off the borders and regulating or or, uh, delimiting, uh, military exercises and things like, uh, you know, preventing incidents at sea and in the air.
So the Russians agreed to that.
So what's, what's Putin really interested in?
Well, you know, I don't know for sure, and I don't want to claim infallibility here, and I'm always wary of, of mirror imaging, you know, what would I do?
Yeah, that doesn't matter.
What would Putin do?
Well, I think Putin, uh, I think I know Putin well enough that he is, that there is zero chance he will risk war in Europe.
He cares too much about his country and he knows what war is like.
Okay.
So what's he trying to do?
He's trying to get acknowledgement finally, that he has a problem with the emplacement of medium range ballistic missiles in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, wherever, where they threaten his ICBM, his Intercontinental Ballistic Missile emplacements in the European part of Russia.
And now he's got that.
They're going to talk about that.
Now, why the- Pardon me, just to clarify, are we talking about getting back into the INF treaty?
Yeah, we are.
And you know, I mean, the equivalent, what we- Which just expired a year ago, a little more than a year ago under Donald Trump.
Yeah, but Jake Sullivan of all people, Tony Blinken of all people said, yeah, this is under discussion.
We want to do the same kind of things that, that intermediate range nuclear forces, uh, treaty, uh, that we abruptly left under Trump.
We want to see if we can reinstate that.
Now you wouldn't know that from the Times or the Post, but they said that, they said that openly to the press correspondents.
So Blinken and Sullivan changed their tune right after Biden talked to, uh, Putin on the 30th of December.
Uh, they told the negotiators, look, hang tough on NATO.
That's a, that's a no starter.
And even the Russians know that to be a no starter, but you know, the reality is, as we all know, Ukraine and Georgia are not going to become members of NATO anytime soon, not for several years, maybe even decades if it gets that far.
So it's kind of like a, what a red Herring, it's kind of like a straw man.
Is Putin going to going down to abject defeat on this?
Of course he is.
Do you expect anything else?
No, but that's not what matters to him.
Last thing I'll add is that I was always impressed by a, uh, an interview, uh, that Putin gave to Western journalists, uh, during an economic summit in St.
Petersburg.
Uh, it was in 2016.
Uh, it was June 17, 2016, as I reconstructed and he just poured his heart out.
He said, look, you guys don't understand this.
And quite frankly, I don't expect you to report this because it's sort of anathema to report these things.
But we have real concerns about those missiles and placements in Romania already underway and Poland.
Now this was, this was almost six years ago.
And he explained to them very, very clearly, look, these holes that they make in the ground for ABM missiles, ostensibly the Americans told us they're not aimed at you, they're aimed at Iran.
And now says Putin, we have an agreement that forbids Iran from such some nuclear warheads carried by such missiles.
And so, so Putin says, so they lied to us.
It wasn't Iran at all.
It's something else.
And the something else of course, is that these same holes that they dig in the dig in the ground can be filled with, uh, Tomahawk missiles.
It's the MK 41 missile launcher.
If anybody wants to look into that, this dual use launcher that you use for your anti-ballistic missile missiles or your Tomahawk H-bomb tipped cruise missiles.
Either way.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was on a radio program with Scott Ritter recently, and he pointed out that the reasons that the U S gave for leaving the INF treaty.
Now, bear in mind, your listeners probably know this.
I was, I was flabbergasted that both sides agreed back in 1987 to destroy a whole class of offensive missiles, Pershing's on our side and the SS 20s on the Russian, they were already in place.
They were installed and yet the two sides were able to agree to destroy them.
And Scott Ritter, bless his heart, was one of those people, inspectors that went out there and make sure those damn well work were destroyed.
So it's possible to do these things, but what it requires is an acknowledgement on the U S side that Russia really does feel very threatened.
And the only way that, uh, that Putin could hit Biden up the upside of his head is to say, look, we also have these a hundred thousand asymmetrical, uh, Joe, you know what asymmetrical means, right?
Uh, on near the border with Ukraine.
They're not there for idle reasons.
We can use them if you don't come to your senses.
Now, again, I may be mirror imaging, but I don't think any country, least of all a country led by a statesman like Putin would invade and try to occupy Ukraine.
That would be as crazy as invading Iraq or invading Afghanistan and staying for 20 years, come on, give me a break, he's not going to invade.
But you know what?
The deployment of troops can also be used in a political maneuver sense.
And that's precisely what he's done.
Not for the first time.
He did it in April as well.
And Biden immediately called the bump and said, let's have a summit.
The summit was in June and now he's done it again.
And this time he said, look, Joe, uh, you know, if, if you continue in placing missiles that can destroy our ICBM force, uh, we're going to have to react and probably we'll have to react militarily.
So let's talk.
And that's the big news.
We're talking, uh, Wendy Sherman and the rap Gulf agreed to continue such discussions on medium range, but ballistic missiles, confidence building measures and so forth, that's the news here.
Not that NATO rejected Russia's attempt to circumscribe its prerogatives.
Yeah.
And as you point out in your piece, Biden had already said previously that, well, look, we're not going to invite Ukraine into NATO anytime in the next 10 years, which is a polite way of saying indefinitely, right?
Yeah.
So he's not going to put that in writing and sign a new treaty promising never to do it.
American politics won't allow for that.
Unfortunately, it seems, but essentially that's the deal that Putin's getting anyway, right?
That's exactly right.
And, uh, you know, um, there are domestic political considerations that weigh heavily in all this and mostly on the American side.
Uh, but also, you know, here's Putin, uh, heading up, uh, the Russian military, military, as well as everything else.
And when he says, uh, Hey, we need iron clad, um, signed agreements, uh, legal documents to make sure that NATO and the U S behave in central Europe.
Uh, if you look at his generals and admirals that he's addressing this sort of said, yeah, right.
Right.
Oh, that's, Oh yeah.
Right.
Well, wasn't the ABM treaty, uh, assigned the legally binding agreement?
Oh, how about the INF treaty?
Come on, Mr.
Mr.
Putin, uh, get real.
Okay.
So what I'm saying here is that Putin has his own hawks to contend with.
These are high level military people whom he trusts and who are defending their equities and pointing out to him, this is a very, very dangerous situation.
Be hard-nosed when you deal with these people.
Yeah.
All right.
So I don't know if you saw this morning that the, uh, well, first of all, I should identify this journalist who's pushing this, I guess, Victoria Newland.
I didn't watch the whole speech, so I missed it, but somebody on Twitter said Victoria Newland made this claim the other day, but there's this horrible so-called journalist named Natasha Bertrand, who made her entire career pushing the bogus Steele dossier, not just Russiagate, but the most bogus part of it, all of it.
And, uh, you can even read a great write-up in the Washington Post about how she bootstrapped her career based on, uh, the Steele dossier in the words of Eric Wemple there at the Post.
But anyway, she's got a story today about how all her CIA sources are telling her that the Russians have infiltrated Ukraine and they're preparing to attack themselves like Hitler in Poland in order to blame the war on Ukraine and invade.
A big false flag attack that's due to take place anytime now.
What do you say, Ray?
Well, I have no doubt that, uh, the Eastern, uh, Ukraine is full of agents of various intelligence services.
I also have no doubt that, uh, nefarious schemes are being, uh, being devised and perhaps implemented in the future, including things like sarin gas attacks.
One of the favorites, uh, in the, one of the favorite quivers in the arrow than the quivers of, uh, U S and other intelligence services.
Uh, but, uh, when Putin gave that major address on the 21st of December to all his generals and admirals, he was followed by the, uh, the Russian defense minister and the Russian defense minister, look, says we have, we have reports, we have knowledge that there are 160, I think he said, the U S citizens, private contractors with sarin gas, with gas that they're prepared to start a false flag attack, blaming it on, on Russia or just so, so these things happen all the time, uh, what, uh, what the correspondents are doing is if they believe CIA, okay, if they believe CIA, despite the record of the last 20 years, well, then they're going to believe, for example, that Russia is going to amass 175,000 troops along the border with Ukraine preparatory to a major invasion in January, like now or February of this year, that's crazy.
But since, uh, the CIA fed that to the Washington post, that's become one of the benchmarks.
That's what we're looking at.
Now, if you look at the negotiations that are going on now, and then you look at the, the, uh, Olympics that are starting in Beijing on the 4th of February, and then you start looking at, uh, thawing, uh, hard ground there.
It's not, not like the, in my view that those, uh, that those notional, uh, those straw men numbering 175,000, uh, will be invading, uh, uh, Ukraine or any, any place else anytime soon.
So, but it's, you know, once the CIA says it, then it's true.
And that's why it's so hard.
That's why it's really hard for these people to back off and say, well, you know what the CIA thought was that really, or anyhow, it's been overtaken by events and now we're negotiating.
And, you know, again, I may be completely wrong on this, but if you look, if you look at what's new, not what's old, what's old is that, uh, that Putin thought he could get NATO, uh, to bar Ukraine and, uh, and Georgia, uh, forever.
That's, that's all stuff that everybody would know that was bring, uh, the new stuff is this agreement, um, Wendy Sherman and Ryabkov said, these talks are going to go on, they're going to take a while because you don't, you don't discuss arms control matters of this intricacy, uh, in just a couple of weeks or even a couple of months.
So here's Ryabkov acknowledging that the timeframe is going to be, uh, much more than what the Western press is saying based on what they see as Russian threats to move quickly.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
So here's the problem though, right?
Is you have just like with terrorism or with communism before or whatever it is.
You have all this tough talk in terms of domestic politics.
That's so hard to back down from.
And I'm reminded of when these treaties are expiring under Trump.
I think it was during the INF treaty, but also there was the real threat.
If Trump was reelected, he had promised that he was going to let new start expire, which was the last treaty, keeping a limit on intercontinental ballistic strategic H bombs on both sides.
And at one point you had Dianne Feinstein and a couple of, say the older, if not more mature democratic senators in the height of all this Russiagate hype saying, well, you know, I mean, it's not like we want to just throw all these treaties away.
Right.
I mean, maybe despite all of our accusations about Russia taking over America and everything, maybe we need to send our state department officials to go meet with their foreign ministry officials and figure out a way to save these treaties.
And all of a sudden they're grownups again, you know, after seven 30 or something, they can stop and think straight about these issues for a minute.
And I guess I'm just wondering, it's too much to hope for, right.
That that's the prevailing sentiment over, you know, I know what you're saying.
We got a big success here and we ought to take it.
Uh, I hear that, but I just mean kind of going forward, it seems like it'd be even if Putin, I mean, pardon me, our Putin, if Joe Biden feels like, yeah, we really should do the responsible thing here.
He also is in a situation where, wow, all the pressure says otherwise.
And so even if he wants to do the right thing, it's, he would have to tread so carefully and figure out just the right way to, you know, get Congress to go along with him and all those other things.
Right.
Well, as usual, uh, you asked the right question.
It's the thorny question and we don't have a, our Putin.
Uh, Joe Biden is not in charge of our country.
The way Putin is in charge of Russia.
Joe Biden has to contend with what I call the Mickey Matt, which is the outgrowth of the MIC, the MIC, the military industrial complex.
I'll say it slowly.
Military industrial congressional intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex.
Now, why do I say media?
Because media is part of this complex.
It's the linchpin.
If it doesn't completely misinform the U S public with respect to Russian intentions, it's really hard to justify spending up to $800 billion a year on quote defense end quote.
So the power lies with the Mickey man.
Uh, and what we've seen here is tactical really in nature.
Uh, it was quite striking that, uh, that Jake Sullivan and, uh, Tony Blinken, uh, overnight changed their views.
And, and, and as soon as Biden gave him the word, no, no, we're going to talk about, uh, these missile emplacements.
Whoa.
They became, uh, they became advocates.
Not only of discussing that, but hearkening back to what you mentioned before the INF treaty, which destroyed that whole class of medium and short range ballistic missiles.
So yeah, over the longer term, it's a real hard slog and the real rub is that Putin knows that we have in this country, no Putin, uh, that Biden has to sort of maneuver here.
And how long he can pursue this, this path, uh, is politically, well, I'm not able to judge that politically because my expertise is not in domestic politics right now in your article at antiwar.com, you include the transcript of what, 10, 12 minutes of Putin addressing some of these issues.
And this is from a few years ago though.
So why did you include this and what's so important in it?
Well, I was hoping that people would watch it.
In other words, it's 12 minutes.
And I boiled down, uh, just, uh, well, I guess it's about two and a half minutes where he says, look, uh, uh, the, the, uh, Americans have placed their quote, missile defense system in Romania, and they're saying we have to protect ourselves from the Iranian, Iranian nuclear threat.
There is none.
Oh, you've got an agreement.
There's no Uranian.
There's no Iranian nuclear threat.
Uh, Matt, now, uh, by the way, I'm sorry.
I got to interrupt here just to say, I tried so hard to find this and I could not find it anymore, but I know that this happened that in the W.
Bush years, he said that at like a G seven meeting or some kind of European thing, and everybody laughed, they just couldn't help it.
He was like, yeah, well, we got to protect Poland from missile strikes from Iran.
And everybody's like, and then Obama said it and it was like, Oh yeah, we also are pretending to believe that Obama, you know, but when Bush said they couldn't help themselves, it was the most preposterous thing in the world.
Oh yeah.
That massive historical, you know, long-term on and off war, the centuries long struggle between the Poles and the Persians.
Right.
Hmm.
Yeah.
And, and Putin is very, very direct here.
He says, uh, you can understand now they were lying to us about the Iranian nuclear threat.
How can you understand that?
Because they're still building these systems and now they're being loaded with missiles and we know that the same holes that they dig in Romania and Poland, I can be converted into Tomahawk missile launchers and that endangers our strategic situation.
So he made it quite clear.
And of course, uh, Romania is, is equipped to do that now.
Well, Romania has the holes and Poland is getting them and what Biden promised Putin.
And this is big on, on December 30th was okay.
We agree.
We're not going to put any of those things in Ukraine.
And that is big.
Yeah.
One indication of that is that when Putin, one month after, uh, uh, Crimea was readmitted to, to Russia one month later, he said, look, we did this for two reasons, one because of the NATO problem, they wanted to make Ukraine part of NATO, but number two, and in Putin's words, even more important.
End quote was we didn't want those missile sites being emplaced in Ukraine.
The ones that are going into Poland and Romania now.
So, uh, taking Crimea back was partly motivated or more important to Putin, uh, from the point of view of missile emplacements to Ukraine.
Well, that's what he said.
And that was just a month after the annexation of Crimea.
Yeah.
Um, Oh, and by the way, I mean, when it comes to the Russian invasion of the East, they absolutely could have in February of 2015, the Donbass region held a referendum and voted to join the Russian Federation and Putin told them.
No.
And this is sort of my turn of phrase.
I guess I'll let you criticize it, but it seems to me that Putin essentially could have changed the border of Russia right there with a magic marker.
And essentially just said, this is all Russian territory now.
And much like in Crimea simply had his soldiers walk into position there and stand on corners on street corners and say, this belongs to us now, and that's it, it would have been over.
And he decided not to do that.
Yeah.
And, and why do you think that is?
Why didn't he absorb this very pro-Russian area of far Eastern Ukraine at that time when they were begging him to?
Well, Crimea and the Donbass are very different animals.
Uh, Crimea is a strategic asset that Russia couldn't possibly afford to lose.
It's their own ice free, all year long naval base in Sevastopol, which has been there since Catherine the Great, for God's sake, the Russians were not going to allow NATO to take over Sevastopol base.
So that was the big thing.
Uh, the Crimeans were even more in favor of, of, uh, being annexed, uh, to Russia witness the plebiscite that they had over 90% voted for it.
And then the Donbass people who were, you know, I would guess maybe 60%.
So anyway, uh, it's, it's the strategic ramifications here and it's also Russia and Putin being restrained in my view.
Look, do we want to, do we want to have to defend a new border, uh, after we annex part of another country?
I don't think so.
Crimea is easy to defend.
Uh, Donbass, let's tell those guys, we will support them.
We'll give them weaponry and some volunteer soldiers, so to speak, but no deal, they're not going to rejoin, but they're not going to join Russia.
We're not going to redraw that border.
You know, I haven't heard anyone who says in the last few months here, who's been saying the last few months that all Russia is going to invade Ukraine.
I haven't heard any of them mentioned the fact that, well, he could have just taken the far East of the country back in 2015, if he wanted to, but he decided not to, but I still think he's going to invade now, they just seem to leave that out.
Or if they even know that that happened at all, you know?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I asked way back when this first came up several months ago, who, who in their right mind would want to invade a country that used to be the breadbasket of Europe, and now is a basket case, really economically destroyed.
Thanks to Victoria Nuland and the others, uh, who would want to invade that country, much less try to occupy her or even part of it.
Yeah.
Putin achieves his objectives with that a hundred thousand, if that's how many troops right near Ukraine, he's already got Biden to take them seriously and we'll just see how it plays out.
We have the Mickey mat to contend with, so you can't be very optimistic, but you can be a little optimistic.
At least you can look at what's happened.
That's changed since that telephone call on December 30th between Putin and Biden.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks for the good news.
You're the only one who sees it this way out there.
Well, you know, uh, it's, it's out on a limb.
I'm sort of used to that.
I'm trying to be a circumspect here and realize that mirror imaging is always a, always a danger for analysts like me.
So who knows who's right?
We'll probably find out in the next couple of weeks.
And that's, that's good.
Yeah.
Oh, and I'm sorry, one more thing here, the color-coded revolution failed in Kazakhstan and now Russia's position there is stronger than before.
Is that about right?
Yeah.
Russia and China.
Um, now whether it was, uh, initial, initially a color revolution, I just don't know what I do know is that the National Security Council, uh, the, uh, the initially a color revolution.
I just don't know.
What I do know is that the National Endowment for Democracy, which used to be known as a CIA's covert action group, uh, that they put a million two into, uh, into Kazakhstan's aspirations to be fully democratic.
So, so forth and so on.
So there were just as there were in Ukraine, many sites of the National Endowment for Democracy at work, uh, whether they were the ones that initiated this, it looks like it was more a case of oil, uh, the scarcity of oil and gas, uh, but you know, they glom onto these kinds of things.
And the, the, the very, the very quick reaction by the ruler, the existing ruler in Kazakhstan, uh, was what was needed.
The Russians came in and now they're leaving.
So all these admonitions from Tony Blinken, Oh, once the Russians come in, they never leave.
Well, he's going to have to admit, well, they came in and they fixed things up.
They helped the local government fix things up and then they left.
So it's not like Brezhnev entering Czechoslovakia to put down a real revolution back there in 1968.
It's more like a peacekeeper people coming in and making sure that, uh, that people who, uh, dubious support, uh, do not prevail against a friend, a very important friend.
And I should add that the longest land border in the world, contiguous land border is the one between Russia and Kazakhstan.
Okay.
And that Kazakhstan is very, very rich in minerals, oil, gas has manufacturing.
It's really a sui generis type modern state in that part of Central Asia.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we'll leave it there.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate you come back on the show as always, right?
Yeah.
Most welcome.
All right, you guys, that's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, co-founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and regular writer at antiwar.com.
And this one is called peeking past the Paul put over arms talks with Russia.
The Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APS radio.com antiwar.com Scott Horton.org and libertarian institute.org.
