01/11/17 – Philip Giraldi on Russian hacking claims, and Washington’s long history of interfering in elections abroad – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, January 15th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Introducing Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest in Washington, D.C., and regular writer for UNZ.com, U-N-Z, UNZ.com, and for the American Conservative Magazine, and yeah, got two pieces like that too.
Washington Invented Hacking and Interfering in Elections, writes Giraldi, at UNZ.com, and No Smoking Gun on the Russia Hack, at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
Welcome back, Phil, how are you?
Hey, I'm okay, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you doing the show again.
So yeah, let's talk about this, well, I don't know, do you want to start with the latest, or you want to go back to the big intelligence report from the other day, like in the article here?
Either way.
Yeah, well, they're kind of linked, in that the, when the big intelligence report was, we never saw that, of course, the public wasn't allowed to see that.
We got a seven-page version, whereas Trump and the President got a 35-page version.
But it turns out there was a two-page supplement which detailed allegations about an investigation carried out by a British intelligence security-type firm that had been commissioned by Republicans who hated Trump back in the summer, it appears, to get the dirt on him in terms of his relationship with Russia.
So this is today's story.
There have been numerous stories over the last two weeks that I'm sure you're painfully aware.
So anyway, this is the latest one.
I'm just, in fact, writing up something for the American Conservative on it, on today's revelation, and I have already written two articles on what came out last Friday.
All right, and now, the latest thing here, did you read the whole thing?
Because BuzzFeed went ahead, I guess CNN reported, hey everybody, there's this thing, and David Corn had reported on it previously for Mother Jones, and then BuzzFeed went ahead and published the whole document, which apparently had been being shopped around in D.C. for a long time now, and boy, it's full of all kinds of things, including things that contradict other things, and all kinds of things, but did you read it?
What do you make of it?
Some of it kind of rings true, or at least very plausible or something?
I don't know.
What do you think?
Yeah, you know, I don't doubt that some of it is true, but see, as a former intelligence officer, I can tell you that's the best way to write something up.
You throw a little truth in, and that gives credibility to the rest of the stuff in there.
So I, you know, and here's the thing to remember.
This was done probably by a bunch of neocons to start, and then the Democrats got into it too, and were also funding it towards the end, apparently.
So anyway, they were out to get Trump, and you go to a private firm run by a former intelligence officer, which I don't doubt at all, and this guy is selling a product.
The guys who are paying him don't want to hear anything good about Trump.
They only want to hear bad about Trump.
So you go to your sources, and you tell your sources, hey, I need a lot of bad stuff about Trump, and these guys, of course, are also on the payroll.
So they, in turn, want to make more money, so they dig up all the crap that they can possibly dig up.
They elaborate on it as much as they can, and a lot of these stories were just ridiculous.
I mean, the one about the prostitutes peeing on the bed that had been used by Obama, I mean, come on.
Is it true?
I mean, the source in the report was a woman, I guess, who cleaned the rooms at the hotel.
So you know, she's got a certain credibility, a level of credibility, but on the other hand, you're paying her, and you're paying her to come up with something that is derogatory of Trump.
So I see a lot of funniness in this story.
There's already a claim from 4chan, whatever that is, that they fabricated part of the report.
I don't know if you saw that.
I did see that, and you know, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
So that's like an online message board type thing, a pretty hard-edged one, where a lot of original stuff originates sometimes.
And they were saying, yeah, they were trolling, this was fan fiction, I think they said, where they were trolling Trump opponents, and somehow were able to niger uranium forgery this thing into the intelligence stream, this kind of thing.
I don't know if Hadley helped him or not this time, Phil.
So yeah, but I guess the contradictory part of the story to that, assuming it's true at all, who knows, according to the CNN story, was that, I mean, and maybe this doesn't really contradict what they were claiming.
Maybe they were only claiming, you know, that they originated some of the facts in there or something.
Right.
But CNN claims that CIA doesn't claim to have verified any of the information or any of the claims in there, but they have verified that this guy really is a former MI6 guy and that he does have real sources in Eastern Europe, etc., and that it's not just a 4chan hoax, according to them, but I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the point is, you know, I have worked for private security companies that do international investigations.
When I lived down in your neck of the woods in Texas, and for five years I worked in these kinds of firms, and I worked for another one up here in Virginia for a couple more years.
So I know how this stuff works.
When a client comes to you with money, with an unlimited budget, and he wants stuff, you're going to produce stuff.
You're not necessarily going to come up with out-and-out lies, because ultimately that would catch up with you and you would not be hired by anyone.
But the fact is, you are going to be, you know, tolerant of things where you're not quite sure, and you will try to report them maybe as fairly as you can.
But it's a business-type thing, and if you have people that, you know, really want to get somebody, get information on somebody, you're going to do your best to make sure that client walks away happy.
So you've got to be thinking in terms of where did this originate, and what was the objective of it.
And sure, I'm sure some of it is true.
And there was another account in there about Trump, during the Miss Universe contest, cavorting with prostitutes and being filmed by the FSB while this was going on.
Do you think Trump cares about, you know, whether his wife finds out that he was with a prostitute?
I don't think it matters at all.
The guy's been married three times, and probably has been around the circuit about a hundred times more.
Apparently it doesn't matter too much to the American voters either.
Yeah, either for the voters, right, exactly.
He's sitting in Nelson Rockefeller in 64 anymore, I don't think.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So anyway, I'm somewhat skeptical of the whole exercise, I'm sure.
Well, I like how they say, well, you know, Putin and the highest-level Russian government agents have been cultivating him for five years.
And then two pages later, they've been cultivating him for eight years.
You're like, wait, really?
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and the fact is, sure, intelligence services watch for important foreigners who come through on their screen and stuff.
We do the same thing.
There's a whole division in CIA, it's called the domestic division, which does nothing but grab foreigners who are at American universities or are coming through to give speeches and stuff like that and try to recruit them as spies.
We do it.
Everybody does it.
So, you know, again, this is one of those stories of, and why would Trump want to, you know, take the risk of getting involved with the Russians?
A guy has money, he has status, there's no reason for him to do it.
And I'm sure he has a very trusted prostitution firm in New York City that he can deal with.
Yeah, exactly.
Why go crazy on vacation, you know, getting drunk?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's today's story.
And he's not a drinker, we might add there.
It's not like he went to Moscow and got trashed like a general.
Yeah, he's not like Flynn.
And yeah, anyway, so that's today's story.
But of course, the story last week was this other report, which was the seven, depends on how you define it, it was about 14 pages long, but seven pages of it was a dissection of Russia Today television service, and how Russia Today has made everybody in the United States vote for Trump.
And the funny thing was the information that they used in the seven pages, most of it dated from 2012.
And as Dan McAdams pointed out, some of the shows that they described as being perverting our public aren't even on the television anymore.
They were canceled years ago.
So it's a total bullshit report, which if the U.S. government, intelligence, and law enforcement services can't come up with anything better than that, it's just absolutely pathetic.
There was no evidence of anything whatsoever in it.
Yeah.
Well, the fact that they even admitted that.
This was originally published back in 2012 at the bottom.
Who put this thing together?
Who was the final editor on this thing before it went out?
And this is, I mean, as you said, though, this is the very redacted version.
They didn't even show us the blacked out lines here.
They just said, we assess this.
And by the way, when we say, I love that you had the exact quote in there somewhere.
When we say assess, that doesn't mean we really think so.
That's right.
The most ridiculous kind of a disclaimer on it.
Yeah.
It said, don't confuse it with fact.
We're not saying it's a fact.
They actually said that.
They said that, you know, we're providing what we have, but don't, don't automatically assume that it's a fact.
Yeah.
Just because we say so.
Don't quote us.
Yeah.
Thanks.
All right.
So, and now, okay.
So we had talked for a minute on the phone.
I don't mind saying about my interview with Craig Murray and how he had said, and actually his story had changed a little bit from what he said on my show to what he supposedly told the Daily Mail.
Although they may have, you know, there may have been something lost in translation there by the newspaper.
I wouldn't be surprised, especially that paper, but whether or not he actually was the one who received the leak in the woods in Washington, DC, or whether, as he told me, it was a later meeting after the leak had already been received, but for some reason he met with the source again anyway, that he wouldn't say the reason.
But anyway, so we had talked about, you know, this whole thing for a minute on the phone and you were saying that like, Hey, you know what, if the Russians were doing this, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
And there's, I think I'm sort of paraphrasing you correct here.
The way I remember it, Phil, you were saying, you know, when this new report comes out, we'll see.
But there, I think probably there's going to be a little something to this, right?
I mean, there must be, they're not going this far out on a limb with nothing.
And then this came out.
Is that basically, do I have that right?
You were expecting a little more substance to this thing.
Tell me, tell me about Fancy Bear and Apartment 28.
What are we talking about here?
What is this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know.
And it's been, there's been, you know, people from NSA, and I think you, you probably talked to some of them who were saying, look, I mean, the NSA collects all this information.
So they know who, or they know at least a profile of who it was that got into that computer.
And so they know who it is.
And if it was the Russian government or GRU, they should say that.
Or if, alternatively, it was some private hacker who might have been working for Russia, you have to say that too, because then it's your credibility on the line to say, all right, this was a private hacker who lives in Romania, but we suspect he might be somebody connected with Russia.
And of course, that destroys your argument, because essentially, if you're accusing a foreign government of having deliberately gone out to destroy your political system, which is what's being claimed, then you better provide, you damn well better provide some serious evidence.
And if all you have is that some hacker got into a computer, and then this stuff wound up somewhere else that you don't know about, then what are you saying?
You know what it is?
It's exactly like 2002.
Well, you know, the president must have secret information that he can't tell us.
It's true that every claim that they've made so far has been readily debunked in one minute.
There's probably something else that we haven't heard yet.
That's what we're down to.
Yeah, it's just awful.
I really expected this report on Friday to have some substance.
And I noted in my account of it, I said, look, the only government organization that is dedicated to finding out about, you know, people hacking and doing all this kind of thing in the electronic infrastructure, infrastructure, is NSA.
And NSA, at one point in that document, said they had only moderate confidence in the judgment, and the judgment being that somebody connected with the Russian government had hacked into this computer.
So that tells you that the only people who actually would be in a position to know were saying they weren't convinced.
Right.
You know, what does the CIA know about this kind of stuff?
Or the FBI?
I mean, they have some good people on their staff, but the NSA, they're the experts.
Right.
Well, and they keep saying this is the consensus.
This is the consensus.
So it must be right.
But then even the best story that they had in terms of the media that I know of, and I might have missed one, but there was a big one in the Washington Post that said, oh, well, now FBI and NSA really have been brought around to the CIA's point of view.
But then when you read the article, that was the headline.
But the article said, well, that's what our CIA source tells us.
But that was all they had.
Yeah.
I saw that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's absolutely correct.
I mean, there clearly is a vast gap in credibility on all this stuff.
I'm not saying for a second that the Russians, they might have done this.
And if I were an intelligence organization doing it, I would very cleverly be covering my tracks.
And as we said before, in the issue of meeting that guy in Washington, he could have been a Russian plant, unless you really knew who he was and you carefully checked out who he was and what his bona fides were.
You don't know that.
And if I were a Russian intelligence agency and I were running this kind of thing, I would have all kinds of red herrings built into the system so that it wouldn't be traced back to me.
So, you know, it's quite plausible that the Russians did indeed do this.
We're not getting the evidence and all we're getting is the Obama administration piling on Russia.
Yeah.
Well, and it really does seem to be evidence of absence when they keep talking all this smack and still they can't come up with a thing really beyond probably fancy bear, which actually is just a made up term for a thing that doesn't really exist is probably the Russian GRU.
And we know that for reasons that, yeah, don't really hold up at all.
And as far as best or best guess kind of thing, that sure is pretty bad.
And you know what?
So here's gets to the real point, Phil, is I think whether this is true or not, that to my eyes, it looks like CIA is in open warfare with the incoming president, the United States.
They're doing everything they can to reinforce this narrative.
Just I mean, in terms of think of what they told the CNN.
We haven't verified any of the facts, but we have verified that there's a pretty credible guy making these assertions anyway.
You can print that the CIA told CNN the other day.
And you know, the whole thing is right.
You come at the king.
You better not miss.
And here's CIA.
It's been swinging and missing, trying to take out Donald Trump since at least Mike Morrell went on the Charlie Rose show back last summer and I guess presumably before that.
And they're not quitting.
And it's January, man.
And so what is going on here, Phil?
Am I kind of getting caught up in my own hyperbole or is this going to be a real fight over who's actually the king of the jungle up there?
Well, you know, you know, Scott, I think ultimately what it comes down to is, you know, follow the money.
I think that people are looking to protect their budgets.
They're looking to to have status with the new administration and that kind of stuff.
And they're all playing insider games.
All the intelligence agencies are playing insider games against each other.
And what is what you're seeing here is I think there are a number of agendas that are playing out.
The it is within the interests of law enforcement and the intelligence agencies to have a real big bad enemy.
And that pretty much by by by, you know, elimination process of elimination has to be Russia.
So they really love this narrative about Russia being a bad guy and so on and so forth.
And what they're trying to do, I think, is put Trump in a corner where he's going to be very kind of constrained in terms of his possible options to try to change the relationship with Russia.
And you're hearing this both from Democrats who are, of course, also have an agenda of wanting to explain why they lost the election.
And you're hearing it from people like McCain and Lindsey Graham, who basically are hawks and want bigger defense budgets and so on and so forth.
So I think there's an agenda here.
Let's keep the cash going.
Let's keep the American people nervous about things.
Let's let's let's make the threat level look real serious.
And of course, that's ridiculous.
Russia doesn't threat the United States in in any way.
And this is all a pretext for people in power to stay in power.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, that coincides very well with a report in The Washington Post that had a I'm sorry, I forget which think tank the guy was from, but it was a fairly prominent one.
And he was saying the same thing as you only he was very approving of it and saying, yeah, well, you know, I mean, basically, at this point, what we're trying to do is just lay this on all this basically all this BS on thick enough that in order to him in Trump, that was the phrase to him him in so that all this let's have detente stuff can only go so far.
And yeah, but so I guess my thing is, though, that aren't they really pushing their luck making it so personal against him?
Because and I understand that the presidency is somewhat of a ceremonial role, but it seems like well, there's even a good article recently that talked about how, you know, that assumes that the national security state and the presidency respect each other's role and like, yeah, he's the figurehead, but he also has some prerogatives that you guys got to go along with too.
And it seems like they're saying, nah, you're gonna you're basically work for us now, Trump, which doesn't seem like a very good way to work to deal with this guy.
You know what I mean?
Obviously, Barack Obama's like, sure, let me lay down on my belly on the floor and you guys just walk all over me and do whatever you want.
But with Donald Trump, that seems like, dude, he could abolish your agency if he wanted to.
You know?
Yeah, yeah.
You're right.
I think it's I think it's tactically bad.
But again, you have to look at, you know, where exactly this is coming from.
If I were to go to over to CIA today, you know, there are 20,000 employees at CIA.
And I would bet you 80 percent of them voted for Trump.
And the fact is, this is coming from the political level.
This is coming from the level of John Brennan.
This is coming from the people who have a serious stake in where this stuff is going in terms of continued relevance, continued importance and continued money coming in from various resources.
So, you know, it's a it's a it's a it's a different animal up on that kind of level.
And I think that once Trump is back, it is president and he has his man as CIA director.
It's going to settle down because it is he will recognize it's more in his interest to be able to use these people for what he wants to do than it is to be an open warfare with them.
And, you know, Pompeo will make will finish off quickly anybody who doesn't agree with that agenda.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there you have it.
I mean, that's a basically, in other words, they win because they're not going anywhere.
It's just like they're not going anywhere.
I think I think it was Hayden was speaking.
I might be.
It could have been Morrell or one of these guys.
I'm pretty sure it was Hayden who told The Washington Post that, you know, right after the present one, after he won, they said, yes, we will brief him on most of the secrets and stuff.
But like, you know, they were making it pretty clear that like, yeah, he's in our hands.
Simple as that.
And not the other way around at all.
We're going to let him know what we think he needs to know, what we think is safe to tell him, which actually is a valid concern considering the trouble they have us in all over the world, I'm sure.
But yeah, well, and so listen, speaking of which, you have this other great article at UNS.com.
Washington invented hacking and interfering in elections.
Weaponized hacking all began with Stuxnet.
Remind us what Stuxnet was.
Stuxnet was the computer virus that was a computer worm that was created by the United States and Israel working together.
The intent of it was to cripple the Iranian computer systems that were involved in their nuclear program.
Now, we know now, of course, the Iranians did not have a nuclear weapons program, but basically created this virus, which just wreaked havoc with the Iranian computers, both in their scientific applications and also their government computers, their oil industry computers.
And then the Stuxnet virus actually kind of morphed and escaped and started to infect other computers in Europe.
So this was this was warfare by computer.
It's weaponizing, using computer viruses against another country with which we were not at war.
And I also point out in the article, of course, that we've we've militarily intervened in a whole lot of places and overthrown governments.
And so why are we complaining about the Russians RT broadcasting in favor of Trump when we've actually overthrown governments and seem to believe that by the divine right of kings or whatever it is that we have the empowerment to keep doing that?
This is ridiculous.
I mean, the Russians, when you compare what they did or even allegedly did, this is peanuts compared to what we've been doing for years.
Yeah.
Well, and you can assume that their numbers are better than ever, you know, in all this crisis.
And I wonder, I mean, are they not working on a, you know, welcome new viewers.
Let us introduce you to the color revolutions, you know, again, special benefited from this actually.
You're right.
Yeah.
People say, well, I must be really good.
Hey, I want to ask you this because I just don't remember, Phil.
So I'm filling in my memory with the assumption that I must have just completely dropped the ball on this and not done a good enough job covering this issue back when it happened.
And that was the election in, I think it was 2011.
See how ignorant I am.
Where this is the one that Hillary has invoked in her big speech in New York that was leaked, I guess.
I don't know if it was supposed to be leaked or not, where she said, oh, this was all Putin's fault.
Otherwise I'd be coronated right now.
But the problem is that he had a personal vendetta against me because he blamed me for the protests against him in 2011.
So I guess this is when Medvedev was stepping back down from the presidency and Putin was moving from the prime ministership back into the presidency.
And so, of course, we know about the color revolutions in Tajikistan and in Serbia and in Georgia and in Ukraine twice now.
They tried one in Lebanon and all these things.
I'm sure I'm leaving some out.
But so I just wonder, well, wait a minute.
Did I miss that?
And do you know about that?
And is she right and foolish to bring that up?
Is that really right?
That it was?
And I do remember Putin outlawing foreign-backed NGOs that he claimed were meddling.
But I guess I never really took the time to get to the bottom of whether that was really, yeah, USAID and NED up to the same old tricks.
They really were trying to do that kind of thing to work against Putin in that election.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, Hillary Clinton was publicly denouncing Putin and calling on the Russians to vote for somebody else.
And there were a whole bunch of NGOs, both Western European and American, who were setting up democracy seminars and stuff like that.
And there were massive demonstrations.
I think one of them was 100,000 people in Moscow and elsewhere that were being sort of ginned up by this.
Putin did not ban a lot of the NGOs until 2015.
That was more recent.
But the fact is, these organizations were set up, NED and, as you correctly point out, and USAID, basically to do the same kind of democracy promotion they were doing in Eastern Europe.
And so Putin had a point.
You know, he certainly had a lot of vulnerabilities in terms of how his own people were seeing him at the time.
But the fact is, a lot of this stuff was being cranked up.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
So now, probably, if I'm just a reasonable member of the audience listening to this, I'm thinking, yeah, but that's crazy.
Gerald, do you really expect me to believe that the Americans are dumb enough to really try to overthrow the government of Russia?
I mean, screwing them out of their proxies in allied states and this and that kind of thing, even in Ukraine, that's one thing.
But really trying to overthrow the power in the Kremlin?
Talk about playing with fire.
Nobody's going to go that far.
But then the only thing I can really think of where they outright said it is a couple of times Carl Gershman from the NED has threatened in the Washington Post, has threatened publicly the government of Russia that if you don't like what we're doing in Ukraine, maybe we're coming for your ass next.
In fact, he wrote that right before they overthrew the government of Ukraine, just what, eight weeks later or something like that, maybe nine weeks later in 2014.
Yeah, that's right.
NED has been threatening Russia that if you guys don't straighten out, we'll straighten you out.
But all you have to do is look back, for your listeners to look back at the example of Boris Yeltsin in 1995, I guess it was, his second election, where he was basically propped up by the IMF under American orders.
There were a lot of oligarchs who were basically supporting him, again, under American orders.
And essentially, he won the election based on American intervention, American and Western.
Let's not leave the Germans and British and our friends out.
But essentially, he won because it was a setup.
And when Putin came in, a large part of the motivation for him was to not let that happen again, because the Russians were very aware, after the fact, of what had happened.
Well, and it was Yeltsin himself who appointed him.
I guess he had to.
Yeah, right.
So yeah, all the same people, I mean, really, if they had intervened in 96, they wouldn't be dealing with Putin now.
That's right.
That's right.
All right.
Well, hey, listen, thanks for doing the show.
I hope everybody read these great articles, Phil.
OK, I should have one up today on the latest developments in the hack business.
So that'll be at the American Conservative.
OK, great.
And that's the AmericanConservative.com.
Thanks again.
Right.
All right, y'all.
Yeah.
Washington Invented Hacking and Interfering in Elections.
That's at UNZ.com.
No Smoking Gun on Russia Hack at the American Conservative.
And then, as you said, there will be a new one out by the time y'all hear this at the AmericanConservative.com as well.
All right, y'all.
And that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.