For Pacifica Radio, January the 2nd, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, happy new year and welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and narrator of the new audio book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I'm very happy that my first guest of the year, this year on KPFK, is my good friend and yours and our great advisor, former CIA officer turned anti-war activist and also regular contributor to Anti-War.com, the great Ray McGovern.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm well, thanks.
I'm very happy to hear that and happy to have you on the show with us here.
And I love your, well, always your focus on Russia issues, but also love this latest article.
What?
No Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And I can tell how sarcastically not surprised you truly are in that headline.
Go ahead and tell us what's behind all the hype.
The Washington Post kicked this off on November the 1st, I believe it was Russia building up, preparing to invade Ukraine.
And evidently you never bought it and now you're confirmed and you're not buying it.
So what's really going on here?
Well, it was a non-starter for me, Scott.
You know, you don't have to have been through Iraq or some other, the propaganda stuff to realize that once the New York Times or the Washington Post carries a story saying intelligence sources say that the Russians are planning to have 175,000 troops invade Ukraine in January or February of next year.
Okay.
So that if memory serves was December 3rd, uh, just about a month ago.
Well, everyone ran with that.
Uh, even people like, and this is sad, even people like Warren Strobel, who was Jonathan Landay were the only people that had the guts to tell the real story about those notional weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war.
Okay.
So you have a, uh, you have a sad situation where even the stars, even the ones that stood up against all the propaganda about Iraq, even they need a job and so Warren is working, I think, for, for Reuters, uh, Jonathan Landay.
You don't hear anything about from him anymore, but even he, all it took was a, um, a trip to Afghanistan, uh, joining the troops for a little, uh, foray on, on the battle line.
And he was converted to thinking that, uh, Afghanistan was a great idea.
Uh, it's very, very, very, very sad for someone like me has been around for a while to see how easily, I don't know.
These guys are really smart guys.
I think it's not unfair to say they need a job.
They need to get paid.
But you know what it is too, right?
It's the CIA.
I mean, the reason that Jonathan Landay, which by the way, on Twitter, he's a terrible Russia hawk, Russia gate truth through the whole time and Russia hawk now, and, but I think the answer is the reason they were good on Iraq is remember the stories that they were breaking were CIA agents are complaining to us or CIA analysts are complaining to us about the neoconservatives in the office of special plans at the Pentagon, digging through our trash and embellishing our lives into even worse ones and this kind of thing.
So it was an interagency type thing.
And what was Landay?
What were Landon Strobel in that situation?
They were the pets of the CIA.
The one time they happened to be telling the truth, not that they didn't lie us into war, but just, they were telling the truth about the neocons at the Pentagon, lying us into war too was all right.
Well, um, half, right.
Uh, let me explain.
Uh, as I've said many times on this program, there are two CIAs.
Uh, they're the operations people who do the propaganda and they're the analysts who, at least in my day, had career protection for telling it like it is.
We're telling the truth.
So what, what did Landay and, um, and Strobel have?
Well, this is very clear in a film it's called shock and awe.
You won't find it in your neighborhood theater because it's an indictment of what happened in Iraq, but it tells a story.
Of one of our veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, uh, who sat outside the secretary of defense's door and was able to see what was going on and talk to, talk to Strobel, talk to, to Landay and she was just one.
Her name, by the way, is Karen Katowski.
And she kept this so close to the vest or to the blouse or whatever, uh, that we didn't know, we didn't know that she was the one until we went to the premiere.
We were invited to the premiere.
It was she and was others.
I have to admit, I talked to Landay myself.
So did Larry Johnson.
So did several people came up at that, at the end of that premiere and said, yeah, well, uh, they named a telephone number and a struggle with his ears would perk up and say, oh, so you're the guy I used to call.
Oh yeah.
Okay.
So there were a number of us.
Now they were all from the analysis part of the agency, the ones who are not pushing the legend that there were weapons of mass destruction, but rather the ones who were, were a gape like myself at how this lie was being spread and eaten up by every major media, except these two guys from Knight Ritter, Strobel and Landay.
But there you go.
People get twisted around and it defies explanation on my part, but well, one explanation, James Risen, who used to have some really good sources in the intelligence community, wrote some books that had really good stuff in it.
Well, there was an, any source within the intelligence community that would dare contact James Risen now because of all the surveillance that's in place.
So what does rising end up doing?
He ends up, uh, he ends up a Russiagator par excellence and defames people like me and Bill Binney.
So it's really serious.
Yeah.
On this particular story, Scott, it's a pretty vivid, uh, what happened.
We know that, uh, the denouement is coming on the 10th of January when senior negotiators from the U S and Russia get together, uh, and talk about, uh, Russian proposals for prohibiting the further eastward expansion of NATO and other measures that, um, that Russia is insisting on to preserve its own security.
So that's in the cards.
That's less than two weeks away.
Okay.
Now on Christmas day, uh, more than two weeks ago, uh, Christmas morning, uh, the Russian army announced, oh, we're pulling out 10,000 plus troops from the area, the areas near, um, Ukraine.
Whoa.
How does this, how does this fit the narrative that the Russians are about to invade Ukraine?
Oh, well, it doesn't, you know, and the only person that picked up on this story was a woman from the New York post, mind you, who published it.
Just, you know, it was a Russian announcement and she just laid it all out there, withdrawing 10,000 plus troops.
Okay.
And what the New York times do.
They didn't say nothing.
Right.
Didn't say nothing.
Why the Washington post didn't say nothing.
Okay.
So here we are, what, 26, we're about four or five days into the whole thing.
And no one in the media has been permitted to say, oh, might this be a sign that the Russians are trying to get the negotiations on January 10 offer on a good foot, could they tucked it into a story about the talks coming up in Geneva, they tucked it into one sentence.
And that is just incredible.
That really is something else.
That's its own news story.
Ray, the Russians pulled 10,000 troops out from where they'd been building them up, which is actually not that close to the border anyway.
I read it was something, you know, more than 200 miles away, like from Austin to Dallas away.
But anyway, um, they pull the 10,000 troops back.
This makes the New York post only, which is really, you know, like America's daily mail or whatever, sort of a right-wing tabloid, but it's not the Washington post is certainly not the New York times.
And, and then only four days later, they bring it up, but it's not even its own news story.
It's as you say, tucked into this other story where do they even point out that, wow, this is actually a pretty big concession possibly, no, or indication of the spirit that Putin's trying to enter the talks in or anything like that.
No, that would be reasonable speculation, right?
But they're prohibited from doing that because they don't have the memo.
They don't have the memo yet.
They didn't get the memo from the people who run the editorial, who run for our government, what people like the New York times and Washington post is allowed to say.
So, so with that, it's really quite embarrassing without, without the memo, uh, as to what to say, what the guidance from the government, they don't know what to do.
So those few outlets, it was ABC news, uh, CBS news.
And as you say, New York times yesterday, uh, that dared mentioned the thing always followed up by saying, yeah, but they have many more troops on the thing.
They're going to invade the Ukrainians.
They're saying they're going to invade.
And besides, it's just a very dangerous situation.
And, uh, it's unclear.
That's the word that they're allowed to use so far.
It's unclear what this means.
Uh, well, okay.
It's a reasonably unclear, but what's really clear is that they have no guidance from Washington and this bespeaks a lack of, uh, well, at least there should be somebody in the white house who was giving the kind of guidance that they usually give.
It bespeaks a lack of, uh, cohesion.
And they're probably, there's probably a Donny book in the white house right now between those who want to do something sensible in January 10th and those who say, no, no, no, it's a dirty Russian trick.
Look what they did pick Christmas day to make this announcement.
Yeah.
It's really pretty bad.
Speaking of Christmas day, it was the 30th anniversary of the final end of the Soviet union.
And I'm sure you remember it much better than me, but I was watching when they pulled down the red flag over the Kremlin for the last time that day and put up the red, white, and blue flag of the new Russian federation.
And the idea was then it sort of went without saying, of course, right.
That great.
Well, that's over with.
Uh, now obviously the counter narrative is well, sure.
And everything was fine until this evil Putin came and Putin, essentially, if he ain't Stalin, he's like Stalin's younger cousin or something, the kind of guy who, if it wasn't for our efforts would be rampaging across the planet right now, Ray.
And so that's why all this has to be done.
Yeah, it was a traumatic experience for me personally, after the Berlin wall came down, you know, it was the end of, of our primary mission that is to make sure that the Soviet union was contained, that they didn't fire their missiles in our direction and that some peaceable, uh, solution could be made for the mess that their economy had had gone into.
So I had retired early 1990, uh, sort of clapping myself on the back saying, whoa, mission accomplished.
The Soviet union is, it's a crumbling in front of your face.
Then, you know, president George HW Bush to his great credit spoke even before the wall came down, he spoke about a Europe whole and free, a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, whole and free.
He told Gorbachev, look, we're not going to dance on the Berlin wall.
We know you're in trouble.
Just realize we're not going to take advantage of your troubles there in Eastern Europe.
Now, in a word, what happened?
We took advantage.
Starting with Bill Clinton, we accepted the application, so to speak, of former Warsaw pact nations like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Baltic States and others to become parts of NATO.
Why was that wrong?
Well, because we promised the Russians we wouldn't do that explicitly.
It's in the notes.
It's in the notes.
Jack Matlock, who's a friend of mine who was ambassador at the time, uh, has, has his own, he was there.
He was there when they said these things.
So, so what happened was the promise was completely, um, discorded.
It was not written down, which was a major mistake.
Everyone acknowledges, but Bill Clinton being the lawyer that he was, well, if it's not written down, we can do what we want.
And even though George Kennan and others warned, warned strongly that this would lead to a, uh, Russia that resented our encroachment on their zone of security.
Uh, they went ahead and did it.
Doubled NATO in size and every one of the new nations well to the East of East Germany and the promise of course, was not to expand NATO one inch East of East Germany.
So that's where we are today.
Actually, Scott, the Russians now are in a different position from back in the nineties.
Hang on just one second.
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But here, Ray, you got to address to what a psychopath, crazy madman, power monger that Vladimir Putin is and his will to power over all of Europe and all of that.
I mean, I know you read the Washington post.
Don't you know what's going on out there?
Well, I'm just teeing you up, but I, you know, cause I know that's not your opinion, but that is the consensus.
Of course.
Yeah.
Now, Putin was in, I want to say Leningrad.
He was in St.
Petersburg under Yeltsin and he watched and what happened?
Okay.
What happened was wall street.
The Russians used to call them blood suckers, Kravatidze in Russian.
They descended on Russia and plundered it, plundered it from 1991 until 1994, the, the mortality rate for males in Russian went down by get this six years, six years now, is that something that Pucci made up?
No, those are world bank statistics.
Okay.
And why did that happen?
Because oligarchs from Harvard oligarchs from, uh, from Russia plundered the Russian economy.
People were starving.
Uh, and that's what, that's what Putin watched.
Okay.
That was from, that was Yeltsin's years.
Now, by some stroke of fate, Yeltsin may have had a pang of conscious and said, look, when I go, I'm going to appoint somebody who maybe be able to write the mistakes that I did, he appointed Putin and Putin immediately tried to get things back in shape.
Now we're talking, you know, early nineties, what happened in 91?
Well, we had this magnificent victory where we slaughtered Iraqi forces, uh, in that, uh, first Gulf war.
Now, why do I mention that?
Because after that general Clark, who was head of NATO at one point, went to the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz and say, what were your, what'd you learn from the Gulf war?
And Wolfowitz says, ah, the most important lesson we learned is that we could do these things and the Russians can't stop us.
Right.
Now we have to prepare for the day when the Russians can stop us.
And so we have to do everything we possibly can to keep them down.
Now that was 1991.
Okay.
Fast forward, Iraq, we invade Iraq.
The Russians can't stop us.
Later, uh, Syria, we invade Iraq with Syria.
Well, wait, don't, don't skip Libya where Putin was cooling his heels as prime minister and allowed his protégé Medvedev to be president for a little while, and Hillary convinced him, we're just going to prevent a massacre in Benghazi and then use their no fly zone UN resolution that Russia supported, or at least abstained.
Um, and then turn that into a writ for regime change in Tripoli, which completely humiliated Medvedev and, and hurried Putin's return to the presidency, which I think he, the plan was he was going to wait another term and he decided he wasn't going to now.
It was Hillary's backstab on Libya.
Big mistake by Medvedev.
Um, no doubt about that.
It was, uh, it was Hillary who, who persuaded the Russians and the Chinese to abstain on that resolution.
And, uh, the result was the dismemberment of Libya and the brutal assassination of Omar Gaddafi at which, uh, Hillary famously said, ah, we came, we saw, and he died, him and a lot of other people.
Now I'm sorry to interrupt.
Cause go on to Syria.
Cause it's so important what America did in Syria and people might not know what's the connection with Russia.
Why is that so important with our relationship with Russia?
Yeah.
Well, when Obama came in the, uh, the deep state, the CIA military and so forth persuaded him to up the ante in Afghanistan to anyone who knew anything about history, that was a real stupid thing.
And as you know, after 20 years of stupid, stupidity, we had to withdraw ignominiously last summer.
Then Syria, what about Syria?
Well, we were about to have our little, uh, moderate rebels, as we call them, overthrow this duly elected president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Okay.
What happened?
The Russians stopped us.
Whoa.
We're talking about 2015 now.
Uh, Putin goes to Obama at the UN and he says, you know, I just have to let you know this, that, uh, we're sending, uh, our, our air force and part of our army into Syria is to block the, um, the moderate rebels that you, that you support.
Uh, we're not going to let that happen.
Uh, we'd like to do this together.
So, uh, if, if your secretary of state Kerry is willing to talk with Lavrov, so much the better.
What happened?
They talked, they talked for 11 months and they nailed together, cobbled together an agreement, a ceasefire agreement.
Okay.
Uh, and guess what happened?
Six days later, the U S air force bombed entrenched, uh, established Syrian army positions that had been there for years and killed about a hundred Syrian troops and of the ceasefire.
Why do I mention that?
Because Putin himself said later, who am I going to trust?
Who am I going to believe?
Uh, this ceasefire agreements worked on for 11 months and it was explicitly approved by Obama and by me personally.
So apparently, uh, things change in Washington and not everybody decides to do what the president agreed to.
Right.
Well, and by the way, I'd like to interject here that it didn't just the likes of, uh, me and you who thought so that it was widely interpreted at the time that Ashton Carter, the secretary of defense was simply canceling president Obama and John Kerry's deal with Russia right there.
And everybody was just like, wow, I guess they can do that.
It was like this shoot down at Gary powers.
Okay.
Well, the president's been vetoed.
Well, you're right, right about that.
And two people who attest to that are John Kerry, who was the secretary of state at the time and, uh, Lavrov.
That's pretty amazing.
That's pretty amazing, especially from the likes of Ashton Carter.
He was no Donald Rumsfeld in terms of power and influence.
Well, comparisons are invidious, but yeah, he was almost as bad.
But what am I saying here?
I'm saying that if you look at, uh, let's say you look at, uh, Putin's end of year press conference, which went on for about four hours, uh, he answered questions without any notes.
He just, uh, it was one of those performances.
Anyhow, was he, was he there with the five of us, uh, keepers?
No, he was sitting alone in the middle of this, an incredibly long, uh, days with his, uh, PR guy, Peskov on one end.
Okay.
So this was sort of a dramatic visual reputation of what the Russians called, okay.
You Dean, a Dean is one.
Okay.
Not shy is a leadership, uh, from the czars down to the present day.
You need somebody in charge.
One guy.
And that happens to be Vladimir Putin at present, uh, on the American side.
And this is going to come to the head in January at these negotiations.
Okay.
So you make an agreement.
Let's say Biden realizes that with China and Russia United to support Russia's core interests, I better give a little, I better not, better not move NATO any farther East.
Let's say he's, he does that.
And he agrees to that.
Well, who is this, who is to guarantee that the next president or even Biden himself, three weeks later might say, oh, well, you know, I didn't really, I didn't really mean that.
So this is a double problem from Putin.
He knows that, uh, our, our situation is not only not secure from presidency to predecessor presidency.
Each president can kind of get out of the ABM treaty for a while.
The ABM treaty, for example, the INF treaty, INF treaty, of course, destroyed a whole class of intermediate and short range ballistic missiles in Europe, a whole class of them already in place there destroyed them 1987.
Now that all is, is, has been negated now.
And there are new missiles that Russia is hell bent on preventing being put in parts of Eastern Europe that would threaten the Russian ICBM force.
So we'll have to see in January where the Biden would acquiesce in saying, well, okay, we won't put those things in.
And if he does, then the military is going to say to Putin, uh, Hey, uh, Vladimir, yeah, this is great.
You even got them to sign a piece of paper.
Well, they signed a piece of paper for the ABM treaty and for the INF treaty.
Well, you know, Ray, I mean, in fact, the single greatest thing that Joe Biden has done probably in his life, other than get us out of Afghanistan was he got us, he saved the new start treaty, which was the last treaty limiting long range strategic H bombs.
And, uh, you know, those numbers of missiles and Trump was going to let it expire.
And, uh, and it was set to expire right after inauguration last January or last February, I guess.
And Biden got back in that.
So maybe there's a little bit of hope there, but it's not reassuring that we have Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and these other horrible people around him either.
Well, what's really unsettling of course, is you have these, uh, these admirals heading up, uh, the strategic air command, so-called, uh, they saying, well, you know, nuclear weapons, uh, we, we could, we don't rule them out, uh, they could be used and, uh, they have Navy admirals like Stavridis saying, yeah, well, war with China is inevitable, uh, give it six, seven years, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll be nuclear.
And it's, it's like the same fellows who were working for John Kennedy ostensibly, Curtis LeMay and all that, uh, sewer of deceit is what George Ball called them, the joint chiefs of staff who not until Daniel Ellsberg asked them how many casualties, how many people would be killed in a nuclear exchange, did they admit that?
Oh, only about 200 million in Europe, but 500 million and whatever it was.
In other words, it was, nobody asked the question.
So has anybody asked these guys who hit up a strategic air command, uh, if it goes nuclear, how many people will be killed?
I doubt it.
Uh, and so we're back to 1962, 63, uh, 61, even when the military is, uh, off on its own and Putin has to contend with that.
Now, in addition to all the other things we saw that violate the principle of Yedina Chalia, here is the example of, uh, General Milley.
Okay.
Now, General Milley is afraid that his president is going to order someone's going to order a war on China so they could be reelected.
Okay.
Now, everybody, all my liberal friends say, oh, they're great.
And he called, he called his Chinese counterpart and said, look, it's not, I'm no, it's not going to, we're not going to let it happen.
Okay.
Well, what the hell is that?
I mean, that's gross insubordination.
I mean, whether or not he was right, there's a precedent there and Putin knows that precedent.
And so if General Milley can act that way, why couldn't, uh, Admiral so-and-so who heads the strategic air command, take it into his head and say, you know, these Russians, they're just as bad as a Chinese communist.
We're going to do them in once and for all.
And our best estimate is that we'll only suffer about a hundred million casualties in the United States itself.
These guys are crazy.
They're still crazy.
I used to work with them back in the sixties and seventies.
They don't have any sense of what it means for humanity to risk this kind of thermonuclear war.
The military industrial complex that Eisenhower so presciently warned against in his farewell address has grown like topsy and it's pretty much ruling the roost now.
There are real questions as to how free, uh, Joe Biden would be to come to a sensible agreement that would lessen tensions with Russia because tensions with Russia are necessary to build, sell, um, get a lot of money out of weapons that need to be developed, uh, in, in the view of, um, of these, uh, corporations that, that do that.
And then they fund the congressmen appropriate the money.
It's, it's, you know, this is the way it works.
And so, uh, the, what Eisenhower also said was that the only way to prevent the accumulated power of the military industrial complex is a well-informed citizenry.
Now, as you've been pointing out, that's what we lack.
That's where we come in and we can't, that's what we're trying to do here.
Yep.
So I think that, uh, you know, we, we can't, we can't stop.
And sometimes we can't always see the results of our efforts, but they're going to come and they could come probably quicker than anyone expects.
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All right, Ray.
So let's keep talking now because I still got 20 minutes.
Um, now as far as the hard ball that, uh, Putin is playing there, like what is even the reality of that troop buildup?
I kind of mentioned as an aside earlier that I had read that all this buildup is taking place 200 miles from the Ukrainian border.
And, you know, Dave DeCamp had told me, our news editor at antiwar.com, that in fact, the Americans, I think the post kicked this off on November the first, if I have it right, and that Dave said that the Ukrainian government's reaction was, what, the Russians aren't building up a thing, what are you talking about?
And then the Americans said, elbow, yuh-huh, they are too.
And then the Ukrainians got on the same page and said, oh yeah, the buildup, yeah, that was the same one we're worried about too.
Or, you know, whatever it was.
Um, but I'm just so used to doubting every word out of these people's mouths, but I don't want to be like naive and stupid either.
It does seem that Putin was building up some kind of force and it was essentially to play this card that, listen, you guys can give these punks, uh, you know, Javelin anti-tank missiles, but you cannot give them, you know, um, anti ballistic missile missiles, which as we know, uh, launched from the same tubes that you can launch Tomahawk missiles from, nuclear equipped Tomahawk missiles from.
That was a line that he was drawing and eventual sooner or later membership for Ukraine in NATO was a line he was drawing.
But, um, just, you know, explain that part of the story, I guess, about just what it was that Russians are doing, what precipitated it.
Uh, give us the timeline as you see it, if you could, please.
Well, first, uh, one needs to be reminded that with the sophisticated collection platforms flying around in space these days, and we know exactly where Soviet troops, so he's got you too, Ray.
There we go.
You know, sometimes having some experience, uh, as a detriment here.
So anyhow, uh, we know where they are.
I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that we are focused, focused laser like on where the Soviet, where the Russian troops are along the Ukrainian border.
Okay.
So, uh, do we get that story leaked to the press?
No, we don't get that story.
Do we get photographs that show that?
No, not really.
We get the different photographs from other agencies and what they show according to, I may have this wrong, but my recollection is it was the Washington post on, on December 3rd that published this thing saying, look at these photos.
The Russians are going to invade Ukraine in January and February with 175,000 troops.
Count them 175,000.
Okay.
Now that was picked up by everybody.
Okay.
Without any questioning.
Why?
Because the source was intelligence sources, quote end quote, and they're, they've never been wrong, right?
I mean, WMD and all the other intelligence, uh, fraud that mistakes, but fraud, uh, over the last couple of decades, of course intelligence sources should be mistrusted from the very beginning.
Anyhow, that played the theme 175, even Warren's trouble that I mentioned before he mentions it in his most recent thing.
Oh yeah.
Uh, intelligence sources say 175,000.
Wow.
Okay.
So that was the theme for December.
And then of course, uh, uh, Putin says, you know, this is ridiculous.
Uh, let's meet with, uh, with Biden, which they did on the 7th of December.
And what I think happened there, uh, there was a very, very, uh, terse cryptic, uh, uh, account of that meeting from the U S side.
But what happened there pretty much clearly is that Biden said, okay, we need to talk about this.
Uh, I I'm willing to, to appoint senior negotiators to talk about this, about what, what was this?
This was the threat that the crazies in Ukraine might start a war.
And in a different scenario, uh, that the medium range ballistic missiles will be put in Ukraine as, as they are being put in Poland and Romania.
Now, uh, are they actually in the holes?
No, there is so-called anti-ballistic missiles to defend against get this to defend against Iran in those holes right now.
But as Putin said publicly five years ago, look, those same holes can be used for Tomahawk missiles.
They can be used for offensive missiles, which could take out our ICM force in Europe.
Now, wait a minute.
They are, they are installing these missile launchers or they said they might think about it or what exactly was the status of that?
Uh, what Putin said to a group of Western journalists is look, he says, do people don't realize that we, we have intelligence on what the U S is planning.
And the Pentagon is justifying the emplacement of these so-called anti-ballistic missiles.
So we only have essentially his take on that, but it's believable.
I got it.
Not believable.
Once the Iran, uh, five power deal was, was sealed, Iran didn't have any nuclear capability.
Yeah, no, no, no.
I don't mean that the Americans, uh, narrative about why they had to do it was a legit.
I mean that, um, it was believable what Putin said that his spies say that the Americans are planning on putting these launchers into Ukraine, which I don't know if that's really true or not, but I could certain, I mean, it must be an absolute fact that they've discussed it, whether they're really going to go that far or not.
Yeah.
Well, I think that, uh, you know, Putin probably said to Biden is what he said to these Western press five years ago.
And that is, we know when the Pentagon intends to change, uh, the missiles in these holes that to put, uh, Tomahawk missiles.
We know the name, we know when the exact schedule that they're going to do it and we know what they'll justify it.
It's not, we can't allow that to happen.
That was a long time ago.
And the Western journalists were sort of falling asleep.
And for very rare instance here, Putin lost his cool.
He says, don't you people know what I'm saying here?
Don't you, don't you realize how, how, uh, how very, very dangerous this is if we only have a few minutes to decide whether to obliterate the word, uh, so the world.
So what, uh, you know, this is, uh, it's been long and coming, but I think, and nobody else seems to be concerned about this, but I think what Putin also said to Biden on the 7th of December is, uh, by the way, Mr. President, uh, with all due respect, uh, you are very poorly advised that before our June summit, uh, when you said that we were very, very worried about being squeezed, your word, Mr. President, squeezed by China, with whom we have a very long border and who was going to be a major military that we feel threatened by China.
Mr. President, nothing could be farther from the truth and nothing could be more significant.
So I'm going to be talking just as I am now with you, I'm going to be talking with President Xi on the 15th.
So just, you know, a week from now, please tune in.
Now, when he talks to Xi, they release one minute, the first minute of the, uh, of the conversation.
Putin says, look, uh, I'm delighted to be invited to the Olympics.
Uh, looking forward to seeing you there, there in person.
Meanwhile, we have a terrifically strong bilateral relationship.
Xi, this is the key here.
Xi says, not only is our bilateral relationship strong, it exceeds an alliance, exceeds.
Okay.
I looked up the words used in Russian.
It's exactly the word for exceeds.
Okay.
Whoa.
So what is Putin saying to Biden?
Look, if you look at that conversation we had, you'll see that we have a relationship with China that the president of China says exceeds an alliance.
And so they've got our back.
Xi goes on to say that, uh, Russia has, has honored and defended our core interests in the past.
And we are going to defend Russia's core interests here.
Last thing he says, I am very happy.
President Putin, that you cooperated with China in preventing others from putting a wedge between us.
Now, if Putin, if Biden is advised by anybody with any sense, uh, he's been told now, look, we messed up in June.
We thought that the Russians were still afraid of the Chinese, but they're not anymore.
As a matter of fact, they're virtual allies.
And China has said they will support what Putin is doing visa V NATO.
Maybe we ought to recalculate the calculus here.
Maybe the correlation of forces and all Soviet term, maybe the world correlation of forces has changed.
And we're on the short end of this triangular relationship.
I hope that has happened.
Uh, it's really gonna, it's gonna be crazy if it didn't happen, but if it did happen, there's some, there's some prospect that the, that the U S will, uh, will come into these talks, uh, with a somewhat open attitude.
And the only two straws in the wind I have so far is that they did agree to do it almost immediately.
I mean, it's right after, right after Christmas in Russia on the 10th.
And the other thing is we have been a C or white house spokesman saying, you know, uh, nobody ever gets everything they want from negotiations.
So, uh, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get what we, what we hope to get.
So there seems to be some kind of openness, but I think there's a battle royale going on in the white house right now as to how flexible to be and how seriously to take Russian threats.
Because finally one can appropriately use that word Russian threats.
If, uh, if there's not some give in Biden's position.
Yeah.
Well, I, I take what you mean that the fact that they agreed to have more talks, Hey, let's have some talks is pretty good.
And compared to the political narrative, you might think that they wouldn't do that, that they would have maybe only had some back channel talks, kick the can down the road, something like that.
Cause they got to look tough right now for whatever kind of reason.
So in this case, actual business seems to have taken precedent here.
So that is a good sign, but, and you know, I know the right wingers would say, Oh no, Biden is so old and senile, he's going to give away the store.
But I guess I'm worried that he's so old and senile that he'll just be incapable of discussing, you know, the depth of matters with Putin.
And then they'll just essentially call the whole thing off early, call a lid as they say in Biden's world, no more questions, you know, just a little way into the meeting.
And not only will he not give away this store, he also won't come to any reasonable compromises either because he's just not up to the job of being the head of a world empire right now, right?
What do you think about that?
Well, you're right.
Uh, in the first instance, the acceptance by Biden, uh, of, uh, talks now, curiously enough, we know from Putin that it was Biden himself who suggested talks.
Okay.
Um, I think he was rather impressed by Putin's presentation one-on-one or one-on-five, uh, on the, on December 7th.
And, uh, that's, Oh, we better, we better talk about this.
And I'm ready to appoint senior representatives.
We have that from Putin himself.
It was Biden's initiative.
Now whether Biden knew what he was getting into or not, probably not, but it wasn't a day or two later before these draft treaties appeared and, uh, and the Russians took the initiative and say, well, this is what we're going to talk about.
So number one, it was great that we were receptive to talking.
It was Biden who first suggested it, but number two, that we said, well, all right, you need it right away.
Uh, how about early January?
And the first possible thing they could do is right after Russian Christmas.
And that was the 10th.
And so that's less than two weeks away.
Now, um, they giving away the store, um, you know, it really doesn't matter.
Um, and this is what I mean.
Uh, even if Biden, uh, agrees, uh, to some sort of, uh, compromise here, it will have to be so rigidly inspected, uh, trust, but verify, uh, that, uh, the burden will be on the U S to, to demonstrate that it's not reneging as it has on various other treaties.
So it's going to be pretty complicated because there are lots of people, including very influential Russian military who are saying to, to, to, uh, Putin.
Yeah, right, right.
You want a piece of paper to say, ah, isn't that neat?
You get a legal piece of paper.
Well, that's what we have with the ABM treaty.
That's what we have with the INF treaty.
So what the hell good?
It's not like the Americans say, it is not worth the paper it is written on.
Okay.
So he's got, Putin's got a lot to deal with, but you know, the saving grace in my view is that he's a cool head.
Okay.
He has Russian national interests at stake.
That's why he doesn't want to be five minutes away from having to decide whether he would destroy the world.
Okay.
That's why, that's why any sensible statement would try to prevent that situation from occurring.
Speaking of which, I mean, that means we need a brand new hypersonic missile treaty too, because you launched one of those bad boys from a ship in the Atlantic and Washington, DC or New York city.
They only have or launch one from an American ship from the Baltic sea or the black sea and DC or Moscow only have a matter of maybe single digit minutes to decide whether to kill all of humanity or just take an H bomb on the chin or what they're going to do.
That's right.
Putin himself has talked about five to seven minutes, five minutes.
If it's a hypersonic weapon, seven minutes, if it's something, something slower.
Okay.
So now what about pressing the main button?
Putin's been asked that, you know they've said, now, Mr. Putin, this is a Russian journalist.
If the, the Americans launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles and that Russia is going to be destroyed.
Will you, will you really destroy the rest of the world when you're, when Russia is going to be destroyed anyway?
And he looked at the guy and he said, wait, what would, what would the rest of the world look like without Russia?
Of course we would die as heroes.
They would be going to the other place, dying as villains.
So there's not a doubt in my mind that Putin is capable of pressing that big button.
But that very capability, I think has persuaded him to act the statesman here, to be cool headed.
And in this case, to be very, very strong, but to be willing to negotiate.
That's what this is all about.
It's not, it's not, please remember where you heard this.
It's not about Russians invading Ukraine.
It's the same kind of thing with Taiwan.
Not that we have time for a whole treatment on that subject here, but every time they say that see China's preparing to invade Taiwan, what they're really doing is flexing their muscles and saying, don't declare independence.
So we will have to invade you.
That kind of thing.
Not that I'm saying that's fine or whatever, but I'm saying that's the reality of it compared to the way they spin it.
Same thing here.
They're not really going to invade.
They're just saying you better not do this, that, or the other thing, or else we might have to.
That's all.
Yeah.
And justifying the expenditure of billions of dollars to build up our quote defenses end quote against China.
Um, you know, when the pivot to Asia happened, I could just see the people in Lockheed and Raytheon having a big champagne party and say, Oh my goodness.
You know, even if the, even if Russia sort of dissipates as a major threat, now we got China where we're sitting pretty, it's going to be a really good couple of years coming up because we're pivoting to China.
China will be a threat in quotes for years and years, man.
Uh, break out the champagne, right?
Hey, you know, uh, Andrew Coburn, the journalist in DC had sources at, or I guess one source, who was at a party in crystal city where all the Pentagon contractors live and work and make money.
And, uh, he said he, they were at that party when the news that the Russians had seized the Crimean peninsula came over the wire and everybody laughed and celebrated and had another round of drinks and thought it was the funnest thing.
Um, and he wrote about that and I've, I've talked with him about it too, that to them, they were just like, great.
There's billions of dollars.
Just think another crank on the ratchet of tension with Russia.
This is wonderful.
They said, speaking for the American people somehow, they're the ones in charge of the policy.
Yep.
Yeah.
That people like Andrew Coburn, uh, are people that the American people should be exposed to read and digest.
Uh, otherwise what Eisenhower warned about, an ill-informed American citizenry is likely to think that, Oh, well the Russians are going to invade Ukraine and allow some crazy Ukrainians.
Now, let me just say this, uh, during, um, and real quick, we just got about one more minute here.
Okay.
What happened during, uh, Putin's recent 23rd, 21st of December, uh, talk to the major military in Russia was that the defense minister came up and said, you know, US contractors are preparing a chemical attack to justify, uh, to, to, uh, a false flag attack from, uh, from, uh, you know, to start a war on the border of Ukraine.
Now that was highly unusual that this report would be reported in that forum, uh, to the president of Russia, but that shows how seriously they take these false flag attacks.
And that's the only, the only way the Russians would, uh, would take up arms against Ukraine if there were that kind of provocation.
And I would not rule it out.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He is a former CIA analyst and regular contributor at antiwar.com.
His latest is what the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Knock me over with a feather.
Okay.
I added the subtitle there.
Um, and that's antiwar radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director there at antiwar.com and I'm the host of the Scott Horton show as well.
I've got 5,600 something interviews going back to 2003 for you at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
