12/06/13 – Steve Horn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, now our first guest on the show today is Steve Horn, this time writing for Counterpunch.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
The piece here is Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Stratfor.
What's a Stratfor?
The Stratfor is the short form of a firm or corporation based in Austin, Texas called Strategic Forecasting, Inc., which has actually been around for a few decades using other names.
It eventually became Stratfor.
It was originally known as Pagan International.
It morphed into a firm called Mongovin, Bisco, and Duchin, which ended up merging with the firm that I'm on the Stratfor in the late 90s in Austin, Texas.
The guy who founded ...
Let's rewind back to Mongovin, Bisco, and Duchin days.
The guys who founded that firm, one of them was actually one of the original Army Delta forces.
Another person was a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, and then another guy was just a guy with a corporate PR background.
That firm ended up merging with Stratfor in the late 90s, which was when that one founded.
Actually, in 2002 is when the merger happened, but Stratfor was started in the late 90s.
The ideology of the two firms merged together, too.
George Friedman is the chairman of Stratfor right now, and he's kind of an academic geopolitical ...
I consider him kind of a warrior intellectual type who was an academic for a while at Dickinson College and ended up starting Stratfor, so that started in the late 90s, and it exists into today.
It's basically a firm that maintains both the U.S. government and corporate clients and just gathers intelligence, not the type of intelligence that the CIA would gather on the ground, but mostly open source stuff on behalf of its clients.
The reason why it's famous today is because of WikiLeaks and ...
I'll hold right there, because I just want to say one thing about them, which is my only experience with them that I can think of is ...
Friedman used to do ...
It must be the same guy.
I'm actually not positive, but I think this is the same guy we're talking about.
He was a regular guest on the morning show on 590 AM KLBJ here in Austin, Texas.
In 2002 and 2003, this is of course when there's 1,000% unanimous opinion that we absolutely must go to Iraq.
The thing about Friedman was that he was conservative enough and he had a history with the boss, and the guy who hosted the morning news show was the boss of the station.
He had a history with this guy going back to before September 11th, where he knew that this guy is a genius about what all is going on in the world all the time, and so therefore it was okay for him to oppose the Iraq war day in and day out as a regular guest on 590.
All I remember about it was him giving reasons, like the Iranians are going to gain influence in the south and it's going to lead to an increase in anti-American terrorism, and all the reasons that anybody who was being critical then knew why not to do it.
He was really good on all those things, and then Mark Caesar is the guy's name, the host of the show.
All he could ever say was, well, I guess that's interesting and we'll just have to agree to disagree or whatever, and just go along with the rest of the talking points, but the point being that they would still let him on because of what a big shot he was.
It is important for someone who has influence and has something to lose that he was very critical.
I mean, not that he talked bad about Bush or any of the decision makers or whatever, but he vehemently disagreed with the policy, at least the way I remember it back then.
So you're saying Friedman disagreed, or you're saying that the host?
Yeah, Friedman did.
Yeah, the whole radio station and everything, they were all just going along with the conventional anything, but I'm saying that Friedman sort of had license to disagree because of his previous reputation with these guys.
Interesting.
I mean, there's another article that was in the New York Times in 2003, just to go to that same era, and it was by Matt Bayh.
This is sort of, I think maybe he had changed his position by then.
I don't know.
It seems like he was pretty favorable to the Iraq War at that time, but I could be mistaken.
I could be mistaken.
You know, I used to confuse Stratfor and global security, Pike and whatever.
Who knows?
I don't know.
Well, I would just say that even if his position changed, it wouldn't be shocking, although I'd be surprised if he wasn't kind of hawkish based on his academic background, that type of thing.
Yeah, I mean, he certainly seemed like a Republican type, but just anybody who really was looking at American national interest and not their own interest in that situation and had a couple of neurons to rub together knew better than that stupid war back then.
So it's not like he was that unique in knowing better, just that he was unique that they let him know better on the radio.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Like David Hackworth.
Hackworth was also able to say, no, this is all wrong.
And what are you going to do?
He's Colonel Hackworth.
So you have to let him say it, you know, but they're going to let Michael Moore on there or some, you know, liberal of any kind.
Right.
Right.
Well, I mean, so you say just the hypothetical that, you know, if this was the same George Truman and his position changed, it wouldn't be shocking because, I mean, what Stratford does is, you know, they work for their clients, just like a PR firm would work for their clients, just like a law firm would.
So maybe at some point his clients change.
And I think the clients are important because they are some of the biggest corporations in the world.
They are often the U.S. government, various agencies that might do some stuff on behalf of the CIA and that type of thing here and there, depending on what the CIA needs.
So they're, I mean, they're, Stratford has hired guns and I think that gets to the story I wrote, which was about another guy who was, ended up being useful for Stratford based on his own background.
And that's, that gets into the story of Serge Popovich, the Serbian, very famous activist who was kind of the figurehead of the revolution in Serbia in the late 1990s.
Well, so talk about that, because the actual revolution that brought down Milosevic was in 2000, right?
So you're going back further than that.
Right.
Yeah, so I'm going back, you know, Popovich at that time was a college student or right out of college and in Serbia and he co-led an organization known as Atpor, which was an indigenous sort of a social movement.
It wasn't U.S. sponsored when it started, but towards the end, in the late 90s, 1999-2000, a lot of U.S. funding started to kick in.
A lot of people sort of excuse this funding and say it wasn't that much.
They say it was minimal.
But I mean, if you actually look at the numbers, it was a huge amount of money.
They were given $10 million in 1999 and $31 million in 2000 towards the end of Milosevic's last days in Serbia to do the types of type of work that they wanted to do.
They had a good formula for just organizing, you know, this social movement type of stuff.
What do you do to overthrow a leader?
What do you do to, if you want to win a battle, what's your grand strategy?
They're really good at that.
And so they were inspired by Gene Sharp's writings, who's a really famous nonviolent political action theorist, and they were useful for U.S. geopolitical aims, which as we know right before, you know, in 1998, the United States bombed Kosovo and was pretty brutal in that region along with NATO.
So what I see as, at that time, Popovic and Otpor were useful to geopolitical purposes of the United States, but it's wrong to say they were pure puppets.
It's just that at the end, a lot of money kicked in, which became useful and ended up getting rid of Milosevic and inserting a leader.
Leaders got elected that were more friendly to U.S. geopolitical interests in that particular region.
And so that's sort of his background.
Popovic ended up transitioning.
He actually worked in the Serbian government for a while right after that, which is kind of telling to me.
And then eventually ended up in 2004, so four years later, after the overthrow of Milosevic, ended up starting an organization called CANVAS, or the Center for Applied Nonviolence and Strategy.
And this organization also ended up receiving a lot of U.S. funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, and from USAID, and from related interests, related foundation interests.
And ended up using a template of what they did in Serbia and other countries that were targeted.
The United States wanted to do regime change.
So for example, in Ukraine in 2004, the guys who were at Otpor, who are now part of CANVAS, were training the activists in Kiev.
So it's a good example.
And that ended up overthrowing Yushchenko, or overthrowing who was there and inserting Yushchenko.
And so that's what happened then, and that wasn't a very popular government in 2010.
It was unseated.
And now, that was NED, USAID, CIA money or not, or do you know?
Yeah.
Definitely NED.
Definitely USAID.
Unclear CIA.
But I think it's important to point out NED was essentially, you know, it was created to do the type of work that the CIA was doing before.
This is like Iran 53, only softer, right?
It's not quite...
Right.
Exactly.
So this is an illustration of soft power.
And it's not that these movements are necessarily complete creations of the United States.
They may have been geared to go in a different direction, and then that U.S. funding or that the Western funding pushes it in a direction that they want.
So that's the key.
So it's not just that they're puppets, but to Popovich, that's sort of the direction that his career went in, as sort of a trainer of not just movements that were useful to the U.S. government, but often movements that were useful to the U.S. government or regime change that was useful to the U.S. government, which, as my story pointed out, I think made him...
He's sort of a mercenary type of figure where he'd work with anyone.
It's not that lucrative of a career to be an activist trainer, so he would take money from almost anyone.
And I think that was the lure of him to end up becoming a source for a firm like Stratfor, which he started to become.
It's unclear exactly when he got in touch with them originally, but I think it was in about 2007 or 2008, and then for the next few years, he was in touch quite a bit as a source for their Eurasia, Eastern Europe, intelligence guy, his name is Marco Papich, and he's no longer there.
But the WikiLeaks emails show that he had a quite close relationship with Stratfor, and ended up...
Now, just to talk about one of the more fascinating parts, he ended up getting his wife a job there, too, and that shows up in those WikiLeaks emails, too.
And his wife was a weekend open-source intelligence analyst, where she just read a lot of news and compiled it in a way that was useful to Stratfor, and worked there for about a year.
So it wasn't as if he wasn't...
He was very close with Stratfor, and ended up inviting many of the people on the Stratfor staff even to his wedding.
So it was...
He was definitely close with Stratfor in a quite intimate way.
Well, now, so this just means that he's traveling around the world emailing them about what's going on, or what was he doing for them?
Yeah, and that's the really interesting part.
So because of his job, his other job that he still has as an employee of the group that he started, Canvas, he maintains a lot of relationships with activists around the world, including the activists in Egypt, Tahrir Square, including activists in Venezuela who didn't like Hugo Chavez, including almost anywhere in the world, our article points out.
And Canvas has trained activists in 50 countries.
And it's those relationships that were key, the relationships that Stratfor wanted to exploit for their own clients, which is a good way to gather intelligence on the ground in activist development and see what kind of things are happening that might not be in the interest of our corporate clients, for example.
Well, this guy opens a whole new door and a window that they never had before, because he does have a lot of street cred as a revolutionary activist, as an activist trainer.
So those relationships were the basis of him getting there.
And what he was doing often was forwarding off emails, for example, to Stratfor.
Yeah, but are these like general intelligence assessments, here's everything that I can figure out is going on in Bahrain that you need to know, or here's everything you need to know about those people that you sent me here to rat on, you know?
Yeah, it's mostly the former.
It's mostly general intelligence assessments, but also a little more specific than that.
So he would sometimes give his own assessment, but sometimes he would actually forward emails from activists where they were talking about what was going on to him, sort of as the guy that they trust to talk about activist strategy.
He would take those emails, which are a little more intimate and might talk a little bit more about strategy, and he would forward those to Stratfor.
So sometimes he would do the general assessments, but there are many times where you can see in the emails where he was just forwarding things off, and he ended up doing that one time, I think the most illustrative one happened in Egypt where an email was forwarded and he almost kind of mocked that activist and mentioned, quote-unquote, exploiting the relationship to a person at Stratfor that he forwarded the email off to.
So it was some pretty sick stuff.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the Egypt one.
I wanted to follow up on that because, so there was a piece criticizing your initial piece here at Counterpunch, Steve, by the Yes Men at the Huffington Post, and then you wrote a thing defending your piece from theirs, and people can go and follow up on all of that themselves, and you can talk about that if you want, but the part I wanted to focus on there was what you said about Egypt because I'm sorry I don't have the exact part of the response in front of me where it makes very clear, I think, well, no, maybe not.
It sounds to me like what's going on here is Stratfor is a middleman between this guy and the American government, and they're basically helping run him, and that their interest is in helping Omar Suleiman, who we already know that because they blurted it out all over the front page of the New York Times, actually, that their plan was, well, geez, we want to hang on to Mubarak no matter what.
This is January 2011, January, February.
We want to hang on to Mubarak no matter what, but if we can't keep him, we want to keep Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret torture police.
He's our number two runner-up to be the next pharaoh of Egypt.
That's what they wanted, and this thing is, this doesn't sound to me like he's on the side of the April 6th movement revolutionaries, who I would think that he's helping run them, and this is some kind of regime change, color-coded regime change against Mubarak.
This is, apparently, he's on the side of those attempting to contain that Arab Spring Revolution that was going on in Cairo at that point, even talking about, well, explain about Tahrir Square and the rest of this.
Sure, yeah.
So, I mean, I think this is an illustrated example where he forwarded an email from the activists, and then it takes a while for the Stratfor employee to email back, and he ends up apologizing what he was laid, because they were, as a firm, they were talking about what the hell to do about Egypt, because it was such a tumultuous time in Egypt, and I assume they had a lot of clients, business clients in the region, and they're trying to figure out what do we do about this eruption in the streets in Tahrir Square, and so they end up talking about, okay, so he asks, the Stratfor employee asks Popovich, you know, how long are they going to be in Tahrir, first of all?
How long is this possible?
They're going to be here for so much longer.
When are they going to tire out?
And then, second of all, they talk about sort of their preference, and their preference was the same preference as the U.S. government, which was try to contain it to, if Mubarak is going to go, we prefer to see Suleiman, and that's paraphrasing it, but that's what you can see in the email, and so they, obviously, there was an alignment between U.S. business interests and Stratfor's clients and the U.S. government itself at that time, and, you know, Egyptian activists on the ground weren't okay at all with having Suleiman being inserted as the next dictator of Egypt, so definitely wasn't in line with the demands of the people on the ground in Tahrir Square.
And that's a good example, though, of what Popovich's use was, and that's use activist contacts to get a lens into what's going on on the ground, and then they would ask him sort of, what can you do to help us steer it in the direction that we're looking for?
And so, both of them benefited, because I assume that he wasn't doing all this, I mean, I can't say for sure, we didn't claim it, but I assume that he must have gotten some kind of financial compensation for this, or at least thought it would be a career ladder for him to climb, gaining contacts at a firm like Stratfor, that kind of thing, so he was benefiting from it in some way, but Stratfor was benefiting from it, obviously, with the contacts that he was providing them, and a glimpse inside of social movements they never would have had if it wasn't for a guy like him, because, I mean, the alternative is sending undercovers into social movements, undercover police agents, that type of thing, but those people can be more easily outed, they don't have, especially if they're not known, and it often happens where undercovers are outed, whereas this guy had so much crap from his time in Serbia, and then beyond, that it was easy for him to keep in touch with these activists, they actually sought him out for his advice, that's how easy it was for him to be a source for them, them being Stratfor.
And now, what can you tell us about what he was doing down in Venezuela?
Yeah, so Venezuela was another interesting case study, obviously, the US government hated Hugo Chavez, now he's passed away, but in 2007, like I said, activists sought out Hugo Chavez, and Hugo Chavez wasn't liked by everyone in Venezuela, he also wasn't liked by the US government, there were some activists who did want to see him go, and so they sought out Canvas, actually, and Popovic.
They ended up going in 2007 to Belgrade, Serbia, for a training that was written about in their state media, D92 in Serbia, which is actually funded by the US government, and the article explains that they were just getting the basic training that everyone else gets, learning the template of what you need to do to overthrow a government you don't like, and the actual theory is really interesting stuff, and I think a lot of activists could learn a lot from it, but the point is that he was acting in service at that time to Hugo Chavez, who obviously wasn't liked at all by the Bush administration, and years later, he ended up writing, and I don't know who funded this, but I'd be interested to find out, he ended up writing a blueprint of sorts of how to overthrow Chavez, but how to unseat him, or just sort of his thinking on what's going on in Venezuela, and that's actually published now on the Canvas website, and it was published in 2010, so that can be, but he ended up, the interesting thing is he sent an advanced copy of the WikiLeaks email show, he sent an advanced copy of it to be looked at and examined by Stratfor, so that shows kind of how, again, how close he was with Stratfor, and kind of who he was serving by doing things like, which is both Stratfor and the US government, and he ended up, obviously, the important thing to remember is that his group, Canvas, got money from the US government for a long time, I don't know if it still does, but definitely was quite a bit at that time.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, did this guy have any role to play in Tajikistan in, what, 05 or 06 there?
With the tulip revolution?
Yeah, the tulip revolution, or yeah, Kyrgyzstan, I'm pretty sure that he at least has contacts there, may have done some trainings, I haven't looked into it very closely, but that's, like I said, there's just 50 countries that he claims that he's been in touch with, activists with, and done trainings with, so I wouldn't be completely shocked, and the emails did show that he had ongoing discussions, at least the Stratfor emails, he was having lots of discussions with, at that time, the late 2000s, with, later than the one you're talking about, with activists in Eastern Europe and even in Central Asia, I saw, I think Azerbaijan, maybe, so definitely very possible he was at least in touch with those activists, but I'm not sure if they end up doing trainings or not.
And then, I'm sorry, we only have a couple of minutes, but did you want to sum up, what was the criticism, did they have a point at all, or at least tell us where people can read about this?
Yeah, you mentioned the Yes Men, the Yes Men called their article yellow journalism and kind of sensationalistic and almost conspiratorial in a way, so that's the crux of their criticism, but they never really made any very specific points, other than to belittle what we found, they kind of called our findings innocuous, they kind of mocked Stratfor as being kind of a stupid, non-sophisticated firm, so their main device was belittling it, not really actually grappling with the facts or critiquing the facts, and so what we did is just end up writing a pretty long response to them to say that it's kind of inexcusable to be making excuses for someone who was collaborating with a firm like Stratfor, given what they've done in the past, given how sophisticated their formula is for undermining the wants and desires of activists, and then, so I mean, essentially, that's the crux of what we did, we haven't heard back from them since, but their article wasn't extremely popular, didn't gain much traction, I think that, and I just think that Stratfor is a really important firm, and has a really important and rich history that they ended up not really wanting to talk about too much, and I think it came down to the fact that they were actually friends with Popovich, Popovich had helped them a little bit with some trainings as a group, so they were kind of running PR for a friend, but I don't think it was a very serious look at who Stratfor is or what he did at Stratfor.
I think it's kind of ironic that it's the outsourcing of intelligence to this firm and then to this guy that's the scandal, rather than that he's employing all this great non-violent revolution stuff in the service of the U.S. empire, which is the actual power on earth that is in question here, right?
I would say that it's both.
Often the U.S. funding that is coming from the National Endowment for Democracy, or USAID, or the State Department, and that funding's in service to the U.S. empire, but that's not hard power, that's soft power funding, but both are, I think, equally important in terms of the final aims of what the empire wants, so that's why I think ultimately he was a natural choice for Stratfor, was because often, not always, but often the U.S. empire's trajectory or what it wants, what it seeks, is in line with U.S. business interests.
Not always, but I think that that would be why he was a natural career choice for him.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, we're all out of time, but thanks very much for your time.
Good work here.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's Steve Horne.
He's a journalist out of Wisconsin, and he's got these pieces you need to look at at Counterpunch, globally renowned activist collaborated with Stratfor, and how defending private intelligence firm collaborators screws grassroots activists.
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