06/30/10 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Ray McGovern.
He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years and used to brief George H.W. Bush back when he was the vice president in the eighties.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and he writes for Consortium News at ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Perry's great website.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
The Russians are coming.
I'm scared of the Soviet communists.
Actually, the title of the new film should be the Russians have already been here for a very long time.
Well, apparently they were all about to set off some suitcase nukes and kill us all and take over and make us communists.
Well, you know, not these particular ones, because Moscow Center is accusing them of taking advantage of these nice homes and educations and other benefits and money that they've given them.
And they're saying, oh, you know, we did this so that you would report information to the center and get with it, folks.
So it looks like these 11 sleeping agents, or they're technically called sleeper agents, but it sounds from the tone in Moscow that they were sleeping agents enjoying the life here.
It looks like the FBI had very little on them.
And so the question is why the big PR move here.
And I would guess, Scott, that when you get when you worked on this for several years and you get 10 of them, well, that's probably the plateau after which you really have to use this to advertise that the FBI is still A, in business and B, can still catch people.
Yeah.
Like with everything else in the world, it's all about the FBI's PR image.
It's the only thing that matters to them.
We already know that.
But wait a minute.
Let's get back to the specifics here real quick, because there are a lot of people who haven't taken the time to read 10 articles about it or whatever, like you have.
So tell us a little bit about these 11 people.
You say they were sleeping.
I guess that you're kind of referring to the fact that none of these people got government jobs or apparently did anything important at all.
Yeah.
When I said sleeping, that was a sort of a joke on sleeper sleeper agents.
These are illegals.
OK, so they're not part of the embassy or the U.S. mission or the I'm sorry, the Russian mission at the U.N. or anything like that.
They're Russian agents who are trained for a long period of time to look, act and speak like Americans.
And they're placed in the American in America with false legends, false IDs and names and all the rest of it.
And these people are saying, wait, so you're saying these guys, they all spoke with American accents and had fake names and they weren't just, oh, we're Russian immigrants and live in your neighborhood.
They were pretending to not even be Russian.
That's right.
Yeah.
This is what we call illegals.
OK, people who come here illegally on false papers, false names, false everything.
Now, this is as old as the hills.
The only difference is that it used to be done with a considerable degree of professionalism by the old KGB, the the Soviet Union's secret service.
Now we have this new outfit that really doesn't seem to know what they're doing.
Witness the fact that they they place these agents in the United States and we only know about 11.
And they were encouraged to get into a good relationship with top policymakers or think tank people or people who are even better still people who knew about nuclear weapons.
But there's not one single hint that any of them got near that what they're accused of.
And this is really interesting.
They're accused of not registering with the attorney general as agents of a foreign power, like the editorial staff over at The Washington Post.
Well, I was thinking AIPAC, actually, you know, same difference, right?
I was interviewed on one of the prominent cable things Monday, and they said, what about this?
This is a serious offense.
I said, well, I don't know how serious it is that within a square mile of our studio here, you have 10 times as many Israeli agents that have failed to follow the procedures to register with the attorney general as an agent of foreign power, 10 times as many as any Russian that you would pick up in all of Washington.
So yeah, I saw that she didn't know what to do with that either.
She's like, Oh, okay, thanks.
So that's, you know, that's the kind of now the other charges is money laundering.
Now that carries a bigger penalty, 20 years, the failing to register, that's just five years.
But you know, anytime you you have to get money from abroad to do an operation that's off the books, to buy your house or to buy your car or to, you know, pay your salary.
Now that's money laundering, if it's done the way you have to do it for illegal.
So that too, is a pretty marginal charge.
You know, if they were charged with espionage, well, then we'd have something that would mean that these people had done some damage to the United States.
They're not charged with that.
And so we have a big, big FBI, very, very long complaint, two complaints, actually, which goes into gory detail about all the very sophisticated methods that the FBI used to, to make these people compromise themselves.
And for what, for people who failed to register and who laundered money, it really appears to me that the FBI, having gotten eliminated is now said to the Attorney General, the American people, you know, have not been very impressed by our performance lately.
We're not real good at catching terrorists.
But we're still good at catching Russian spies.
So let's have a big press conference and reveal the fact that our painstaking work with these very sophisticated methods, including decrypting messages and so forth, that it's really paid off.
And we've got 11 Russian spies that we've wrapped up.
All right.
Now, here's the thing.
Let me agree with you some, but then challenge you.
We know that when the Unabomber's brother finally basically marched him down there and handed him to them, they said, congratulations to us.
After 19 years of solid police work, we cracked the case.
And we know that the FBI is pathological in protecting themselves.
That's why, you know, like Peter Lance says, investigation after investigation in Al Qaeda were made to go nowhere, because if they went anywhere, they would have to reveal how they could have stopped the last one if they'd been doing their job the last time.
So for PR purposes, protecting the FBI purposes, they went ahead and left us wide open to being attacked.
But anyway, so I agree with you that no one at the FBI has any motive whatsoever except to make themselves look good, or at least it's all of their first priority or they're fired.
So everybody who's left at the FBI, that's their only priority.
However, you're saying that that's the whole motive here for even doing this is just the FBI really needs some PR right now.
Well, one is hard pressed to think of any other reason.
I got one.
Go ahead.
It's just like when the CIA set up Dwight Eisenhower and had Gary Power's U2 shot down over the Soviet Union in order to scotch the peace talks where they were going to try to end the Cold War right then and there in the Eisenhower administration.
And the CIA guys got away with prolonging the Cold War another 30, 40 years.
You've been listening to Webster Tarpley.
No, I have not been listening to Webster Tarpley.
No, I don't buy that.
I don't buy that.
That U2 mission was pre-scheduled.
It was a very, very unfortunate coincidence of events, but they never expected that it would be shut down.
All right.
Well, if you say so, because I don't really know about that, but it's still on its face.
And the lady on RT said this to you, too.
Hey, man, come on.
The American president and the Russian president just sit down and they have Ray's hell burgers together and everything's fine.
And then somebody comes out with this and all the at least right wing radio and probably the Hannity show on TV, et cetera, get to go wild with stories of, you know, Russian spies, just like the old days.
Maybe some congressmen get to sell some more fighter planes.
Yeah, well, it's got what it's very cynical, right?
Well, no, no, you're I mean, this is this is the conspiratorial attitude that the Russians reacted with, including the folks at RT.
And that's why it was such an uphill struggle to disabuse them of that notion.
But we'll come back to that hopefully when when you're great.
Yeah.
All right.
It's Ray McGovern from Consortium News dot com.
We'll be back.
You can put the Liberty Radio network on the air in your area.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santa Ward Radio wrapping up second hour here, we got Ray McGovern on the line.
He's a former CIA analyst and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Rights for Consortium News dot com.
And for those of you listening to chaos, we are going into the third hour after the top of the hour.
And you will be able to tune that in if you like at LRN dot FM.
Otherwise, stay tuned to Chaos Radio because there's going to be all kinds of good shows coming up, starting with my favorite, really, Mark and Nathan.
Sorry, I'm going to miss the first hour of that anyway.
Ray, welcome back to the show or welcome back to the show after the commercial.
I don't know what you call that.
Is that welcome or is there a better word for that there?
After the break.
Yes.
Welcome back from the break.
That's there you go.
I'll have to think about a better way to say that anyway.
So I caught myself saying if you say so to a CIA guy and, you know, maybe you're on a covert operation right now to lie to me and stuff.
You sure this whole Gary Powers thing back in the Eisenhower years was just an unfortunate accident.
That's how I've always looked at it, Scott.
I know that there's some recent information wafting about that.
No, he was deliberately sabotaged, that the thing went down lower than the altitude prescribed and all that stuff.
Frankly, I haven't sorted through that yet, but it seems to me extremely unlikely that that's the case.
Yeah, I guess.
Well, the extraordinary part of the story is just how far reaching of a deal like Eisenhower wanted to cut with the Soviets.
So the fact that that plane getting shot down ruined such an excellent opportunity to detente right then and there in the 1950s.
And she's just think about all the killing that could have been stopped.
You know, that's what makes it seem more like it must have been a conspiracy, you know.
But anyway, so back to the current thing.
You're saying that I'm just I'm being too hyperbolic and assuming that somebody's trying to scotch the reset with the Russians.
Well, that was the attitude that was given to the interviewers there at the Russian TV place where I did three interviews within an hour or so of the of the press story of the wrap up of these 11 Russian spies.
You know, there is a natural tendency to think that, well, maybe the CIA or the FBI is acting in the way the KGB used to act and, you know, sabotaging efforts at true detente or a better relationship between our two countries, Russia and the USA.
But the timing of the thing is all off.
If the FBI were up to that kind of game, they would have done something to mousetrap Medvedev when he was here, or maybe before he even came.
The fact that they did it afterwards suggests to me that the FBI was shopping at the bit saying, hey, you know, we have we have 11 now we have a level we have to announce this.
And the White House told me, OK, you can announce it, but announce it after the visit and announce it well before the Senate hearings on this Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that's that's going to be underway in a couple of weeks.
And that's what they did.
Now, as for why the FBI was so interested in in doing this, well, when the FBI feels beleaguered, and as I say, anyone looks at their record and trying to catch terrorists, which is their primary job now, like more than half of their people are devoted to that would be nice if they took a couple off that and put them back in Wall Street.
In any case, they haven't been very successful there.
OK, now they can still catch Russian spies.
And so PR is really, really important to the FBI, partly for budgetary reasons, partly so they can stay afloat.
And I'm thinking back, you mentioned 9-11.
Well, right after 9-11, remember what the FBI did?
They rounded up 1,000 suspected Muslim terrorists, OK?
Everyone who had a Muslim name, especially those who overstayed their visa, were rounded up and put in prisons in New Jersey and New York, and some of them had to stay there for almost six months.
Were any of them proven to have any tie at all with Al Qaeda?
No.
So, you know, the FBI is a very political animal, unlike the agency that I used to work for, the CIA.
And the FBI has its own little PR needs and its PR capabilities.
And that's pretty much what we have here.
And the last thing I'll say is that both President Putin and President Barack Obama, in the person of this PR guy, Gibbs at the White House press, they both downplayed it, both said that, you know, this is really too bad that this still goes on, but it hopefully won't have any real effect on our relationship.
And of course, Putin knows where he speaks, since he used to be head of the Russian secret service at that time called the KGB.
All right.
Now, I'll admit that it didn't seem like a big deal to me at all.
So I didn't even bother reading the criminal complaint, because who cares?
And so who cares about that?
Let's talk about something interesting.
You just said that the CIA is a, at least, far less political government, bureaucracy, agency, department than compared to the FBI.
But what I hear is that they're rewriting the National Intelligence Estimate because the Democratic War Party wants to pretend that the Iranians have some sort of nuclear weapons program of any description, Ray, and the CIA apparently is rolling over and working on the dang thing right now, even though you and I and they all know it ain't true.
Well, the proof will be in the pudding.
That estimate, the most recent one, which is dated November 2007, was the one that shocked everyone by concluding all 16 intelligence agencies unanimously that Iran had stopped working on the nuclear warhead part of its program in the fall of 2003.
So four years previous to the estimate, and that they had not resumed work on it.
Now, as recently as March, the head of national intelligence, since cashiered, Dennis Blair, hewed to that judgment.
He said that there's nothing that would contradict that or no new evidence that they have started up that program again.
So it's going to be really, really interesting to see if the people that are running the National Intelligence Council now, who have purview over this new estimate on Iran, whether they buckle for the pressure and fudge the language in such a way as to allow the president and everyone on down to suggest that no, no, no, no, Iran is hellbent, as Bobby Gates has put it, hellbent on getting a nuclear weapon, or whether the professionals in the CIA, the good ones that are left will do what they did in the fall of 2007 and say, hell no, there's no evidence that Iran has decided one way or another, whether they're going to go for a nuclear weapon.
This is going to be extremely interesting.
And I think there's a good sense that if people play fast and loose with the evidence, and I'm thinking of that congressional guy, Panetta, who comes out of that congressional ethos where everything is compromised, you compromise this, you compromise that.
That's the kiss of death for an anthologist estimate.
Either it's so or it's not.
So we'll see if Panetta hears and obeys orders to make Iran sound more dangerous than it actually is.
And there's a disincentive for him to do that.
And I'll tell you what it is.
There are enough honest people still working in the CIA that I would guess, although I would not name any names or even have any, you know, specific proof, I would guess that Panetta and the others would be deathly afraid that the next morning that Reid on Wikileaks, the real memo, the first draft, which said, as we said, in November 2007, Iran has stopped working on the warhead related part of its nuclear program and has not resumed that work, you know.
Now, if somebody leaks the first draft, and they have a new draft, you know, a fixed draft that says, watch out for Iran, they're hellbent, just as Bobby Gates says, hellbent on a nuclear weapon.
Then we have a major story.
And then the CIA belongs in the same sort of political camp as the FBI has fallen into.
Yeah, well, and the thing is, though, too, is even if you go back to the NIE of 2007, they basically are half conceding to the war party, a bunch of lies, which after all, was maybe you can blame the other half of the CIA over in the lawbreaking division or whatever.
But it was a CIA laptop full of a bunch of bogus forged Israeli documents funneled through the communist terrorist cult, the Mujahideen Al-Khalk, and then put on what they now admit was a CIA laptop.
And then they went, Look, everybody, we have a laptop of a dead Iranian scientist that has all this proof of a nuclear weapons program on it, which is a giant, ridiculous lie from beginning to end, and has been proven that way over and over again, most especially by doctors Porter and Prather.
And that's the basis of the they used to have a program up until 2003.
And that's from the good NIE.
So I mean, I don't know, I guess he used to work there.
You got more faith in these guys than I do.
But hold that thought, Ray.
And I'm sorry for just talking us to the end here.
But we'll be right back after this break.
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Our number three is next after the news here on the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.
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All right, everybody.
Welcome to the third hour of the show.
Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
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And now back to Ray McGovern, who's hanging on the line.
Ray, are you there?
I still am.
All right.
Now, when we left before the news, I was accusing the CIA of being political and accepting forged Israeli documents posing as Iranian documents for the basis of their claim that there ever was a nuclear weapons program in Iran up to 2003.
Yeah.
Well, Scott, I can tell you for sure, and you can take this to the bank, as they say, that the Iranians were working before the fall of 2003 on a nuclear weapons development program.
They weren't getting very far, but they were doing work on that.
And that's not based on any forged documents or any computers given to us by Iranian dissidents.
That's based on a whole array of sophisticated analysis based on sophisticated technology and collection techniques.
So it was a real big thing at the end of 07, when Tom Flinger, the head of the National Intelligence Council, a fellow from the from the State Department, as a matter of fact, when he insisted that a bottom up appraisal of Iran's nuclear weapons program or nuclear program would be undertaken, they did that.
It took more than a year to come out with their conclusions.
But by happy circumstance, they covered still more very sensitive information, confirming that the weapons program had stopped at the end of 2003.
All right.
Well, I've been interviewing you on various shows for years, and you've always seemed honest, even though you have CIA near your name.
And you've been a great critic of American policy.
And I'm liable to trust you, Ray.
But why don't you at least try to explain to me how it is that you know this so well that I can just take it to the bank because you're the footnote.
Okay, hang on for half a second.
I have this buzzer coming on.
Okay, yeah, that's the I guess I mentioned to you that I'd be getting a call from Congress about this time.
Right.
So you can give me that one last answer here and I'll cut you loose.
Well, the answer is this.
When you hang around Washington, as long as I have, and when you worked actively in the business for almost 30 years, you know which guys to trust and which not to trust the highly paid technicians, the nuclear scientists, as well as the intelligence analysts.
And suffice it to say without naming names, that I've done my homework on this.
And I am 100% confident that Iran did have a nuclear weapons related program before the fall of 2003.
And it stopped.
So and that's why it was such a big deal.
And if, if the information comes out now that they've restarted it, we'll take a really close look at that.
Because as you know, the Israelis are really, really interested in getting a war started with our help against Iran.
Sorry, I've got to take off here, Scott.
But I did promise these other folks.
I understand.
Go ahead and set them straight.
I appreciate it.
Okay, bye now.
All right, everybody.
That's Ray McGovern from ConsortiumNews.com.
And cutting them loose a little bit early here because somebody in Congress needed to be told what for I figured probably better to have Ray telling them than somebody else.
I don't know, I still have more follow up questions on that question, though, didn't you?