Title: The Roundtable — Gonzalo L
Show: The Roundtable (Gonzalo Lira)
Date: 2022-12-27
URL: https://youtu.be/nrGSOXvNrdw
Duration: 96:00

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[00:04] foreign [Music] table number 39 I am Gonzalo Lira and I

[00:35] am joined by my two guests Larry Johnson and John kiriaku and we are going to talk about all things intelligence you know to understand the world and I've drawn these two gentlemen to discuss a lot of stuff about the intelligence community and I'm particularly interested in focusing on the failures unfortunately of the intelligence community so far and also something else that it's inevitable you know the creeping uh uh sense that the alphabet agencies are kind of like taking over the public discourse in the west and

[01:07] controlling what people find out about which is deeply disturbing I mean it's really third world Banana Republic kind of stuff so anyway first of all let me welcome my guest Larry Johnson Larry how's it going man I am well thank you for having me I'll from the time pop is a live camera when I'm not talking that way I won't be robotic but when I talk I'll go back to the to the picture it's a handsome picture you look great you know I mean like uh me I I look at

[01:38] me live man I don't look so good so yeah you look great thank you so much Larry for joining us it's always a pleasure you know he's a Larry's a repeated guest for those of you who are new to the show and it's just a delight and a treat to have him on John kiriaku how's it going my friend hey doing well thanks thanks so much for inviting me oh it's my pleasure and by the way uh to both my for both my guests you'll see in the in the description of the video as well as a pin comment links to the work of these two gentlemen you can find Larry at sonar21.com and you can find

[08:24] they're now involved in artificial intelligence and biotechnology and working with with these other governmental agencies like DARPA and NSA we're working with um with classified defense contractors in this new lab that has no civilian oversight no public oversight and only the the big four of the two congressional committees the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate committees have access to the information

[08:57] autonomous lab that's going to develop all kinds of crazy ass stuff and nobody's going to know what it is or how much money is being spent on it you know I want to pull in Larry uh for this I mean what see the thing that has me like freaked out at this point to tell you the truth is the fact that a lot of the alphabet a agencies are going had have been shown now to be manipulating social media platforms and directly participating we we know about the FBI

[09:27] but I'm assuming the CIA has something analogous to what the FBI was doing insofar as propaganda efforts and so forth can we even say Larry at this point that we have like a democracy I mean can we say that the CIA the intelligence community in the United States is really just part of a a political a socio-political academic Financial class that does not care about the people anymore I mean help me out here yeah no that yeah the short answer is yes before

[10:00] we do that I I had a question for John so were you going to lunch in the unclass or the class classified cafeteria yeah that's a good that's a good question um it was in the classified cafeteria oh okay CIA used to have two different cafeterias one for classified conversations and one for unclassified conversations um you had to take people like from the state department or from outside to the unclassified cafeteria which was really tiny and not very nice they ended up turning that into an event space and now everybody has to go to the classified

[10:31] cafeteria you know listen to you guys talk about this you know it's like two guys from the same High School talking about the cafeteria there you know oh yeah the food was garbage and remember you know Mrs Smith who who made the best cupcakes or whatever I mean it sounds like that but anyway can I add something I don't mean to get too far afield sure but you know part of or one of the problems of the cafeteria was uh on the morning that Mary malkansi opened fire at the red

[11:02] light in front of the CIA and and killed two CIA employees and wounded I think it was six others uh you know the CIA kind of went crazy trying to uh find him and to to track down his background it turns out that his roommate worked for Dunkin Donuts and his roommate had access to the CIA to deliver Donuts every day to the CIA cafeteria okay how did something like that happen like is everybody asleep at the switch well that's a good question that you can

[11:34] ask sorry sorry I I changed places and I know I look like the Prince of Darkness now uh because I have like this little Terrace in my apartment where I can like uh smoke because I'm you know I'm in a war zone man I mean give me something you know but anyway no um about that about the the failures to anticipate like obvious things because look this is the thing that pisses me off about the intelligence uh uh communities in the west that they do not seem to be able to anticipate what is

[12:05] obvious to everybody else of things that are coming and reactions that are going to come because of certain actions done by Western governments why why are the intelligence communities all failing in the west why are they unable to provide intelligent analysis that can actually help the democratic nations of the West make wise decisions I'm throwing it out to both of you yeah the the simple answers it's a bureaucracy and the

[12:36] bureaucracy with all of the bureaucratic incentives which are run counter to the sort of what I'll call the Curiosity intellectual incentives that one would associate with in good intelligence analysis so and let me go back to your first question about the the influence on Twitter this really isn't new remember that there was an age when the CIA was infiltrating the regular media with human beings and doing it the old-fashioned way when the in the era

[13:07] when they're using typewriters so this is not new it's it's just it's a continuation it's an expansion but the the bureaucratic element that's out there at CIA and I'll be curious to see what John if John's experience was the same as mine the Hollywood image the popular literature image is of CIA with these highly intelligent people and with the enormous background and experience and depth and morality Well Jack Ryan he's

[13:39] supposed to be the poster boy for this yeah yeah um setting the morality issues aside uh I go back to my experience when I walked into the Middle America Caribbean division and this fall of 1986 and I was in the Central American Branch so right right away I'm giving you the bureaucratic structure so you have this branch and then you have a division and then above or an office the Middle

[14:09] America Caribbean Division and then in the office of Africa Latin American Affairs so it's you know it's very hierarchical and so in in my office there was a Honduras analyst me there was an analyst for Panama there were uh two analysts three working on Salvador because Salvador was a big priority for the United States uh Nicaragua had its own Branch where John and John and I have a mutual friend Fulton who was the uh the chief analyst

[14:42] over there and out of all of these analysts here we are in Central America branch I was the only one that spoke Spanish and spoke it at a level four I was the only one that had actually lived in Central America so you've got people that are supposed to have this expertise in depth and they don't they come in and they get you know start piling the message traffic in front of them then there's no incentive to report anything from the press or anything

[15:12] that's unclassified unless you're using classified material then your work as an analyst is considered inferior so that's one of the reasons why I I sort of feel liberated these days because I go on the internet and get access to really better information than what I was getting on the inside when I had I had access to classified information up until about three years ago so it's just the combination of that if you would call it the lack of expertise the incentives to

[15:45] promote people um I I give I give you my own personal experience what happened to me I had a new branch chief a woman named Mary McCarthy she admit she came out of Africa and John knows her very well so um unbeknownst to me uh we were asked to provide the front office and this was in the days we just got computers but we're still using hard copy pieces of paper so we're asked to provide the front office the top 10 15 cables you know

[16:17] human reports State Department reports DOD anything that they should pay attention to so I'd go through and call it and send it up to the to the front office and I did that that went on for two months came time to get promoted I get called into the deputy uh director's office in that Branch Carmen Medina you remember Karma Carmen so I think I'm still Facebook friends with her oh my god I think I'm not so she she sits me down

[16:49] and she just says well you didn't get promoted because and listen to this we had questions about the Integrity of your analysis and my my eyes did one of those you know Roger Rabbit things where the eyeballs poke out and the steam comes out of the ears and I was like what are you talking about well it turned out that unbeknownst to me Mary McCarthy who didn't speak Spanish who had never served in Central America who had no background in it whatsoever she was picking out her own

[17:20] group of cables every day sending it forward to the front office and for two months the front office was getting one stack for me which was radically different from what she was doing because what she was sending up was horseshit she had she was sending the propaganda and the crap that was coming from the field hmm my point is the first day that happened any competent manager should have called us both in and said what the hell's

[17:51] going on Mary why are you sending this and Larry why doesn't yours match no they let it go on for two months and then we had questions about your integrity and so that's why we didn't report uh promote you that was when I knew I had to get the [ __ ] out of that place yeah there was let me ask you something when they say that we question your integrity are they saying that you're a traitor or no they're saying I lied I was lying and shading the intelligence

[18:21] Jesus yeah so that and this was that was Karma Medina and Kate Hall so yeah I'll call him out that that that I mean this is really fascinating why would anybody assume that you're lying I mean you you are an American uh uh Larry Johnson sorry that doesn't sound like Honduran to me okay so the notion that you're lying what what reason would you have to lie why well it's just well a political reason that I that I wanted to

[18:52] I wanted to make things look better for the Contours or I wanted to make things look worse for the contrast the reality was my analysis was pointing out that there was not a lot of support in Honduras in particular for maintaining the Contra presence there at the time and therefore what I was pushing from an analytical line was going against what the directorate of operations was supporting so it was creating a political Conflict for the branch because then it was they were getting messages back from the White House and

[19:22] other places about why aren't why aren't you people being team players so this notion of being a team player is you support the policy so but the fact that they had questions about that for me was on the very first day or the second day they had questions they should have called us both in confronted us with it and said what's going on at which point I would have been able to explain that she didn't know that my branch chief Mary didn't know what she was talking about because she did not

[19:52] have the experience just because she'd been at CIA longer than me didn't mean that she had actual substantive knowledge about the area and particularly about the Intel well what's fascinating about this that you're that you're describing Larry is that of course this happened in Honduras in the 80s right we got to expand it to the entire world in so far as the CIA is concerned because the world is the purview of the global American Empire and you know realize that in all of these this analysis some sort of similar

[20:23] kind of incompetence is going on and therefore the intelligence that is being reported by the CIA to decision makers is completely number one wrong and then it starts to become the policy drives the intelligence that's provided as opposed to the intelligence providing a true picture of the reality on the ground would that be correct John yeah I think I think you've hit it on the head and I think everything that Larry said is is also right on this is an ongoing theme in in the uh in the CIA

[20:56] it's not it's not just in operations as Larry says it's also prevalent in analysis too you know the part of the problem of the CIA is is everybody thinks that he or she is the smartest person in the room and there's nothing that anybody can tell them that is gonna that's gonna change their mind or that's going to teach them something new and like Larry correctly said if somebody has been there longer and they went to

[21:26] you know some great School uh they just automatically think that they're smarter than you are even though you're the substantive expert on these kinds of things you happen to be younger and more Junior in the hierarchy but they just think that they're smarter than you and if they don't like your analysis they're going to go around you whether it's to the office director or to the president of the United States or to somebody in between that happens every single day at the CIA and I'll add too that you know we criticize uh the

[21:58] cia's operational elements a lot right they've they've fallen on their face a million times uh we know what happened uh up until 1975 thanks to the church committee but what we often don't focus on is the cia's analytic failures if somebody were to go back and take a look at all of the major world events from the creation of the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947 onward I think we would learn that the CIA

[22:29] missed every major world event analytically they either missed it completely or they got it wrong whether it was you know the the Berlin airlift the events surrounding the Berlin airlift or the Suez Crisis in 56 or the The Six Day War or whatever the the fall of the Berlin Wall uh the Iranian hostage crisis you name the major world event and I guarantee to you that the CIA got it wrong yeah is it is it almost

[23:00] like you know that whenever the CIA says left you have to turn right I think so what do you think Larry so one of the things has happened um it's it's been an evolution when the CIA was first set up you did have a separation strong separation between the operation side of dialysis and the analytical side of the house and uh part of that was the unders you know that I think the the Ops people understood that they would be in a position to manipulate uh the analytical

[23:31] side and they literally had doors that in the in the first CIA headquarters constructed out in McLean Virginia they had doors in the middle of the building that would separate people from operations and Analysis so you were you were literally physically kept apart then somewhere I think it was late 70s early 80s they opened the doors so now there was interaction and exchange uh what I experienced uh as the you know I

[24:01] I did a stint on the opposite in the Central American task force so I had connections and ties with people there but then I became the Honduran analyst and the Honduras as functioning at the time as the aircraft carrier for the contrast you know a land-based aircraft carrier and um the pressure that was coming the the Ops people when they get involved with covert action and when I'm referring to covert action let's say our main training equipping the contras helping them carry out

[24:32] um military attacks in Nicaragua and other places those officers who are invested in that their their success depends upon the success of what's happening on the ground so therefore they're going to do everything in their power to make sure that that looks as good as possible even up to an including lying and I had the experience once where we were reading about the the upside was issuing uh the

[25:03] T it's called TD it's a human report and the human report was a was detailing and attack but the contrast had allegedly take carried out but we had no other corresponding evidence of it no overhead imagery no intercepts what happened was uh the guy who was running the program first name by John he was a he was a frustrated West Point he graduated from West Point 67. and what he was doing was he was

[25:34] actually writing out himself the operations orders for the contrast sending it down to them and then at the point of date and time he would issue it as if it had actually happened even though it hadn't happened okay so This lends itself to all kinds of corruption where this genre you think okay I'm sorry you know I I'm not intelligence man I'm Mr director dummy so so basically yeah was he skimming off

[26:06] the top in particular in this issue you know it had it when you come up for your annual report you got to be able to show your Fitness report the the par as it's called you got to be able to have some you know you do you get decide all these accomplishments that you carried out even though they may not have actually happened now that was 30 years ago okay uh actually almost 40 years ago so what has happened what's happened since then it's gotten worse because now they've created these centers where the

[26:36] analysts and The Operators are share the same space so right now I would like you to imagine that you are a Russian analyst and you're sitting in this task force that's been set up to monitor what the events in Ukraine how do you think it's going to go over if you come in and say the reality is the Russians felt compelled to launch this military operation because of what the United States and NATO was doing with respect to expanding NATO to

[27:08] Ukraine do you think you'd be allowed to say that no would you be allowed to write that no because it goes against the the this policy decision to send complete military and intelligence support to Ukraine regardless of what the facts are on the ground yeah when when Larry and I were we're analysts um there was a Chinese wall between analysis and operations uh there was a period where

[27:38] um you know we had to be buzzed in to the operational uh offices right we we didn't have the ability to just walk around freely around the building um I think it was actually better back in those days because as Larry says uh correctly we've got these centers now where everybody's sitting together the operations people the in the analysis people the Science and Tech people there are a couple of FBI agents there's an NSA rep there's some guy from you know

[28:10] Customs and Border Protection or whatever everybody's sitting together in these in these centers and then group thinks sets in so if you're an analyst and your job is to prevent to present rather a completely independent view based on your reading of the intelligence but then the people you're sitting around are saying no no no no you're getting it wrong um even if you're not uh we need to protect these and these uh operational

[28:41] equities or you can't say that because they're they're going to be pissed off at the White House at the NSC so you have to change it to this well then you've got this completely mucked up analysis that's wrong and is not what you intended in the first place and you're only you're only presenting it because it's going to keep everybody in your silly Center uh Happy well that's not that's not service to the country that's not public service that's just going along to get along and

[29:12] that's what leads to intelligence failure after intelligence failure yeah because to talk about the specific situation in Ukraine you know I mean uh what Larry was saying that yeah no analyst is going to tell the truth and and so how are how is the public at large and decision makers in particular going to make the right decisions because what's what's obvious to everybody who's in the alt commentarian Community if you will the YouTube you know the this little um circle of people who are watching this like like it's a

[29:43] Mexican soap opera right uh you know we are getting the correct information because we are predicting things that are going to happen correctly whereas in the west they they are just out to lunch I mean like I remember uh before when the conflict first started I was talking to a friend of mine uh in the financial community and and he's a pretty Sharp customer and very well informed and he said these sanctions aren't going to do anything to Russia they will probably hurt the West and and of course the decision makers went Full Throttle on the sanctions and

[30:15] exactly what the guy said the guy works at Investment Bank and his job was to now analyze this stuff but his job was to present realistic analysis whereas the CIA the the publicly funded intelligence agencies seemed to be completely off base you know I mean wouldn't it be better to just shut down the CIA and and just follow the Duran and a few other channels well I think Larry and I have both have both advocated that yeah yes you know can I had something to I I did an analysis one

[30:48] time I was a junior analyst and I did an analysis on um on a popular Uprising in Bahrain and I said I believed that the Bahraini royal family would muddle through they would give the opposition just enough to calm them down without giving them any real freedom and they would muddle through that that ended up being what happened but I was I was taking a task over that analysis and I was told that I needed to start thinking outside the box I freaking hate that phrase first of all Yes I need to think

[31:20] out of box out of the box and I said to my boss I said listen you gotta make stuff up that's what it means well you took the words out of my mouth I said to my boss there's a difference between doing thoughtful analysis and just making [ __ ] up and you want me to just make [ __ ] up yeah and I can't do that but uh that happens every single day yeah yeah guys by the way I just want to mention the fact that we've crossed the 3 500 Mark in so far as concurrent

[31:51] viewers and I'm urging all of my viewers who are interested in Larry and John to check out their links they're in the description below and as a pinned comment I just want to like you know throw that out there so that everybody knows where they can find them but anyway John I'm sorry I cut you off no no you didn't go ahead you're okay you're cutting me off I'm upset Noah oh so yeah you know it must be my Larry phobia because everything is a phobia nowadays there's trans

[32:21] that phobia it's Larry phobia well you know there are a couple of other changes that have taken place so let's call it sort of institutionally or procedurally so the the phenomena that John and I are describing of political influence over the intelligence analysis process is not new uh I I was fortunate that I was taught in the new analyst course by an old analyst by the name of George Allen wow Allen was the division Chief over

[32:54] the Vietnam War and he was the one who had an analyst by the name of Sam Adams literally a descendant of Sam Adams and the the advantage that Sam Adams had as an analyst was he had lived in Vietnam he knew the terrain but he was also wealthy he was a multi-millionaire so he had what is called [ __ ] you money so they're because they couldn't threaten if they threatened him with loss of his job no big deal he was going to survive

[33:25] and be able to feed his family and what George Allen described to to us my class there were about 12 of us in there he described what it was like he was getting phone calls from Lyndon Baines Johnson from Robert McNamara the Secretary of Defense he was getting from the National Security advisor and the the it was over and over this pressure why don't you be a team player you know why aren't you why are you saying that the the Viet Cong have all of this uh extra forces when we've killed them all

[33:55] and you know that was sort of the basic issue and he and he told us he said I regret that I didn't push back harder he said because at the time I had two kids one was in high school one was starting College I didn't have any money to fall back on so he was basically a hostage to his economic situation unable to tell the truth about what was going on but the other change that's taking place is back in that era in the 60s and 70s

[34:28] the CIA still had a very good human ability where our case officers go overseas and persuade foreigners to come to Quran to spy for us and to give us information and between their own countries what has happened started in the late 90s accelerated into the 2000s over Reliance on liaison reporting where our intelligence comes from a foreign intelligence service and it just gets passed to us and then we put it out which is why what's going on with a lot

[34:59] of the so-called analysis right now with respect to Ukraine it's coming from the ukrainians whatever the ukrainians tell us these analysts are repeating and they're not they're not even going out to challenge it critically so that's uh you know that is absolutely correct absolutely correct you know I I worked for a a CIA deputy director it was my last headquarters job I was his executive assistant and he used to say all the time that the job of the CIA is

[35:30] actually quite simple it's to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyze those secrets to allow our policy makers to make the best informed policy and on paper that's perfect that's exactly what the CIA should be doing but in reality the CIA has never done that never they've done things like you know uh smuggle uh Nazi war criminals into the country or to infiltrate U.S media organizations uh or

[36:04] to uh to to drug people as we said at the start of the show just to see how they react or uh you know rather than developing so sources and let me tell you it's hard work I spend eight years in operations it's hard to convince somebody to commit Espionage for you yeah or to commit treason for you just because you're a nice guy and they enjoy your company and you're gonna pay them a lot of money in the end but it's hard work well it's not hard work to drive to the Ukrainian intelligence service every

[36:35] morning and say what do you got for me today and then you go back to the station and you type it into the cia's computer system and say Here's a liaison report which then the White House or the Pentagon or the CIA promptly leaks to the New York Times or the Washington Post to make it look like the ukrainians are going to win this war yeah I mean because they're they're not winning it's it's catastrophic quite frankly right I want to ask you something uh to flip the coin if you will do you think that similar problems are befalling the Russians or the

[37:07] Chinese for that matter or do you think that they have organized their intelligence services in a in a more rational sense to order in order to get a better sense of reality I think the Chinese because of the the money that they have um you know they don't spend their money like we do on on ridiculously expensive uh defense projects they they have a lot of um free cash flow and so they've coupled the collection of human intelligence with electronic collection of

[37:39] intelligence um the Russians do it the old-fashioned way they recruit human sources to to give them information um it's something that we've gotten away from in a in a really bad way now with that said and I'll I'll repeat myself uh I'm on record as saying that I don't think we should have a CIA not that a CIA wouldn't be valuable if it could be trusted and and successfully and efficiently overseen by by uh the House

[38:11] and Senate intelligence committees but it's proven over the course of 75 years that it can't be trusted to do that and so you know we've got the state Department's Bureau of intelligence and research for example that does fantastic analysis we have a a division of not a division but a a bureau of the Department of Defense called defense Human Services that does exactly what CIA operations does it develops human sources we've got NSA that does

[38:41] electronic uh intelligence collection we've got DARPA that does all the experimentation and the scientific uh and technological advancements there's there's no reason to have this out of control uh body called the CIA it's it's doing the American people a disservice yeah no but I I when I refer to the Russian intelligence services and the Chinese intelligence Services why I'm interested in knowing is are they providing their leadership their respective leaderships with accurate

[39:12] information uh with an accurate analysis of the of the of the ground situation because it's seems to me that what's going on with the CIA and Western intelligence Services generally is that they are providing the leadership cost with a completely distorted view of reality and so they keep constantly being caught flat-footed they they they're like how did this happen we were winning like for instance in this situation here there is inevitably going to be a moment of collapse of the zelinski regime it's it's on the horizon and everybody in Washington is going to

[39:44] be like what happened you know like well they did they did the same with that I mean the same thing happened with Afghanistan For Heaven's Sake okay just two years ago so what what you're seeing is we we've witnessed a complete role reversal what the Soviet Union used to be the United States is what the United States used to be Russia is becoming yeah and what I mean by that is in the Soviet era there the the Party

[40:16] politics and the the the people who need to sort of tell people up on top what they wanted to hear was very very strong and that when you have a very centralized system that it inevitably it caters or panders to the person at the top uh and by contrast the more decentralized it is the more likely you are to actually get some real information and I'm sorry I think the

[40:48] Russians I think the Russians are far superior to the United States on that account and I don't I don't think there's there really is at this point no incentive to lie to Vladimir Putin or talaveroff or to the the rest of the or to garasimov and the military leadership there because they recognize the survival as a nation is not stick this we're talking extensions

[41:19] yeah focuses it you can't [ __ ] when there's a real chance that you're gonna be overrun so so they have to be and and so you think that maybe the CIA the the problem of it is that it it consider it has always considered the United States so rich and Powerful that it sort of like almost doesn't matter because you know I mean things will work themselves out so it's okay if we cut Corners that kind of mentality yeah well we're terrible at self-reflection

[41:49] because if we would simply be honest with ourselves step back and look at the record of the last 60 years from Vietnam to the the futile Wars in Central America to two Wars in Iraq to a war in Afghanistan this this pox American instead of pax America it's been more like pox Americana okay and it's it's an infection upon the world I'm gonna I'm

[42:20] gonna steal that that's a good one yeah feel free that was our model at CIA anything worth doing well as we're stealing from someone else okay the only the only place you'd ever work where plagiarism was encouraged and rewarded you know so that was so true oh true they they look merving yeah plagiarism so it goes in different directions and you just claim credit for it

[42:52] yeah so because the thing that drives me up the wall is that see from the sea because it seems at this time that we have the following situation in the west where we have these intelligent services that get this information and they have a bunch of press people that are more or less I don't think that they're on their payroll per se but they provide exclusive information so these various journalists can show up to their editor's offices and say hey here I got something from this CIA guy you know it's real intelligent stuff and so the

[43:24] the CIA is providing uh false information because of the reasons that we discussed previously and providing that information to the press that regurgitates it and spreads it out and propagandizes the people into believing things that are simply not true uh yeah Alexander mercuris in in yesterday's show and I always recommend Alexander and the Durant they're fantastic he mentioned the fact that the Wall Street Journal I haven't read this article I'm just going by his account but he's is always you know on point and reliable he

[43:56] says how the Washington uh they excuse me the Wall Street Journal put out an article talking about Putin and basically characterizing him as you know uh uh um you know Hitler in in the in the days as as Berlin was falling you know and and issuing nonsensical orders and pacing around and being hysterical which could not be further from the truth I mean because everybody's been noticing the various meetings that Putin has been running they're very competent and very on point and I mean he seems to

[44:26] be like a man in charge in full and everybody seems to be lockstepped not fearful of him but rather yeah we agree let's go where this guy is telling us to go or leading us towards and so the Wall Street Journal which is supposed to be a reputable news um uh news site a newspaper is spewing things that are objectively not true and the smarter people who read the new The Wall Street Journal are saying to themselves well this must be true and it's just [ __ ] and I'm like dude what the hell is going on with you

[44:58] so my point is do you do you think that the way the system has become organized I'm not saying that there's some cabal or something I think it's a Natural Evolution but do you think that the way the system is currently organizing whereby information coming erroneous information erroneous analysis coming from intelligence Services is being passed to reporters and essentially being propagandized well but is it erroneous in the option I I maybe you're giving them too much credit you know there was a there was a thing in the in

[45:29] the Press just a few weeks ago about uh russiagate where a Washington Post editor had emailed um a reporter the reporter had gotten some information from the CIA saying uh the Russian were involved in getting Trump elected and he was saying this just sounds wrong to me and and the editor wrote back and said um

[45:59] but if anybody would know wouldn't they know I can't believe they would get something like this wrong well it's not an issue of getting it wrong it's that they're lying to you yeah you know there's a fantastic journalist who's now at Bloomberg um uh he used to be with uh oh my gosh we started off with the LA times but anyway Jason Leopold Jason Leopold has been described by a senior DOD official as a foia terrorist because he has made

[46:31] more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other person in the world right really he's the one who used foia for example to break the Hillary Clinton email story so what he did this is about I don't know two or three years ago he sent a foia request to the CIA asking for copies of all Communications between the cia's office of public affairs and journalists all journalists and what he found among other things was as a series of emails traded between CIA and

[47:03] kendallanian who is the lead National Security correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and he found that kendallanian was sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before he was sending them to his own editor and what do you another thing that he found was that was that the cia's office of public affairs was warning journalists not to publish anti-cia information or

[47:37] they would not be invited to the Christmas party anymore oh my God yeah let me slit my wrist oh my God yeah and we you know we talk about operation Mockingbird for example where until 1975 the CIA was recruiting journalists or or placing CIA officers in journalistic Outlets they don't need to do that anymore the journalists now do it for free because first of all most Outlets don't have a budget for investigative journalism right and secondly you know

[48:08] the CIA is going to give you a scoop you just it you put your name in the byline you make it onto the front page you get promoted that's just what they do now that's just a reality of today's media so just a series of bad uh uh uh motivations about incentives Miss incentives is creating this this uh the situation where lies from the intelligence Community are passed on to journalists whose few more lies and it just expands the lies all over the place

[48:39] until the people have a completely distorted sense of reality the real flaw is as long as covert action is allowed to remain part of the CIA it will never be able to reform itself I I agree with John that it probably ought to just be burned to the ground uh I would start it over I think I think there is a need for if you will a professional Cadre of analysts but in

[49:09] but genuinely independent analysts and and the problem with with a creature like the CIA is it's sort of like that dog you have at home that wants to go out for a walk so the CIA eagerly waits for the treats that the White House will throw it or for the pat on the head for boy that was great analysis and up until the point that you're actually pointing out that uh that hey you know you guys at the White House you've [ __ ] the bed well they don't want to hear that you know they don't want to be told that

[49:41] they need to go buy some depends and put those on um so you've always got this this tension where as long as covert action is operating it does it's going to actually drive the attempts to recruit human sources if that's going on and so you're going to always have corrupted intelligence produced by the directorate of operations if you're going to have a covert action capability it needs to be walled off be its own agency but then that's something that frankly is really

[50:11] dangerous because when you look at our history as John mentioned earlier the history of covert action is not a one with uh great success scattered about it's nothing familiar after failure or where we make the world worse off not better off yeah yeah exactly right you know because I I think to myself you know of of uh different kinds of analyzes that I I uh that I've come across uh mostly Financial quite frankly and that Financial that financial analysis is usually spot on if if some

[50:45] financial analyst is saying oh it's more or less like this you you can take it to the bank because money is riding on these decisions there are consequences immediately if an analysis uh an analyst says you know buy this Bond or don't buy this Bond you know a lot of money can be lost or won depending on the correct uh uh analysis right but insofar as a CIA and these intelligence services are concerned there's no consequences it seems to me I mean that that you know uh Vladimir Putin tomorrow is going to be

[51:16] replaced by a purple kangaroo as the president of the Russian Federation I say this as an analyst at the CIA and you know it proves out to be wrong of course and nothing happens to me no but that's but that's the reality and that's the reality in the CIA for years I worked for a guy who um who had been a Saudi analyst and then moved into management and when he made it up to gs14 he told a group of us that he was going to make a name for himself

[51:46] by saying over and over and over again to everybody who would listen that the Saudi royal family would be overthrown and so this became his thing it became a joke for us but as administrations change and you know new people coming into these positions just don't know any better this is a really powerful briefing that they get when they first win the presidential election that the Saudi royal family is going to be overthrown well he made it up into the

[52:18] senior intelligence service level one level two level three level four he ends up one of the one of the Deputy directors of the CIA even though the Saudi royal family Not only was never overthrown but is probably in a stronger position now than it ever has been in its history yeah the truth never mattered What mattered was he came across as a smart guy who had lived in the region and spoke Arabic and he really passionately believed this

[52:49] could be true in fact he didn't passionately believe it to be true he believed that it would set him apart from everybody else saying that there was no danger to the Saudi royal family and he was the one that got promoted yeah in fact if you screw up you're most likely to get promoted you get rewarded not punished I mean I have uh one of my uh so in the first year I was there I was in the career trainee program and this this is one of the first runnings where in the past the career trainee program was only for future case

[53:19] officers people who were going to go out and try to recruit spies but I was in the era when they had both analysts and operations people and Science and Technology and admin people so Valerie plain for example was part of my class uh so one of my classmates uh his first assignment was in Costa Rica and what he discovered was that his the predecessor that had been there before him had recruited supposedly recruited some agents that were giving information on

[53:52] the sandinistas it turned out the guy had fabricated him so so my my friend he disclosed the fabrication pointed it out he got a twenty thousand dollar bonus doing it the guy that had created the false agents he later wound up as chief of station in Romania oh so I I mean but that's the point that lack accountability because that's what

[54:23] we're really talking about here if people are going to be held accountable for the decisions they make if they get people killed or if they get if they if they cause Major Mayhem or give the wrong coordinates and you bomb the Chinese Embassy in Sudan you know we go down the list and that was the one thing that I I really saw lacking out there and I don't know what John's experience was but the utter lack of accountability that's something else that we're seeing across the board in Western Society a

[54:55] lack of accountability you are completely incompetent and what happens to you you get kicked upstairs look at Kamala Harris look at Ursula Wonderland she was a current EU commissioner president she was the Minister of Defense of Germany and she was under disaster and she got kicked upstairs it's almost like you know if you're competent your career is cratered but if you're an idiot you get a better position with a better salary how did this happen uh in in the in your view

[55:26] that that that failure is rewarded that incompetence gets you ahead how did this happen I mean this is a genuine question and I'm asking you in so far as your expertise in the CIA concerned but I'm interested in it as a general problem that I view in the West John well I mean it's a tough problem it's a tough question yeah it's a tough question uh and I think that there are several answers one it's very much an old boys

[55:58] club and now an old boys and girls club where at the top at that senior level level they're all friends and they all um take care of one another now there's some notable exceptions of course where personalities conflict and and they go after each other but for the most part they all look out for each other at that very senior level um another thing that that I sort of came into contact with when dealing with people at that level is that they're also afraid that if somebody in a senior position becomes

[56:30] disgruntled that they'll go to the media and that would be disastrously embarrassing you know I worked for a woman um who had never uh I worked for her in operations she had never been a case officer she was what was called a reports officer meaning when the case officer collected the raw intelligence she would make sure that the formatting was correct and the source descriptor was correct and she would send it into headquarters for release well in the 1980s

[57:03] a large group of of female CIA operations employees filed a class action suit saying that they had been discriminated against because they were women they had been discriminated against and so in the eastern district of Virginia a judge found that they had indeed been discriminated against he said he said in his decision that he had never seen a defendant in a case um so deeply document its own crime as the CIA did by like they they turned

[57:36] over in Discovery memos saying oh don't promote her she's a woman promote the guy instead like they actually wrote this down and kept it so they're supposed to be intelligence man yeah so every every woman in operations got a two grade promotion so you go from a 12 to a 14 that's a significant that's a significant promotion a 13 to a 15. these are very significant promotions well she was one of those people that got the to grade promotion she had never been on a covert to a covert meeting in

[58:10] her life she had never recruited a spy in her life but all of a sudden she became the chief of the biggest station in the world and then on the strength of that became the deputy director of National Intelligence that kind of thing happens a lot where this woman this woman Excuse excuse the pun she was a boob I mean I I never I never worked for anybody who was so cut

[58:43] off from the day-to-day life of an operations officer and frankly had no idea what the analysts did all day long she had no idea nor did she care um who made it literally to the very top of the intelligence community Jesus right well what about our current director of CIA is Burns oh yeah Burns is uh he's sort of the worst from the standpoint with his Heritage as a Foreign Service Officer yeah you know he

[59:16] underst he understands the business of intelligence but he's just he's a political Adam and that's that's the problem with this you've got to try to divorce the politics if you're going to get a real intelligence done the politics have got to be divorced from it I'd go and suggesting that I'm incredibly naive but it is really you need somebody that's going to tell you the truth you know hey honey do I look fat in this dress well you know you're you know if you're married you

[59:48] know that the correct answer to that is no so or if you want to say me you look lovely yeah that's that's an example where politics comes into interferes with doing real intelligence analysis as opposed to said yeah you know you could drop a few pounds and you'd look better you know that would be the truth but you get in trouble unfortunately I I think what has allowed this political corruption to take place has been been because we've not faced an existential

[1:00:19] threat in the United States sense since we since the Civil War yeah yeah I mean World War One World War II Korea none of those posed existential threats to us so as a result you could always get away with hiring Fredo to do the bookkeeping okay and that's right yeah I mean it's just uh it is it's the kind of thing that where you're it's not life and death because when it gets down to life and death if you look back at the

[1:00:49] founding of the the Republic here in the in the United States that uh those men who gathered in Philadelphia and put this documents together um they were had flaws and they were far from perfect and they allowed you know slavery but uh there was a level of competence among them that was extraordinary that when you compare that with the current group of folks that inhabit Congress and the you know the

[1:01:20] halls of the senator or the House of Representatives it was a calling I was just reading the other day as an example the the Republicans elected a guy up in New York who lied I mean Santos unbelievable he lied about everything that he had he was excited about being gay he said that he's been openly gay for 10 years and he was married to a woman until a year and a half ago okay that's a first that's a first you

[1:01:50] know so lying about being in the closet yeah yeah so I I wonder if YouTube would would bump me in the algorithm if I had claimed I was gay or maybe said I identify as a woman would that help I don't know that's the way to go nowadays Jesus hey by the way um I'm gonna uh we've got like 4 200 concurrent viewers

[1:02:20] Chad thank you so much I I appreciate it why don't you give our guests a plus one if you are appreciating this conversation because it's a delight as far as I'm concerned and um yeah I'm gonna bring on uh one of my longtime supporters on patreon uh to ask a question and to patreon supporters we're going to do a couple of questions but please be to the point and brief please thank you uh JJ how's it going man it's going very well thank you um I'm rather late so this may have

[1:02:51] already been covered um but uh can you talk about the stove piping of intelligence services um for the Iraq War and um what happened with David Kelly wow who's that who's David who's David Kelly Dr David Kelly who apparently well The Story Goes that he committed suicide he was a weapons inspector that came out and said that the dossier was fake was all sexed up I believe was the term at

[1:03:22] the time and uh basically um he came out said this then he suddenly turns up dead um the working theory is that it was a foreign intelligence service which I'm not going to name because I don't want to be accused of being anti-semitic but you can guess from that which one it was I I'm surprised you haven't heard of him yeah yeah but but he was not the only one he wasn't the only one saying that

[1:03:54] the the the claims about weapons of mass destruction were false I mean you had Scott Ritter was very prominent at the time and in fact ended up uh resigning oh I think over that very issue just that they were being ignored so uh it was uh and then you know what was going on at CIA uh my my former colleague Valerie plain I mean Valor I know was honestly looking because they had all these reports coming out but they could never verify and corroborate and then

[1:04:25] they began to see it was complete disinformation yeah so um I I don't I don't think Kelly was necessarily so prominent that he needed to be taken out because the message was getting out there through other means as well John it was it was my understanding that his his wife later said that it was a it was a suicide with that said um JJ is right uh that intelligence service has a very long track record of

[1:04:57] taking out anybody who might perhaps maybe someday pose a problem to them uh they they very proudly took credit for the Gerald Bull assassination back in what was it 1990 the spring of 1990 uh and and Untold number of Iranian um nuclear scientists uh it would take us hours to talk about the the stove piping of intelligence um in the run-up of the Iraq War the

[1:05:29] stove piping can you can you explain that please yeah you know there was a lot of intelligence out there saying that the Iraqis just simply did not have a program to develop weapons of mass destruction it just didn't right and I remember being an observer not a participant but I was there as a note taker for a meeting between CIA analysts and Department of energy analysts on what had and had not been developed on

[1:05:59] this Iraqi program and it became a shouting match because the department of energy analysts kept saying there is no evidence that the Iraqis are developing weapons of mass destruction and I'll tell you what convinced me that they were right was that Saddam Hussein's two sons-in-law Hussein kamela majeed and Saddam camel amaji they had been married to saddam's uh two daughters uh uh two of the three daughters Rana and rugged uh they defected to Jordan and the CIA

[1:06:31] sent a team not of operational people but of analysts to go out to Jordan and um and debrief them and one of those people was a boss of mine he told me when he got back that as soon as they walked into the room uh Hussein camel who had been saddam's minister of industry and Military industrialization he was in charge of the wmd program he's dead that

[1:07:02] the Iraqis destroyed all of their weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War because they were so afraid that Scott Ritter and his teams were going to find something that it would allow the Americans an opening to attack the country again and so you know a biological weapons program you can set up in in your kitchen all you need is a sink and a stove and a refrigerator and you've got to buy a weapons lab so that was easy but the

[1:07:33] nuclear uh program was well documented to have been uh disabled and and uh destroyed well before a decade before the Gulf War the CW chemical weapons program was a little bit harder but but Hussein Campbell said no in in 1991 and 1992 that whole program was done away with the CIA just chose to either not believe it or to ignore it and then to sort of

[1:08:05] beat that drum for the next 10 years until George W bush became president and he was comfortable enough allowing Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at all to take falsified intelligence from Ahmed telabi and the Iraqi National Congress to to lay this false uh this false premise for for war yeah the the other the other element of stove piping is that information that's

[1:08:35] kept within CIA channels is not shared with FBI as an example I mean that was really the that was really the most prominent case of the stove piping in the lead up to 911 and 11. that with information that the CIA had that was FBI agents who were detailed out to the agency were unable to share it back with FBI headquarters which you know may have made a difference and uh it was this protection you know there are lots of

[1:09:06] different theories and explanations for why that was done but that failure to use the use compartmentation of information to prevent it from being shared where you get to see the whole picture well until 2003 the CIA and FBI computer systems were incompatible with one another right and so if something was reported in CIA channels the the FBI had no access to it and vice versa finally the the CIA named a CIA officer

[1:09:36] as deputy director of the FBI for counterterrorism and the FBI named a senior FBI agent as as deputy director of the cia's counter-terrorism center so there was that forced cooperation but Larry's exactly right uh stove piping in that in that example led to the deaths of thousands of of Americans just simply because the CIA and the FBI hated each other yeah and then on on top of it when when Edward Snowden did what he did

[1:10:09] um and I personally view Snowden as a hero myself um what what he did up to that point I was scripting exercises with the U.S military Special Operations Command and we would have full access to CI to State Department of messages once that happened they went back to stove piping they cut off all DOD Personnel were cut off from the state department message traffic so yeah you know it's they keep talking

[1:10:39] if we we do it and then they go back to the old habits of uh not sharing information across uh you know across the agencies agencies become very protective and parochial of their interests yeah is that my thing my thinking is let's see like with what happened in 2003 uh insofar as you know there are no weapons of mass destruction and so um you know that that comes out after the invasion has happened but it's still during the Bush Administration and so

[1:11:10] there are no consequences to the to the CIA or the Intelligence on the contrary because they they gave the justification for what they wanted irrespect I mean they were gonna they were gonna invade anyway and it was just uh there's some clicking going on I don't know who's Mike or or somebody like at top tapping anyway there was there was there were some there were some consequences Gonzalo but the consequences were for Joe Wilson and Valerie playing yeah that's right they went after Joe told the truth he said

[1:11:41] that there was a lie that was sold to the American people and they they went out and destroyed him and then they they ended up destroying Valerie so if you're in government at that point the message is loud and clear if you dare to tell the truth they're gonna get you Jesus JJ does it answer your question yeah yes that was an excellent answer um also what about the collapse of human

[1:12:11] intelligence and uh tradecraft and now the over Reliance of uh Communications uh because everything seems to have shifted that way and there seem to be very few assets on the ground uh I know in the US military they've got the activity but you know there seems to be a complete loss of networks can you talk about that we actually covered that a little earlier yeah yeah a little earlier but the question I have specifically about that issue is that when was the decision

[1:12:42] made not to cultivate human intelligence was it a specific decision or did it sort of like Peter out on its own no it developed over the years you know it it probably started at the beginning of the Clinton Administration uh the the CIA underwent something called a cull where um where the white house uh told the CIA we've got to fire every clandestine source that we have who has a a problem with human rights which was a noble

[1:13:13] thing to do but um but it it results can you expand on that I don't understand yeah yeah so so let's say uh you are uh the leader of a debt Squad in uh yeah in El Salvador or Nicaragua or whatever um no Uruguay Uruguay please because it's got better yeah right okay better beaches so the CIA wasn't going to do business with you anymore so we're gonna

[1:13:44] we're gonna cut you off we can't talk to you anymore because you're a human rights violator that's an that's a noble thing to do but if you want information on what the other members of the death squad are doing yeah uh then you know John McCain once said that it's difficult to be in business with pigs um you're gonna get dirty by Rolling in the mud with the pig but the pig enjoys it so you know you've you've got to make a decision a policy decision about whether

[1:14:16] or not you're gonna lay down with monsters and well in terms of getting information it would I mean if your job is to get accurate information yeah you're gonna have to you can talk to Saints but you're gonna have to talk to some demons too A lot of them exactly the demons are the ones who are causing the trouble it's not exactly right and so the notion that oh I'm not going to talk to you because you're a human rights abuser abuser I I don't see the Practical uh benefit and I see a lot of practical

[1:14:48] detriments to uh uh self-censoring yourself because you're not going to know what horrible people are up to which is the whole point isn't it well yeah and because the people you're they're really targeting to recruit were anybody that had any connection to the Russians or to the Chinese uh that were working in diplomatic jobs you know you know really did CIA had a different completely different cast of uh assets compared to what DEA would get uh DEA

[1:15:20] would actually you know you get some people that really knew what was going on but they were you know usually that killed two or three people and they were drug traffickers uh I think there was one other Factor though that contributed to the movement away from Human uh it was in the night early 1990s under Clinton that they started sending senior analysts overseas as Chiefs of station yes in other words you you would send somebody like the boss in my middle middle America Caribbean division was a

[1:15:51] guy named Marty Rover well Rober was a he was a character he was a porn addict among other things you know they didn't didn't hide it at work I mean this is what was said oh God yeah no I mean there were I heard some conversations coming out of him it was just like you know I'm thinking you're doing this at work but he was saying he's doing that at work imagine what he was doing at home oh God so and then he winds up as the chief of station I believe it was Buenos Aires he had never taken the

[1:16:24] field officer's training course he had never served in a clandestine position overseas really knew nothing about recruiting intelligence assets and then running them in a way to protect their identity sounds like John Brennan yeah yeah well exactly exactly the same thing with Brennan sure yeah he he had he had never spent a single day in the directorate of operations and he becomes the chief of station in Riyadh yeah yeah in reality out of all places yeah

[1:16:55] one of my one of my classmates was the chief of base out of dehran when that was blown up and one of the one of the Back stories to that is they were prevented from collecting on any intelligence that would be terrorist related because they didn't want to offend the Saudis yes right so he was prevented from being able to collect information that probably could have uh prevented that incident and that was Brennan signed off Brennan signed off on that and JJ uh thanks for being on I'm going

[1:17:27] to bring somebody else up thank you so much okay by the way just finally I'd like to say a great thank you to John kiriako I know he's been through an enormous amount and there's a lot of us out here that actually really appreciate what he's doing oh thank you so much thank you very much that means a lot to me I appreciate it thank you JJ I appreciate it yeah uh let me bring in um uh real quick let me bring in the spy guy and spy guy is is called the spy guy he runs a channel called the spy guy check him out hey how's it going spygon

[1:17:59] great this is great like uh two people I would love to do an interview with kind of thing uh uh you guys have shown to me I always thought the CIA was the sandbaggers but you're you make the abware look good from what you're calling me oh my God so what's on your mind man thank you yeah just uh I don't know do you have any favorites in uh in intelligent shows or what do you think is really a realistic show that's a good

[1:18:31] question right that's a good question all the questions I wanted to ask I had to come up with something out there so I went with that one yeah that's a great question um I think the best the best um intelligence related show um ever is the Americans okay absolutely the best yeah and Joe Joe Weisberg the the creator of the Americans I I worked with him in the counter terrorism Center fantastic guy absolutely brilliant

[1:19:02] complete and total failure as the case officer it just wasn't for him he just he just didn't have it in him to ask people to commit Espionage and so he told me one one day that he was resigning and I said what really I said oh man I'm gonna be sorry to see you go what are you gonna do and he said um well I'm not married I don't have any kids I'm gonna go to Hollywood and find my fortune and he wrote a he wrote a novel that was well received but didn't do very well commercially it was heavily

[1:19:33] redacted which I liked because it showed that he was serious about it and then he created the Americans and as successful as the Americans became the CIA still insisted on reviewing and in many cases redacting the script to that show because they were just they were just too true to life yeah so they were involved in that now in terms of movies there was a movie that came out 20 years ago called the recruit with

[1:20:04] like Orlando Bloom or somebody um Pacino was in it wasn't he yeah patino was in it exactly the first half of that movie was 100 right on and then the second half kind of went a little crazy it was exactly on except they didn't beat us in um in training I mean training was hard it was very hard but they didn't beat us now with that said I'm gonna blow my own horn here I'm the script consultant for a new show that's going to start in March on CBS

[1:20:36] called True Lies it's based on the James Cameron movie of the same uh name this show is going to be awesome it starts at the end of March it's got a cast of Young nobodies and there's some of the most brilliant script writers I've ever met nice I was like listening to your question I'm like I don't know but now you know I want to see the show I I would weigh in with one of the problems with the agency and and

[1:21:07] Hollywood television movies is people their image becomes Sean Connery yeah Pierce Brosnan right and the reality is I think captured by Scott Adams and his cartoon Dilbert Dilbert is more the more appropriate image for the CIA indeed I'll add one other thing too too and I don't mean to I don't mean to take a piss on the on the parade here but um over the last uh 10 years or so the CIA has opened up a branch within the office

[1:21:39] of public affairs whose employees jobs it is to solely liaise with Hollywood Studios so oftentimes most of the time you're gonna get only Pro CIA programming coming out of LA sure yeah which is you know not a good thing that's not the case with True Lies but most most CIA related Productions are just like the FBI related Productions were in the 50s 60s and 70s

[1:22:11] where everything had to get the personal approval of Jay Edgar fair enough the spy guy I hope that answered your question man yeah I I will say if you guys have not seen it I would recommend watching the sandbaggers you can find them on YouTube it is a great show from about British intelligence in the 70s written by Nick uh spy himself and uh it goes it gets really into bureaucratic drama so I I do that with you I I will say that my the show I like to watch and can watch over and over is the Lecrae Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

[1:22:45] the British the British version of it not the not the American yeah the alakiness one you can also find those on YouTube yeah okay thanks so much spy guy take it easy bye yep bye uh by the way in so far as Finance is concerned the best movie to watch about uh an investment Bank from the inside is Margin Call and it was uh a few years ago yeah that was absolutely the best uh Financial movie that gives you a sense of real sense of what an investment bank is like I bring on Susie Q who's a long time

[1:23:17] supporter and thank you so much Susie Q for being on Hi how are you well um I I I have what I have a couple of questions but this one I'm not sure you may or may not want to answer what happened to Gina haspel oh I know what happened to Gina haspel in fact from where I'm sitting I can see the office building where Gina haspel Works she is now an uncredited investment advisor at a hedge fund that's located

[1:23:50] at the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue she is not on the funds website she's made she's I forgot I I forgot she was head of CIA and she there was some uh yeah there was some concerned that she was involved in some activities that happened over in Germany at the time of uh the election well she was she was actually prior to

[1:24:21] that she was the chief of Station in London so she was liaison for the whole Russia gate the involvement of British intelligence with CIA and FBI so she was actively involved in the plot against Trump yeah yeah she was also one of the god the god parents of the cia's torture program infamously so yeah oh okay so she was not on the side of the angels as it were oh no no no no no no in fact you know what I when she was named CIA director

[1:24:52] The Washington Post called me and they asked if I would write an op-ed um about her nomination as CIA director I said absolutely so they told me take as many words as you want we'll put it in on Sunday so I wrote like 1500 words and then they did a a video uh interview to attach to the electronic uh copy of the the uh op-ed well the day that it ran I got a call from Rand Paul and he said can you come to my office and we strategize about how to block

[1:25:24] This Woman's nomination I said absolutely so I speed up to Capitol Hill meet with Rand Paul and four or five of his aides we spend a day strategizing and then five days later he voted yes on her nomination really why Wow because the CIA is wow yeah you know Chuck Schumer once said that uh he said that if the C if the intelligence agencies want to get you they've got uh you know Seven Ways

[1:25:54] to Sunday yeah I mean nine ways from Sunday yeah intelligence Services basically are a black male the the lawmakers so that they get their way is that an accurate statement yes and it's not even blackmail so much as it is gray mail you know I I I went up to um I went up to Senator Ron Wyden one time at a dinner party I had just gotten out of prison and I went up to him and I said hey Senator I gotta I gotta say I

[1:26:25] was disappointed I expected more from you I thought you would support me more strongly than just you know one meaningless statement and he got very angry and he said look it takes all of my energy just to not lose my security clearance and I said oh so you're afraid of them that's what it is wow that's my senator I live I live in the Communist uh area of uh Oregon so yeah that's quite

[1:26:58] disgusting very disgusting so my next question um what do you think will happen now that the Twitter files have come out and have shown that not only were the FBI but the CIA Homeland Security Now the Biden Administration with the uh malady yeah and that we not only that the FBI paid Twitter three and a half million dollars to censored American citizens what do

[1:27:32] you think will happen with that everything you've said is 100 true and we're learning more and more about it every day thanks to uh Elon Musk and Matt taibi and Barry Weiss um and I hate to say but I think nothing will happen I think nothing will happen now if I had a choice in this I would say there have to be prosecutions this is clearly a First Amendment yeah first amendment constitutional violation right America

[1:28:04] had their constitutional rights to freedom of speech uh uh curtailed at the insistence of the FBI which is a governmental entity so clearly constitutional crimes were committed and I think that I think that nobody cares yeah no well I'll tell you what we conservatives and Republicans we care we care a lot and we're not happy

[1:28:34] yeah it's important that the information is coming out to that it to expose the fact that on every substantive issue that was in front of the U.S government the U.S government was an active uh collaboration with social media to lie to the American public the the reality is we have a nation now founded upon lie after lie after lie it's being exposed but you know it goes

[1:29:05] back to our earlier conversation about the lack of accountability nobody's being called on the carpet and held accountable for it because there are too many monied interests in this that are profiting from it you know but they're making money you know for the FBI personnel man they got a golden parachute when they landed at Twitter and top jobs that's uh you know uh yeah 80 80 FBI agents tasked with nothing but looking for troublemakers and unfortunately Gonzalo got caught in

[1:29:38] that web but um I'll tell you what if you send emails to like Twitter support and say hey can I get my account back that is what's working for people from solo and I've been tweeting it out and tweeting it out so yeah okay that's true Dixon was reinstated yeah okay and hey I think even Scott Ritter got put back on so you've got to get on it okay Susie Hugh thank you so much for being on oh you're welcome and it's good

[1:30:09] to see you again all right bye-bye bye yeah uh yeah because the whole Twitter thing yeah because the lists that are coming out and also what's obvious to me is that see once you hire a bunch of people to start censoring them you censor these people and then you start centering more and more and more to Justify Your Existence until you censor everybody until there's nobody left basically and so it's just absurd and the fact is that these social media platforms have de facto become the

[1:30:39] Public Square and so you really are censoring the people uh and this notion that oh it's a private company they can do whatever they want you know that's actually not true I mean you you can't censor people on the phone company and and say oh we don't like your your conversations on the phone so we're gonna de-platform you and not let you have a cell phone or a landline I mean it doesn't work that way and so the thing is I find it deeply disturbing but unfortunately I think that John you're correct they aren't going to do a goddamn thing

[1:31:11] at the end of the day I mean I don't think they will yeah Jesus Christ well I think the only thing that will be done is what elon's doing right now eliminating the bots off the off the platform exposing the malfeasance and it'll make it a little more difficult for them to use Twitter going forward but hey they still have Facebook and yeah yeah they certainly do especially now that Facebook is completely tanking because they made the

[1:31:41] wrong bets but uh uh yeah uh oh it's it's something there is this conspiracy theory rumor whatever that Elon Musk is like CIA or that he's connected I'm throwing this out there you know it's not something that I don't really use a sleepover I I don't think he's CIA I think it's more overt than that the guy's got hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts with the CIA and with the NSA and the whole National Security establishment so I mean he's

[1:32:13] got a vested interest in making sure that the CIA is comfortable with whatever it is he does how does he have business relationships with the CIA by the way and then uh Cloud uh cloud computing cloud computing yeah okay yeah just we're talking about Elon Musk right because yeah yeah sure oh yeah yeah yeah he's a he's a serious uh National Security contractor hello oh okay go ahead dollar well I just say but it appears he has the advantage that the

[1:32:44] government needs him more than he needs the government good point for he's got some freedom to basically you know so if they don't want to use a fund I'll cut you off like he could he could shut down the Ukrainian military tomorrow turn off starlink they're done well the Russians have done a pretty good job of that already yes from what I understand the Russians have really clipped uh Star Lincoln it's not as functioning as it used to be and attorney and that was something that I wanted to bring you guys to because um you know we were talking about like

[1:33:15] there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but since the administration the Bush Administration continued after this Revelation there were no consequences now it's very clear that the situation in uh uh Ukraine is deteriorating and so far as the zelensity regimes um military is concerned it's really just a meat grinder that is the major battle that is taking place here and so I want to ask you you know eventually the the the the zlonski regime is going to collapse this is sort of like

[1:33:47] inevitable and so the question becomes you know once that collapse happens will there be any effects insofar as the intelligence Community or do you think that just the momentum and they'll just keep on rolling on and I mean will there ever be accountability I suppose is what I'm asking will there ever be you know something that the failure is so colossal that they they have to stand still and take the the justly deserved beating for their failures will that moment happen or do

[1:34:19] you think that they'll be able to slide away from everything even the mess that is being left here in Ukraine yeah I I think I think they will uh try to blame it on Biden and uh to ignore any any accusation that they were responsible or played any role in this uh yeah I mean it is going to happen uh but the you know the the bureaucratic inertia I can't emphasize enough that the the size of this monster because it employs all these people and all these

[1:34:50] different hierarchies as long as they're drawing a paycheck and they show up to work and you don't rock the boat hey you live to survive another day and those uh uh the the sad truth about this is Whoever has been leading this effort they'll probably get promoted reward it yeah they probably will are we gonna have a Victoria Newland as the new vice president or something like that God oh my God you know you wish something would something would bring an

[1:35:20] end to these neocons I mean they've been that they are consistently wrong and yeah yeah and for 25 years yeah it's just empathetic but anyway look we've been going on for about an hour and a half uh it's been a delightful conversation but I want to drive to a close because you know always leave on top that that's my my motto you know there you go Long Life Is Knowing When It's Time to Go and so I want to thank Larry and I want to thank John and uh guys stick around a little bit we'll we'll just uh just chat a

[1:35:52] little bit um chat do me a favor and if you enjoyed the show hit a plus one if you hated it or didn't like either of my guess or me hit a zero so you know we can get like instant democracy and and we can know if if people liked it or not plus one if you liked it zero if you hated it uh and there we go with a bunch of plus ones thank you so much Chad and I hope you enjoyed the show gentlemen it's as always a pleasure to have you both on it's just so much fun and uh yeah everybody chat I'll catch you next time

[1:36:24] take it easy
