[00:01] John thank you for coming a bit early my pleasure because my other guest apparently didn't show up so you are oh that sounds familiar how you doing this today man you're doing all right I'm okay thanks how are you I am doing great John you're easily one of my favorite people to talk to oh thank um you have led such a colorful interesting at times U painful life um but nevertheless it has led to like I said colorful life um the Reon I what you in I I've been
[00:33] focused on what has been taking place in Syria where turkey the US even Israel have put money resources in having jihadists reignite come out of ilip screaming with a full-blown military of terrorists um oh I'm sorry Freedom loving terrorist Freedom Fighters yeah Freedom loving right freedom fighting terrorists um who are chopping off heads as they go along
[01:03] and we back this stuff we pay for this stuff we I mean these guys are driving an American um um armaments weapons like tanks and whatnot why go back for us into the way that the CIA has ingratiated itself into these al- Qaeda groups in order to get these groups to fight for America and how is this even done like meaning how does the CIA a getting contact with a terrorist like who who are they even
[01:35] talking to in order to get their hands on is this just going through turkey and turkey talks to the terrorists how does this work in practice uh yeah in part there there are several different ways to do it and and this is a very we should preface this jamor by saying this is a very complicated situation but the easy part is that the United States is wrong so let's talk about that the way you get in touch with uh a terrorist group is multifold number one you go through the Turks number two you might
[02:06] have a recruited asset that you then send to the leadership number three maybe you've captured some of these guys and you sit down and you say look here's our position and then you lay it out that you want to actually cooperate work Finance arm their their organization so there's several different ways to do it now I I said it comp uh uh it was complicated for a number of reasons number one the United States does not have any genuine national interests in
[02:38] this fight right I mean let's let's just call it spade a spade here Syria doesn't have any any appreciable amount of oil number one uh well just I am G to quible with that just a little bit from from us perspective I think we are looking at this as a global conflict and these are just fronts like if we were in the second world war but we shouldn't though but we shouldn't look at this as a global conflict is my point number one you know what let me tell you a very
[03:10] quick little story in 2000 my two oldest Sons wanted me to take them to Madison Square Garden to see a WWE professional wrestling match so I took him I hated it I didn't understand any of it and I said to them finally about 15 minutes in I don't I don't get it which one's the good guy and my oldest son said that's just it Dad there is no good guy and that's the situation in Syria
[03:41] there is no good guy now with that said whether you like his politics or not whether you believe that he has killed his own people or not with gas or chemicals or whatever and there are serious doubts that he ever did Bashar alasa is the only thing standing in the way of the complete and total annihilation of Syria's quite large Christian Community all right there are Christians in the parliament there are
[04:13] Christians in the cabinet in senior positions including the foreign minister and if Bashar Al Assad is overthrown by these Jihadi radicals every Christian in Syria is either going to be executed or forced out of the country so the decision that the United States has made is this is a black and white issue we don't like Assad usad is with the Russians we're with the Kurds the Turks are against the Kurds the Kurds
[04:44] don't have the manpower to take over the whole country but Isis does so we're going to Ally ourselves with Isis light which is the the Islamic Rebels formerly known as the anus front which before that was known as Al-Qaeda now can you imagine we've Allied ourselves with Al-Qaeda now they have promised us that they would moderate their politics they haven't but
[05:15] they have gladly accepted American weapons American still chopping off heads they're still chopping off heads exactly but this is what we've done because we don't like Assad and we don't like the fact that the Russians are in Syria propping up Assad that's really what it comes down to and it's just astonishing to me I like I at some point you realize you're not the good guys and this is one of those moments where you we are just not
[05:46] good guys I mean it's amazing to me that we're willing to do this just to take down a side and do you think this is being provoked because of what's happening in Ukraine like they are effectively losing so poorly in Ukraine that they've expanded the battlefield out to Syria yes I do I do very very much so I was having a conversation with a friend about this just yesterday and he said you know one of the interesting things is that there is literally no leadership in the west right now the the American president is weak uh the Canadian prime minister is weak the the British prime
[06:17] minister is falling on his face the French government collapsed yesterday the German government is in the process of collapsing there's just no leadership in the west and so what happens in a situation like that is that the US government flails around looking for a quick and easy war in which it can make an impact and come out looking more strongly Syria is not the not the way to do that but in Washington nobody seems to either understand or to care but why
[06:49] do they think that though I mean like for example and let me get your take on this when you would think at the very least in the old days that there was some strategic overarching plan when they're looking at the world and looking at the globe that doesn't seem to be the case here it seems like they slept walked into Syria thinking well we're at the West we have economic and Military domain so we can tell the Russians that we can totally win this fight in Ukraine
[07:19] there didn't seem to be any planning on it they seem to just fell as backwards into it well it's let me interrupt you it it's akin to the Russian position during the Vietnam war where the Russians didn't want to get directly directly involved so they just armed the North Vietnamese did it over the course of years and finally the Americans were driven out the American calculus is the same in Ukraine we're not going to get directly involved We're not gonna have American troops fighting Russian troops but we'll arm the
[07:49] ukrainians to the to their eyeballs and just hope that they can bleed the Russians even if it takes 20 years and then Force the Russians out and that's actually not the way it's working out yeah that fail miserably that didn't happen that way at all and it seems like they've State this idea this the reason I I quible with this idea that it wasn't in our interest in Syria is because it seems that they they're looking at this is existential from the standpoint of Western control like if they lose in
[08:21] Ukraine then the very purpose of NATO the very purpose of this notion of Western control World also fall dies with it I mean correct came from wrong on that because that's they have escalated over and over and over again and they don't seem to be able to accept the fact Ukraine is a loss they just don't seem to be able to do it well because if Ukraine is a loss then what happens to the post-war planning I mean the notion that you declare uh Ukraine a
[08:55] non a major non-n Ally goes out the window Ukraine can't join NATO uh as a as an official member Ukraine probably then can't join the European Union although there's a precedent for that in Cyprus but if if the ukrainians lose this conflict it really screws things up for the Americans and then what do we do there's no plan there's no post-war plan for what happens if Ukraine loses wow the CIA when it's dealing with
[09:26] I would imagine so one of the things that see more pointed out was that during the Bush Administration that there was a turn with this idea that okay in order for us to get Iran we need to get Syria and so back during the George Bush Administration they started working with terrorist organizations to try to make connections with those organizations with the idea of creating a resistance against Assad or for that matter even his dad at one point um to try to either overthrow to undercut him
[09:58] with the idea of moving into Iran now this goes back to Wesley Clark saying that the US government was trying to take down seven governments in five years which is again astonishing when you really think about it I mean the number of lives that they were willing to basically kill in order to pull this policy over with I remember a conversation with you where you told me how you were sitting at a meeting and Dick Cheney pointed out they were going to try to go through all of those countries into Iran um that seems to be what they're
[10:30] doing and it seems to be what they're still doing now correct me if I'm wrong but now I think that well you know the the Pentagon the CIA the state department they have these o on the shelf or off the-shelf policies right so we've got a a a policy that's just sitting there on the Shelf to invade Iran and to uh overthrow the government but it's it's not just Iran specific we have we have off-the-shelf plans for two dozen countries like that just in the
[11:00] event that all hell breaks loose you know or or we see an inn or there's an uprising in Iran we can move in and take advantage of it um what you're talking about is a a meeting that I was in the night before we invaded uh Iraq and uh it was General Tommy Franks who was the commander of Central Command in Tampa giving his um his final pre-attack briefing in which he said that we're going to cross the border in the morning
[11:31] and if all goes as planned he said we can be in teron by August this was uh the end of February 2003 of course that didn't happen because there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East and as we've come to learn of other countries around the world where we're not greeted as liberators we're greeted as Invaders and occupiers and so we're resisted they're not going to throw flowers at us which is what one of the senior directors at the National
[12:01] Security Council said in that meeting when we cross the border they're going to throw flowers at us no they're not they're going to throw hand grenades at us to try to stop us from invading and occupying their country so it's the same situation now yeah I made a point on a show the other day and I'm gonna stick by it um the Iranians hate Donald Trump Donald Trump hates the Iranians Donald Trump murdered kasum yeah the the head of the alud force and there's a there's
[12:32] a very special kind of hatred of Donald Trump in Iran with that said there are credible reports that Elon Musk with met with the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations two weeks do you believe that because Iran said it didn't happen I do 100 per. I do you can't you can't hide a meeting like that so they deny it for public consumption not absolutely okay and the reason I think that it happened is because you remember the old phrase only Nixon could go to China right right
[13:03] Richard Nixon had spent his entire adult life attacking Chinese communism and then it was Nixon that went to China and made peace with the Chinese and established diplomatic relations with the Chinese only Trump could go to Iran and I think something may be a foot at least in the very preliminary stages where you know maybe we've underestimated Trump or maybe his domestic craziness has influenced us to the point where we just dismiss
[13:34] everything that he does maybe there's something to this even with this Pro radically pro-israel um contingent of lunatics that he bring into his administration even with them yeah you think that he may but what makes them any less radically pro-israel lunatic uh than what the Biden Administration has given us um heges heges believe one of those people believing that um Christ is going to return in the middle of a war in the
[14:05] Middle East yeah and if you could provoke that war and build a temple on the mound that Jesus returns correct that's I mean you know what that looks like in regards to policy I agree with you may not necessarily be that different in the way it's expressed um that is pretty damn outrageous and it's like if these are the people that he's bringing into this Administration that gives me concerns in but it was the same kind of people that were in the the Reagan Administration and the George W Bush Administration we
[14:36] cycle through these Evangelical lunatics every time there's a republican Administration nothing comes of it you know and this is a very longstanding uh Evangelical position that you've got to support the Israelis because you've got to support a policy that that demands that all Jews return to Israel because only then can Jesus come back and right it's the apocalypse and blah blah blah and then the Rapture and then everybody that's good go happen
[15:07] it's all nuts yeah and not biblically based by the way they they believe it though there's the word rapture never appears in the Bible anywhere it's made up it's an it's a a late 19th century invention of a of American Baptists even European Baptists don't believe in the Rapture interesting interesting I'm curious from your te how is the CIA involved in all of this stuff like meaning yeah that's a good question this is one of those situations tomorrow
[15:37] where the CIA does as it's told uh remember the CIA is the CIA is not a policy uh agency it's a policy support agency and so if the if the policy coming out of the White House is that the CIA should you know make nice with Al-Qaeda or with Isis then they make nice with Al-Qaeda or Isis if the if the position of the white house is that it works along with the government of turkey to encourage uh Islamic radicals to take idlib and H that's what it does then that's what it
[16:09] does yeah it does how are they paid like meaning when the CIA goes to some of these groups big beards um Warriors of Allah that are free free democracy loving terrorists yes at some point they're getting paid they're driving around in military Beast they're they're carrying you know these special they're getting training from Ukraine's ukrainians in regards to drone Warfare I mean like they were this is a full like hundreds of thousands of thick bearded men going into war how on Earth
[16:43] does the CIA get money appropriate from Congress to give and no no oh no no let me let me I'll correct that first and then answer your question more specifically uh the black budget is never delineated the Appropriations are never delineated it's just a number and then once the number is approved by Congress the CIA spends it in any way they want so there's no line item that says no there's no oversight at all to this the gang of four the the chairman
[17:15] and vice chairman of the two oversight committees will have access to the information but even the other members of the committee won't have access to the information that's number just the number so the CIA says I need a trillion dollars and they say okay here's it all right and then they'll whisper into the ears of the chairman and the vice chairman of the House and Senate committees what the numers for and then they just go like this so number one number two I'm I'm fond of saying I've been saying for 20 years 30 years
[17:45] intelligence is a cash business I'm not joking with you jamor when I say we were throwing money out of the side of helicopters in Afghanistan I drove from Islamabad to lore in 2002 with $2 million in cash in duffel bags are you serious I did indeed yeah it's a cash business you deal in cash now it's changing where you
[18:16] can deal in Bitcoin there's no nobody's tracing Bitcoin it's not possible to change to trace Bitcoin you just hand somebody a thumb drive a digital wallet and you say knock yourselves out it's that easy oh John that is I mean I guess that's is how it would have to be at once some level right otherwise you can trace it exactly but it is a little disturbing they are somebody is taking duffel bags of money I say all right here you are now you're well paid go buy
[18:47] this gun go buy this well listen when when we thought we had identified the location of abuaba we knew that this was going to be a big and expensive operation and so I put out a cable region wide and I said I need $10 million in cash and so one station sent a million a small station sent $200,000 another station sent 2 million it was all in cash and it's flying in in diplomatic pouches and I put it all in a duffel bag and then I drove with a colleague to Karachi not to Karachi to
[19:18] lore and we we started buying real estate we bought two houses to use as safe houses and interrogation centers we're throwing money at you know Al-Qaeda people to rat out their colleagues we're buying guns and battering rams and ammunition and satellite dishes and night vision goggles and you know that that's just the nature of the job and so when we were working with turkey for example at that point turkey takes the suspense and
[19:49] they well turkey will take this suspense we we will reimburse them every cent okay yeah wow I'm sorry I just got I just WRA my head around that like there's so much money that it's just slashing around in cash that is paying people um for disreputable actions all right so they call out there's a number that comes up even though they don't exactly know what the number is for Congress has to pay money for that that
[20:20] money is effectively given in cash and that cash is sprad around to whoever is going to be involved in the operation um all right so then at that point though how does the CIA get them to do X or Y and I guess this point this is a conversation with turkey Turk is I intered on this on with erdogan having his own objectives the the yes the objectives have to coincide the the national interests have to coincide the Turks have to want exactly the same thing that the Americans want because if they don't it's not going to work and you're gonna
[20:50] have to go It Alone case this case yes the the the national interests are identical not to say that it's the right thing to do but the national interests are identical we hate Assad the Turks hate Assad here's a chance for us to overthrow Assad again if you're an Israeli I think the Israelis are making a serious mistake here well they just want chaos they just want want chaos yeah fighting each other which over the course of a couple of weeks might be a good thing if you're
[21:21] Israeli because it'll distract the bad guys while they fight each other but the devil you know is better than the devil you don't and Assad has never been a threat to Israel never but what happens if Isis is in charge in gonna say if the government Falls meaning if all of these people if the us if the Turks if the Israelis get what they want and aside Falls and you get this calip over all of Syria where all of the Christians are killed all of the other groups Muslim groups that they
[21:52] don't like are killed and beheaded then what exactly you know I've I've been to Damascus I don't know if you have been but I was able to go to a working synagogue in Damascus right there's a community of Syrian Jews they are perfectly free to practice their faith as they as they see fit they're loyal to the Assad government because because it respects freedom of religion believe it or not safe yeah and keeps them safe um there are churches all over Syria I went
[22:24] to Sunday liturgy at at a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Damascus there Catholic churches in Damascus well if Assad's overthrown everybody's dead and and they're going to bulldoze these Isis and Al-Qaeda people are going to bulldo the churches they're going to bulldo the synagogues everybody's either going to be killed or driven out of the country and then what are the Israelis going to do when they've got an Al-Qaeda or Isis Le government right on their border I know but Al-Qaeda never attacked Israel because it's never had the ability to
[22:55] remember it killed Jews in India in the uh in the Mumbai attacks back in what was it 2008 I guess um but they never had proximity to Israel to attack Israel if they're right on the border you know the sky's the limit is the thinking that okay well we can't militarily attack aide we can't create a justification for the US or anybody else to attack Assad in that way however jihadists hedg Hoppers oh they're fair
[23:27] game sure attack them and the new government that we put into place will be a py and an ally of us Israel and be antagonistic to Russia is that the thought that that is the thought okay and and the NRA front now called the ja HTS or something yeah yeah I forget now whatever they whatever they're calling themselves today keep changing things um they they have made they have a policy of promoting the
[23:59] notion that they are moderates they're not moderates right they're head choppers as you say chers but they have successfully convinced the United States or maybe the United States wants to believe that they're moderates so that as we arm them and finance them we can sleep at night they know that's not true I mean like I I don't I don't believe for a moment that the U I believe look I think we were dealing I think these people are sociopath many many in the US they have
[24:31] to know yes they they have to know they know but but at the same time they think that they are so smart and so good that when Assad's overthrown they can successfully convince these these radicals uh to truly moderate and work with us in the International Community and remember there's a bigger fight here this is the Americans versus the Russians just happens to be in Syria yeah it's just another front in
[25:02] this kind of conflict is there an open line between the Russians and the US in Syria no not in Syria specifically there is an open line from from the Pentagon to the Russian uh Ministry of Defense but Ambassador Antonov uh the recently departed ambassador to the United States said that it's essentially defunct there's no communication that's so dangerous I I so I went to the Putin Biden Summit um I was covering that for the network and I remember being I guess
[25:33] at this point um naive and somewhat optimistic because it seems at at the time that Joe Biden and Putin were saying the same thing like they were like literally and the Press was attacking Joe Biden because of it like what do you mean you didn't read them WR you know this type of stuff and Biden starts screaming at a reporter at one point saying you don't understand trying to get across to the reporter look we're dealing with nuclear Powers here we need to have some level of communication in order to know what each other is doing
[26:03] so we don't necessarily make any mistakes in our like that we don't mispredict what the other one is doing okay well that's out the window now correct yeah it's out the window there's no negotiation there's no communication there's no hope for any kind of forward progress in bilateral relations it's just not happening what about through the back door what about William B give me your take on um Burns Burns seemed to be a bit better Diplomat than Anthony blinkin
[26:34] oh yeah there's no comparison I I know both Bill Burns and Tony blinkin um I've known Tony blinkin for years actually not well we're not buddies or anything but I've known him for a very long time he seems like a lunatic no no no he's a lovely guy he's just in completely over his head oh yeah he's a lovy just came out and said you need to send your kids to a losing War yeah yeah well because that's his job he's the Secretary of State he has to promote the policy but Tony listen Tony's a very
[27:06] bright Harvard educated bureaucrat but Tony's first job out of Harvard was as a junior legislative Aid to Joe Biden he worked his way up through the Biden Senate Office yeah then he became the legislative director for Joe Biden then when Biden became the uh chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tony became the staff director when Biden was elected vice president Tony became his National Security adviser then Biden had Tony uh installed as the deputy
[27:36] secretary of state and then when Biden was elected president Tony became the secretary of state so he literally every job he's had in his adult life since he graduated from college was with Joe Biden wow yeah he's never really lived in the real world Bill Burns on the other hand bill Burns is the consumate Diplomat yeah Burns is one of these guys that was respected across party lines at the
[28:08] state department the CIA the defense department the White House I wrote an oped when Burns was firsted CIA director saying finally an adult in the room I saw that I read that I think but it says a lot when you've got these extraordinarily sensitive negotiations between Hamas and the Israelis where you don't send your secretary of state exactly you send your CIA director to conduct diplomacy that says a lot about Tony blink as much about Tony blinkin as
[28:38] it says about Bill Burns tell me something else tell the audience something about the CIA that they don't know that they' be surprised about I think there's a lot that people would be surprised about the CIA you know it's it's a group of tens of thousands of very very bright um very patriotic people who are infected by the disease called group think and they end up analyzing policy in this little tiny box
[29:12] so even though these are some of the smartest people that our country can can offer they don't offer the smarttest analysis they don't influence policy the way that they probably might be able to and uh you know that old that old German adage that I I was just following orders is really the Mantra at the CIA really yeah and
[29:43] so may may I add one thing Jamar I'm sorry to interrupt you no no this is why I have always always opposed Military Officers as heads of the CIA because you become a four-star general by saying yes sir right that's how you make it through your career yes sir right you need a CIA director who has the balls to stand up and say Mr President let me tell you why that is a terrible idea and we don't have CIA directors
[30:14] like that policy Trump's intelligence under normal circumstances yeah wow John man thank you for this I I I'm always fascinated by these conversations just like my pleasure like the idea that people sitting in room and come up with yeah we're going to get all these people killed because of policy yeah and it doesn't seem to register like hey you're getting people killed like we don't we don't learn our lessons from history you know John krey famously said in 1972 do
[30:46] you want to be or to paraphrase John KY do you want to be the person who sends his his son to die uh you know for for a lost cause at the end of the Vietnam War and here we are decades later we've not learned that lesson doing the same thing to die for a mistake wow yeah it's just astonishing John man thank you for this John Kaku pleasure he is a former CIA officer John what do you where are you now where do people find you now substack everything
[31:18] I do I put on substack and I am very soon in January going to begin a 50 event 90day speaking tour of the the United Kingdom are you yeah starting with four dates in Ireland January 31st in Belfast February 1st in Dublin February 3rd in Waterford and February 4th in Cork and then I go to uh five five nights in London now what is the conversation going to be on it's a conversation with CIA officer John
[31:48] kiraku so we can talk about anything people want to talk about oh that is fantastic John it's all all on substack thank you thank you man I appreciate all right we have come