Cillian Dunne reveals new CIA files proving Manuel Noriega's regime was a "triple spy" network trained by Mossad, the DEA, and Castro's Cuba. The book details how Noriega's right-hand man, Carlos Wickreen, facilitated drug trafficking while curbing Contra training, leading to the 1989 US invasion. Dunne connects these historical betrayals to modern conspiracies regarding Omar Torrijos' 1981 assassination, Charlie Kirk's shooting, and global censorship, arguing that imperialist manipulation of foreign leaders remains a persistent threat to sovereignty today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Meeting Carlos Wickreen00:02:00
How did you get connected with the Noriega family?
I got a call in October 2023 from a buddy of mine called Jack Moran.
He's an American guy, but he lives in Panama and does business in Panama with a guy called Jose Goldner, who's a Panamanian guy.
And Jose's in his 50s.
He was sort of raised in a diplomatic sort of government family.
During that time in the 80s, the Noriega regime was like raging when he was.
Like a teenager in his early 20s.
And I'd just written a book where I was in a high risk environment in South Central LA interviewing Bloods and Crips.
It was a prison book that I wrote called Dreams and Incarceration.
And then Jack says, Hey, I got access to this story through this guy, Jose, in Panama about the old dictatorship.
Do you want to call him and see what's up?
So he calls me.
I was actually on the verge of being homeless when he called me, living in LA, in my car and on friends' couches and stuff.
So we spoke for like 20 minutes.
He told me the whole story.
And then.
I just said yes, like right away, and I hopped on a plane to Panama, like a week later.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So I knew, I mean, I was like a blank slate going into this, pretty much.
I knew who Noriega was, but super surface level.
So when you went down there, who did you end up meeting?
I met, the first guy I met was the protagonist, like the subject of the book, this guy, Carlos Wickreen.
He was Noriega's right hand man, his enforcer.
He was also, like, you know, Carlos's cousin was married to Noriega, one of his wives.
The guy had, Multiple secret women, but she was, yeah, she was the reason why Carlos met Noriega.
So Carlos was like 18 when he first met Noriega.
Noriega was a, he actually worked for the US Army at that stage and he was like a CIA asset.
And then over the years, he built himself up to essentially become the dictator of Panama in 1983.
And Carlos stuck with him the entire time and became his right hand man.
So he was like the dictator's right hand man.
Twilight Zone of History00:02:50
The Cold War was such a crazy fucking time that shaped like the.
World, we live in now, it's kind of crazy.
Like, going back, there's so many stories from that time that are all connected from like Iran Contra to Kennedy assassination, Watergate to Noriega, and they're somehow all intertwined.
It's fucking wild that that time in that was like the twilight zone of history, as far as like, you know, all the little deception and the spy agencies and the assassinations and stuff like that, and the drug smuggling and Panama.
You know, the movie Casablanca.
Yeah.
You ever seen that?
Yeah.
I love it.
It's one of my favorite movies, but Panama is like, was like the Cold War Casablanca for spies.
So every, and it still kind of is like, you know, I was just there like this past month and I met, I was introduced to a Russian spy.
Like, dude, it's.
Last week?
Like two weeks ago.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, literally like two weeks ago.
Jeez.
But it's a, you know, back in the 70s and the 80s and, you know, the real height of the Cold War, it was like, like the, Like it was like Casablanca for spies.
Like every sort of major, every superpower in the world had spies like embedded within Panama.
And it all just relates back to the Panama Canal, really.
Because that's, I mean, the canal is, you know, Panama didn't exist until 1903.
It used to be like a part of Colombia, it was owned by Colombia.
And then the United States helped the Panamanians earn their freedom from Colombia with the intention of digging out the canal because the French had actually started digging the canal in the late 1800s.
So the US saw the opportunity.
They knew that a canal was necessary in Central America.
They weren't the first ones to, you know, even the French weren't the first ones to sort of come up with that idea.
There have been efforts for a canal in Nicaragua and places, basically all along Central America.
But Panama has a really thin, it's like 50 miles from coast to coast, from Caribbean to Pacific.
So the US comes in, it helps Panama get their independence from Colombia, and then immediately they have a stranglehold over the nation.
And they dig out the canal, and they have the canal, and they own it up until the year 2000.
And we install military bases all over it.
They're still kind of there, but it's a really interesting topic because.
The Canal Treaty of 1977, which was signed between Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos, who was like the dictator before Manuel Noriega.
It part of the treaty sort of was that the US would remove all soldiers and military bases and sort of like American indoctrination, like American schools were supposed to be like shut down and pulled from the Canal Zone because the Canal Zone is a 50 mile stretch through the country and then 10 miles on either side of it.
The Canal Treaty Era00:15:20
So, like, that's like American territory, right?
Like, people that are born there, they're not quite Americans, but they're not.
Quite Panamanians.
They're actually called Zonians.
Zonians.
It's like a very particular group of people.
Yeah.
And they're Zonians.
And I believe they have American citizenship and Panamanian citizenship, but they're all like, they're like military brats.
They're like, you know what I mean?
They're like military kids.
And a lot of the issues, like I say, issues and challenges for the Panamanian people and all that sort of stuff stem from the canal.
Yeah.
But all of their opportunities stem from the canal too, because it just generates so much money.
So this guy that you went down to meet, what was it like when you first met him?
What was he looking for?
Was he looking, he just wanted to get his story out there?
What was like, It's a good question.
Yeah, he.
So I went down in October 2023, and within like two days of me being down there, Jose, the guy who set it all up, and myself go to this Italian restaurant and meet Carlos for lunch.
We all sit down.
Carlos doesn't really speak English, right?
So Jose and Carlos are speaking in Spanish.
My Spanish isn't great.
Like I did it in like school and stuff like that.
I could pick up like words here and there, but they're talking.
And then after like 20 minutes of them talking without me understanding, Jose.
Turns to English and he's like, Hey, Carlos Killian here is a writer from Ireland.
He's interested in writing your story.
And Carlos turns and he looks me up and down.
He's got these really sharp eyes.
And this guy was like a triple spy, right?
He was like trained by Mossad in Israel.
He was a close confidant of Fidel Castro.
Him and Castro owned a restaurant together.
What?
They owned a restaurant together.
Yeah.
So there's a restaurant in Cuba.
I still think it exists in Havana.
I've never been to Havana.
I was supposed to go like last week, but there were issues going.
But it's called La Bodeguita del Medio.
And they opened one in Panama.
And Carlos and Fidel were like the owners together.
It was the US military that made him shut it down.
That's what Carlos told me.
But Carlos was a Castro asset.
He was trained by Mossad.
And then he was also trained by the DEA.
He was one of the first Latin American DEA agents in the world.
Because the DEA only really began in the early 1970s, because that's when the drug trade started to really pop off.
And Carlos and a group of other Panamanians were among the first.
They were sent to Washington, D.C. to be trained by, you know, The new formed DEA.
So, triple spy.
He also did some CIA work too.
So, I guess you could say quadruple.
As one does.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
So, he, super sharp guy, right?
Like, he just, he knows how to read people up and down, right?
So, he was looking at me like really sharply.
He was like, essentially, like, what the hell does this little Irish kid want?
He doesn't know anything about Panama.
He didn't know you were coming?
Barely knew I was coming.
Yeah.
He had been informed that somebody wanted to write a book about him.
And this was like, Like an interview, basically.
An interview without questions.
It was all body language.
It was all vibes, right?
Not to turn something that was really intense into like Gen Z slang, but it really was like he was just like feeling me out.
And then he, without, you know, without any questions, like he just scans me up and down.
He's like, in English, he goes, you will do a good job.
And that was it.
And then, like, two days later, I hop in a car with Carlos, a translator, and Carlos's Colombian girlfriend.
And we drive seven hours into the middle of nowhere, into rural Panama to live in a beach house for the next few weeks.
We were supposed to be there for like a lot longer, but, uh, The country broke out into like these massive civil protests.
Like, the U.S. Embassy was like, if you're an American citizen, get the hell out of Panama.
Really?
The entire country shut down, dude.
I don't remember this.
Yeah.
So it was in October 20th, 2023.
It started.
The entire country shut down to like mid December.
And like, you couldn't go, you couldn't travel down high.
We had to like flee in the middle of the night.
Really?
And you flew back to the U.S.?
And then I flew back to the U.S. Whoa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of those guys from that era are still alive.
And like, for some reason, they're not in jail.
It's pretty wild.
Did this guy tell you why, how he somehow got out of prison or did he escape or did he get immunity or what?
What was the deal?
It wasn't like, I don't want to say that he escaped because he did serve time in prison.
Like in 1992, he served like six months in prison in Peru before he was extradited back to Panama.
And then somehow he was let free.
Like I asked him about this.
He essentially, this guy had committed murder after the dictatorship, right?
So this wasn't even during the dictatorship, but he, you know, escaped.
He escaped like a really long prison sentence by, you know, having a good lawyer and all that sort of stuff.
All of that sort of crap, right?
But during the dictatorship, it was like, you know, it was so different in Panama.
And the US came to like get Noriega in 1989, extract him basically, right?
They sent him to Miami where he stood trial, a drug trial under three charges money laundering, drug trafficking, and racketeering, right?
Carlos was somebody that was so close to him that my question for him, Every single time I saw him for, you know, after an extended period of time, was like, why weren't you at that drug trial?
Like, why weren't you at that drug trial, at least as a witness?
And he would turn that again.
He would like flip that on its head and be like, exactly.
Like, why was an eyewitness?
Like, if Noriega actually was guilty of doing these things, like, why wouldn't they call on me as a witness?
So he was like a really smart guy.
He knew how to like flip conversations.
He was very manipulative, extremely smart guy.
Like, I also don't want to like make it seem that.
This guy like divulged everything to me, like he actively lied to me, and it was my responsibility to go out there, wallows in Panama, and like find out the truth.
So, I interviewed like journalists, authors, other members of the regime, civilians, like members of Noriega's family.
Like, I just told you, you know, I think I don't know if we had officially started yet, but I was smoking a cigar with Noriega's nephew like three weeks ago.
I've met him several times, you know what I mean?
Like, I really, when I say like I embedded myself in this world, like I was given the opportunity through Carlos, but I, I. Dug in so deep.
And the book is like written two thirds from Carlos's perspective.
So they're like testimonies, right?
He's telling me his life story.
His intention was to have a legacy, right?
So he wanted to tell me what he wanted to tell me.
He wanted this book to serve as something that would continue to exist.
He wanted his name to live on forever, right?
And that was really part of like who he was as a person.
Like he has like eight children with four different women.
Like legacy is really important to him, right?
He wants his bloodline to continue.
He wants his name to live on.
But my job as an investigative writer was to entertain that, take all of that into consideration because he's a primary source.
And then to also extend my investigation by using Carlos essentially to get in touch with all these other people and learn things that nobody else has learned ever.
So this guy was originally from where?
Panama.
Originally from Panama.
And then how did he get involved with the Mossad?
So in the early, it's all because of Noriega.
So Noriega.
Oh.
Yeah, Noriega was an intelligence asset for the CIA since like the 1950s, right?
The late 1950s.
Noriega went to a military school called the Churios Military School.
And one thing that the CIA used to do, I can't speak to now, but they used to do was they would handpick foreign assets from a very young age.
So Noriega was like some guy who was the top of his class in military school.
He showed extreme intelligence and, most of all, Most importantly, he showed compliance, right?
He was compliant.
So it was here that he met this guy, Richard Helms, who was the director of the CIA in the early 1970s.
He was the director of the CIA under Nixon, like the whole Watergate thing.
Oh, yeah.
So they were like boys, they were like best friends, right?
Noriega made it a personal mission to become like very good friends with every CIA director, every single one, right?
And where his real sort of turning point came was when H.W. Bush was director of the CIA in 1976.
Noriega's ego really pissed Bush off.
So that was like sort of the beginning of the end.
But when it came to Carlos, Carlos had met Noriega in the 1960s, in the early 1960s, when Noriega was in his mid 20s and Carlos was like 19 or 20 years old.
They met at a family party.
Carlos's cousin was dating Noriega at the time.
And Noriega saw that Carlos was this sort of like really primal, animalistic kind of guy.
Because Carlos was like he could snap at any moment like that.
Right.
He, but he was like, it was just everything was very like instinctual.
You know, if he cared about you, he cared.
If he was mad at you, he was mad at you.
Like if he wanted to hit you, he would hit you.
You know what I mean?
Like that kind of thing.
So he earned Noriega's trust by sort of being genuine and loyal and like really sticking to him.
And then as the Panamanian, like as the coup happened in 1968 that saw the introduction of Omar Torrijos, the dictator before Noriega, Noriega became increasingly more important.
He became the chief of intelligence for Panama.
Under Omar Torrijos, Carlos being right next to him the entire time.
And Noriega had long standing ties with spies all around the world, but officially he had these ties with Mossad because he understood the importance of building Panama's intelligence network.
So when Mossad came to him and they were like, hey, we want more assets around the world that we can call upon when we need them, Noriega put Carlos's name forward.
And Carlos said, fuck it, I'll go to Israel.
And he went to Israel for like two years and trained under this guy Mike Harari.
Who ultimately became, I forget his official title, but he, you know, the Munich 1972 Olympics, that whole thing?
Yep.
You ever seen the Spielberg movie, Munich?
Oh, yeah.
About how Mossad were assassinating all the Fatah people?
Mike Harari was the leader of the hit squad.
So he was the one who put the hit squad together.
Yeah, and then there was another one where they actually tried to take out one of the, what was the October, what was the name of the terrorist group?
Something October.
Talk about like, is it like Black October?
Black October, maybe that was it.
Yeah.
That was the Munich Olympics thing where they kidnapped the Israeli guys.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And they actually whacked the massage, went to go take out some guy that was a part of it, and they killed an innocent guy.
That was Lily Hammer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was Lily Hammer in Norway.
And Mike Harari was one responsible for that mistake.
No way.
So Mike Harari essentially had an egg on his face after that.
But he was the one that trained.
Black September.
Black September.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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To get more exciting guests for you to listen to, that was yeah, the Munich Olympics, and then Lily Hammer was 1973, one year later.
Mike Rowry was also the leader of the hit squad during that assassination attempt.
They killed a waiter, right?
It was a waiter that they killed, yeah, and he had egg on his face.
But Carlos had left Israel before 1972, right?
Before the Munich Olympics.
So Noriega had a relationship with intelligence agencies all around the world.
Israel said to him, We want to have assets in your country, so we'll train anyone you want for free.
Like, basically, that was there any other exchange?
Not really, yeah, and not that I was told.
And my understanding was this, right?
Noriega being like the chief of intelligence and this sort of intelligence whiz that he was, like, everything was very intentional.
Noriega knew that strength came in intelligence because at the end of the day, Panama and all of these Latin American countries.
Where had like the shadow of the United States looming over them the entire time, right?
So, no matter what you did, the American interest always came first, okay?
The Panamanian interest, especially in Panama, like never came first, okay?
So, Noriega knew that the way to build autonomy within the country was by strengthening the intelligence networks.
Like, the National Guard was Panama's like military, they were the ones that the Americans like funded to overthrow this guy, Arnulfo Arias.
In the late 1960s.
So the United States wanted to have just more power in Panama.
And they gave the National Guard money and weapons and all that sort of stuff.
Noriega, being so close to the CIA and the intelligence networks in the United States, knew that they could take him out any second, right?
So they funded this coup happening in 1968.
Noriega knew that what's stopping the CIA and the United States from Throwing another coup to overthrow me and Omar Torrijos a couple years from now.
Like, if we start to act out of line or if we start to act within our own interests, basically, what's stopping the Americans from just doing another coup and ousting us?
That happens all over the world.
That happens all the time, you know?
So, Noriega knew that strength came in intelligence and he made it a point to like really strengthen the connections with the most important intelligence agencies in the world.
Mossad is like so important, right?
Mossad is like the number one intelligence agency in the world.
Like, Way more than the CIA was back then.
Like now, to my knowledge, I met with a CIA agent a few weeks ago and he told me that the CIA is like shrinking a little bit because the NSA is becoming a lot more important.
And I assume that just correlates with like the sort of like increase in the use of technology.
There's definitely a pullback in human intelligence and there's way less human intelligence happening now.
Right.
It's all digital surveillance and satellites and shit.
Yeah.
So that's, I'm sure that's what the guy was like.
Referring to, but you know, back in the day in the 1970s and, you know, 1980s when Noriega officially became the dictator, like his intelligence networks were extremely important to him.
But he learned all of this from Fidel Castro, right?
Fidel Castro overthrew the Cuban Republic in 1959.
Supposedly, he had helped from the CIA to do that, right?
I think the CIA might deny that, but I do know that at the time, there was, according to Carlos and according to the people that I interviewed, like there was some funding going into Castro's campaign.
But then when Castro came into power, obviously, he was a socialist, communist, like he was an extreme leftist.
The US wanted him out immediately, so the Bay of Pigs and all that sort of stuff happened.
The original Cuban Revolution, there's evidence that the CIA was part of that?
It's interesting.
Noriega as Necessary Evil00:15:31
Yeah, that's well, that's so primary sources told me that in Panama, right?
And they and I call them primary sources because they said they heard it directly from Castro and Castro told them this directly.
But one really interesting thing as well is like who said Castro, not like a source that you can't talk about?
No, I can talk about.
So Carlos told me that, and then this guy Trujillo told me that as well.
Trujillo is, um, I so while I was in Panama, I hunted down several hundred previously.
I guess they're technically declassified, but they're previously published documents that highlight correspondence between Noriega, the CIA, DEA, and Department of Justice, stemming back from the early 1970s right up until 1987.
And they essentially just tell the story of Noriega's relationship with the United States, where the United States has always been pretty honest about the fact that Noriega was an intelligence asset for the Americans and how he was tasked with curbing the drug.
Trade that was coming out of Colombia for a very long time.
What they never sort of led on people to believe, or what they never like sort of revealed, was just how important he was and how much gratitude they gave him and how many favors they asked of him.
So I hunted down these like several hundred documents from this guy Trujillo, who Noriega gave them to him in the 1990s.
Trujillo considers himself held on to them.
Held on to them.
Yeah.
He considers himself to be a historian.
He was the mayor of Panama City in the early 2000s, I think.
But he held on to them.
It's like.
Over 200 of these documents, and then there are like another 200 pages of these like international human rights organization reports.
There's like archived articles from like the New York Times, the Washington Post, things that just show that the story isn't exactly what has been told to us.
Well, it fits in perfectly with every other story around it.
Like the United States putting people in power while they're useful for the United States, and then when they're no longer useful, getting rid of them and disposing of them.
Yep.
And that's the theme of the book, right?
The theme of the book is that this is a framework for how the CIA and the United States operate all around the world, right?
They pick, the book shows how and why they pick a foreign strongman or a leader, how and why they build him up, how and why they use that person to get what they want, and how and why they discard them when they have no more use, right?
And it's a framework.
Like you could apply that to Augusto Pinochet in Chile, you could apply it to Saddam Hussein, you could apply it to even like the Shah of Iran.
In 1953, there was a coup to overthrow the Shah.
It was Shah Reza's father, I believe, that the coup tried to overthrow.
And then the United States were basically just like, no, we don't want someone else in there because between the US and the UK, the oil coming out of Iran was just too important.
What we now know as BP, I forget what it used to be called, but they felt really threatened.
Iran essentially wanted ownership over their own oil production.
So, the US funds the Shah and keeps him in power until the Ayatollahs overthrow him in 1979.
Right.
So, that's it.
It's just one instance.
But the Noriega thing is Gaddafi, too, right?
Gaddafi was another one.
Yeah.
And Noriega and Gaddafi were super close.
Like in 1988 and 1989, Noriega had a feeling that because Noriega was indicted by the US government in 1988, which essentially, for any listeners, it just means he was accused of these things, but like officially accused.
So, Noriega was obviously worried that.
The US were going to come from as they had just done in Granada like five or six years prior.
Um, and you know, he uh, he used to call Gaddafi like once a week and they would chat about the US government.
Gaddafi would give him advice, that's what Carlos told me.
And then Fidel Castro used to give Noriega advice like all the time because in Latin America, people, a lot of these like socialists, like left leading leaders, Noriega wasn't really he didn't really have a stance, he really just was like a strong man, like he was all about power, ego, influence, um, and also.
Like he just, yeah, he really just wanted that power, right?
But a lot of these left leaders really look up to Castro because they see Castro as the only guy who took on the United States and won.
Like the United States never overthrew Cuba, you know?
But look at all these other countries that the United States like really tried to and did, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Kennedy kind of pulled the plug on that kind of with the Bay of Pigs.
I think he was supposed to send air support and he never did.
And that was one of the huge, one of the main reasons I think he got whacked.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
The whole history of South America is just so bananas.
Was there any.
Did he ever have anything to do with or ever meet with Che Guevara?
No, I asked.
Yeah, I asked because actually Irish people love Che Guevara.
They love him?
Yeah, because Che Guevara is Irish blood and he actually visited Ireland a couple of times.
And Ireland's like, historically speaking, it leans to the left a little bit.
You know, it's changing a little bit now, I think.
I actually haven't lived there for about 10 years.
I've lived in the States for.
The majority of that time, but yeah, man, Che Guevara.
There's some, I think it's on his mom's side that he's got like Irish blood, and there's like a lot of weird connections.
It's crazy how he's become like this popular cultural hero icon.
I don't know how that happened.
Was that Rage Against the Machine that made that happen?
I don't know, dude.
I, you know, I think about that, and I just think that he's this monster.
I think he's just like this handsome dude who had his face painted everywhere, and I think people just like naturally gravitated.
I forgot who.
Someone with so much conviction.
Somebody was on the show who knew him.
I can't remember who it was now, but they were telling us a story about how in Cuba, there was basically all these families that were in line to get clothes or food or something somewhere.
And he was like patrolling it.
And there was like this kid was crying and the mother was there.
And he went and like approached the mom and he's like, Tell your kid to shut up, stop crying.
He's like, He's hungry, he's hungry.
And then Che Guevara went, Okay, grabbed the kid by his hair and blew his head off right in front of his mom.
No, he's not hungry anymore.
Jesus, dude.
Was that Felix Rodriguez?
That might have been Felix.
Wow, dude.
Yeah.
I can't say I know too much about even like the Cuban Revolution itself.
While I was there, somebody handed me a book about the Bay of Pigs and they said, this should be your next story.
That's why I said I wanted to go to Cuba while I was in Panama.
But just, it just didn't work out.
And I think it's interesting, but I know nothing about it other than what Carlos has told me about his relationship with Fidel Castro.
Mm hmm.
Which, when it comes to intelligence and how that sort of all worked during the Cold War, like Fidel Castro knew that in order to sort of stay where he was, he divulged information to American intelligence agencies all the time, but through Noriega, right?
And through all these other leaders.
It was never like really, really direct correspondence, but like Noriega and Castro were tight, you know?
For instance, when Castro needed like sensitive US intelligence about what was going on in Latin America, like he would call Noriega and say, hey, What's going on?
And Noriega would divulge the information.
So Noriega was, you know, obviously he flipped all the time.
And I think the US kind of knew that, but they genuinely needed him because the drug trade coming out of Colombia with like the Ochoas and Escobar in the 1980s was just like, or late 1970s and the 1980s, especially the 80s, was just so strong and such a threat that Noriega was like a necessary evil for a long time.
So, people who aren't familiar with it, can you explain specifically what he was doing to facilitate all the drug trade?
Yeah.
So, in.
So, in I believe it was 1973, the DEA is created, maybe 1972, but in 1973, the drug trade is like really kicking off, and the United States government recognizes the drug trade coming out of Colombia as like a super serious issue, right?
Something that like really is like a problem.
Where before that, the spread of communism was sort of like the biggest problem the US government had, now the drug trade was.
So, Escobar and the Ochoas and the cartel were.
You know, just generating a lot more money and their routes to the United States were becoming a lot more complex, and drugs were sneaking in to the country.
So Noriega recognizes that this is a problem for the US and advantageously he becomes like the guy to curb drug trades between Latin America and the United States.
In 1973, he actually gives a speech to the UN about the threat of the drug trade.
He calls drugs the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.
This is documented.
I have the article in my book.
Like it's there, right?
This is 1973, 16 years before the United States invasion of Panama, 15 years before they indict him for, you know, racketeering and money laundering and drug smuggling, okay?
So Noriega has been on this for a while.
And as the years progress in the 1970s, the drug trade just rapidly increases.
I know this because the now declassified documents that I have from the DEA show.
The numerical figures drastically increasing over the years.
These letters explicitly say we caught this guy in this location with this much cocaine, right?
And the Panama Canal being the nucleus of all of this, right?
So many drugs used to pass through the Panama Canal.
But the United States owned the canal, right?
US troops were on canal territory, but they had Noriega and the National Guard sort of take care of it, okay?
I like to say that when the United States needed their trash taken out, In Central America and Latin America, they called Noriega, okay, because they didn't really want to do it themselves.
So the 1980s roll around, 1983 specifically, Noriega becomes the dictator of Panama.
Escobar and the Ochoes are just, you know, becoming way richer.
The drug trade is just like intensifying so much more.
And in 1984, Escobar has a politician assassinated.
I think, I know his last name was Bonilla.
I forget.
Rodrigo Bonilla, maybe.
The commerce guy, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, in 1984.
And Escobar has to flee Colombia, Noriega takes him in, right?
He takes him into Panama.
The reason that he gave was that the previous dictator of Panama, Omar Torrijos, was really good friends with Escobar and that he didn't really want to take him in, but he did, right?
So Noriega is like playing all parties in this situation and he just becomes strong through his like relationship.
So the DEA recognized that this drug trade is drastically increasing.
All of the facts and figures are showing that there are so many more drugs coming into the US, right?
Specifically through Florida.
Through Texas, basically just anywhere with a coastline on the Gulf of Mexico, like you're, you know, all of these places and all, and also these airstrips in like Texas and Louisiana, like you know, the movie like American Made with Tom Cruise.
Yeah.
So these guys, like these CIA pilots, were loading up their planes with drugs from Escobar's guys and they had these routes down, right?
We had the pilot who hired Barry Seale on the show.
No way.
Yeah.
What did he have to say?
Oh my God.
It was incredible.
He was just telling all the stories about how the first day he hired him and then how Barry, uh, Flipped on him and brought him to dinner.
Basically, the whole story ended where they're in Santa Monica, I think.
And Barry's like, Hey, I want to meet for dinner or whatever.
And he's meeting for dinner with him.
And then they're talking, and like Barry breaks down in tears.
And they're in this room, he's looking around, and he's like, Barry, are these all FBI agents?
He goes, Yeah, every single one of them.
And then the FBI guy comes, sits down at the table with him, and he goes, Roger, that's the guy who hired Barry.
He's like, You got two choices.
You can.
Ride first class with us back to Miami tomorrow morning with your wife, or you can come back in handcuffs.
Your choice is yours.
He ended up doing like, I think he did like 40 something years in like eight different prisons because he escaped.
He escaped six or seven prisons.
Holy shit.
He ended up doing most of his time in Australia because that was one of like the most like maximum security prisons that he couldn't escape.
But dude, it was a wild story.
He was flying back and forth from, he was like a pilot in his.
Teenage years in his early 20s with some sort of like ministry.
And then he moved to California working for the fire department.
And then one day, one guy just like said, Hey, man, I heard you fly airplanes.
He's like, Yeah.
It's like, You want to make a million dollars this weekend?
And he's like, Hell yeah.
So we ended up doing this once a week and one trip back to Mexico, a million bucks.
Started out with weed and then it graduated up to cocaine.
Wow.
Yeah.
Holy shit, dude.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's nuts.
Yeah.
That's nuts.
So, I mean, all of that, like all of these stories, it's just like one giant spiderweb, right?
But when it comes to, um, Like, I guess the like Noriega being at the center of it all, it really just is about all those relationships that he cultivated.
So he was playing all parties.
So he was playing the DEA by saying, Hey, we're gonna curb this drug trade, right?
So, which he genuinely did.
Like, there was a whole group, it was called the DENI within Panama.
I forget what the acronym stands for, but you know, it was to curb the drug trade.
Then Noriega, you know, this is why he went to prison and why the US invasion of Panama happened, but he was sort of allowing.
Some stuff to come through Colombia, to my knowledge, right?
Carlos never admitted to any of this, by the way.
This was all me doing my own investigations.
People obviously know this, and you know, it's naive to think that a guy like Noriega never benefited from the illicit drug trade coming out of Latin America.
Like, that's just like childish, you know, even though they all claim that he didn't, even though there wasn't actually that much proof.
But then, as well as that, so he was benefiting monetarily from Latin America, the drug trade, he was.
He was on the CIA payroll, DEA payroll.
He was just working all sides.
And he, in my opinion, was sort of a mastermind at just balancing his relationships.
So, as the drug trade continued to increase, more shit's coming out of Colombia and Latin America, more shit's getting to the US.
The DA is getting more funding.
Nancy Reagan announces the war on drugs.
Drugs is becoming such a problem in the US.
It genuinely is.
Drugs are piling in through the country.
Noriega, he's their guy, right?
Iran Contra Turning Point00:04:33
He's their guy.
He's closest to Colombia.
Panama's right next to it.
He's curbing as much as he can, but he's benefiting from it.
And it just escalates until the Iran Contra affair.
And that was the turning point.
So, the mid 1980s, Noriega is like the best friend of the DEA and the United States government in Latin America, arguably the world, right?
He is like their closest ally, somebody that's acting upon their interests.
Yeah, he might be taking his own cut like those pilots, right?
But he's servicing the US government.
And then the Iran Contra affair happens.
The US has egg on their face.
It's the greatest public embarrassment for the United States government ever.
In at least in televised history, where the general public knows or like knows what's going on, and they need a scapegoat.
Noriega became that scapegoat because in 1984, Poindexter and Oliver North do you know those names?
Those guys, yeah, Poindexter and Oliver North come to Panama, they sit down with Noriega, they say, Hey, we're losing this fight in Nicaragua, the Contras are losing.
We need you to train the Contras here in Panama, we need you to send Panamanian troops to Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinistas.
And we need you to help us stop the spread of communism in Nicaragua.
And Noriega said no.
He said no.
And then that was the turning point.
Everything changed after that.
Yeah, I remember.
I remember Rick Prado, we had in here, who was a CIA knuckle-dragger, paramilitary, basically paramilitary, like CIA assassin that got sent down there to train the Contras.
Yeah.
And he was telling all the stories about meeting with all these people, flying around to Panama.
And there was a reason Panama didn't want to do it, didn't want anything to do with it.
He had a crazy, whole, deep description of it.
I don't remember exactly what it was, though.
Yeah.
And I'm sure it might be contradictory, but what Carlos told me was that they just didn't like the Contras, that the Contras were animalistic, right?
And they liked the Sandinistas.
Carlos, actually, like the Panamanians trained the Sandinistas in the 1970s.
They liked them.
And then Daniel Ortega becomes the leader, the president of Nicaragua in 1985, right?
He's like a left wing, people call him a dictator, just left wing leader.
I actually don't know that much about him.
Carlos and Noriega are at his inauguration in 1985, like not that long after they told.
Poindexter and North, no, we're not going to help you.
So they're actively disrespecting the US government, right?
Come the mid 1980s.
Even though the drug trade continues to get stronger, Noriega continues to become more important for the DEA and the US government.
His ego starts to inflate.
He starts to act upon his own interests more and more.
And that just pisses off the US.
And it pisses off George H.W. Bush.
So much because when HW was the director of the CIA in the 1970s, apparently him and Noriega butted heads quite a bit.
Noriega tells it a different way.
He says that him and Bush were friends at first, and Bush actually did some.
Bush allowed Noriega to do what he wanted in Panama.
Noriega used to claim that Bush was pro Panama owning the Panama Canal, which I just don't believe for a second.
You know what I mean?
But that's what these guys tell me.
That's what these guys tell me.
But what I do know for a fact is that.
Bush and Noriega just like, boom, like fucking hated each other so much.
And Bush becomes VP to Reagan in the 1980s.
And then in 1988, Bush becomes president of the United States.
And then in 1989, Bush invades Panama to extract Noriega.
Right.
And so during this whole time, where was Carlos?
Carlos was right next to Noriega this entire time.
So Carlos was, in a lot of ways, used by Noriega, right?
Noriega, you know, I paint him as like this mastermind of like.
Strengthening relationships because I genuinely believe that he was.
But Carlos was this like instinctual primal guy.
Like I said earlier, like if he liked you, he liked you.
But if you wronged him, like you were fucking, you were toast.
Like, and I know this because when I interviewed him, like we really got along quite well and I really ended up liking the guy.
But like if I said the wrong thing, like it really pushed him to shove like really quick.
Like there were times he would grab my collar like this and like pull me close and be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Oil and Venezuelan Tanks00:04:18
How old is this dude?
82.
He's dead now, dude.
He died in March.
So I got all of this stuff before he died.
Holy shit.
You got any photos of him online?
I can send you.
I got him on my phone.
Do you?
Yeah.
Send him to me and I'll send him to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've got a really good one of him in his Panama, his PDF uniform, his military uniform.
And I've got some confidential documents too that we can put up on the screen.
Oh, really?
If you'd like that.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That'd be cool.
That'd be really cool.
Yeah.
Let me.
Yep, I'll send them to you, Steve.
I'm going to forward them from.
Yeah, this is also the time where, like, you know, the U.S. had people going all over the world trying to loan them money in exchange for, like, taking their resources or, like, building infrastructure.
Right.
And a lot of this stuff was happening in Panama.
A lot of it was happening over in Europe.
And.
Well, it's like the.
It's like, have you seen what's going on with Venezuela right now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, dude, that shit is crazy.
You know, Maduro's like a socialist dictator, right?
The people of Venezuela are suffering, okay?
I'm not for him by any means, but if you take a step back and you really think about it, it's like Venezuela's greatest resource is oil.
They have like the largest oil reserve in the world, right?
I'm sure we don't want the oil.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with that.
Why would we want oil that's like one third of the distance from the Middle East?
Right, exactly.
You know what I mean?
It's like, that doesn't make sense.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
But think about it, right?
Obviously, the oil is like a huge asset, whatever.
Maduro's been in power since Hugo Chavez died in 2013.
Hugo Chavez was a product of the Fidel Castro indoctrination, right?
In Latin America in the 1970s, right?
And Maduro now is getting funding from like the Chinese and the Russians.
Did you see that video of him with a cell phone?
No.
It was pretty, honestly, it's kind of funny, but like Maduro was giving all these press conferences and They're very like anti American, right?
And you saw the thing recently where he's like, I want all the civilians of Venezuela to take up arms.
And like, if you see an American, like, shoot them, right?
He's calling for war.
Like, I don't agree with any of what he's saying.
But there's this video of him from not that long ago.
He whips out a phone and it's a Chinese phone.
Can we find it on here?
Yeah, you could probably find it.
Okay.
Yeah.
And whips out a phone and he's like, Look at my brand new cell phone from China.
He's like, You know what?
The best part about this is that the USA can't track me.
And he says this in a press conference.
You can definitely find it.
I'm not sure what you'd search, but I'm sure it's easy.
Wow.
And so it just, it's very clear what's happening that, you know, and also like I'm pretty sure I saw videos of these like amphibious tanks in Venezuela that were given, that the Chinese gifted to Venezuela for like their military.
And like they basically, they're these tanks that just like roll off the beach, like into the water and they serve as like boat submarines.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like amphibious tanks.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
And so, but anyway, you look at this stuff from like a political perspective.
Venezuela is oil.
They have an unstable dictator who's been in power for, 12 years before that, Chavez was in power for I don't even know how long, but for quite a while.
And it's just, it's the perfect narrative to overthrow him for an American friendly leader to come in and take his place and for that oil to come to the US for obviously it can't be free, but it's like you're not being like tariffed or sanctioned or anything like that.
Whereas I'm sure right now Maduro's saying, and I don't know this, but I'm sure he's like, we have all this oil.
We're so poor.
Why don't we just?
Why aren't we rich?
We have all this oil.
Who are they selling it to now?
I have no idea, but I really have no idea.
But I would assume that whoever is in charge of the oil or like that production, yeah, you got all the stuff there.
Machismo and Legacy00:03:37
Yeah, I've got a picture of me and Carlos, and that's one of the documents there.
Yeah, the Venezuela thing is so interesting, and I haven't been paying a lot of attention to it recently, and I should have been.
But one of the things I remember is there was not that long ago, there was an attempted insurgent paramilitary SWAT team that tried to storm the beach there and take out.
I think it was an assassination team.
And they got caught and they got arrested and handcuffed there and they were denied by the US.
Wow.
They might have been.
I'm not sure who they actually found out they were.
Maybe you can find that, Steve.
All right.
So this is Carlos.
That's Carlos.
Me and Carlos at the.
At the secluded rural beach house in Panama.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's on the last day of interviews right before we had to flee that night.
And his Colombian girlfriend took that photo.
Crazy shit.
Wild.
He was in his 80s.
He was, yeah.
He was 81.
He was 81 when we took that photo.
And then he was 82 when he died.
I don't know.
I think you could take him, bro.
I could not take that guy.
Yeah, you could.
Dude, I know he looks old.
You just kick him in the hip.
That guy was an old bull.
And I swear to God, he.
The only problem is he probably had two pistols on him somewhere hidden and at least one switchblade.
Well, he just picked up so many little things from being like an intelligence asset for so long.
Like one thing that he did that I caught on quite quickly was he never let you walk behind him.
Carlos always had to walk behind you.
He didn't trust anyone behind his back, he didn't trust anyone that he couldn't see.
Right.
Yeah.
Like this guy, he was just a sharp man, but he also had so much brute strength.
Like we were drinking in his apartment one day, right?
From like 9 a.m. to like 9 p.m.
Like we were fucked up.
And he, first of all, he threatened to kidnap me and not let me back to the US.
It was his sick idea of a joke.
And then secondly, like, bitch, what are you going to do, old man?
How are you going to kidnap me?
Well, secondly, he was like.
Unless you got like, you know, tons of ammunition in here.
I'm sure he did.
Well, I don't know, but.
I joke around, but I actually really did like the guy.
Got on together like extremely well.
Um, but he, yeah, dude, like he, that night he like grabbed me by the collar and like he was like, He's like, you're a fucking pussy.
He's like, he's like, punch me right now.
And I was like, Carlos, I was like, You're an old man.
I don't want to punch.
He was like, He's like, you are a fucking pussy.
Punch me right now.
And then I was like, Okay.
And I punched him in the chest and he's like, Harder, you little bitch.
And this is all in English, right?
Like this guy claimed that he didn't speak English, but he knew how to speak English.
That's like a, A tactic that a lot of pretend that you don't speak English exactly.
Yeah, you pretend that you don't speak English, so that's a great tactic, exactly.
It is, it's very clever.
But he pretended that he didn't speak English, and then so I'm punching him in like the chest and in the arm and all this sort of stuff.
He's like, harder, you little fucking pussy.
And then it got to the point where like I just had to stop, I was like, I was winding up for like big ones.
And he was like, he's like, yeah, he's like, I'm 81, but like I'm still a bull, I'm still a fucking bull.
And like this guy, he was full of machismo, he was like the ultimate like Latin American.
Alpha male, like, cared about legacy, eight children, like, five different wives.
Like, this guy was like, he was a product of a completely different era.
Covert Operations Unveiled00:09:24
Wow.
Yeah.
That's fucking bananas.
Product of a different era.
It was Carlos who had the cell phone?
No, he's talking about the dictator of Venezuela.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what you would search for that clip, but Maduro is the dictator of Venezuela.
Maduro with Chinese cell phone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was like a press conference.
He's like sitting at, Like his desk with a bunch of mics in the video.
Yeah.
So they're basically like blowing drug boats out of the water in the Caribbean or something.
Well, that's what the White House Instagram page is posting.
I really know nothing about that, but I can't say that I don't disagree with it because they're called pongas.
Those little wooden boats with motors.
They almost look like Somali pirate boats.
Right.
And I see people on Twitter being like, You know, this is like it is, you know, you are killing people, but people are saying that it's unjustified, but they don't understand that a lot of the like, that is how they transport drugs, like in Pongas, like in these little wooden boats that can like shoot across these seas, like pretty much undetected.
You know, they're not like these big boats with large.
Yeah, but the crazy thing is, like, those guys that are driving those boats are like poor fishermen.
Totally.
Yeah.
And they're not responsible for the drugs, they're just trying to feed their families.
Totally.
Yeah.
Is this the clip?
This has got to be it.
Yeah.
He's done a bunch of these different little press conferences.
Hit play.
Top left.
There you go.
Venezuela Maduro shows off his iPhone gifted by China's Zheji.
Maduro claims it's the best phone that can't be tapped.
Here, I got a better one.
Is this him talking?
Xi Jinping gave me this phone.
A Huawei phone.
The best phone in the world.
The Huawei.
And the Americans can't have it.
Neither can they find it with their satellites.
Look at that watch.
It's more like a $300,000 watch.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
All those countries down there in a tug of war.
China's, I mean, the U.S. and China are playing tug of war with a lot of these countries down there.
And, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens with Venezuela.
But, like, they're all over, China's all over Mexico, too.
Oh, really?
I actually didn't know that.
Yeah, they got mining operations, mining lithium down there.
And they're hiring the cartels and using them as security for those mining operations because they're producing tons and tons of batteries in China.
Wow.
And they're also working with the cartels in some capacity, too.
I'm not sure exactly how, but.
And then there's the fishing stuff, too.
They're doing all kinds of crazy illegal fishing all down the coast of Central and South America.
Hmm.
Uh, and Mexico, but you know, right here in our own backyard, you know, right south of us is crazy, they're everywhere.
Yeah, it is nuts.
It's like the uh, you know, like the Belt and Road Initiative that the Chinese have.
Yeah, you heard of that?
That in uh, that I don't want to, I was going to use the word infected, that's a really negative word, but what word?
Infected, infected, yeah, because it's like you know, it spreads, right?
It's like you know, but that's a very like American nationalist thing to say, so it's the wrong word to use, but it sort of is the case.
But in Panama, the Chinese, like before Black Rock.
Bought them back again.
They owned the ports on either side of the Panama Canal, which is why Trump went after the canal.
That's why he was very, you know, I guess like publicly, he was very like outspoken in the public about retaking the Panama Canal, like back into Americans' hands.
Right.
The reason why he did that is because the Chinese just owned the ports at either side.
So, in theory, there was a threat that they could sort of like stop what was coming through or they could at least have an influence of what was coming through and what wasn't.
Part of the canal.
The treaty of 1977 stated that if there ever was a threat to like American security because of the Pan Am Canal, the Americans could take back control of the canal, right?
That's like in the treaty.
So, um, so yeah, yeah, China's everywhere, man.
They're uh, I'm sure their spy operation is we don't hear about it very often, yeah.
You know, you really hear about the CIA and the Mossad and a little bit of the FSB, but you don't hear much about China's spy operation, I forget what it's called, but um, they're everywhere.
They're all over, they're all throughout the United States.
I'm sure there's probably dozens of undeclared, probably not, probably hundreds of undeclared spies in the U.S.
And like, you know, they buy up our land.
They have, they got caught recently having like police stations where they were arresting their own citizens in the U.S. Did you hear, did you hear about this?
This was crazy.
We had, um, that lady that we had come in here a couple months ago, Steve was telling us about this, where they had, um, I think it was in New York and all along the East Coast and maybe in California as well.
But, um, Basically, they were kidnapping, arresting, and I don't know what they were doing to them, but they were basically essentially Chinese Americans who were caught speaking negatively about China or something like this.
And, you know, they were fucking arresting them illegally in the US, which is crazy.
And that was a huge bus that went down.
Yeah.
Admits running a secret Chinese police station in New York.
Dude, that is crazy.
Holy shit.
Yeah, dude.
It's bananas.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I mean, I like, I can't say I know too much about it, but it's definitely like the covert sort of operation that these major nations are very advanced, man.
Super advanced, dude.
People don't realize there's like China is such an old culture.
It's been, there's buildings in China that are four times older than the United States.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
It is crazy.
Yeah.
The United States hasn't really been around for that long.
No.
There are pubs in Ireland that are older than the United States.
Right.
Yeah.
It's crazy when you think about it, you know?
But, like, yeah, I don't know.
I think that it's kind of crazy too how it seems like the people that run this country are envious of China in a way.
You think so?
You know, they use like communists.
Communists are the bad guys.
Yeah.
But like, I think the people that ultimately run this place want to turn it into China.
They want this to be some sort of a complete surveillance, lockdown police state.
Yeah.
It just looks like it's going that way.
It does look like it's gone that way more and more every day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it really does.
Like, I spent the last month in Panama, and even just the general feeling, the atmosphere of things is just completely different to being in the US.
I bet.
Completely different.
You know, you have, well, obviously, Amir is some biased against the UK.
Not a huge fan of the UK and their government, but like, that country is going to complete shit.
Like, there are, there was, there's a really famous, Irish TV show from back in the day called Father Ted, and one of the creators tweeted about like anti trans messaging or something like that.
I'm not exactly sure what he said, but when he landed in the UK, they arrested him.
This was recent, right?
Yeah.
It's pretty recent.
Yeah, that guy was on Joe Rogan, I think.
Oh, really?
A couple days before that.
No way.
Yeah.
He was a TV writer, I think.
Yeah, he was.
He landed there and they arrested him.
He did.
Yeah.
The TV show was called Father Ted.
It's like beloved in Ireland.
It's like a comedy, but.
I saw a video yesterday of the police.
We were arresting a veteran, a British army veteran, or something like this.
They had him in his driveway.
They had him handcuffed.
And he's like, How are you doing this to me?
How are you arresting me for something that I reposted on Facebook?
I didn't even write that.
I just re Facebooked it or whatever the hell you call it.
And the guys, the police officer, this is all on camera.
The police officer literally says to him, He goes, You caused a lot of anxiety to the people that had to view that and had to experience your views.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's getting really.
It's getting really scary.
Yeah, Graham.
Oh, yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Yep.
Father Ted.
Yeah.
Yeah, at London Heathrow very recently.
He was on Joe Rogan.
Yeah, he was literally on Rogan like a week before that happened.
Wow, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Jesus, dude.
Yeah.
And that was a really big deal in Ireland.
And then he, you might be able to pull up the picture, Steve, but he showed up for his like court date with like a, I forget those things, like a plaque that you put.
Geez, I forget what it's called, but he basically had all this writing on this piece of cardboard like over his chest.
Censorship and Anxiety00:10:19
Yeah.
And he was like, you know, countering the sort of like the arrest and just saying, like, this is ridiculous.
Because it really is.
It's crazy.
But the UK has gone really sort of crazy.
And I think the US is not really too far behind.
Yeah.
No, I don't think it is either.
Yeah.
This, exactly.
Keep men out of women's sports.
I don't know what those are called, but yeah.
Yeah.
What did he post?
He posted something like, like, keep biological men out of women's bathrooms or something like that.
That was what he posted.
Yeah.
Like, whatever he posted, it was not like inciting violence.
It was not doxing anybody.
It was like, I forget what the tweets were.
Maybe you can find the actual tweets, Steve.
But they weren't crazy at all, you know?
Yeah.
And then, yeah, I mean, dude, did you see what happened when Matt Taibbi and the other dude did the Twitter files investigation where they exposed all the Twitter stuff?
No.
It was a couple years ago where I think.
When Elon first bought Twitter, he basically tasked two journalists to go through all of the documents and all of the emails for like the last 10 years of all of the moderators that were running Twitter.
And they found all this correspondence between the CIA, the FBI, and the moderation teams and the executive teams at Twitter.
And it basically found that they were having weekly meetings, that they were like targeting certain types of accounts or whatever to like throttle it.
They were, while meanwhile they were saying, no, the shadow banning stuff doesn't exist, when clearly it had just a different name where they were like turning down the volume on certain accounts, deleting certain accounts.
Like the FBI would say, hey, we want you to delete this account.
Yes, sir.
Every week, this was happening.
Jesus.
And like they had a plan to like completely lock Twitter down.
And, you know, just by the fact that Elon bought it and let these people get in there and expose all of this evidence and all of these emails, like, Jesus Christ, like, if that wouldn't have happened, who knows where we probably would have been where the UK is right now.
Dude, that's actually really nuts.
I didn't, I didn't even know about that.
It is nuts.
God.
And it's funny.
This fucking crazy African born billionaire who comes here and starts like, Tesla car company and PayPal somehow like pushed the death of free speech a little bit farther down the road.
Jesus, dude.
That's crazy.
It's so funny because I, you know, I like when I say I was a blank slate coming into this whole project with like the Noriega people and stuff, like I really was.
Like I was so influenced by media and indoctrinated in a lot of ways.
I, you know, I graduated college five years ago in 2020.
I was, you know, very much like a Like a product of that, like, you know, higher education system in the US where people are come out of college like quite liberal and all that sort of stuff.
And then I go to Panama and I learn about like the behind the scenes stuff and how like all of these intelligence networks worked right up until like the mid 90s.
And I'm obsessed.
So I start looking at what's happening in like present day and contemporary times and just how it's evolved is so crazy.
Like, how just how much social media has affected.
The nature of intelligence around the world is so nuts.
Like, you have, you know, obviously, like all that stuff about like Russia interfering in the elections and, you know, all these like face, fake, like Facebook profiles, like starting these groups and stuff.
Like, it's just, it's so complex.
Like, I feel like my head's going to swell.
Everything's a lie.
It's like, it's like everything's a lie.
Yeah.
Like, literally, I think, I forget how many it was.
I'm like brain dead today, but it was like 20 something, 30 something CIA agents signed off that it was a Russian hoax, that it was the Russiagate thing.
Right?
That was what the CIA agents signed off on.
Sometimes I mix it up with something else.
Yeah.
And then now it comes out that it was like literally all set up and it was all just a big lie.
All right.
This is Graham Linehan's tweet.
If a trans identified male is in a female only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act.
Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
He's a comedy writer.
He's a comedy writer.
Yeah.
Yeah, dude.
Like you're putting him in prison for this?
Yeah.
Whatever.
Is he still in jail or what?
I have no idea.
I've just been sitting, like, you know, Irish social media accounts were quite vocal about his arrest, especially it being on UK soil.
But I just, you know, I can't say I even pay much attention to this whole thing, but I see this and the fact that he's arrested for it.
He has to go to court over a tweet.
Like, it's just, it's nuts, dude.
It feels totalitarian.
Yeah, it's crazy.
You know, the scary part is that normal everyday people perceive this as like a right-left thing, but it's the people that are.
Above all of that, it's like the billionaires who control the world and have the most power are the ones that benefit from censorship.
It's not the normal everyday people that benefit from censorship.
Poor people, speech is all a powerless person has.
It's one of the only things you have is your ability to have free speech and express yourself.
People that are powerful and have billions of dollars that are doing evil things, that have things to hide, they're the ones that use censorship to shield themselves.
And when you impose this kind of thing and you have stuff like this that you think, oh, okay, this guy's a radical right wing extremist.
The problem with that is.
Is right and left evolves.
It's never the same.
It changes.
With time, it's always changing.
You know what I mean?
Like what you could classify as a right wing person would be a left wing person five years ago, just based on whatever views you have, you know?
And to me, that's where it gets crazy because once they start to lock down this stuff and take more control over social media, these basically, these companies are utilities, you know?
They're never going to let it go.
It's never going to go back.
You're not going to be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Yeah.
That's a perfect way to put it.
Yeah.
So it's crazy.
Yeah.
Then there's just, I forget when it was, but I think it was a couple of days ago after this whole Jimmy Kimmel debacle.
There's people out there that are saying that we have to take another look at Section 230 or 240, which is the basic protection for social media companies to where they can't be sued.
They're protected from lawsuits.
Against people who speak on their platforms, right?
They can't be liable for people posting shit on their platforms because they are the utility, right?
So if you want to file a suit against something, it has to be directly against the person who made that statement.
And that's the reason these social media companies are able to do what they do.
Like if they had to use the manpower to go through and fucking censor and catch everything that everyone's posting all the time, they wouldn't be able to operate.
It would be an unbearable job.
You know what I mean?
So they had to have that protection.
So now, like, there's people that are threatening to take that away after this Jimmy Kimmel thing.
This is it here.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
The taxes are $230.
Yeah.
It's just like a crazy political football, man.
These social media companies.
It's influenced.
The way they've changed the face of the earth in the last 10 years is insane to me.
It's influenced everything.
I. Like, I really feel like my head is going to explode when I think about it all.
And it's just like it's ever shifting.
Like, there was this really prominent American journalist that has lived in Panama for decades.
His name was Richard Coster, right?
Richard Coster was, he worked for Newsweek based out of DC and he would report on Central American politics for a very long time.
And I met with him and I spoke with him, first of all, about Carlos and the Noriega thing.
And I expressed my worries with.
Telling a one sided story.
I was actually, what I was most worried about was that I was just sort of like feeding into the delusions of somebody who was on his deathbed that didn't want his legacy to be someone that committed atrocities on the behalf of a dictator, right?
So I expressed that to Coster.
And what Coster told me was that what exists are realities, not reality.
So reality doesn't exist.
Like everybody doesn't exist in the same reality.
People exist in their own space.
For example, he told me that because Carlos felt convicted in what he did, right?
He Acted upon his beliefs.
He believed that the right way to live was the way that Noriega wanted him to live and the way he wanted Panama to be run under a fascist dictatorship regime, a totalitarian regime.
So I think, I don't know, I just think that now social media just like obviously it amplifies voices.
People are just like butting heads way more because people live in these different realities and they're coinciding now.
And people are like, no, dude, you're fucking wrong.
Like this is the way you should live.
And then you hear that and you're like, I don't want to live that way.
Like, I'm like, this is the way I should live.
Like, I live in this reality.
This is how everybody should live.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
I, yeah.
Like, when I say, dude, like, blank slate coming into all this, like, this, I was 27 years old when I went down to Panama, like, this.
I'm 29 now.
It's been a little over two years.
And, dude, like, I just, like, I watched the news today and I just, like, my head is going to explode with all of these converging realities.
You, first of all, you've already lost the public's trust for the most part over the last five to 10 years, starting with COVID.
I think COVID probably was one of the things that really.
Push people over the edge.
And now you have stuff like this where people, if you tell them it's raining outside, they're going to go out and check.
Kiki Camarena Case00:15:50
Yeah.
It's getting really bad.
It is.
I mean, it's getting really bad, but is there not some good to that as well?
You know, I think distrust of government has positives and negatives.
I don't think any government truly has the interests of its people fully in mind.
You know what I mean?
There's a weird vibe right now.
Yeah.
You know, like there's just a weird vibe.
I don't know how to put it.
I can't explain it, but right now it feels like not good.
Dude, you know, it reminds me of like COVID, that kind of feeling.
When COVID first hit, there was like this eerie, spooky feeling.
And I feel like that is right now again.
I don't know exactly why, but it just feels like that to me.
Yeah.
Ever since the Kirk assassination, I've just had that feeling in my guts, the one that you just described.
Like things just feel off.
You know, things just really, truly feel off.
And then you have, like you mentioned, Candace Owens doing those live streams and like Tucker Carlson.
Did you see that?
The 9 11 stuff.
Yeah.
I'm like, dude, like.
Wait, what 9 11 stuff?
He released like a.
I haven't watched.
He released a documentary about 9 11?
Exactly.
I haven't watched it yet, but I know it questions things that have never publicly been questioned before.
You know what I mean?
It's like.
Well, they've been publicly questioned for a long time.
There's a lot of really good documentaries about this stuff.
The problem is you're painted as a fool for questioning it.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
People who publicly question 9 11 get painted into this corner of being like kooks.
In the same way that Carlson, I haven't watched the documentary that he just did, but, you know, he's.
I haven't watched it either.
He's questioning Israel and stuff.
Right.
Which there's legitimate questions for that.
Yeah.
I mean, there's legitimate questions for that.
The problem is there's a lot of moving pieces with all of this stuff.
Yeah.
And there's, I'm sure, I'm sure it's a very accurate documentary.
I'm.
I mean, you could fact check probably all of it and find out that it's really real.
I mean, there's lots of crazy stuff.
There's lots of ties to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the entire CIA knowing about the terrorists being here.
Yeah.
There's this crazy documentary.
I don't know how deep you've gone down the 9 11 rabbit hole, but there's a really crazy documentary called 9 11, the new Pearl Harbor.
Haven't there's interviews of the fighter fighters sitting there like on the benches right after it happened and they're explaining explosions happening.
They're like, I was in there and there was like boom, boom, boom explosions happening in the basement.
Dude, you know, I haven't.
Where can I watch this?
Uh, just google or just go on YouTube.
It's called 911 New Pearl Harbor.
And, uh, you know, and then like the have you seen the Tower Seven thing where the thing just comes down perfectly?
I mean, that shit is, I just like.
There's questions, dude.
And like, look, the burden of proof is on them.
Like, they just decided to cover everything up and hide it all.
They never gave us an explanation for any of that stuff.
How do these passports get found perfectly on the ground, untouched?
Yeah.
You know, not a drop of dust, not a speck of dust on these passports.
Yeah.
You know, after the airplane exploded, the terrorist passports in the middle of the street.
Right.
There's just like, there's legitimate questions to be asked where they just decided to cover the, seal the report, the 9 11 report, and.
Keep the black boxes of the airplanes, not release any of that, and just decide to be hush hush about it.
Yeah, it's pretty wild, dude.
I went down to New York in March and I met with a former FBI agent who worked in the terrorism unit.
And, you know, he lived through 9 11, all that sort of stuff.
But what he sent me back home with was the Osama bin Laden indictment report from the late 1990s.
What it really, what interested me the most about it was the sort of the coverage of the World Trade Center.
Like, uh, attack in 1993, and it was 1993, right, with the truck where they like tried to bomb it.
Yeah, and what this FBI agent said to me was that it was the um, the televised public trial that sort of gave away the fact, you know, the whole like jet fuel can't melt steel beams thing.
I guess, in that trial, the televised trial in 1993, the expert that they brought in to talk about like the structure of the towers said that the only thing that could take these towers down would be to melt the steel beams at this temperature, right?
And somebody realized that.
You know, you could do it with this or whatever.
I'm no expert, but.
They said that you could do it with jet fuel?
I guess so.
I mean, that's what this FBI agent told me.
But he was also like a servant of the FBI for decades.
You know, he, in many ways, indoctrinated by like the beliefs that sort of trickle down from the top.
I think that every agency has their own indoctrination.
You know what I mean?
I don't think there are a lot of genuine free thinkers in those agencies.
There's so many questions, bro.
Another one of the biggest ones is explain to me why all of these high level government and intelligence officials.
Placed put options on the airlines the week before it happened.
I don't know, dude.
It's like.
That's one hell of a coincidence.
If this was a movie, people would.
Those would be like foreshadowing events, right?
If this was a movie and like you were able to see behind the.
It is a movie.
These walls.
There's a quote from a massage.
Oh, I fucking.
The 60 Minutes guy.
The 60 Minutes guy.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's real.
I mean, it's 60 Minutes.
So take it with a grain of salt.
Yeah.
But it's.
I'm sure.
I would bet that that is probably accurate.
Yeah.
Speaking of 60 Minutes.
He said so.
So, what he said to the reporter was that the Mossad guy said that we are the set designers, the directors, and the producers of a movie.
Yeah.
That you are watching.
That episode is insane.
Yeah.
Because it is, I mean, it, like the.
There was the pager operation.
The pager operation.
Yeah.
The explosive pagers.
They sold those pagers 10 years before they used them.
10 years.
Like that shit is insane.
That shit's insane.
Right.
The funny thing, so about 60 minutes, and just tying this into like the Noriega stuff.
Yeah.
In 87 or 88, 60 Minutes did a segment on Noriega, right?
And it was a slam piece.
They did it intentionally to slam the guy and sort of paint him as a.
Because a lot of people put Noriega in like the Pablo Escobar box, like a tyrant, right?
Like a dictator, like a tyrant to a nation.
And he very much was.
Like the people of Panama hated him, but he was different.
He was very different.
But this 60 Minutes interview, they slam him, but there's this one little segment.
Where Noriega opens up this book of correspondence, and it's all these classified files that I have published in the book.
No way.
Right?
And they're on 60 Minutes, dude.
And they're all from the administrator of the DEA.
At the time, it was this guy, John C. Lon.
And the interviewer, the 60 Minutes interviewer said that, and it wasn't on camera with Noriega, but he was like Noriega said that if he ever gets taken to the US, extradited to the US, and forced to stand on trial, he's going to have John C. Lon, the administrator of the DEA, defend him.
And Noriega also said that he, so this guy, William Casey, was the director of the CIA as well, but he died in 1987.
Mm hmm.
Casey and Bush were like this too.
And Noriega said that if William Casey was still alive when the US invasion of Panama happened, Casey would have defended him as well.
Now, obviously, these are the words of a liar, essentially, like somebody who trained in the covert arts and he knew how to lie and went to lie.
But I think there's merit there that the leader of the CIA and the head of the DEA were sort of so close in correspondence with this guy that.
And these letters prove that there was gratitude, favors, and gratitude.
Yeah.
I think Bill Casing was CIA director when Kiki Camarena was killed, too.
Are you familiar with that story?
No, I'm not.
When was that?
I want to say Kiki Camarena was early 80s, late 70s.
Find out, Steve.
But there's this documentary about this DEA agent named Kiki Camarena.
I forget the name of it.
There's a couple documentaries about him.
I think he was actually in one of the seasons of Narcos on Netflix.
But he was getting deep in his investigations and he was really aggressive, really getting deep on the cartels.
And then he was captured.
He was kidnapped one day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rafael Carl Quintero, leader of the Guadalajara cartel, was responsible for kidnapping.
So he was kidnapped by Rafael and he was kidnapped and tortured and eventually he died.
He died.
Okay, 85.
Okay, so I don't know if Casey would have been the director then or not.
But there was a witness who was in the room with him when he was getting tortured saying there was one man who came in who claimed he was from the CIA and he had a Cuban accent and he was torturing Kiki in there.
Yeah.
And they never found out who he was.
The CIA denied it.
And then eventually, after all the investigation, they found out what the guy said his name was.
And it turns out there was a CIA agent, a Cuban guy who defected during the Cuban Revolution to the CIA.
And he was actually a part of the Bay of Pigs.
And they found out it was this guy named, or allegedly, they claim it was this guy named Felix Rodriguez, who we actually interviewed.
And he obviously denies it.
But he was down there in that part of the world, you know, during IRA and Contra, during this whole thing with the cartels and Kiki Camarena.
And it's crazy, dude.
If they had the CIA whack a DEA agent for getting too close to exposing cartels.
Yeah.
You know, spooky shit.
Absolutely happened all the time.
Like, I'll tell you a story that was relayed to me that I heard multiple times from several different people.
So I think it's true because all the facts remain the same.
But there was in 1971, the CIA hired a Galician from Spain.
This dude who essentially, you know, was a, like a, you could call him a terrorist, right?
He was this mass murderer.
And they hired this guy to go to Cuba and to take out all of these guerrillas in this fishing town, these like Cuban guerrillas that I don't know what they were planning, but obviously something against the United States.
The CIA got word of it.
So.
This guy, his last name was Villa.
He was referred to as Comandante Villa.
Comandante Villa comes into this fishing town and instead of spending whatever amount of time to figure out who these guerrillas are, he just opened fires on this small fishing town, killing everybody in it.
Mass murders the entire town.
The Cubans, Castro's guys, capture him before he can get away and he's held in Castro's cells, very close.
This guy's not going anywhere.
So the CIA call Manuel Noriega and they're like, hey, We need you to go to Cuba and get this guy out of jail.
And Noriega, from what Carlos told me, was like, How do you want me to do that?
Like, this guy murdered like a bunch of innocent civilians in Cuba.
Like, Castro's not going to let him get away.
And the CIA were basically just like, Do it.
Convince him, right?
Convince him to do it.
So Noriega flies to Cuba.
He sits down with Castro and they have a conversation.
And Castro's like, Why are you doing this for the CIA, man?
Like, don't you want Panama?
To be Panama.
And Noriega's like, I need to make sure that I'm feeding the white bear, right?
So that it doesn't attack me, right?
That's the way it was put.
So they work out a deal where Noriega can essentially take Commandante Villa out of the cell and send him back to the CIA.
And in return, Castro gets information from Noriega about CIA dealings, right?
But this is a case of a literal mass murderer.
Being let back into the CIA's hands just because it served a purpose.
And this was in 1971.
Can you imagine the amount of time something like that has happened?
Like, think about the Middle East, where I really don't know anything.
My knowledge really pertains to Central America and Latin America during the Cold War, during this specific period right up until 1990.
But, dude, starting with the Gulf War and extending on to Afghanistan and all this sort of stuff, can you imagine the amount of deals that are made between intelligence agencies and like.
Al Qaeda, whatnot.
Evil fucking people do just to serve a greater purpose.
I also think that people are a lot smarter than they give themselves credit for, right?
I think the mass, I'm stealing this from a movie, but a person is smart, people are stupid, right?
The masses follow trends, they follow narratives.
The news is all about narrative, but I think an individual person can feel it in their gut when something isn't right.
So you talk about Epstein and all this stuff.
You know, like you feel it in your gut that something's up, right?
You don't know the facts.
You don't like, you can't look behind those closed doors, but like something stinks, right?
Something smells there.
But you like, we'll never truly know.
You know what I mean?
Like, no.
There are too many powers at play.
And then, you know, you have like, and then like there are just tears to intelligence, right?
There are things that we're supposed to know and things that we're not supposed to know.
And then things that get washed away over the course of history.
You know, there are things.
There are things like we, I talk about like having these confidential documents that show this correspondence between Noriega and the DEA and DOJ and CIA and all these different agencies.
Like, what was said that wasn't documented?
That's what I've always wanted to know.
So that's when I go to Panama, when I meet all of these people who are in these rooms and I'm working off pure testimony.
Like there are two sides to every story, or rather, there are multiple sides to every story.
But for instance, I hear somebody be like, oh, yeah, in 1976, George H.W. Bush tells Noriega that he gets pissed off at Noriega in a meeting and he says, you're going to regret that.
Right?
That's what this guy tells me.
And then I think about that.
And I'm like, you know, I could see that happening.
I was like, I know for a fact they butted heads.
I know for a fact they fucking hated each other.
It's like, I could see the director of the CIA making a threat to an intelligence asset who thought he was more important than he actually was.
And then when that intelligence asset continues to do things that he's not supposed to do, the director of the CIA or former director of the CIA putting his foot down and being like, you're going to pay for that.
Just for that, I'm going to invade your country with 27,000 troops and bomb the shit out of your civilians.
And then not only am I going to do that, but I'm going to.
I'm good.
Like, we're gonna say that 300 people died when in fact we don't know how many people died.
Thousands.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's this great documentary called The Panama Deception.
It won the best documentary at the Oscars in 1993.
This woman, Barbara Trent, wrote it.
Santeria and Testimony00:09:48
Fantastic documentary.
Yeah, The Panama Deception.
And yeah, 1993, Oscars, maybe 92.
But, you know, she got in trouble for it and whatever.
But in the documentary, the claim is made that.
The US military used their military exercise of the invasion of Panama as a chance to.
Yeah, exactly.
This is the documentary here.
92.
They used it as a chance to test weapons on Panamanian civilians.
So I interviewed a lot of people and soldiers who claimed that they saw, like, the US Army shooting lasers at Panamanian soldiers and that, like, their guns melted to their body when they got hit with these lasers.
Dude, and this is in, like, 1989.
Like,.
There's a lot of funky shit out there that there are testimonies of, but documentation will never exist.
So, who's like, will we ever know the truth?
Like, truly, we can talk about it and our guts can tell us that something is fishy and if there's smoke, there's fire and all this sort of shit.
But will we ever have documentation?
Will we ever have like actual, real, true proof?
Like, no, I'm sure.
I doubt it.
I'm sure the most sinister shit that the government has done, I'm sure they make it.
They make it a point to make sure none of that shit is documented.
Yeah.
Or ever talked about, and people go to their graves with that stuff.
Do totally.
Even Noriega himself.
And this was like the really big thing with the book.
I wanted to know what secrets he knew.
I wanted to know what the dirt was.
George Bush, an alien.
I wanted to know everything, but I came to the realization, and I still stand by this.
Maybe it might sound naive, but I truly think Noriega went to the grave with.
The dirtiest of his secrets.
Really?
Truly believe it.
Yeah.
Carlos was like his best friend, man.
He knew nothing.
And like he knew things that he didn't tell me, right?
Like he, for instance, we were sitting in his living room one day drinking.
It was actually hilarious.
We had just been out at one of his friends' apartments, these like Panamanian gangsters, like at some penthouse apartment.
It was honestly really fun.
I had a good time.
But we were sitting there at his apartment afterwards and he turns on the TV and Scarface was playing.
Like Al Pacino Scarface.
And there's like a scene where he's just like doing a line of blow next to his hot tub.
He gets in a fight with Michelle Pfeiffer's character and she storms off and he's like ripping blow.
And, you know, Pacino rips the line a blow, and Carlos turns to me and he goes, You see, very, very bad, very bad.
Right?
He was like talking about Coke.
He was like trying to tell me that, like, you know, all this shit was bad.
And then I was like, Yeah, I was like, you know, speaking of that, I was like, Can you tell me anything about Noriega and drugs and, you know, what you know about like the drug trade and the illicit stuff?
And he's like, he starts telling me a story about the Mexican government, like the current administration, the At the time, it was the current administration, that guy, AMLO, like Andreas, you know, that guy, AMLO was like his nickname.
He was just the president.
Carlos wasn't talking about him, but he was talking about like his cabinet and all of those guys.
And he starts telling me the story.
I whip out my voice recorder, I'm recording it.
And then he stops and his eyes get really big.
And he's like, delete that right now.
And I was like, why?
And he's like, if you put this in the book, you're going to get killed.
What?
Yeah.
He's like, if you put what I just said in the book, you're going to get murdered.
And it was in Spanish, so I didn't fully understand it.
I would have had to have transcribed it to fully understand.
And I was like, it's okay, it's okay, I'm not going to put it in the book.
But I kept the recording, and he snatches the thing from me and he deletes it.
And he's like, you're going to get killed if you put that in the book.
So I think it's dual pronged.
And you don't know what it was because it was in Spanish.
No, but it was about the drug trade.
It was about the cartels, it was about the illicit drug trade, and also the connection that it had to the Mexican government at the time.
So you can put two, like, it's the whole gut thing, right?
You can put two and two together, and you can.
You can make the claim that there were people in that cabinet that had like close ties with the cartel, you know what I mean?
Like, but that's also obvious, right?
That's, I think that's also obvious.
It is, yeah.
Because how can the cartel get that strong with it?
You know what I mean?
It's like, I think that's obvious.
But the problem is, there's people that were directly involved that are still alive today.
And if all this stuff came out, it would destroy them.
Absolutely, yeah.
And so, like I said, I think it was dual pronged.
I think on the one hand, I think on the one hand, Carlos was.
Partially protecting his legacy by also practicing something that Noriega did, which was silence in a lot of ways.
I think they didn't want to divulge everything that they knew, all of the secrets that they knew.
But on the second hand, and this is just maybe me being naive, but I would like to believe that he came to care for me.
And he was like, I'm going to save this guy from getting in this major trouble.
But as well as that, I was also writing his.
You know, his book, and maybe he just wanted the book to come out and for me to like not get in trouble and all that sort of shit.
But you know what I mean?
You know what I'm getting at?
It's like there's a lot of stuff out there that like was not documented and only exists in testimony.
Yeah.
You know?
And those people are dying off.
They're a dying breed.
Did you ever talk to any of the Ochoa brothers?
I think they're, I think one of them, or at least one of them is still alive, right?
I wish.
There was a guy in Panama who said that he would fly me down to Cuba to meet with one of them if I wanted to.
He's in prison, right?
No, I heard one of them had a.
Roger was telling me that he was the pilot who hired Barry Seal.
He was telling me one of them owns a huge horse ranch in Mexico, maybe.
Really?
And the dude's like just making tons of money.
No way.
Like raising and selling racehorses.
Huh.
Well, maybe it was one of the Ochoes.
And it might have been that guy later.
L E H D E R. Maybe Carlos Lader.
Might have been his name.
Oh, that sounds familiar.
Yeah, that might have been his name.
I know that is a guy, but I can't remember if that was a guy that they.
Said they wanted the guy that they wanted to introduce me to was in prison.
Okay, yeah, that might be him.
Uh, is he in prison?
Yeah, Colombian and German former drug lord.
Looks like he's in prison.
Yeah.
In 1987.
That was when he got extradited.
Released from prison in 2020.
Oh, okay.
Well, he's out of prison now.
Yeah, there was somebody there in Panama.
I'm not able to say his name, but they said that they were like, this guy will probably talk to you if you're writing about this.
And I said yes, but they couldn't make it happen.
They couldn't get me down to Colombia during that time.
Did you ever end up going to Cuba?
No, dude.
I wanted to.
Like, I was.
I was ready to go like last week while I was in Panama.
It's like a two, three hour flight.
And the guys, I couldn't make it happen.
I was down there with like a couple former CIA guys.
The work that they did was mostly in Asia in like the 70s and the 60s.
They're like quite old.
And there was a plan to go to Cuba and to meet with a correspondent of a former general of Noriega's, somebody from like the Castro regime that was like in his 80s.
Like the guys, like, Pretty fucking old, but I was supposed to go there and speak with him about the Bay of Pigs.
And then also, have you ever, do you know like Santeria, like that, the Afro Caribbean like religion thing, like Santeria?
Not really.
It's kind of like witchcraft, voodoo, voodoo type thing.
I don't fully understand it, but the guy, my contact in Panama had a, it's, I don't know what they're called, like his, it's like his priest, like practiced Santeria and he would like speak to this.
Priests like quite often, but he said Santeria, yeah, that's like the religion, okay.
Um, Sant, yeah, like Santana, Santeria, yeah, this the way of saints, religion that developed in Cuba, yeah, it's like Afro Caribbean from the Yoruba traditions of enslaved Africans who uh syncretized their beliefs with Roman Catholicism to preserve their ancestral faiths under Spanish colonial rule.
So, this guy wanted me to go to Cuba to meet his like his like priest, basically, yeah, and also to meet with a former.
Like a member of the Castro regime to, with the intention of researching a story about the Bay of Pigs and how, like, there was an overlap with the Santeria and, like, this sort of religion.
I don't fully understand it.
It's not like I can sit here and really speak to it because I really wanted to go, but I was terrified of this stuff.
I was really, this, I mean, you know, I don't understand this.
Like, I was raised Irish Catholic, like, pretty set in stone, go to church, pray, all this.
But this is, like, a lot more primal and, and, uh, I don't know anything about it.
What would be the, would there be any logistical hoops you'd have to jump through to get to Cuba?
There's, I mean, you can't just visit there, but you also can.
I think there's, there's like, you need one of like 12 reasons to go to Cuba, and one of which is supporting the Cuban economy.
So, or like supporting the Cuban people.
So, the reasoning that I would have given traveling on my US passport would have been like, like I'm here supporting like the Cuban people or the Cuban economy.
Black Market Internet in Cuba00:03:05
A lot of Americans do travel there though.
Like, there are direct flights from like Miami.
There, right?
You know, it's not like it's completely off limits.
Um, even though I think Trump might have declared it like a red zone, like a no go zone, there's still like I think there's still a loophole.
I think you can still get in, and from my understanding, it's not like incredibly difficult.
And Americans do go there, also like Irish people go there all the time, like Europeans go to Havana all the time, really, dude.
My best friend in Ireland, his entire family did like a two week trip to Cuba and like traveled all around the country and stayed with like an indigenous family in like the middle of nowhere.
Like, Europeans go there all the time.
How long ago do they go there?
It was only a couple years ago.
I saw this documentary about this EDM group that went there to do a bunch of big bands have gone there and performed there, like where they basically get like half the country will show up in the town to go watch these live performances.
Yeah.
And there was these, the documentary described it where there's these like little hard drives they pass around the whole town to get like movies or TV shows or like podcasts or any kind of like media.
I don't know if it's still like that because like, I guess the media and the television and the radio is like super controlled by the state.
And if they want to get anything outside of that, like from America or from other parts of the world, they have to like clandestinely pass around these, they called them the paquetes, where they were just like little, little like floppy, or not floppy, but like little like USB sticks that people would use and they would like download it to their computers.
They could get movies and like all the current music that's happening around the world and all that kind of stuff.
Wow.
Pretty crazy.
That's wild.
We actually, In Ireland, we have something a little bit similar.
Obviously, it's not like a controlled state by any means, but we call them dodgy boxes.
And they're like these little Amazon sticks.
They basically are an Amazon stick.
You put it into your TV, but it connects to some, I don't know, something on the internet.
And you can watch, like, if a movie comes out in the cinema, like last week, you can watch it on the dodgy box.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it's like a jailbroken thing.
It's like a jailbroken Amazon stick.
But we call them dodgy boxes in Ireland.
They have them all over the world.
And they're like uncensored, like, There's no like government protection or anything like that.
Like, you can essentially just put whatever you want on it and it like constantly updates.
All you need is the internet.
So, I'm not surprised that they exist in Cuba and that they're like a popular market, popular item on the black market.
Right.
You know?
Yeah, I wonder if you could get away with doing that with like a VPN in Cuba, right?
Like, if you had the internet, couldn't you just use a VPN and just like.
I guess so.
VPNs kind of.
All of a sudden being Miami.
I don't trust those things.
They kind of freak me out.
I think.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, Dodgy Box.
Good Dodgy Box.
Look at that.
Yeah.
To illegally stream paid for content is live sports, movies.
Oh, wow.
So you watch like UFC and shit without paying for it?
Whatever you want.
Wow.
Yeah.
Whatever you want.
Don't let Dana White find out about that.
VPNs and Real Estate00:03:45
Oh, no way.
Yeah.
I'd say about 50% of Conor McGregor fans watched all of his fights on Dodgy Boxes.
Oh, really?
I would say so.
Yeah.
They didn't fucking pay for that shit.
Oh, man.
Is he going to be the president of Ireland?
No, he's not.
He officially pulled out.
Oh, did he really?
Yeah, I forget when, a few days ago, but yeah, he's not in the running.
Do you think he would have won if he would have made it to the running?
Dude, this all comes back to the social media thing.
I don't know what to believe.
I feel like my head is going to explode because when you're on the ground in Ireland, people either love him or hate him.
He's very polarizing.
But I know that the way the political system works, he needed votes essentially, which he wouldn't have gotten.
Well, he'd be the perfect president.
I mean, Look, they fucking the head guy, the apprentice, is the leader of the United States of America.
If that's the way the world's going, man, Jesus Christ.
I mean, it is.
Yeah.
If that's the way the world's going, but they're going to do a fucking UFC fight in the White House.
I was just about to say, yeah, if you saw that picture that the White House posted, it's hilarious.
Dude, it's nuts.
Yeah.
It's the Twilight Zone, bro.
Dude, it's so nuts.
Yeah.
It really is.
Yeah, it's super nuts.
That picture really is crazy, though, to like.
Having like the octagon, like right outside on the lawn, it's just yeah, this, yeah, this picture that they put is this a real picture?
Oh, this is an AI.
Yeah.
But, like, just, dude, that is so nuts.
That's nutty.
Speaking of AI, have you seen the AI rendition of the real estate plans they have for Gaza?
No.
They want to build South Beach, Miami on the Gaza Strip.
That's awful.
Oh, God.
Are we able to pull that off?
Tim Dillon did this crazy rant on his podcast.
It was incredible.
Really?
Yeah, where he was showing this rendition that they put together for the.
The, the real estate plans they have for the Gaza Strip, that's.
And he's like, yeah, you know, I pay all my taxes but I can't afford a house and I can't afford my knee operation, but at least we're going to have Miami on the Gaza Strip.
Dude, that that's shocking.
That's shocking.
I really want to see what that.
Yeah hey, i'll take a leak real quick, we'll be right back okay oh yeah, there's a.
Yeah yeah, that's the one.
Look at that, Wow.
That's awful.
Gaza Riviera.
Oh, plans dismissed.
It's terrible, dude.
There's a.
What's that?
Who did Netanyahu propose that?
I think so.
I think maybe it was Trump who did it.
Scroll down.
The origin of the concept was put forward by Donald Trump.
Yeah, that's what it was.
And allies like his son in law.
Yeah, I remember that now.
He's been on multiple conferences talking about how it would be great to.
You know, be a nice hub for for real estate investments.
Wow, look at that, right on the beautiful beach before and after.
That is shocking.
Is there a before and after of Gaza um, before october 7th and after, where it shows like all the buildings and like basically it's looks like a asteroid hit it?
There definitely are.
I just saw one recently.
It's crazy man, Have you gone down the rabbit hole and all the Charlie Kirk stuff?
I have, yeah.
It's pretty wild.
It's funny.
Conspiracy Agent Encounter00:02:33
I actually, so when I was in, it happened while I was in Panama, but I met this guy, this former CIA agent in Panama who's like, now he's like a conspiracy kook.
He lives in the woods and he covers his house in aluminum foil so that satellites can't see him.
He's like one of those guys, right?
And I met him for breakfast, I was introduced to him.
And we chatted for like a couple hours.
And then a couple days later, the Kirk assassination happened.
And this guy has been like blowing up my WhatsApp every day with like conspiracy theory stuff.
But he, you know, he was like trained, he was like a US military guy.
He was then he became a spy in Central America.
And then, you know, he's got all this crazy experience, but he has like severe PTSD.
But he's sending me all this stuff and he literally sends me like numerical lists of like all the things that are wrong with it.
Yeah.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
Like I don't even hunt.
You know what I mean?
I've shot a gun like once in my life, but.
It just like it goes back to like that gut thing, right?
It's like my gut tells me that like there's something fishy as fuck.
Yeah.
Something smells.
You know what I mean?
Like something doesn't smell right.
And then you got like Kash Patel, you know, like they're pressuring the government in Utah to wrap it up and seal the investigation.
It's like it just, it really just feels like it just feels like we got our excuse and now we're not allowed to ask questions and let's just move on to the next thing.
Yeah.
The craziest thing to me is like all the gun enthusiasts and like the former military people.
Online, and that I've talked to who say that, like, A, there's no way that that gun created that hole in his neck.
Like a 30-aught six round would absolutely have an exit wound, and there was clearly no exit wound.
And if it didn't have an exit wound, it would completely explode inside of it.
Like his head would be gone or his neck would be gone if that was really that from that kind of a round.
Yeah.
Right.
And then the other thing is that kid, I don't care how, I mean, even if he trained for six months practicing with a blindfold, taking that weapon apart, after you pull off that shot, like under that amount of stress, there's no, Possible way he would have been able to break down that rifle.
You need so many tools.
You need an Allen key, you need screwdrivers, you need all these other little tools to disassemble that rifle.
And it's no way, it's not still not going to fit in the fucking backpack.
Yeah.
So the fact that he was like running off the roof immediately after and like it just does none of that stuff adds up and then reassembled it so he could hide it in a towel in the woods.
Instant Narrative Explosion00:05:28
Yeah.
None of this story is making any sense.
It doesn't make any sense, dude.
Even like that old man who right after the shot was like.
Did you see the footage of him?
No.
Well, what are you referring to?
Well, so there's the footage of him, like his pants fell off, first of all, right after.
But if you watch the footage, there's a camera of the crowd right when Charlie was hit.
And everyone gets down.
And immediately, when everyone's still on the ground, he stands up and starts waving his hands around like this.
Like he knew this was going to happen.
Yeah.
And I, you know, it's all like.
And then they charge him with child porn.
Exactly.
So that you can't ask him questions anymore.
Exactly.
Yeah, I was just about to bring that up because it's a.
He was there at 9 11.
He was there during the Boston bombing.
I was just about to say that.
Yeah, dude, it's like I just don't understand.
I don't understand.
Coincidence doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
There's a before and after of Gaza.
Wow.
Rafa.
Look at that shit, dude.
That's fucking shocking.
That's fucking shocking.
Yeah.
It's awful.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's like, you know.
It's like they almost knew that you can't pull off this lie in today's day and age with cameras rolling everywhere, not only security cameras, but iPhone cameras rolling everywhere, and like cover up a lone shooter that assassinated Charlie Kirk.
Like people are going to get to the bottom of this.
So it's like almost you have to throw in all these confusing little tidbits everywhere just to throw people off the scent and make everybody confused.
Right.
I feel like you have to create this cauldron of bullshit, right?
That just people talk about and talk about and talk about until.
Maybe eventually it'll fizzle out when people give up and no one talks anymore and none of the people in government investigate it anymore.
And eventually, you know, they'll just label them like kooks, like they did with the 9 11 people.
Totally.
But you got to think as well.
Like, I feel like guys like us are like the general public, people who don't have, like, we don't have the lenses to go behind these closed doors, behind the veil, and to really understand what's happening.
But you got to start with the outcome.
Like, what is the outcome of this?
And you got to think about why.
You know, so I don't know if we've experienced what the outcome truly is yet, right?
I think we're building towards it.
But like you talk about, like the 9 11 conspiracies and all the questions that are asked, like, what was the outcome of 9 11?
Like, we invaded these countries in the Middle East.
You know what I mean?
Well, there's footage of Netanyahu after 9 11 saying something.
Find out what his exact quote was.
But Netanyahu was quoted, and I think it's actually recorded, where he says that this is a really good thing for us.
I did see that recently.
Yeah.
He's like talking to those like students or those kids in that room, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I saw that.
But it like, you know, it was a good thing for Israel.
Yeah.
It was.
Yeah.
It got us over there.
Totally.
Yeah.
Like it was.
So, I mean, I feel like when I put on like my little investigator cap, what I immediately do is I go to the outcome.
I was like, what ended up happening?
And then you work your way back.
Because if you start with the inciting incident, like there are fucking so many different directions that you can go.
Like the inciting incident here is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right?
You've got like Republicans, not like all, obviously, but a lot of Republicans being like, this is the far left trans movement that are doing this.
And that's the story that like Kash Patel and the FBI are going with, right?
That was almost the instant narrative.
Exactly.
The instant narrative, which.
You'd be a fool to believe that, I think.
Did you read those text messages?
Oh, yeah.
What the fuck was that?
Dude, what was that?
But, like, no one has to go retrieve the weapon, and there's a squad car still sitting here waiting.
What fucking 21 year old talks like that?
Who bought that?
Nobody bought that.
You know what I mean?
So, like, these are all just narratives that are being created.
But, like I said, like, I don't think we've arrived at the outcome that was intended for that.
Like, even let's say that it was.
Like a trans thing, right?
Like, what is the outcome?
Is the ultimate outcome just like Charlie Cook is dead?
No more hate speech?
No, well, for sure.
A lot of people really hated him, a lot of young people really hated him and probably thought it was a good thing.
That I mean, obviously, people are like cheering about it and like, yeah, which is false and saying that it's a really good thing, stomping on his memorial and all that, but like, man.
He was a really divisive figure.
I mean, he was moderate.
I mean, he wasn't extreme.
He wasn't like a Nick Fuentes.
He wasn't like a fucking Nazi.
He was like fairly reasonable on most of his takes.
He had a lot of shy, I didn't fucking agree with, but a lot of shy did agree with.
But like, he was arguing.
His job was to go out to these universities and argue with kids that disagree with him on all the most hot button topics that exist in society.
And you're doing that.
In a huge open area with tons of people all over the country.
And I'm sure you don't have Secret Service covering every roof all the time.
So, like, there's something, there's something, I don't know, maybe it's just me because, you know, I have a fucking wife and three kids.
Arguing on Campus00:07:49
I am not, it's not on my priority list.
In fact, I'm going to go out of my way to not be in public in front of hundreds of people that probably despise me.
Yeah.
You know, I, I, there's just, I don't know, maybe it's like a DNA, something in my DNA.
I just have an instinct that.
Maybe I shouldn't do that.
And if I didn't do that and like my livelihood depended on it, I would imagine that I would have fucking tons of security.
You know, it was a really risky thing he was doing for sure.
Incredibly risky thing.
Yeah, it really was.
It's just the whole theater behind it all is so weird.
And Netanyahu going on the news immediately like, dude, the dude obviously can't read a room anymore.
You know, like if you're the one that everyone is blaming for this, You don't go out and say, Hey, I didn't do it.
I didn't do it.
You don't want to be the first one to go out and say, I didn't do it.
Yeah.
You know, if you rob a bank and someone's like, and people are saying, Oh, it could be this person, this could be this person, you don't go to, Hey, it wasn't me.
I promise it wasn't me.
Like that's not what you do.
Dude, no.
Psychology 101.
Yeah.
Something stinks, right?
And everybody knows it.
Yeah.
But like.
And on the same day.
Yeah.
I think Congress blocked the Epstein files.
They did.
Well, I saw that on like, on X, you know?
Yeah.
But you gotta, I don't know, you just gotta think like, what was the intended outcome by the person or people who did this?
Have we arrived there yet?
If we have, let's start there and work back as to answer the question, why?
You know what I mean?
Because that's what everybody really wants to know.
We know how, you know, we know when, but we don't know why, you know, and that it just like, yeah, this video.
Or like, what he posted like six videos, right?
Or like multiple videos being like, Israel did not do this.
Like, this is crazy to think.
Like, Charlie was pro Israel.
But then you got Candace Owens, you know, doing all these live streams being like, Charlie turned on Israel like weeks before and they offered him this amount of money.
Yeah, well, there was that meeting.
I guess he had that meeting with that billionaire a day before.
Before he went on some live stream with Megyn Kelly and the kids ranting about how, like, they're trying to control and bully him and then intimidate him and all this stuff, and how that's gonna just force people like him to speak out more about, you know, all the crazy shit Israel's doing to influence the United States and us giving them money and funding their wars and all that stuff.
And I guess, like, because he was very pro Israel his whole career, like, very, very pro Israel, you know, mainly from a religious perspective, um, because he was like a huge Christian, but, um, You know, it is obvious that he was like starting.
I think when he invited Tucker, he did something in Tampa.
He did a thing, um, like 30 minutes away from here in Tampa with Tucker Carlson, and he had Dave Smith on there to do a debate with some pro Israel guy.
I guess that was kind of like the biggest, um, turning point, no pun intended, on like his pushback from his Israeli donors.
And you know, he had a hundred million dollars in donors, like people that were billionaires that were huge Zionists.
So, like, yeah, you know, and he pissed a lot of people off.
And Bill Ackman was the guy who she was trying to say was like a part of this, part of this like bullying intimidation campaign that invited him.
And that's just a crazy thing, too.
Like the whole Bill Ackman Zionist thing aside, bullying, if he was, whether he was or was not like trying to bully Charlie into stopping all the Israel talk, like he just straight up admitted in his long Twitter rant that he was inviting all these influencers and bragging how he had.
Influencers with over 100 million total subscribers or followers to talk to them about politics in the United States.
Huh.
Really?
Like you just opened, you just admitted that, but you didn't.
I mean, like, it's kind of like out in plain sight now.
Like, why are you doing that?
Right.
Why is some Zionist billionaire trying to invite all these influencers to a private party in the Hamptons to talk about political influence in the U.S.?
Interesting.
That in itself is fucking crazy.
It is, dude.
And no one talks about that.
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Wow.
Jesus.
Yeah, dude.
It's just, it's a rabbit hole, dude.
It's a rabbit hole.
We're never going to know the real true answer because there's no documentation that's going to exist about it.
And if it does, it's probably been shredded or manipulated or something like that because it's just, dude, it's a conspiracy at the end of the day.
Like, it's a huge deal.
Like, I see a lot of people being like, why are we doing this for a podcast or this and that?
He was incredibly influential.
Like, he turned the minds of millions of people.
I remember I was a college freshman in 2015.
At Northeastern University in Boston, an extremely like, it was a very liberal school.
Like, everyone I went to school with was a Democrat.
But my roommate was like a right wing guy.
And I remember him in like 2015, 2016, probably being like, Have you ever heard of Charlie Kirk?
He's got this turning point thing.
It's awesome.
Right.
And he was like, and he was like a Charlie Kirk fan for like years, right?
Like, way before all of this like TikTok social media stuff like exploded.
So, I mean, he was a very influential voice in the Republican movement for so long.
It just makes me ask the question, like, why?
Like, who really benefits from this?
You know what I mean?
Like, we talked about JFK.
Like, what are the conspiracies there?
That the mob did it, that it was the CIA that did it, that Israel did it.
Like, there are multiple different conspiracies, right?
I don't think anybody believes that it was just like the lone gunman theory, right?
I think that's been mostly disproven or discredited.
But you got to think, like, what was the outcome of that?
You know, like, what was the reason?
What was the outcome?
Continuing wars.
Yeah.
I'm not like extremely well versed in that whole thing, but I do know that the lone gunman thing just doesn't make sense.
Like, why?
Why?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good point.
You know, what is the outcome?
Because.
Killing Charlie Kirk, somebody's going to replace him, right?
I know they said that Ben Shapiro is going to replace him, but I don't think that's going to happen.
I think that's just Twitter anti Semitism.
You know, it's like, it's kind of like the Hydra, you know, you cut the head off and like two or three grow back.
So I don't think that, I don't think it makes sense that like you can kill Charlie Kirk and you're going to basically, everyone's going to forget about this movement or like no one's going to take his place, right?
I think that's kind of naive.
Yeah.
But it has created a huge fucking shit storm of.
Conspiracies and videos and people talking about it.
Like it took over the news cycle.
It's still taking over the news cycle, right?
And like what's going on behind the scenes that we're missing now because everyone's paying attention to the Charlie Kirk thing.
Yeah.
There's so many different ways you can look at it.
And I don't know.
Yeah.
I really don't.
I don't think anybody in the general public does, but let's pick an outcome and work back.
Like let's say.
There, I see things online about it, Charlie Kirk's assassination being like an intentional creation of a martyr for the Republican Party.
Right.
Let's look at that outcome.
Right.
Martyr work its way back.
Like, what does that do?
Does that drive more voters to keep Republicans in power?
Like, who knows?
I just think that we'll ultimately get to the outcome that was designed from this.
And then we'll have a better idea of why it happened.
But I just think right now it's just like, Well, for one thing's for sure.
Google Bias Charts00:04:45
Crazy.
It's making Israel look terrible.
Making, at least, not Israel.
It's making Netanyahu and his government look terrible.
And it's making Trump look terrible.
You know, like the fucking video of Trump and they're asking him about his good friend Charlie Kirk's like, oh, great.
How about my new ballroom?
That was tough.
You know?
Yeah.
Like, and all the other things.
It's just, and the Jimmy Kimmel thing, like that, with Trump trying to pressure them to get rid of Jimmy Kimmel and then him.
You know, off that joke that was actually pretty funny.
It wasn't even about Charlie Kirk.
It was about Trump.
Right.
The joke was like, what was it?
Like the fourth stage of grief is construction, like my ballroom.
Like, yeah.
It was a, you know, it was a little, you know, it was a little sensitive.
It's a sensitive subject because he did it like four days after.
Yeah.
But like still, it was a funny joke.
It wasn't, it wasn't about Charlie.
He was making fun of, he was ripping on Trump.
So like I went back and watched the whole thing just to like make sure I wasn't missing anything.
And, and, uh, You know, that's another thing that people don't understand about like the government trying to control the fucking media and pushing the FCC, using the FCC to,
because they were trying to like merge with this other company, Nexstar, I think it was, was trying to do this merger where they controlled like 80% of the television, the telecom communications for those channels across the US when the FCC guidelines is you can't have more than 30% coverage.
Interesting.
Now they were going to have 80%.
Huh.
But they needed the White House to sign off on changing these FCC regulations.
And then Trump's pushing to get him off the air.
Magically, he gets taken off the air, and then like the people revolt, he gets back on the air, and uh, it just fucking exposed just this insane rot that exists, yeah, definitely.
And then, like, it just people don't that's one thing that you have to step back and like understand is like this censorship goes way beyond left and right.
Because if the right imposes a bunch of censorship and then the fucking left gets in power.
They're just going to take that and run with it and then impose more censorship.
And before you know it, we're living in China.
Huh.
Wow.
As somebody who, you know, your entire livelihood is within media and social media, like, how do you personally, like, what do you think is going to happen in the next, before the midterms in like 2026?
Like, do you think we're going to see like drastic change in the next couple of years?
I guess I'm curious.
I don't think so.
You don't think so?
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I mean, everyone was optimistic.
I think when Trump Got it and thinking that like all the regulations and the censorship on social media was going to relax.
Yeah.
And I think, I don't know, but I think to give the Trump administration credit, they are pushing back against a lot of the social media censorship stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
And I heard there was, you know, they were pushing like a trust bust with Google, trying to separate YouTube and Google because they have just an insane monopoly on information.
Like Google controls everything, all the advertising, all of the information.
The two biggest websites on the face of the earth are Google and YouTube.
And they're one company that controls so much and donates tons of money to politics and political campaigns.
So, and then there was so much evidence of them.
Like, we had this one guy, Robert Epstein, in here, who's a Harvard psychologist who was like exposing all of the suppression of search results during the first Trump election and the second Trump election, where they were basically like, you could Google.
Try to find something positive about Trump on Google and you could only find negative stuff.
Try to Google something negative about Kamala Harris on Google or Biden and you could only find positive stuff.
Wow.
And he did this crazy experiment where he got hundreds and hundreds of people to agree to participate in it, where he would basically put like a tracking thing on their computers.
So, throughout their day, they did this for like over a year, I think, on each of these participants.
Where they would like basically track their search results and track like what would be populated on Google when they search for X, Y, and Z, and to figure out how biased Google actually is.
And they found out, like, he put together all these crazy charts and found out, like, on each topic, how biased Google was, you know, on each one, like hard to the left or like moderate or maybe no censorship.
And it was astonishing what it found.
Panama Banking Secrets00:10:46
So, you know, that's terrifying.
It's like the Twitter files on steroids, you know, for Google.
Like, if the Twitter files, if the government was that deep in Twitter, The CIA and FBI were like meeting with them every week, talking to their moderation teams about the content, about the users that should be banned and what they shouldn't be allowed to say regarding certain topics.
Imagine how deep they are in Google.
Wow.
You know?
Yeah.
When Google was literally created by the CIA and DARPA and funded by them.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Wait, I didn't.
Yeah.
Like Sergey Brin, when he was first creating Google at Stanford, he was getting visited every single week by CIA and DARPA.
They got the whole PageRank system from DARPA.
Wow.
Yeah.
When was that?
In the 90s?
I don't remember.
I think it was the 90s.
Mid 90s.
And that might have been early 90s when they were first.
1998.
1998?
Wow.
Creating Google.
Dude, that's nuts.
And it's, I mean, all of this shit is going to like trickle into like public knowledge as time goes on.
You know, I was just on like a podcast last week and the guy, the guy, you know, he thought he was funny asking me the question, but he's like, do you ever worry about ending up like Gary Webb?
You know, that guy?
Yeah.
Yeah, look him up.
He was a journalist who exposed Iran Contra and got assassinated by the CIA.
And this guy.
Oh, I haven't heard about this guy.
Yeah, there was a movie about him too where Jeremy Renner plays him.
Really?
Yeah, I think it's called Kill the Messenger.
But Gary Webb was, yeah, he was assassinated.
He was killed and it was made to look like a suicide.
Yeah, Kill the Messenger.
That's it.
But, you know, this guy thought he was funny and he asked me, he's like, You know, what do you think of this?
And yeah, and I was like, Well, I don't want to end up like him, that's for sure.
But, um, but that was only like I think he was only killed like 25 years ago or something like that.
And he was talking about the same, yeah, 2004.
He was talking about the same that I'm publishing in my book.
Whoa, the exact same.
And this was 20 years ago, but I feel, yeah, cause of death, suicide.
Yeah, right.
Um, but look at this.
Uh, it also stated that oh, wait, no, uh, Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the CIA.
Where was.
You might have to scroll down a little bit more about the conspiracy.
He was just exposing how the CIA were behind the Contra movement during the Iran, like during the affair.
But it was because it was a trade embargo that the US Congress imposed.
So, what it really, at the end of the day, did was it just proved to the American public, but also the world, that the American government.
Can and does act outside of the interest of US Congress.
So it acts on their own will.
The CIA is its own country.
It's its own country.
Inside the borders of the United States.
Exactly.
It's autonomous.
Yeah.
So the Iran Contra affair just proved that to the world.
It was like the greatest embarrassment.
You know what I mean?
It was egg on Reagan and Bush's faces.
It was just a huge embarrassment.
But that happened in the mid 80s and this guy was whacked in 2004.
For reporting on it.
Have you heard of the Danny Casalero case?
So I know the name, but I actually don't know really what it's about.
You get us a great documentary on Netflix called The Octopus Murders.
You got to watch it, it's incredible.
He basically goes down this rabbit hole investigating the.
What was it called?
This.
Do you remember what the name of that stuff, the software was called?
Promise Software.
Yeah, Promise.
So the Promise software was a software that was, I think, created by the FBI, the CIA, where they could consolidate all of the U.S. court records into one master file that everyone could access, right?
So, like, if you're in any district, if some guy gets arrested and he's getting tried somewhere, you can pull up his whole record, right?
And you can pull up anyone who's connected with him, right?
And they ended up selling this Promise software to foreign nations so they could use it too.
And we also built a back door so we could hack into it.
And get all their information on their justice departments and their judges and figure out what was going on.
And he was uncovering this whole thing.
And he ended up uncovering this whole sinister underbelly of drug, gun trafficking, human trafficking, all this crazy shit.
Wow.
And all of these spooky CIA feds that were involved in it.
And he went to go, he was in, I think, Tennessee, supposed to meet up with a source to discuss this stuff.
And he was found the next morning in a bathtub dead.
Yeah.
With a suicide note.
And he had, he allegedly cut his wrists.
There was a broken bottle there.
And he had like six gashes in each wrist that were so deep they went through each tendon.
But they didn't think about like, if I slash all the tendons in this wrist, how the hell am I going to use this hand now to slash all the tendons in this wrist?
Yeah.
And they speculate that they found this guy who they think murdered him.
Wow.
And these dudes spent years creating this amazing documentary that they sold to Netflix.
Wow.
That's crazy.
It's called The Octopus.
It connects to Iran Contra.
It connects to every single scandal throughout the Cold War.
Wow.
Yeah.
Oh, I got to watch that, dude.
I mean, I scare myself when I watch that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
You know, I feel, I genuinely feel fine.
I think it's like old news now because it was like 40 plus years ago, but it just goes to show that this shit has such a trickle.
Trickle down effect, like in into what's going on today, like the Cold War.
I fully, you know, obviously the fall of the Berlin Wall and and and all that sort of stuff, and Gorbachev being like removed from power in Russia, like that symbolizes the end of the Cold War.
But I just don't buy that it's really truly over.
I just think it's evolved.
You know what I mean?
Like Russia is still considered a world superpower and an enemy of the United States.
Putin is a product of the KGB.
So silly.
You know what I mean?
It's like, how can we really truly say that the Cold War is over?
I just don't think it is.
I just think it's evolved.
So I think that there's a trickle effect from.
That shit in the 80s, which was major public scandals, you know, that just it still has relevance in what's going on today.
Like, you go to Panama and you spend time there and you look around and you look at all these banks.
Like, are you familiar with the banking system in Panama?
And like, it's like the Switzerland of the Americas.
So people go there to, or people have traditionally gone there to wash money and launder money.
Panama.
Yeah, Panama.
Have you heard of the Panama Papers?
It was like a bit, essentially, it was like a revelation of like all the people and companies and corporations around the world that were.
Using Panama as a hub to launder their money.
It's a very taboo subject, which I've been told that if I thoroughly investigate it, I will find a bullet in my head.
Really?
That's what I was told.
By who?
By, I can't say his name, but somebody in Panama who's very close with the banking system.
And he said, if you want to do this story, if you've got the, no, he said, if you have the balls to do this story, he's like, there's a good chance you'll end up with a bullet in your head.
And so it's still very relevant, right?
But the banking system is a product of the canal.
Like everything.
Comes back to the canal in Panama, but the banking system was created in the 1970s, um, and it was taken advantage of by the cartels and also by like people in America to launder and wash their money because it was outside of like the American banking system, and also there were like free regulations, like free laws.
Um, and I forget where I was exactly going with this, but it's heavily ties to sort of all the stuff with the Iran Contra affair because the Americans were washing money there too, and if you think about Sort of the scandal.
It's because they were like funding the Contras and they were giving them weapons during an embargo.
So they used the banking system in Panama as like a backdoor.
And Noriega was the dictator, so he was like the book stopped with him.
But all of that stuff was backdoored through this sort of like banking system that allowed money to come from foreign governments and be washed through Panama and released out into Central America, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that does make sense.
And it's still relevant today.
Still relevant today.
Yeah, look up the Panama Papers.
It happened, I think, in 2017.
Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents of published data published beginning April.
2016, the papers detail financial and attorney client information for more than 214,000 offshore entities.
These documents, some dating back to the 70s, were created by and taken from the former Panamanian offshore law firm and corporate services provider Mossack Forenska and compiled with similar leaks into searchable databases.
Yeah, it's really nuts, dude.
So, this links to Russian intelligence.
Yeah, I told you I met with a Russian spy in Panama, like.
Two weeks ago.
It's still, dude, it's all still going on today.
And it's just, it's not like directly related to Iran Contra, but it's like a trickle.
It's like it's trickling down through the years and it's still quite relevant.
You know, you see that it says that these documents date back to the 1970s when the banking system was introduced.
Yeah.
It intensified in the 1980s when Noriega was the dictator and there was a lot of illicit stuff going on and continues to this very day.
Yeah.
I guess that's their biggest problem, right?
Like, how do we hide money?
How do we fund covert ops?
And hide and wash money and do it without Congress knowing or without the public knowing about it.
I mean, you got it.
That's the.
That's the easiest way to track what's going on and all the malicious things that are happening around the world is, just follow the money yeah, but if you can figure out a way to hide the money, then you can get away with anything.
Get away with murder, yeah.
Yeah, and that seems to be what Jeffrey Epstein was really involved with was moving around money for people you know he could have been doing that for for multiple countries and multiple people.
Just figuring out ways, creative ways, to hide people's money, wash people's money, invest it in weird NGOs and get things done.
Yeah, it's hard.
Hiding Money Through Delusion00:03:09
Yeah, hard to say.
I really don't know.
I wish I knew more about that.
I wish the world knew more about that.
People are dying for that information, but somebody is withholding it.
Yeah, yeah, no, we'll never know.
We'll never find out.
They'll never let us know.
I don't think there's any one person who does know.
I don't think so either.
You know?
Yeah.
It's probably also stove piped.
And there's like, imagine if there's one, imagine if there was one person that was alive today that knew the truth about all these secrets.
Yeah.
About Kennedy, about 9-11, about the war on drugs.
Yeah.
About all these crazy assassinations and scandals that have ever happened.
I can't imagine that that, I mean, I don't know.
First of all, I don't know how you would go through life holding that information to yourself.
And like living a normal life, if you had a family or something like that.
Yeah.
Well, delusion, compartmentalization is a big thing with these guys.
I saw with Carlos, you know, I mentioned earlier, Carlos has like eight kids.
He was relatively present in their lives.
Like he took them on vacations.
Dude, he took them on vacations, trips.
You know, he was like, he was a father, but he was able to compartmentalize being an intelligence agent, being an enforcer, very much an enforcer.
You know, like I've spoken, and you have too, I know, with a lot of people that.
You know, you have on here.
Like, there are people that you've had on here that have murdered people or killed people, right?
I've spoken in my line of work.
I've spoken with so many murderers, so many, and a couple, like Carlos didn't, you know, divulge this to me, but like you could probably label him as like a mass killer, right?
He's probably killed like a lot of people.
But these guys are able to compartmentalize that through delusion and through belief and it's, you know, belief or conviction.
Like they feel convicted in their beliefs.
And it's almost like morals aren't really in question.
And it stems back to what that, Guy Richard Koster told me in Panama that reality doesn't exist, it's realities, and there are people that can jump between their own realities, right?
And that's really just what compartmentalization is like, you're yeah, you're jumping between realities.
So, I just think, uh, these guys, like you say, like, how can they live with themselves and how can they do this?
Like, knowing all this stuff, I just tell themselves stories, they just like they're delusional, yeah, you know, they just make themselves delusional.
Well, you would have to do that, you'd have to use that to your As a tool for yourself, like psychologically trick yourself so you could actually live with yourself and sleep at night.
Yeah.
You know, make yourself believe, tell yourself a story that helps you feel better about it or makes you feel like you're doing the right thing.
I think that, yeah, I think you're right about that.
I think that's the way you have to do it.
I think that's just what I think these guys do.
Thankfully, you and I are not in that sort of position where you don't, we're like, we don't fully understand or like know what that feels like.
But I would imagine.
That it's extremely stressful.
CIA Framework Analysis00:08:02
Yeah.
There's a reason why these guys are so high strung and volatile.
Yes, that's a good point.
So, what are you planning on doing like any sort of follow up to this?
Or when does this book come out?
The book comes out November 4th.
Okay.
It's on, I've got a website, it's www.therighthandmanbook.com, but it'll be in bookstores and on Amazon too.
It'll be everywhere.
My publisher is currently just like, Making sure everything is fully clean, and then we'll have the book available for pre order in a couple weeks and all that stuff.
But if you go on the website now, I have just like some information listed.
I, yeah, that's one.
I have some information listed.
If you scroll down a little bit, Steve, I have like the, yeah, Triple Spy, Trained by Massad, DA, Cold War Secrets, and then this is like the blurb or the log line.
It's very, it's like a, it reads like a political thriller, but everything's.
The Cold War turned Central America into a battlefield of.
Spies and sabotage a Panamanian soldier trained by Massad, DEA, and Castro's Cuba becomes the right hand man to the dictator Manuel Noriega and must survive the covert war launched by the very intelligence networks that created him.
Yep.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So the documents serve as like, you know, primary sources through testimonies.
The documents are, you know, backing up sort of everything that Carlos was telling me.
Yeah.
What was that document you sent, Steve?
Yeah.
Steve, if you can pull it up, it's so I've got two, I sent two documents.
Mm hmm.
Let's see which one is this one.
So, this one, yeah, this one is from Francis Mullen.
He was the administrator of the DEA in 1984.
This is a letter of correspondence directly to Noriega.
So, if you notice, it's gratitude, right?
I commend you for your initiative and I look forward to our continued working relationship and our mutual endeavors.
This is from the administrator of the DEA in 1984.
Francis Mullen?
Yeah.
And I've got hundreds of these letters in the book.
They and also, like, so you see, it says ether.
Wow.
So, ether ethyl is a component in cocaine production, and drums of ether used to pass through the Panama Canal on shipping containers coming from Germany.
That was like one of the main countries where a lot of this stuff came from.
It used to pass through and it used to come to Colombia or like Peru and Chile and basically everywhere in South America because the other ingredients came from like Bolivia and like all that sort of stuff.
It just like all converged in this one region.
And yeah, so it was like Panama's job basically to detect when ether, ethyl used to come through the Panama Canal.
So that explains that.
And then this is another, I've got, like I said, hundreds of these, but this is from Arthur Sedillo.
He wasn't like an administrator, but he was.
His job was to communicate with Panama, with Noriega.
Colonel Noriega, this is, yep, talking about this guy, Orlando Cabos Escaraja, fugitive from the New York office, took place in 1975.
So there was constant monitoring.
You know what I mean?
Like information was being shared constantly between Panama and the United States through Noriega.
The interesting thing about this is that this is from 1978, and Noriega wasn't even the leader of Panama.
In 1978, it was Omar Torrijos.
So, and I'll tie this in, but there's a major conspiracy in this whole story that in 1981, the leader before Noriega, Omar Torrijos, was mysteriously killed in a plane crash.
And afterwards, Noriega becomes the leader of Panama.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So, I remember this.
Yeah.
So, who did we have on that was talking about this?
Either Sheehan?
No, it wasn't Sheehan.
It was the gentleman who was the guy who was.
He was going from country to country, convincing the leaders of other governments.
Confessions of an economic hitman.
Yes.
John Perkins.
What?
Perkins.
Perkins.
Yes.
That's who it was.
Yes.
The economic hitman.
He was partying with these guys.
Yeah.
And he basically said it without saying it that the CIA basically made his plane crash.
Popped him.
Yeah.
So there are two trains of thought, both of which involve Noriega being involved in the assassination that the CIA basically said, hey, Manuel, take care of yourself.
Because he wasn't willing to play ball in the US.
No, because Omar Torrijos was a socialist.
He was like a Maduro or like a Castro.
He had left leaning ideals and he had a complex relationship with the CIA in the United States because there were two coups in the late 1960s it was 68 and 69.
In 68, it was this guy, Boris Martinez and Omar Torrijos, who overthrew Arnulfo Arias, the leader before, who was like an American backed leader.
The US were basically just waiting to see who ultimately came out on top.
And when they saw that it was those two guys, they were like, well, we're going to choose Boris Martinez because Omar Torrijos is a socialist.
He doesn't share the same values as America does.
So Torrijos is sent away.
Torrijos is in Mexico.
And Boris Martinez announces himself as the leader.
There's a little bit more to it, but basically, Martinez becomes the leader.
And then Noriega, Carlos was there too.
It's all in the book, but Carlos and Noriega and a group of guys sneak Torrijos back into the country.
They go to an empty airstrip in.
In the Cherokee province in Panama, which is close to like Costa Rica, they fly Omar Torrijos back in.
They use their headlights on their cars to light up the airstrip.
No lights.
Flies in, they take Torrijos, they come back.
There's another coup in 1969 where Torrijos comes out on top.
After 1969, when Torrijos is the leader of Panama, he refuses to communicate directly with the CIA because the CIA, he knew that the CIA didn't want him in power and actively tried to overthrow him.
So instead of communicating with Torrijos, they CIA communicated with Noriega, his head of intelligence.
So, it takes us to 1981 where Torrijos dies in the plane crash.
Two frames, two trains of thought, frames of thought, whatever you say.
Wasn't his whole family on the plane too?
No, it was.
Just him?
I think it might have been his wife as well, but there wasn't a lot of people on the plane.
But Torrijos, they said his plane crashed into the side of a mountain.
Carlos said he was there at the wreckage and he saw that it did crash into the mountain.
He was there.
Some people say that his plane, eyewitness reports say that they saw his plane explode in midair.
And then the other sort of conspiracy is that, and I spoke to an air traffic controller about this, that when you've.
Or back then, or maybe now, but back then, when you had low visibility, the plane sort of had this almost like sonar system where there are like beacons all over the country that they like sort of project these like sonar images so you could see like the outlines of things.
So you could see like the outline of like these mountains, right?
On your like sonar device within the cockpit.
Whatever, I'm not doing it justice, but you know what?
You kind of get what I'm saying.
But if this air traffic controller was like, if you move one of these beacons, it Projects a different image on your sonar device, like within the cockpit.
And a lot of people think that the beacons were moved for Torrijos's flight intentionally so that the mountain that they crashed into appeared further away than it actually was.
And so they just flew right into the mountain on it, like a foggy day.
Now, that's a great way to do it.
That being said, there's obviously more to it.
I'm sure somebody listening to this will do their research or have read a book and they're like, oh, you know, Killian, like you missed this, you missed that.
But the.
Tracing Political Sources00:04:15
Coming back to the outcomes, what was the outcome of this?
Right.
The CIA's guy steps into power in 1983.
He steps into power, and then all of a sudden, they don't have the middleman to worry about anymore.
They don't have to worry about Torrijos, the guy that they don't communicate with at all.
They only communicate with Noriega.
So now they're communicating with the de facto leader, the dictator of Panama.
And if they want something done, they just go right to the source.
Wow.
Interesting, right?
Like it's.
It's an old story that I think it highlights the framework that the CIA used to use with like all of their sort of foreign affairs or whatnot, like with Saddam Hussein and stuff, like building someone up, using them, and then taking them out, like weapons of mass destruction, like that whole thing.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's, I hope I did that justice.
But that's.
Oh, shit, bro.
Yeah.
Are you working on any other projects or you got any plans for future projects?
I wanted to go to Cuba and do that.
I have a feeling that it's not going to work out, which is fine.
I'm working on sort of like an IRA adjacent story in Ireland about this guy, Nicky Kelly, who was wrongly convicted of being a member of the IRA in the 1970s.
And he fled Ireland.
And he basically, like the crew that were accused of being in the IRA and sort of committing this crime, were proven innocent.
And so Nicky came back to Ireland after fleeing.
And when he came back, they threw him in like a terrorist prison.
And Nicky went on like a hunger strike for like 37 days or something.
And it's like a really incredible story.
But that's like a passion project for me.
This is like an Irish thing.
I would really like to do another Latin American project.
So I'd really like to go.
I think El Salvador is interesting.
I think Bukele is an interesting guy.
Yeah, he is.
And then I really like the sound of.
I really like the sound of Argentina as well, and sort of the political changes that they've been going through for quite a while.
But the instability in Latin America, I think it's very interesting, right?
And I think it all sort of stems back to both American imperialism and then European imperialism as well.
That's the whole thing with the Monroe Doctrine.
You know about that?
Yeah.
I find the Monroe Doctrine very interesting, both from a European perspective and from the American perspective, where essentially people are just carving land in Latin America to extract resources.
Yeah, that whole thing.
Yeah.
And it ties into like what's going on with Ukraine and Russia right now, right?
With us, with NATO basically putting military bases all around Russia.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, this shit happens all over the world and so many like so much rising tension and conflicts that are erupting that have been like boiling for quite a while.
And I think we're, I mean, I'm definitely not alone in thinking this, but like we're at like a boiling point in the world.
That's what it feels like anyway.
It feels like that.
Right.
It's like a boiling point.
So I think that.
I'll, this is the outcome of something that I want to trace back to its source.
And I think I just have to be like specific with what I want.
I don't know quite yet, but, um, but I, Latin America interests me a lot.
I, I really dig it down there.
It's fascinating shit, fascinating history.
That's cool what you're doing, just turning over rocks, trying to find shit that no one's looked at.
Totally.
Trying to find a new angle to it.
Yeah.
It's fucking cool.
Yeah.
Um, we'll link your website below.
Anything else?
Any other, uh, links we should put, uh, where people can find you, social media stuff?
Well, yeah.
Just, I mean, I, not a huge social media guy, but Instagram, um, It's just my name.
It's just done.killian is my Instagram.
And then the website is going to, over the next couple of weeks, it's going to be like filled with those documents so that people can read them for themselves.
Cool.
But the majority of them will be published in the book.