#340: All About Steve dissects how Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories—like Sandy Hook and Parkland false flags—trace back to Steve Pieczenik, a self-proclaimed "Patriot spy" who claimed CIA ties but lacked credible evidence. Pieczenik’s dubious role in the Aldo Moro kidnapping (1978) and ghostwriting for Tom Clancy, paired with Stratford Consulting leaks and WikiLeaks’ silence post-1979, expose a pattern of unverified claims and manipulation. Ultimately, the episode frames Steve as a master of self-mythologizing, whose influence on Jones stems more from persuasive bullshit than real expertise. [Automatically generated summary]
The thing that comes to mind is like you think about parents.
You think about it and I guess this isn't so much advice as it is like just what sticks out in my head of like this was a bad move from like a good source of information.
And so when I'm 10 years old, coming into Missouri, and from what I know of Missouri in advance, is that there are these things called tornadoes that happen there.
As we dig through the past of Alex Jones' show in 2013 to learn more about how he ended up believing that no children died at Sandy Hook, we found that Steve Pieczenik is absolutely the first person to make that argument on air in a way that Alex considers.
He thinks about it.
He even says that it's blowing his mind hearing Steve Pieczenik say these things.
We've encountered Steve many times in the past on Alex's show, and we've delighted in how he and Alex tend to get into fights on air, as they did in a lost episode of our podcast where Alex called Steve, who was in the middle of trying to survive Hurricane Irma.
Alex wanted to talk about how Trump was being surrounded by globalists and he was under attack, but Steve wasn't having any of it because he had water coming in.
And moments like that are really fun, Jordan, because Steve shares a relationship with Alex that most guests don't, in that Alex really needs him, or at least he did for a very long time.
Steve was a former State Department official and an expert in psychological warfare, and his proximity to Alex and his professed respect for Alex's work made him invaluable in terms of making Alex appear credible.
There's no way that Steve didn't understand that dynamic.
So he could just yell at Alex a little bit here and there, which is always so much fun.
It upsets the normal power dynamic of the show, wherein Alex is the unquestioned king of all that he surveys.
The other side effect of this relationship is that Steve was pretty much able to say anything on Alex's show, and Alex had to treat it like a serious statement worth considering.
Like the time, who could forget, when Steve told Alex that Parkland was a false flag.
And once again, I want to thank your audience and you.
What we did was, in fact, to do a psyops on Hillary, which was in effect to create Bernie Sanders to bring him out to co-opt her extreme left and then to bring Biden in to co-opt her middle and then to break up and fractionate her system.
It is kind of funny that on the same show, it's entirely possible to hear a guy who claims to have committed 9-11 as well as the guy who says that 9-11 was a false flag.
The truth of the matter is this is one of the most phenomenal American revolutions I have ever seen and the one we were waiting for, Alex.
I thank you and I thank the audience and I thank the so-called alternative media, which really became the mainstream media.
The reality is Trump had been monitoring this mainstream media for a long time.
I knew it.
He knew it.
Many of us had known that.
And in fact, when he put his name up for the next presidency, he took it and basically ran with it.
And this is the true expression of the moral majority and the fact that we are so tired of the people who committed the crime of 9-11 that once Trump gets in, my suspicion is many of them will be arrested.
So what we have is him pitching this narrative to Alex that he was part of a group of heroes who enlisted Trump to run as president as a counter-coup against Hillary Clinton, who's trying to pull off her own internal soft coup.
Fun fact, the narratives that Steve was promoting on Alex Jones' show in late 2015, as we saw in our 2015 coverage, they're shockingly similar to the things that people who are into QAnon believe.
You know, the idea of they're going to arrest all these people after Trump gets over.
I'm not trying to say that Steve is Q, but I wouldn't be too surprised to find out that the people who were running that scam, the QAnon scam, weren't at least in part inspired by narratives that Steve used to help persuade Alex to support Trump.
Right.
There's so many little elements that are very similar.
Maybe that's something for another episode.
I didn't want to get into it.
Maybe that would be something we should leave to the guys over at QAnon Anonymous.
And then there's perhaps my favorite thing that Steve ever convinced Alex of, and that is the idea that Steve does psyops, but he isn't doing them against the good and noble people who listen to InfoWars.
And he does do manipulative stuff where he was like, Jeb Bush should run.
He's a really great leader.
I really like him.
When he's saying George W. Bush is involved in 9-11 and should, you know, go on trial for treason.
And then it turns out he's been at the Council on Foreign Relations advising them to run Jeb Bush to set Jeb Bush up so they could then make it about 9-11.
So looking over the period of time that we have, the various stretches of time, it's hard not to get the impression that a lot of the ideas that Alex has gotten and that have gotten him in the most trouble trace back to Steve.
But simultaneously, Steve's earliest appearances on Alex's show, claiming that 9-11 was a false flag, created a legitimacy in Alex's content that wouldn't have been there without a purported expert and insider backing them up.
Without being on the vanguard of the 9-11 conspiracy movement, Alex would never have been in the position to become what he later became.
And at least some of that credit for elevating Alex above the level of just another weirdo yelling about shit was getting Steve Pieczenik to say on air that 9-11 was fake in 2002.
That is a massively important piece of Alex's trajectory.
Unfortunately, their relationship soured in 2017, ultimately reaching its breaking point on October 5th, when a caller asked Alex his thoughts about Steve saying that the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen.
So the other conspiracies Steve had fed Alex had kernels of ambiguity to them.
Like, we don't have any videos of Sandy Hook, so who's to say it actually happened?
Alex wants to believe that Bernie was a psyop against Hillary, because that seems fun for him.
And he wants to believe that a team of good guy Patriot spies installed Trump as president to save the Republic.
So he's happy to lap up that bullshit.
But saying that the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen, that's just too much.
Alex was already starting at that point to get blowback about his Sandy Hook coverage.
And if he said that this shooting didn't happen, he had every reason to know that he was tacitly telling his audience that a gigantic number of people were crisis actors.
That Route 91 Harvest Festival had an attendee count of over 20,000 on the day of the shooting.
And that's a ridiculous amount of people to encourage your audience to potentially harass.
Plus, there's a high likelihood that there were multiple Alex Jones listeners at that country music festival, so Alex wouldn't want to alienate them or create some sort of, I don't know what you'd even call it, but like he would be disrespecting, you would risk turning them into enemies.
So I've taken a look at all the available information I can find about Steve Pieczenik, and that's what we're going to discuss here today.
If you're looking for definite answers, I don't have too many of those.
Steve is way too complicated a guy with way too long of a trail for me to ever pretend that I can definitively tell you what he's up to or why he does what he does.
Do you know the thing about his argument for why Las Vegas didn't happen is somehow it is literally the only perhaps or not plausible, but of the implausible arguments that could be made, that one seems to be the most plausible of like, well, you know, Trump's crazy.
He wants the biggest and biggest of everything.
So if he was going to orchestrate a false flag, it would be the biggest one in American history.
So all I can do here is walk you through what's known about Steve Pieczenik's past and see if it matches the character that we've come to know as a wacky and cranky guest on Alex's show who doesn't like bad manners.
Steve Pieczenik was born on December 7th, 1943, the second anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, something that Alex Jones almost certainly thinks is a false flag.
The family relocated to France for some years, then made their way to New York City when Steve was eight years old.
According to his bio, Steve went to Cornell and received his bachelor's degree in pre-med and psychology in 1964, then proceeded to get his medical degree at Cornell as well.
He went on to do his residency at Harvard Medical School and simultaneously pursued a Ph.D. in international relations at MIT.
This timeline has always confused me a little bit.
If you assume that Steve finished his undergrad work in 1964, then the assumption would be that he'd probably complete his MD at Cornell probably in 1968, right?
I mean, generally there's four years of med school.
Now, it should be pointed out that a lot of people do take combined MD-PhD programs that often can take between six to eight years to complete, but that couldn't be what Steve is doing.
So the reason this timeline sticks out to me as kind of fishy is that Steve entered the State Department in 1974.
And it seems unlikely that he would have been able to complete all of that coursework and residency in the time before then.
It's not impossible, but if he did pull that off, he's basically superhuman.
When you add that Steve also claims to have reached the rank of 06 in the military, things become almost impossible to imagine.
Like, generally, it takes 20 years of enlistment to reach the rank of 06.
There are definitely variables that can make things go quicker or slower, but from everything I've read, 20 years seems like a pretty average tenure of someone when they reach that rank.
So now, if you imagine that Steve enlisted on his 18th birthday, he would have to reach that rank seven years quicker than average in order to reach that rank by the time he enters the State Department.
I don't think you can get all the way up there that way, but there is a consideration, too, of like if you're a doctor and you join, apparently you can skip a rank or two.
Then he went on to start his residency and PhD programs.
Even if he got his undergrad work and MD at Cornell out of the way previously, he would still be beginning the second part of his doctoral track at 32.
And unfortunately, that means that he would have to be at the State Department while he's a resident at Harvard and studying at MIT because he would have been 32 in 1974, the same year he's supposed to have joined up with the State Department.
He was just a consultant with the State Department initially, but in 1976, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
So in two years, he rose through the ranks at the State Department, completed his residency, and got a PhD, if you believe his version of the story, based on the ages that he clearly is saying that he was.
And that's not to say that the fact that he hasn't published his transcripts means that they are not real.
That would be kind of faulty of me to accuse.
But I'm just saying that psychologically, I would do that.
I don't publish my transcripts because I wasn't a good student.
So if you read any bio of Steve's, one of the things that you notice is that they're all pretty much the same.
They all have pretty much the same lines.
They all copy and paste.
A lot of the stuff that you find in his Wikipedia page is just taken directly from his bio, which he has on his website, which I don't recommend people go to because if you Google it, it gives you a warning this site might be hacked.
I had to do all of this without going to his website, which is a bit of fun.
But you'll find, if you look at all of his bios, they say, quote, he has been credited with devising successful negotiating strategies and tactics used in several high-profile hostage situations, including the 1976 TWA Flight 355 hostage situation and the 1977 kidnapping of the son of Cyprus's president.
Gotcha.
So these are not things that they're saying he was involved in.
The way I look at it more is the same way that Alex pays people to write articles that he then reports on.
The way that this reporter is clearly talking to Steve, Steve tells him things.
They're in this article in the LA Times, and then Steve uses blurbs from it for his bio.
It's that same circular thing that I see.
That's the feeling that I have.
And it seems strange to me that Robert Toth wrote two articles about Steve Pieczenik in 1978 that are the primary sources for almost every element of Steve's bio.
There are other elements, but they also come from other articles that Steve is the source of.
Is completely unrelated, but a year prior to him writing these two articles about Steve Pieczenik, Robert Toth was the Moscow bureau chief for the LA Times, and he was detained by the KGB on suspicion of being a spy.
I don't know if it's conspiratorial as much as it is, like, maybe intentionally cloudy.
Yeah.
So things get a little more strange when you start to look at the specific cases that are mentioned as the ones that relied on Steve's strategies and consider them from a hostage negotiation standpoint.
First, there's the case of the hijacking of TWA Flight 355 back on September 10th, 1976.
The plane had taken off at LaGuardia when five passengers claimed to have a bomb hijacked the flight.
The bomb was fake, and the hijacking was mostly an extreme publicity stunt by Croatian rebels who were seeking to gain attention for their cause of gaining independence from Yugoslavia.
They had no bomb, and this wasn't a normal terrorist hijacking.
A man who was on the plane related the experience to The Atlantic, saying that the lead hijacker told them, quote, we are going to pass out papers for you to read.
Read them, please.
You should not worry.
We have no intention of killing anybody.
All we want is for our declaration to be published in the American newspapers.
We are not asking for difficult things.
We want the world to recognize the injustices against our people, the people of Croatia.
After that, he said the mood became almost social on the plane, even with the hijackers.
He describes it as friendly.
At a certain point, a passenger is engaged with one of the hijackers in a conversation and argues with him about their political beliefs, which is crazy.
At one of the stops, the hijackers decided to let 30 people go.
They had 25 children and elderly and infirm people that they released, and then they asked the rest of the people if any of them thought they should be allowed to leave because of an illness or another problem.
They let one woman go because she was on her way to get married.
Many passengers began to identify with the hijackers, which many people have pointed out is a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, named after Stockholm Europe.
In his discussion of other hostage situations, Steve has said a good policy is, quote, no ransom, no concessions, no negotiations, which is exactly the opposite of what resolved the TWA 355 situation.
The hijackers released everyone after they got exactly what they wanted, namely people publishing their political message.
The strategy employed in this standoff doesn't seem in line with Steve's stated beliefs, nor does it match the techniques he's used in situations he's been directly involved in.
And yet, every single bio credits his innovations for resolving this hijacking, and yet they never specify what innovations they mean, which I find very curious.
But also, most people say that a good strategy is to show willingness to negotiate because that buys you time and offers the possibility that the people who have taken hostages might screw up or they might change their mind.
So the confusion about this first case is only heightened when you consider the second case that Steve's methods are said to have resolved.
That's the December 1977 kidnapping of Achilles Kiprianu, the son of the president of Cyprus.
The kidnappers demanded the release of 25 prisoners, and if they didn't get what they wanted, they were going to send the president his son's head.
Ultimately, negotiations did not lead to the freeing of prisoners, like the 25 they'd asked for.
But the negotiators did make concessions.
The kidnappers were allowed safe passage out of the country in exchange for Achilles' release.
These are situations where completely different approaches were taken to hostage negotiation, and neither of them match with the way that Steve operates, based on instances we definitely know about that he was directly involved in.
It isn't like hostages were never taken before 1974 when Steve supposedly entered the State Department.
And from what I can tell, these cases that he's credited with, designing the methods used to resolve, were actually resolved using pretty standard tactics that long predate Steve's involvement, his education, his employment.
I don't know what, without anybody ever giving more specifics, I don't know what they're talking about.
One of these situations was the March 9th, 1977 hostage situation in Washington, D.C.
A group of Hanafi Muslims, who were a radical group that had splintered away from the Nation of Islam, took over three buildings in D.C., the B'nai Brith Center, the Islamic Center of Washington, and City Hall.
The leader of the group, Hamas Kalas, made a number of demands.
Four of his children had been murdered in 1973, and he was demanding that the men who are incarcerated for that crime, as well as the murderer of Malcolm X, be handed over to them so they could deal with them.
For one, Kalas wanted the $750 back that he was fined for contempt of court, stemming from his disruption of the trial of the killers he wanted handed over.
In Jeffrey David Simon's book, The Terrorist Trap, America's Experience with Terrorism, the event is discussed.
And according to his telling of the story, quote, the incident was finally resolved with the assistance of three Muslim diplomats, the ambassadors of Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt, who met with Khalas and other Hanafi leaders for more than three hours and read to them from the Quran, appealing to their consciences.
So this is incredibly complicated for me to make sense of because I can't escape the fact that a March 13th, 1977 article in the Eugene Register Guard does seem to confirm that Steve was involved in the response to the standoff, saying he was, quote, in the picture and, quote, working side by side with police chief Maurice Colinane.
At the same time, Jeffrey David Simon's book doesn't mention Steve at all, but it does say, quote, also joining the negotiations were U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Earl Silbert, and Deputy Attorney General Designee Peter Flaherty.
The book even quotes Police Chief Maurice Colinane, and there's no mention of Steve.
He mentions the head of the FBI and Attorney General being at the command post, but everything we can learn about Steve's involvement comes from his own mouth, either through his telling of the story or quotes he's provided to newspapers.
Apparently, he wasn't happy that he wasn't called in to resolve the situation, telling reporter Georgie Ann Geyer, quote, I had to walk into the operations center on my own after 72 hours.
This is a little confusing to me, because here we have a guy who's revolutionized the entire world of hostage negotiation, who's called in whenever there's a big crisis unfolding, who's considered a genius in high-pressure situations, and no one calls him when the big game is starting here with this Iranian hostage situation.
That just doesn't track.
If the people in the State Department knew that they had the king of hostage negotiators at their disposal, there's literally no reason they wouldn't use him when a potentially explosive hostage situation breaks out.
I'm guessing Alex might want to write this off as the State Department secretly not wanting the crisis to be diffused.
So they keep Steve away from it, knowing that he would easily be able to set things straight.
A more real-world explanation may be that they didn't trust Steve, and that maybe that has something to do with his most recent, at that point, high-profile job.
One of the few things we absolutely know Steve was involved in, and that is the botched negotiations to free the kidnapped Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro.
This is one of the more documented pieces of Steve's history.
In 1976, Aldo Moro and the Italian Communist Party had joined together in what's now known as the Historic Compromise, where they began developing a political alliance where they would share governmental power.
They were going to call it the Three-Fifths Compromise because it made sense in that situation, but then they heard about ours and they were like, no, historic.
Like, it was one of the first times that communist parties would be involved in a coalition government.
Right, right, right.
Up till that point.
So, perhaps not coincidentally, the day Moro was kidnapped, he was on his way to parliament to attend the historic first joint voting of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party.
The kidnapping severely hurt the Communists and put this attempt at cooperation completely on ice.
Moro had been kidnapped by terrorists on March 16th, 1978.
He was ultimately held for 55 days, during which time the Red Brigades gave him a criminal trial.
Apparently, he was found guilty because on May 9th, his body was found in the trunk of a car.
And everybody that I can find specifically points out that the car that he was found in was equidistant from the Communist Party and Christian Democrat headquarters as if it's a message of written all over the place.
And I don't know if it's true, but I don't know if it's.
It could be apocryphal, but goddamn if it's apocryphal in every single report.
So for three weeks during this period, Steve Pieczenik was secretly working and meeting with the Italian authorities and intelligence, helping craft a strategy to negotiate the release of Aldo Moro.
However, in April, Steve left Italy and gave up, having decided that Moro was the victim of a setup and that there wasn't anything and anyone in the government that he could really even trust.
Quote, given the deployment of paramilitary forces, I found it increasingly difficult to believe that they could not find him, that they had no clues to follow.
I realized that the whole situation was compromised.
What I suspected, and that was why I left early, was that they didn't really care to pull Moro out alive.
This is one version of the story that he's told, that he was just a good guy trying to get the job done, but everyone else, they were a bunch of snakes.
In 2014, the International Business Times reported that, quote, prosecutors in Rome said there's serious evidence suggesting Steve Pieczenik, a former State Department international crisis manager, participated in the murder that shocked Italy.
Considering he'd more or less admit as much on tape six years prior, I don't think that's too shocking of a report.
Both Steve and Italian Interior Minister Francesco Cosiga have admitted that they released a false statement attributed to the kidnappers, known as communication number seven, which announced that Moro was dead, though he was still alive in captivity.
Steve admitted that they did this to gauge the public's reaction to news of Moro's death, as well as to send a message to the Red Brigades that they didn't care whether Moro lived or died, that they considered him dead already.
Later, this information came out, and both of them have admitted that they sent this fake communication, which was part of trying to manipulate the kidnappers.
Man.
Which probably led them to not believe that they had a bargaining chip anymore.
So to quote Steve speaking about the Red Brigades, quote, I drew them into a trap where the only thing they could do eventually was kill Aldo Moro.
Steve literally literally says that he did this through a psychological operation, a psyop.
Steve's goal was not to free Aldo Moro.
His goal was to protect the established power structure.
And once it got to a point where it was decided that Moro was a threat, he worked to get Moro killed.
Freeing him wouldn't be advantageous, since Moro's letters indicated a feeling of being betrayed by his associates, and they worried that if he made it out alive, he would use their inaction to save inaction to save him against them politically.
Simultaneously, they couldn't take the risk of the Red Brigades not killing Moro, because if they kept him alive long enough and treated him well, his animosity toward the people who were not rescuing him could grow to the point where he might leak information to the Red Brigade to hurt them politically, because he'd get like the Stockholm syndrome kind of thing.
And meanwhile, held in his cell in the Via Montalcini, the hostage is interrogated every day by his Red Brigade kidnappers.
Convinced that the country is politically and economically enslaved, they attempt to make him confess to links that exist between the Italian state and multinational companies.
The comrades who interrogated Moro were expecting him to confirm what they had imagined about the Italian state.
to confirm that there existed an imperialist multinational state and that the United States were the brains behind this vast globalized restructuring.
In fact, Morrow talked about a reality that was much more complex and not so easy to decipher.
...complicata, molto meno decifrava.
and the combis quickly felt they were being duped.
They said that Moro was deliberately not answering their questions, but trying to waste their time, or rather trying to gain some time.
Our leader, Moretti, couldn't get Moro to give way.
According to him, Morrow's answers were partly true, but only partially.
The reality was much more complex, but for a brigade member, it was incomprehensible.
For us, reality was much more simple.
There were causes and effects, that's all.
The complexity, the intrigues, the overlapping, the contradictions.
We couldn't understand all that.
After a few days, the interrogation stopped and Moro began to write for himself.
He didn't seek to convince us because he understood that in no way did we want to kill him.
He knew that his negotiating partner was now the state and no longer the Red Brigades.
So in an interview Steve did with the St. Petersburg Times from April 21st, 1978, he's pretty clear that he thinks the Morrow situation worked out well.
Because the government didn't have to resort to extreme actions, which he felt would threaten the credibility and viability of the state.
Of course, like I said, in 1978, when he's talking to this newspaper, he was pretending that he and Kasinga hadn't sent out fake communication number seven.
If you're a hostage negotiator and you're dealing, you're sent in by the State Department at Jimmy Carter's behest to go and try and resolve a situation where a head of state of an allied country has been kidnapped by rebels, you don't necessarily want to come out of that with a dead prime minister in the trunk of a car.
It's not a great thing.
So my feeling on it is possibly that Steve Pieczenik punted on this, just screwed up, and then wasn't involved in the Iranian hostage crisis because he had just been coming off this terrible outing where the fucking prime minister got assassinated.
Without exception, whenever Steve's bio is repeated, it will say that he was, quote, instrumental in getting the accords signed.
And that to me is very interesting.
It seems entirely likely that Steve could have been at the staff that was there at the time.
It's in between the Morrow affair and his resignation in 1979, so it's believable that he would be there as a State Department attache.
The problem comes in when you try to define what the word instrumental means, because no source I can find that doesn't trace directly back to Steve credits him with being instrumental in the accords.
I mean, so here's the only thing that I could say: is that obviously the guy at the, you know, if you're an aide or a secretary or something along those lines, sure, generally speaking, they do all the legwork and the face gets all the accolades.
But in this type of situation, usually those guys are not listening to Steve Pieczenik, deputy assistant to the Secretary of State.
And so, like, yeah, it is a cool position to be in, and I'd never knock somebody for reaching that level of achievement.
But it's also easy to say that you're doing a lot more than you are, possibly.
Now, one of the things they find incredibly difficult is that Steve Pieczenik definitely was in that position from 1974 when he was a consultant to 1976 when he became a deputy assistant secretary of state to 1979 when he quit over the Iran hostage situation.
I know that to be true from contemporary reports, from definitive things you can trace down.
He was in that role.
According to Steve, when he's on Alex's show, according to his bio, he took a little time off and then returned and served under Reagan and Bush Sr. Gotcha.
I have no idea what the situation is, but there's a lack of clarity there.
So we get into the early 80s here.
After the Iranian hostage crisis and Steve's resignation from the State Department, he starts showing up on places like CBS and ABC, talking to a number of newspapers also.
He's offering his expert opinion on how things are going with hostages.
In all instances, he's credited as a psychiatrist.
Then, on February 17th, 1981, Steve formally accuses the State Department of sanctioning the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubbs.
Dobbs had been kidnapped by militants, and as the story goes, the U.S. urged patience and negotiation, whereas the Afghanistan government took a more rash approach and attacked the militants, which led to the ambassador's death.
There was tremendous fallout from this incident as the U.S. began to change its stance towards Afghanistan and drastically cut back foreign aid.
Steve claimed he was in the room when permission was given for the Afghan forces to attack, but no evidence has ever been produced to back those claims up.
He said he knows the name of the official who gave permission, but quote, doesn't want to identify the official because he doesn't want the case to become an indictment of just one person, but to focus the attention on the U.S. anti-terrorist policy.
This is shockingly similar to what he told Alex Jones about 9-11, saying he knows the names of generals who are involved in the false flag, but wouldn't reveal them.
According to the United Press International, an article on that, quote, State Department spokesman William Dice said officials involved in the Dubs kidnapping had been consulted and communications logs reviewed.
And then he said, the allegations by Pieczenik are incorrect.
All concerned stressed the need for restraint as well as avoiding a precipitous assault.
It strains credulity for me to imagine that Steve Pieczenik could be involved in the bungled Moro negotiations, quit over not being involved in the Iranian hostage crisis, then take to the media to accuse the State Department of being complicit in the murder of an ambassador, then get his job back at the State Department.
That feels like, you know, it feels like this kind of an act of making public accusations like this would probably disqualify someone from getting a sensitive job back.
In articles in the New York Times from 1982, 1985, and 1991, Steve is consistently credited as a former member of the State Department who is now in private practice.
And all this is during the time that he supposedly was back in the State Department under Reagan and Bush Sr.
There's no indication from contemporary sources that he ever worked in the government in an official capacity past his resignation in 1979.
And that would make total sense based on his behavior and his actions.
In a March 12th, 1977 article in the St. Petersburg Times discussing the B'nai-Brith Hanafi standoff, Steve said, quote, this was a paradigm of unusual cooperation between different agencies and countries.
Maybe it's instinct, or maybe Steve did his homework in advance.
But looking at this exchange, he seems to know exactly how to ingratiate himself to Alex.
Alex brings up that Steve is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations in a really skeptical way.
And Steve reassures him that the CFR is basically a rotary club.
He hasn't been to a meeting in years, and he's also a member of the NRA.
So what do you think about that?
I'm a member of that.
Yeah.
Minutes into the interview, Alex is saying shit like, quote, we're talking to Dr. Steve Pieczenik, and he's one of the info warriors in four administrations, crafting much of the policy that we've seen over the last 20, 30 years.
And I'm so honored to have you on the show tonight.
I think after hearing about the previous journalists writing and looking to Steve for blurbs, it makes way more sense that he would be as polished and good as he is in 2002 to now.
Like he's already honed his bullshit for almost 20 years.
He's been working out at those remote gates doing one-nighters, getting that in, and then when Alex comes along, he's at the height of his fucking power.
As Steve continued making appearances on Alex's show, particularly in the 2011-2012 timeframe, he took particular aim at President Obama.
He called him a sociopath and unfit to be in office.
And in fairness to Steve, he'd also said some pretty horrible things about George H.W. Bush while Bush was still in office.
He'd called him, quote, clinically depressed and obviously in the midst of a serious identity crisis.
And even further fairness to Steve, in 1978, he complained to the L.A. Times about how people were lazy in psychoanalyzing President Carter, saying, quote, I personally feel it's unethical to write psychohistory about a president while he's still in office.
These studies do not take adequately into account the many constraints, the checks and balances, the many hats which the president wears.
One of them is called Putin KGB Forever, which is really funny because he's pretty pro-Putin in 2015 when he's talking to Alex.
But he wrote another article in Volume 22 of the American Intelligence Journal.
It's called A Mandate for Intelligence, in which he argues that the national security infrastructure in America was woefully underutilizing resources that could be gained by gathering human intelligence.
He describes a bit of the complaints that he has like this: quote: Unfortunately, effective integration of civilian military intelligence, counterintelligence, and psyops has been absent from the government for well over a decade.
This has led to a serious inability to predict human behavior and prevent evolving crises.
Crises.
This is a strange position for Steve to have when compared to the positions he takes on Alex's show.
In one of his appearances on the show, Steve literally tells Alex, quote, It has to do with the famous technique in warfare that we call the stand down, false flag, deception, and denial.
It was done by LBJ during the war in Vietnam, where we had the Gulf of Tonkin, and he claimed we had a false flag operation and we had to shoot the Vietnamese because they shot at us.
That was wrong.
Many men died for that.
Many men went to war.
He seems very against false flags, deception, psyops, counterintelligence, when he's talking to Alex.
When he's writing in the American Intelligence Journal, he seems to be pro those things and say that they've been gone for well over a decade in the United States.
One of Steve's suggestions for how to resolve the problem of limited use of human intelligence is to, quote, develop open source predictive intelligence, which is to say that he was interested in taking already public information and using it for intelligence gathering purposes.
Quote, what is needed is an up and down change in the culture of intelligence community, where 90% of what's required for operations already exists in open source venues such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and most importantly, the internet.
As usual, American entrepreneurs have anticipated this intelligence conundrum and accordingly have developed extremely capable software for data mining, cataloging, managing restricted content, and predicting behavior.
Greater cooperation between the business community and the intelligence community is imperative.
He's literally like, I am angling and hopeful for a massive surveillance state, fucking utilizing already public information to control and manipulate the population.
And by the way, Alex, I'm against the globalists, who are absolutely.
Did you say that they were doing exactly that?
Well, kudos to everybody else doing that and fuck the globalists.
And this wasn't a stray idea that Steve had in this 2004 article.
In 2001, he was the CEO of a consulting firm called Strategic Intelligence Associates.
And in his capacity, he was profiled in a November 30, 2001 post in the National Defense magazine, arguing that the intelligence gathering should be outsourced to the private sector.
It seems very strange for me that in all the times I've heard Steve on Alex's show, I've never heard it come up that Steve was the head of a consulting firm that was advocating for the creation of private spy businesses and advocating for spying cooperation between the government and tech startups.
It really seems like that's something Alex would be massively against.
unidentified
Yeah, it's half of his content at the present day.
And I don't know in his now, if I were, I suppose looking at it from his perspective in that kind of field, that would be something that you say to a higher-up in the spy world, and they'd be like, genius.
I can't tell you why what he's saying in this journal doesn't seem to match at all with what Alex believes or what he leads Alex to believe.
Because if he was like talking with Alex and he's like, oh, also, I run an intelligence consulting business that is super into creating private spy companies.
In interviews with Alex Jones, the story has gone so far as to be that Steve himself is the inspiration for Jack Ryan, which based on everything I can tell, doesn't seem true.
But it does probably lead one to assume that much like other writers that Steve has been in the orbit of, he insinuated himself into Tom Clancy's circle by being very flattering.
Op Center began in 1995 and Netforce in 1999, whereas the character of Jack Ryan debuted in 1984 as Hunt for Red October and had been the focus of six books by the time either of these spin-off series began.
It was less of a creative partnership that these two men had.
It was more of a business venture.
Steve and Tom were the creators of the series, but they didn't write any of the books in the Op Center or Netforce series.
A man named Jeff Roven wrote most of the Op Center books, and Steve Perry, not the guy from Journey, wrote the Netforce ones.
They called the books Tom Clancy's Op Center and Tom Clancy's Netforce, knowing that most people would just assume that meant Clancy had written them, as opposed to just signifying they exist in what I'm going to call the extended Clancy verse.
Unfortunately, Jordan, all good things have to come to an end.
And the same is true for Steve and Tom's friendship and their business partnership.
In 1999, Tom Clancy got a divorce.
And in the 2005 settlement, his ex-wife, Wanda King, got control over Jack Ryan Limited Partnership, the entity that was used to publish the books written by other people with Tom's name on them.
Jack Ryan Limited Partnership was in a joint venture with SNR Literary Incorporated, an entity owned by Steve Pieczenik.
With Clancy's ex-wife taking control of Jack Ryan Limited, Steve was now in business with Tom's ex-wife, or Steve was out of business.
Yeah, it's like I think their reasoning was basically like, in good faith, you made it totally fine for someone else to write books with your name on them.
Also, in the divorce, it came out that the reason for the separation was that Wanda had discovered that Clancy had cheated on her with a woman nicknamed Ping Pong, who he had met on the internet.
When the chips were down and Clancy was trying to take his name off these books that he no longer had any control over because his wife was in charge of Jack Ryan Limited, Steve sided with King and testified against Clancy, alleging that his motivation to take his name off the books was to hurt King financially.
From everything I can tell, there's no reason to give Steve any elevated status with Tom Clancy as if Steve was responsible for his success or anything like that.
Some of them, Alex might have been inspired to believe, based on Steve.
For instance, Bloodheat is about an evil cabal working in a conspiracy to create a mutated bioweapon, which could make the bubonic plague even more transmittable.
The Mind Palace has to do with psychiatry being used nefariously.
Pax Pacifica involves conspiracies and power struggles in China that ripple over into the United States.
All these vaguely intersect with major Alex Jones narratives.
But Steve's 1992 book, Maximum Vigilance, is perhaps the best example of his literature having strange parallels with the things that he's told Alex.
The central conflict in that book is about how a fictionalized version of President Bush was crazy and needed to be removed from office using the 25th Amendment.
Interestingly, around the time of the book's release, Steve went around to all the places, all the media places that would talk to him, and he was out there just accusing George H.W. Bush of being crazy.
I have zero doubt that if Alex's show existed at that point, he would have used it as a platform to spread the Bush is crazy idea.
Steve's comments got him in some trouble, and he was reprimanded by the American Medical Association, which ultimately led to him leaving the American Medical Association.
He said that Bush was, quote, clinically depressed and obviously in the midst of a serious identity crisis.
No one else was putting forth these sorts of accusations or gossip.
And it's super relevant to point out that there was a little bit more than a passing similarity between the book he was selling at the time and the portrait of reality he was presenting.
Unsurprisingly, the hero of maximum vigilance is, quote, Deziax Clark.
This guy is a, quote, psychiatrist and State Department crisis manager with a taste for kinky sex who works his way through layers of deceit, betrayal, torture, and assassination to uncover the multiple conspiracies afoot.
In the book, Clark, clearly a fictionalized version of Steve, discovers that the president, who's clearly a stand-in for President Bush, has Marfan syndrome.
That's the condition that he has that makes Deziax Clark need to get him out of office.
That book came out in 1992.
When Steve started coming on Alex Jones' show, one of the ways he impressed Alex was arguing that Osama bin Laden had died back in 2001 and he had died of Marfan syndrome.
Marfan syndrome is something that would have been almost a death sentence in the period of time that Steve was coming up in the world.
In the 50s and 60s, the prognosis for someone with Marfan would not be good.
Death from cardiovascular complications often would happen by the time the patient was in their 20s.
However, modern medical science has made big breakthroughs.
And for the most part, it's a relatively manageable condition now, with predicted lifespans of people with Marfan syndrome being comparable to the general population.
So I don't necessarily, I mean, the thing that I think is that Steve knows of this thing that most people don't know anything about.
And it's a great thing to throw in as a creative device.
Especially he clearly did it in his book, Maximum Vigilance, as a plot device.
And now he's clearly repurposed it as a plot device to help convince Alex that Osama bin Laden was dead long ago.
And that's exactly what you would want to tell Alex is some disease that he has never heard of, that's so rare that nobody listening to the show is going to follow up on.
And Alex is going to pretend like he already knew all about.
He starts writing thrillers and they're not getting much traction.
He meets up with Tom Clancy, starts working with him on this, and then that sort of falls apart.
And I don't know what his fucking game is with Alex.
Like, I don't know.
Some people think that he's running a psyop on him and that he, you know, he was infiltrating the Patriot community in order to bring them down or something like that.
And I find that argument to be completely uncredible.
I think that there is some viability to that theory.
I can't prove it, obviously.
But one of the questions that comes up to support the argument that he is legit is the fact that he knows a lot about the intelligence community.
He knows a lot of names.
He knows a lot of dates.
He talks like an expert.
I believe that some of this could be explained by a piece of his reading diet that was accidentally revealed in 2012.
In 2012, Wikileaks released a ton of information from the intelligence group Stratford.
Included in that dump of documents was an email chain from 2011 where Steve Pieczenik was complaining to customer service: quote, I bought several Stratford books several weeks ago, but have not received them.
Could someone inform me as to what happened?
From this, we learned that Steve is a customer of Stratford who produces intelligence assessments.
And we also learned Steve's phone number and the fact that he uses an AOL email address, which you wouldn't think someone in his position would do, particularly when emailing with an intelligence contracting company.
All the books Steve ordered were the works of George Friedman, the founder of Stratford.
In his exchange with customer service, Steve implies that Stratford has his visa number on file, which seems to indicate that he might be a regular customer and consumer of their products.
This impression is strengthened by another email from 2009, where Steve is responding to a bulk email, like a mass email that got sent out by Stratford.
It got sent to all their subscribers, and he's responding very snippily.
It appears from his response that an auto-mailing that he doesn't like.
Another email from 2007 includes Steve on a list of, quote, premium users of Stratford.
One email has him listed as the holder of a lifetime membership.
In 2005, Steve sent Stratford the following email: quote, happy holidays.
Continue the great job.
Soon, we will not need our expensive, ineffective, bloated government agencies.
I would venture to guess that someone who reads the premium content, including their daily intelligence reports produced and released by Stratford, reads them pretty regularly to the point where he interacts with them to wish them a happy holiday and wish for the downfall of government agencies, that's probably a person who would be able to sound really well versed in geopolitics and intelligence stuff the way Steve does.
That's just a theory.
But it would kind of tend to explain how Steve is able to sound like an expert in this field when he probably hasn't been involved in decades.
He just reads a lot of Stratford publications who put out intelligence assessments professionally.
Now, what's interesting about this is that literally every single classified document that's been released that mentions Steve comes from the period of 1976 to 1979.
There's nothing that's been released that would tend to indicate his continued involvement in government past the point where he quit because of the Iran hostage crisis.
Steve Pachenicks' name only exists in the timeframe you would expect it to, and in emails he's sent to Stratford as a paying customer of their materials.
It doesn't prove anything still, but it does, like, if our working thesis is, well, based on all available information that doesn't trace back to Steve or an article in the paper where Steve is the primary source of information, he left the State Department in 1979 and has not worked officially in the government ever since.
If that's our working theory, I keep finding things that reinforce that.
The fact that every newspaper article after 1979 refers to him as a former State Department official.
The fact that these WikiLeaks consistently go straight through with him being mentioned as a State Department only during that timeframe.
It's hard for me to overcome that.
But like I said, if there's proof, I'll change my tune.
I assume it's because it's the easiest to get into, get out of, and scam people on because you can make up whatever it is you want to say about it, and your confirmation or your placebo effect is going to give you just enough to get by on.
There's no regulation of the market whatsoever.
And you're basically private labeling everybody else's manufactured pills.
So you get a storefront, you get a thing, and if you don't like it, you just close it all down and burn it up for insurance money.
So I've about reached the end of where things I've looked into.
And I intentionally didn't want to explore too much the idea that Steve's counter-coup narrative and all that stuff kind of is very similar to QAnon.
We already have gone greatly in depth on our podcast about Steve's involvement in convincing Alex to support Trump.
And so I felt like that would be rehashing too much territory.
But outside of this, I think the image that I come away from this with is like we're seeing a pretty strong indication that Steve Pieczenik is involved with Alex Jones turning around on Sandy Hook.
We have seen his involvement in convincing Alex to support Trump.
These are two major decisions that Alex made that have negatively affected his career to a point that is almost unexpressible.
And it has been done based on, as it appears, based on the advice and guidance of somebody who, when I look at it, all the chips are down, I would never think is a credible person to talk to.
Even if I didn't know any of the stuff that I've looked into for this episode, if you told me a psych warfare guy wants to talk to me and promises not to do psych warfare on me, I would say I pass.
No matter what information he gives, he can give it to me in writing.
I don't want to talk to him.
I do not trust myself not to get completely bamboozled by it.
He appears to have exactly the right amount of credentials one would need to be able to convince people who are inclined to believe him that he had been everywhere and he has done everything.
Ultimately, when I look at all this available evidence about Steve Pieczenik, what comes to mind is a line from his 1985 novel, Bloodheat. Quote, every life is exciting, depending on how you paint it.
But he might be really, really talented in that field.
He might be very gifted in understanding how people's brains work, which is what allows you to be able to spin the yarns he does and get involved in the situations he does.
I don't know.
But again, like I said, I want to be totally clear.
There is an incredibly small possibility that a lot of his resume is true and there's just no evidence of it.
That being said, the stuff he tells Alex is still bullshit.
Which is fun when you consider his arguments with Alex about manners or how he was mad when Alex was supporting Neil Gorsuch being on the Supreme Court.
Steve got really mad at him about how we can't have a neocon on the court.
Yeah, it's fun when he's cranky at Alex, but it is what are you going to do?
So I don't know if we have a definitive conclusion, but that's the end of the episode.
Make your own conclusions, what you will, about this whole matter.
I just thought it was important to, as we're in the 2013 period where Steve has appeared, I think it is essential for us to have a better understanding of when he comes on and is like, I am a complete expert in all of these things.
What is true about that?
We couldn't do that within the span of an episode that wasn't fully dedicated to this.
But an episode of our podcast will emerge from, actually, a hand will emerge from the summoning circle, and it will give you an episode of our podcast.