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Dec. 24, 2017 - No Agenda

02:08:21

993: Let Them Speak #1

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	Adam Curry, John C. Devorak.
	And Sunday, December 24th, 2017, this is your award-winning Gimbo Nation Media Assassination, episode 9 or 9 or 3.
	This is No Agenda.
	Celebrating the UN Protectorate of Chirac and broadcasting almost live from downtown Austin, Tejas, capital of the drone, Star State, in the Cludio, in the morning, everybody.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, where I'm not really here today, this is a recording.
	I'm John C. Devorak.
	It's Crackpot and Buzzkill in the morning.
	We get better at these as we go along, don't we?
	I don't think so.
	Okay.
	Well, Merry Christmas, John.
	Tomorrow's the big day.
	Merry Christmas to you and Merry Christmas to everybody listening.
	Yeah, tomorrow is the big day and it's a nice Monday Christmas.
	It's perfect for everybody to get a little extra time off, although I think next week everybody takes the whole week off.
	Oh really?
	Who gets to do that?
	We don't get to do that.
	We have a full show.
	Kids.
	Kids.
	Yeah, we're going to be back on Thursday live because this is a special show so you could go to Chicago and I could go shopping at the last minute.
	Important stuff.
	Yes, because you like to get everything on the cheap and celebrate.
	I like to get it at the last minute because it's like a men's club.
	I've been a member of this club for many, many years.
	Yeah, you go in there with all guys.
	It's not pretty.
	Oh, no, it's not pretty, but everybody knows what's going on, and it's all men.
	Yeah, you all give that look like, eh, eh.
	Yeah, there we are.
	The head nod, right?
	We're here again this year.
	Hey, how you doing this year?
	Good.
	I'm sorry, so I was going to say, what do you have lined up for us on today?
	Well, so when did I go on Infowars?
	Like, was that not two months ago when I met Steve Pachanek?
	It was longer than that, wasn't it?
	Maybe.
	Everyone says, Dr.
	Steve Pachanek.
	I don't know, Steve.
	Steve Pachanek, who is, as far as I'm concerned, the psychological warfare master of our U.S. government.
	Could be.
	It could be.
	It could not be.
	Yeah, it could be just a disinformation artist for all you know.
	But if you look at his Wikipedia and you look at every other...
	Every other biography that he does check out.
	I mean, he really did hold these positions.
	He really was...
	You know, he was part of the hostage negotiation team for the hostages in Iran.
	I mean, he's done so many things, but the thing that annoyed me...
	And, you know, after I did that appearance on the Seed Man show...
	He got in touch with me.
	He's like, I want to talk with you regularly.
	You guys have become buddies.
	Yeah, he's my handler.
	I always tell him that.
	He says, no, I'm not your handler.
	Okay.
	Because he knows who the handler is, and it's not him.
	He knows it's you.
	But he's a very interesting fellow.
	He loves talking, but he always gets cut off, certainly whenever he's on Infowars.
	But I don't think I've ever really seen him just in a normal interview without commercials, and we can just tell his stories.
	And he's got stories that you can just...
	Let the guy talk!
	That's the idea.
	Exactly.
	No pre-interview, no setup of questions, just...
	And this is about two hours, I think, unedited.
	Holy crap.
	Yeah, it was easy.
	And while he's talking, I'm like, I'm listening to the stories.
	I'm like, let me check this out.
	And he has the names, the dates.
	He knows exactly what everyone was doing.
	So that must be a part of his thing.
	Yeah, his skill.
	But we talked about, oh man, just so much.
	It was in a way a bit like a...
	A bit unstructured, like the No Agenda show, so it kind of fits in with our format.
	No clips, nothing like that.
	Just him talking.
	And I think that, for me, after talking to him, I want to believe everything he says, but some of it is so unbelievable that it's just hard.
	It's hard.
	It's hard.
	And I'm the first guy to be an easy target for me.
	Like, oh yeah, I'm all in on that.
	Well, I was thinking about this, and so I think we got together and talked about not interrupting this conversation.
	In other words, when we do these shows, typically we stop in the middle and ask for donations, and we're not going to do that this time.
	We're going to go right to the end and then just sign it off.
	And I want to mention to people, though, that because we're not doing donations, I have a few kind of housekeeping issues.
	One, anyone who was executive producer for this show or associate executive producer Based on the donations and any donations that come in that came in after last show and is coming in today and the next day that will all be pushed to Thursday.
	We're having a real show on Thursday and you'll get a longer donation segment but it'll all be there so don't have to worry about that.
	And I want to remind people that we do The shows, but we can't really promote them as much, the donation part as much, because there's no thank yous.
	But I want to remind you, Dvorak.org, D-V-O-R-A-K.org, O-R-G slash N-A, if you want to think about helping us out.
	I have never, ever, ever in 10 years, I don't think, heard you spell out your last name.
	Right.
	I don't think I have ever before, and I realize it was probably a mistake.
	Yes, because the way to remember it is...
	I've been tapping in DEV, and I don't know.
	I can't find the DEV. Where's the DEV? I can't find the DEVORAC.org.
	So there you go.
	All right.
	Well, we'll say goodbye at the end of this special show.
	But you're right.
	Remember us and our value for value model at thevorak.org slash NA. So now, without interruption, our special for this Christmas, which should be nice with a little eggnog by the fireplace and everyone else looking at you like you're an idiot as you're snickering away with your earbuds in.
	My interview with Dr.
	Steve Pachenik.
	Steve, you're one of the most interesting people I know, and this is really why I wanted to speak with you, is because I never really get a chance to listen to you finish a thought or finish a sentence except on your own videos and your own website, because you're always getting interrupted by commercials or there's never enough time, and I feel like I've never really heard a longer interview with you.
	You know, that's a good point, Adam.
	It's probably a metaphor for my life.
	One of the reasons that I never finish or nobody allows me to finish the idea.
	No, I think it's really important to understand it in a way you picked up a very crucial dynamic for me.
	Nobody really wants to hear what I have to say.
	Many times, even in medical school or elsewhere, I kind of talk about the future.
	And it's obvious to me what's apparent to me is not obvious to others.
	So they cut me off and I learned to keep quiet or, you know, make a joke and then just pass the time away.
	But you hit it on the head.
	I mean, this has been true since I was a kid.
	And I think this also determined your career, which is almost like a dichotomy when you look at your Wikipedia, for lack of a better place to go look at your career.
	Well, go ahead.
	No, please.
	Wikipedia is not accurate, but it doesn't matter to me.
	I mean, it's not relevant.
	My career really was a series of ideas and ambitions that could not be immediately realized.
	In other words, very early on in my life, I understood that I was going to do something creative.
	I was a piano player for a classical pianist.
	That's a fancy way of saying it.
	For many years, but I knew I could never end up to be a composer.
	Were you not somewhat of a prodigy even when you were young playing piano?
	I don't know.
	I don't know about a prodigy, but I did play on the Young American Artist Series and I did play many well-known, I hate to say tunes, but Music, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and I played on WNYC, and I played at Town Hall.
	But one of the key issues, and I think you get to it very quickly, is I didn't want to perform.
	What I wanted to do was to create.
	Now, I knew I couldn't create music.
	I didn't have the background.
	But there was a compulsion in me to really do writing.
	Since I didn't speak English and I came to this country with only two languages, Spanish and In French, it was a real challenge for me to say, wow, this is an incredible language.
	And at school, we really didn't learn English very well.
	And it was incumbent upon me to learn how to say things or to translate them.
	And even until today, sometimes I write in an awkward sentence.
	And my significant other, Dasha, says, this is European.
	This is not American.
	It sometimes even sounds a bit rude.
	Well, that's correct.
	And, you know, I don't intend it to be rude at times, but when I want to be rude, I'll be rude.
	But very often, I don't intend it to be rude, and then I understand that the construct is really...
	Now, was this when you were in Cuba?
	No.
	Actually, I left Cuba when I was about four or five in the late 40s, early 50s.
	My parents...
	We're very prescient about the notion of communism coming in because my mother had been through the communist regime.
	She said, I'm not going through another one.
	And they came here to the United States and my father was a physician.
	He'd been in the French army and that unfortunately was defeated in six weeks.
	And his first and last order on the French army was retreat.
	So I pretty well understood France from that point on.
	Nothing's changed.
	It's still the same.
	Well, it's true.
	It's still the same except for the Vietnam War where they literally hoodwinked us into a combat situation which was inane.
	And the French had a Great ability to do that with the Americans.
	They bring us into places we don't want to be.
	Vietnam, Africa, Djibouti.
	You name it, we're there.
	And so...
	And why is that?
	Is there some special relationship that we have with France besides them coming up with the basic idea for the Republic?
	Why is this?
	The French, I hate to say this, are quite seductive.
	And they are very good at manipulating our intelligence service.
	As you know in your family, I mean...
	They came forth with this cockamamie idea that they thought they created called counterinsurgency in Algeria, which was, of course, a joke because I grew up in Toulouse and I saw how the Algerian colonels and the French colonels blew up everything and they were angry.
	And I saw the French round up the Algerians.
	But they convinced a few of our intelligence operatives that it's such a great theory, let's do it in Vietnam.
	And John F.K. bought it and then LBJ bought it and the CIA bought it and before you know it, We were doing exactly the exact mistakes that the French had done in Dien Bien Phu and before that.
	And you see that in many parts of the Ken Burns series.
	Documentary, yeah.
	So here you are, you're learning English, you play kick-ass piano, and then at a certain point, medicine is where it is for you.
	That's the key part.
	I played Rachmaninoff.
	What I really loved was I was listening to Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
	And it really was in the 50s where you didn't quite play that.
	So I had to sneak it in.
	And I loved it.
	And I thought, wow, that's America to me.
	When you're talking about rock and roll and blaring music and the guitar riffs and the drumming riffs.
	I said, now that's what America means to me.
	And to me, that was the beginning of my open eyes to America, what the real America was about.
	I mean, very few people would go to Carnegie Hall to hear somebody play Chopin, Attitude, or Nocturne.
	But I would go to the Brooklyn Paramount or downtown to hear the Platters and whatever other group there was, because this was great.
	And I grew up in Harlem, so on 108th and Amsterdam, You know, I had this milieu around me which was really rock and roll and black blues and rhythm.
	Yeah, truly the roots of rock and roll.
	And I can't tell you that, you know, I was there at the beginning, but I certainly, you know, when I heard Antoine Domino, and I heard his Blueberry Hill, and I knew his name, I could understand that there were French people in this country.
	A state called Louisiana.
	And they have all Cajuns.
	And so that influenced me.
	I mean, eventually I listened to Zydigo and then from there I used those characters from the Cajun area into my novels.
	And because it allowed me to be both American and somewhat French at the same time without being pretentious.
	So that was an influence on me.
	Chuck Berry was an influence on You know, most of my education was really listening to rock and roll in the back of the room and listening very little to the teacher.
	I was not a great student, quite frankly.
	Yet you became a doctor.
	Yeah.
	Well, I knew the route to becoming a doctor.
	That's a good point, Adam.
	It's the kind of thing where one of the things that influenced me very early on was the realization.
	And because I spoke French and Russian, And I would read with my mother or I'd read on my own.
	There were several physicians that influenced me quite a lot.
	Somerset Moham, who was a physician, and he wrote plays while he was a physician, as well as novels, not many but a few.
	A.J. Cronin wrote The Keys of the Kingdom and The Citadel.
	And then I had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes.
	So very early on in my career, rather than look to music, I said, aha, what I see now is I can be a physician and at the same time I can go through the kabuki of being a doctor, but at the same time I can create something that's on my own.
	As we would say sui generis, but not only that fancy.
	So they influenced me and the idea that I'm going to be a physician, but at the same time I'm going to learn playwright.
	And in fact, when I went to Cornell Medical School, which was an excellent medical school, and it was very tough to get in, and they taught you quite a lot, I still went to the new school and learned how to write three-act plays.
	And my influence at that time was a famous American playwright named Sidney Kingsley, who wrote Men in White and won a Pulitzer Prize.
	So throughout my dreams and ambitions, excuse me, medicine was just the bottom, the starting point for where I wanted to go.
	So I went from medicine to writing.
	But then I got drafted, which was fine with me because out of the class of 88, I was one of the two or maybe the only one.
	But that was the agreement I made with America.
	And one of the things that I enjoy about America, and I'm grateful for it.
	And this is a key point because this is something that has gone by the wayside.
	That's the thing that is so misunderstood today is kind of the deal, the agreement with America, which you understood then.
	It maybe just was understood then and has been forgotten and gone by the wayside today.
	Well, I think most people don't understand the social contract that's implicit in coming to America today.
	You know, so many people wanted to come.
	My parents were fleeing the Germans.
	They had to go through Spain, Portugal, and then Cuba, from Cuba to the United States.
	So, you know, when people say, oh, we should come in here automatically, that's not correct.
	We were vetted out.
	We had to learn a certain amount of English.
	My father had to pass an exam, or if he didn't pass, he'd go back to Toulouse.
	But for me, when I was a teenager, very early on, the Selective Service explained to me that I had the choice.
	I would be drafted.
	I said, I understand that.
	And in return, you know, I could become an American citizen.
	Now, that was a rare contract.
	But it was implicit in my world to say, yeah, if you want to be an American, you have to pay the price.
	You don't pay the price with money.
	You don't pay the price by avoiding the draft.
	You pay the price by putting yourself on the line, be it whatever war.
	Now, did I want the Vietnam War?
	No.
	I knew about it.
	I probably knew much more about it than the generals knew about it or even our presidents because I was in Toulouse at the time when Jim Being Fool occurred and it was obvious to me how it came about and why they failed and why we would fail.
	Nevertheless, I was drafted and then from that point on That agreement came in, and as a result, actually, of that agreement, you know, I served, and then I went on to go to Harvard and MIT, where they paid for my education.
	Now, where did you serve, Steve?
	Well, I first served at the St.
	Elizabeth's Hospital.
	They brought me in.
	First, they drafted me to Fort Meade, and then it was switched over.
	To the Navy.
	And the Navy put me in under the Public Health Service to St.
	Elizabeth's Hospital where we had the criminally insane.
	In other words, at that time in the 70s, you really had to have military officers taking over.
	Now, this was pretty much like...
	We were GMOs, general medical officers, and I had three or four wards of really criminally insane people.
	And I said, is anybody going to train me here?
	And they said, well, you're in there.
	You know, good luck.
	Watch your back.
	Well, yeah, I mean, and again, it was imperative that I kind of learn what I was doing, and then what I did was to sneak into the actual residency program that they had, and they were pretty nice about it, and then I learned how to take care of schizophrenics and killers and murderers.
	We ordered lobotomies, I hate to tell that.
	I was the last one to order a lobotomy, and unfortunately, oh yeah, that lobotomy was...
	They were pretty effective.
	I mean, they worked.
	Well, let me put it this way.
	In principle, in theory, St. Elizabeth's had people who could verify that lobotomies work.
	In the last case that I had, unfortunately, it did not work.
	And we did a autopsy and it turned out that the young man who had been born in the prison or in the prison in St. Asylum had half a brain.
	So we couldn't control him with anything else.
	But that was the last lobotomy.
	And then from then on, I was told that I would go on.
	They'd give me education for two to three years.
	So I went to Harvard to actually learn psychiatry, even after I spent two years already practicing psychiatry.
	But I had to get a degree.
	But my real interest was in intelligence and in bringing in psychiatry into foreign affairs.
	Now, that was unheard of.
	Nobody even knew about it.
	You know, when I got the orders to go, it was to go to the public health service, the public health division of Mass General or Harvard, as well as Harvard psychiatry.
	But instead, I took the chance to go to MIT and there I had met really what I was looking for, Lucian Pye, Ithiel de Selleppol.
	And lo and behold, it was called the John McCone Center, which was the Center for National Relations at MIT.
	And it was funded by none other than the CIA.
	And that's when it got interesting.
	Well, yeah, that's exactly it.
	And that's when it got interesting.
	And at the same time, I was fascinated and emotionally.
	I could connect to the country and understanding that as a physician and as someone who spoke other languages, our country, America, needed these types of talent.
	They didn't necessarily need me, but they needed to understand how psychiatry and psychology would impact The evolution of America and particularly, and not so ironically, how the president's personality would affect the policy and the outcomes of our nation.
	And so I had an incredible education.
	Lucian Pai was my mentor.
	I kind of spent six weeks while I was on night duty at Harvard and immediately got through the years, the undergraduate years, and then we went on to the Graduate years where I was trained, and here's the real kicker, I was trained on the internet and social media by A. Phil DeSolopoul.
	And what year was this, Steve?
	72 to 74, so I don't really know what Bill Gates or Zuckerberg did, and I don't know who the fathers of Al Gore hadn't invented it yet.
	This is amazing.
	No, no.
	Al Gore hadn't invented it, and Google hadn't invented it.
	All those narcissistic, grandiose individuals hadn't invented it, and Silicon Valley was nowhere to be found.
	But ironically, those people in the CIA and the DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Project, We're really quite incredible in picking out myself and others to say, okay, now you're going to join us and we would like to train you in the necessary skills.
	So even though I was still in the military under the PHS or the natal part of the PHS... I'm sorry, what is PHS, Steve?
	Public Health Service.
	So I got a National Institute of...
	No, you wouldn't know that.
	There's no PHS now and there's no Surgeon General.
	But at that time, it was a very effective system.
	And immediately, I went back to the National Institute of Mental Health under Bert Brown.
	And I covered working both in intelligence and at the National Institute of Mental Health.
	I was able to go to Romania, Poland, and most importantly, the Soviet Union.
	And it was there that I began to understand that.
	My innate ability to negotiate and understand the dynamics of the Soviet Union and at the same time incorporate the training that I had from the CIA and MIT. And what happened was the Soviet Union had a psychiatric hospital called Kachenko Psychiatric Hospital, which was run by Armenian brothers who were very nice, KGB, of Artanian and his brother.
	But the head of it was an old Stalinist who was actually Stalin's last psychiatrist, whatever that was.
	And I forget his name.
	And I went there and what that hospital was doing and what the KGB was doing was a very clever incarceration, which went as follows.
	If you were political dissident, they didn't call you a political dissident.
	They created a term called sluggish schizophrenia, which as a psychiatrist, we knew didn't exist.
	It was absolute nonsense.
	But what I realized as an intelligence officer, and that was when I was discussing it with others involved, not at NIMH, it was a way to incarcerate political dissidents where there was no oversight from a judicial point of view.
	So I immediately went in there and started to commoditize the political dissidents, who, by the way, were Christians fundamentally.
	Fundamentalists, Baptists, Anabaptists.
	But we didn't say that.
	And I didn't say any of that.
	And I didn't talk about human rights at that point.
	It was under the Nixon administration.
	And what I did was discussing...
	The individuals who are incarcerated, I used their names, and then I would offer, at that time, Wang computers.
	Ah, beautiful.
	Yeah, the big Wang.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Well, the big Wang at that time was major, but, you know, eventually I commoditized Christianity.
	And most people said, what?
	I said, well, for this, let's say for Mr.
	X, who's quite important as an Anabaptist, I said, I will give you five Wang computers.
	I didn't say he was...
	A political dissident and the head of Kuchenko Hospital, the Stalinist, understood what I was doing.
	And then for Mr.
	Y, I would give you four WAN computers and so on and so forth.
	So I had about 15 to 20 political dissidents who were really Christian dissidents who refused to accept the Soviet system.
	And I knew the Russians well enough that what they do is what we call in the Soviet Union, we go to the left.
	So we talk to the right.
	In other words, I talk above the surface, but then underneath the table, I know I have to control their back end in what they do behind my back.
	In Europe, we say you talk left and you feel right.
	That's exactly correct.
	Oh, I didn't know that.
	You talked on a big left game, but you fill your pocket with the right.
	Correct.
	And so what happened, that's a very good way of saying it, Adam.
	And what happened there is I asked myself, I asked the chairman of the psychiatry department, who was more than just KGB, I said, I need a letter of agreement between you and me, Steve Buchanek and blah, blah, blah, whoever that was.
	And he said, of course.
	He said, why do you need it?
	I said, well, often we have trouble when we, you know, we try to implement this problem.
	And of course, I anticipated there would be major problems.
	And so when the Soviet delegation came over, And the foreign ministry said, no, we don't have any agreement.
	We will not release any political dissidents.
	I don't know where that came from.
	And I just pulled out the letter and I showed it to the foreign ministry and they backed off and they said, oh.
	Were you employed by CIA at this point?
	No.
	The irony was, in reality, I've never been employed by the CIA when I worked with them.
	So it's kind of a love relationship, a marriage of inconvenience or convenience.
	Although they trained me, they wanted me to come back in and, you know, bring me in full time.
	And I said, guys, I like you a lot, but I really don't want to be constrained by your Top Secret and all the other kabuki that you do, but I will work with you.
	So for the most part, everybody thought I was CIA, which was fine.
	But you're just a contractor, basically.
	No, I wasn't even a contractor.
	I was really under military control.
	I really was a Navy captain at that time.
	So we completely went to the military side, but I worked, you know, it was an ad hoc arrangement.
	And to this day, it's always been ad hoc.
	Right, but it's interesting because I would say you have quite a disdain for today's CIA, and you're much more on the military side.
	Did you already have that kind of...
	No, that's a good point, Adam.
	I eventually got to have disdain for the CIA after 9-11.
	For the most part, the CIA, to me, was represented by people like your uncle, Don Gregg, or Jim Lilly, or many others whom I knew.
	And, you know, I'm not going to say who they are, but who worked with me in the State Department.
	And that's where it came down in full blossom.
	In other words, When I came in, Eagleburger asked me, I want you to work for Kissinger.
	And I said, I'm not working for Henry Kissinger.
	He said, why not?
	I said, well, he and I don't get along.
	I don't respect him.
	I don't have really any appreciation for his intellect.
	Remember, I was trained at MIT and Henry was at Harvard at that time.
	Yeah, that doesn't help, does it?
	Well, it's not only that.
	It's more than that.
	It wasn't my sense of honor to MIT. What it was is I was trained in force structure and deterrence theory by a man who was far more important than Henry Kissinger, and that was Bill Kaufman.
	And most people didn't know that.
	And so at MIT, we really had the nitty-gritty of combat issues, tactical, strategic.
	You know, I was there with a bunch of guys who were in the military, like myself, and then went on through the military.
	So when I came into the State Department, I had a career fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, which was very nice to me.
	And they offered me the Deputy Assistant Secretary rank, which meant they really didn't know what to do with me, but they wanted me to run certain things, and it would appear it was really ad hoc.
	So at the same time, I had a relationship with Langley.
	I understood them.
	They understood me.
	It was informal, but, you know, they were like colleagues.
	I had other colleagues in the State Department, and then I had military, the DIA. Which I understood, and ironically, I'm jumping the gun now, they're always there when I needed them overseas.
	So the real disdain came in not so much beforehand, it came in after 9-11, when I knew that the agency had really screwed up Tenet, and you had all the other guys there, Michael Hayden, I mean, even though they were military...
	They had no idea what they were doing, and it was stupid enough to create what I was teaching at Fort McNair, which was stand down and false flags.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	You were teaching this?
	Oh, yeah.
	I was teaching at Fort McNair once a year at the War College, and I was teaching false flags, strategic notions of how you go to war, but we're jumping the gun.
	So...
	That disdain came in much later on when you had amateurs.
	You didn't have Tenet was not a function of the CIA. Many of the others were not a function of the CIA. I mean, I can go through the whole list.
	And instead, they were imposed by Bush Jr., a moron, literally.
	I'd been on his committee to get him in and get elected, and I regret it that day, but...
	And since I worked for the old man, I understood where the agency came in, and suddenly they decided to create a war.
	And since I knew Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and all these neocon Jews, I knew they had never served, they had never really given to the country, and I knew they created some...
	Nonsensical piece of paper with Zalmi Halazad saying that America has to be great again under Clinton and therefore Israel will be our pivot point in the Middle East.
	And I said this was the most moronic, idiotic idea I'd ever heard of.
	But anybody who picked it up was not only stupid, it would have been incompetent and criminal.
	Why did they want to do this?
	Every president wants to put a landmark issue underneath his auspices.
	And most presidents, most people don't realize, really can't do very much after 100 days.
	And the only thing they really can do is to go to war.
	And in the case of Wood Jr., who had no idea whatsoever, but I knew Cheney, and Cheney was a lot smarter than Bush, much more Machiavellian.
	And many of these guys, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hadley, and others were trained by a man who was at the office, now I'm jumping the gun, of Office of Net Assessment by a man called Andy Marshall.
	Now, Andy Marshall had trained at the University of Chicago.
	He never served in World War II.
	Said he had a hard murmur, but he lived to the age of 99.
	I still think he's alive.
	But he came up with a cockamamie idea and sold it.
	Or these guys came up with it with Zalmay Halazad and all the boys out of the University of Chicago, where they were trained.
	And there's another name by Wolfstetter who said that Pearl Harbor was a false flag and a stand down.
	I mean, they wrote about it, and then they wrote that we needed another false flag and stand-down, but they didn't call it that.
	So Andy Marshall marshalled all of his neophytes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, all the morons.
	I mean, for me, Cheney, when I had to deal with the generals, I asked all my generals around the table, how many times did Cheney refuse to serve us?
	And they went around.
	I said, once, twice.
	I said, no, no, it was 11 times.
	And so the general said to me, wow, how did you get that?
	I said, well, he didn't feel the Vietnam War was really to his liking.
	So when I came in to the State Department, now we go back to the 70s, I was a deputy assistant secretary with a rank of Navy, and basically Eagleburg's first assignment to me was to evacuate Vietnam and literally deal with our ambassadors, Graham Martin and Ellsworth Bunker.
	And that was a problem, because one of the things that I saw, and it was clear in that...
	Ken Burns' series was that Graham Martin and Ellsworth Bunker, but Graham Martin in particular, was totally focused on the notion that we had not lost the war.
	Now, this is where the agency, which had initiated the war, but was smart enough to put in guys like Richard Armitage and others, whom I kind of knew on the side, Basically said, look, we've lost the war and we got to get out of here.
	And it correctly depicts how we did not understand what was happening then.
	Of course, your uncle was a part of that, Don Gray, and he explained it.
	But the ambassadors didn't want to believe it.
	And so that was my first assignment with Graham Martin.
	I don't want to go into detail as to what I had to do.
	Unfortunately, he ended up to have a sad career.
	My second assignment came almost as an ad hoc situation where there was a gentleman by the name of Arafat who decided to take one of our ambassadors hostage.
	And that was the PLO. And we had what was called the Office to Combat Terrorism, but it really wasn't all that effective.
	So my job was to reorganize the office, create a policy where we could effectively take out hostages.
	And in that particular case, it happened to be serendipitous.
	Seventeen students from Stanford had gone to Tanzania under the auspices of a famous self-aggrandizing individual, Jane Goodell.
	And, unfortunately, Jane Goodell doesn't want to really explain how much of a coward she was.
	Wait a minute, Jane Goodell, the gorilla lady?
	Correct.
	Jane Goodell and her husband both were kind of miscreant, and basically what they had done...
	They had totally absolved themselves of any responsibility for the 17 Stanford students who were taken hostage by the Tanzanian Liberation Army.
	And I never forgot that.
	Larry said, get into that negotiation.
	I just need a little background.
	Were they there with her, these 17 students?
	Yeah.
	They were sent there, I think, under Dr.
	Bourne's auspices to study chimpanzees or monkeys.
	I mean, I really didn't.
	You know, know at that time who Jane Goodell was, but subsequently I found out she was a very self-aggrandizing, you know, cowardly individual.
	And she could sue me.
	I don't particularly care, but that's exactly what happened.
	And we took it over, and then Stanford really didn't know what to do.
	And so I said to Larry, I need to have a policy, which I concocted at that moment, where we can...
	Basically, take care of humanitarian concerns, meaning that I can get the hostages out, but I have to be able to pay the terrorist, so-called terrorist.
	Which is something we're not supposed to do.
	Right.
	But from the very beginning, I could not afford to allow 17 young kids from Stanford, and I didn't know very much about Stanford then, or any university on the West Coast, to allow them to get executed.
	So...
	Basically, what happened is one of the fathers came out and provided the money, and these kids were released.
	So Larry said to me, why don't you take over the Office of Combat Terrorism, but why don't you also look at the Office of Medicine since you're a doctor?
	And subsequently, what happened, I became a desk for management, and Not only did I get into terrorism and counterterrorism at this very early stage, but I also got into the business of really working with physicians overseas and realizing that we were spending a lot of money bringing back our foreign service officers who had alcoholism or drug dependency.
	And part of that was both personality-oriented, but it was also socialization.
	And we had very good Foreign Service officers, but it cost us a fortune to bring back these people.
	And eventually some of them we would lose.
	Literally, they would commit suicide.
	And we weren't able to treat them.
	So the first thing that I did when I came into the office of medicine was I looked at the list of psychiatrists, all of whom were psychoanalysts, and I immediately fired them.
	You were pretty much developing a field here.
	Were there any peers that you had in this psychological department or in the field at all?
	Yes.
	Actually, I was not the new one.
	I actually had found, and with all due respect to Harold Laswell, who wrote in 1926 about psychiatry and personality and really based it on his experience at St.
	Elizabeth.
	And then eventually I did have a peer in the CIA. I think I can talk about him.
	Jerry Post, who did some brilliant psychological profiles.
	Now you have to understand, or your audience has to understand one thing, and I will go backwards now.
	The CIA, the forerunner of the CIA was the OSS. And the forerunner of the OSS were people like Walter Lacker, Wild Bill Donovan, who was a military officer, but brought together all the people from Yale, and particularly the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from Yale and elsewhere.
	But what he emphasized was the importance of psychoanalytical theory as it was applied to anthropology and political science.
	And so I was the heir to that.
	So, for example, during the OSS, one of the great individuals there was Ruth Benedict, who applied psychoanalytical theory to anthropology.
	She wrote Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
	As a result of that, she was able to predict the fact that Douglas MacArthur would have to deal with Emperor Hirohito as the leader of Japan.
	Of course, MacArthur was above him, but At that time, in the 40s, before the end of the war, there was a question as to whether we should get rid of Hirohito or not, and she predicted that we needed to have Hirohito there.
	There were also other individuals who were psychoanalytically trained, Walter Lacker, who wrote about the analysis of Hitler's mind, and when that was released, I mean, now it's a real treasure of understanding how Hitler really performed and what he would do under various circumstances, and it was brilliant work.
	And those people, including Julia Childs, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, who actually not only was a famous actress and beautiful, but she was also the mother of telecommunications, working with others in the OSS. So the OSS really started around the notion of psychiatry and psychoanalysis and its application to national theory and I
	So I was really the recipient of a lot of, lot of work and brilliant work that was done by Everett Hagen and many others, Lucian Pai on China and many, many others who had graduated from the OSS and the CIA and literally came many others who had graduated from the OSS and the CIA and literally So I was not the inventor of all of this.
	I was probably the first applicant who really applied to Harvard at one time and MIT at the same time to come in as a political psychiatrist.
	But there was many who preceded me and were already in the CIA. So the CIA understood this intuitively.
	What I did subsequently to that, I went in to use it for counterterrorism, as I explained, and for other issues like regime change.
	That became a lot more sophisticated because as I began to understand the Soviet Union and commoditizing the Christians, I also began to see the weaknesses in the late 70s of the Soviet Union.
	In other words, you'd see men already drunk by eight or nine in the morning.
	And I would say, oh, my God, this is amazing.
	That wasn't just a few, it was quite a lot.
	And then I would, on my own, go to the various factories that were there in Moscow and around Moscow, although I was limited in what I could do, and see that they were really doing make work.
	And Ironically, I worked very well with the KGB, contrary to the common image of Americans shooting KGB and vice versa.
	It wasn't like that.
	The KGB would follow me, and in times where they had personal problems, I would say to them, how's your son?
	that said, I need money for the antibiotic, and I would give them money.
	Right.
	And it was that kind of personal relationship where they would allow me to go to Leningrad or St. Petersburg on a train by myself, knowing fully well that I'm not going to play games in the Soviet Union.
	But at the same time, they understood that I was accumulating information that I subsequently used at the Rand Corporation.
	Now I'm jumping to take down the Soviet Union with me.
	Can I step back for just one second?
	I just want to go back to Hedy Lamarr and Julia Child.
	It's pretty well established what they were doing.
	I don't think people realize it anymore or think about it or probably miss the revelations.
	But were they actively, I guess two questions, were they actively working in psychological operations towards an audience or...
	No.
	It's a good question, Adam.
	They were actually operatives in what we would say now the CIA, and they were case officers.
	Julia Childs worked with a gentleman named Swift, and she was the handler for Ho Chi Minh.
	Really?
	Yes.
	So the notion that Ho Chi Minh was anti-American was absurd because he loved America.
	And he loved cooking.
	Yeah, well, you could say that, Adam.
	Actually, he wasn't the cook.
	He was the dishwasher in New York and in London.
	But all of his intellectual narratives came out of the United States and Abraham Lincoln.
	At the same time, Hedy Lamarr, whom I didn't know but was beautiful, had gotten herself involved.
	Her former husband had worked with the Nazis.
	She understood what the transfer of technology was and she eventually got into telecommunications.
	The ones who I knew were particularly operative or specific to operations because of my operative who I had in intelligence and research, a very bright man by the name of Phil Stoddard who ran Greta Garbo.
	He ran because she was Swedish and One of the issues during World War II, contrary to what they like to talk about the Wallenberg this and the Wallenberg that and how great it was to the Jews, of course, that was a storyline that was contrary to the real storyline of the Wallenbergs.
	Both the uncle and the father who were pro-Nazis and funded the Nazi war machinery, as did Sweden.
	But Sweden was supposed to be neutral.
	And so getting Greta Garbo along with Niels Bohr We basically said to Alfonso, the king, who is German, that if you don't maintain your neutrality, you will go to prison, as we said to both the father and the uncle.
	And how is Garbo used as an asset in that?
	Well, she spoke Swedish.
	I can't directly tell you that it was told to me because she was very famous.
	She was silent.
	She was highly discreet.
	And she, I believe, went with Niels Bohr to Sweden to explain it to them offline.
	And, uh, as a result, I think, I'm now being, I'm jumping the gun that, uh, the so-called son, the Wallenberg, was sacrificed to say, oh yeah, well let's get the storyline where he saved a lot of Jews.
	So, the notion of what really happened in World War II and what covers, what other story covers, are totally different.
	And that's pretty much what I began to realize in terms of the history and what the hidden history was and how nation states that were collaborators really go back and try to explain what they did.
	For example...
	The Anne Frank story.
	That's absurd.
	It was a nonsensical story.
	And, you know, they say the father wrote with a ballpoint pen and he was...
	Yeah, there's a lot of discrepancies, even in recent history about...
	Well, it was absurd.
	Authenticity.
	Right.
	The reason, and they don't talk about it, is that...
	Because it's the third rail.
	You can't talk about Jews unless you are one.
	That's correct.
	Which you happen to be.
	This is good.
	That's right.
	And I happen to be a Jew who can be quite critical of American Jews or Israel and at the same time maintain my identity and be proud of it.
	But the key there was I said something is wrong in Holland.
	Having grown up there, I concur.
	Well, yeah, but you saw it firsthand.
	What I saw was secondhand and I said The greatest percentage of Jews killed was in Poland, number one, by the Germans.
	However, the second greatest percentage of Jews killed was 93% versus 96% in Poland, but there were no Nazi officers in Holland, and it was done by the Dutch.
	And also, at the same time, years later, when I wanted to write about Holland and its collaboration in World War II... We're talking about the NSB now?
	Yes, correct.
	And so what happened is, you know, Beatrix ran, the Germans came in, and the Dutch said, oh, we didn't understand.
	We thought they were speaking Dutch when the Nazis were paratrooping to Rotterdam, which is all nonsense.
	And the Dutch were really culpable.
	So they came up with this nonsense.
	So would you say that story in particular was one of the longest lasting, greatest psychological operations ever?
	Well, yes.
	I would say Holland went out of its way to create this absurd facade that they were free of any guilt or any collaboration.
	Most of them were collaborators.
	I mean, that was very clear.
	The Germans didn't need to have Nazi enforcers.
	The Dutch were more than happy to do what the Germans didn't do.
	As a matter of fact, the Germans were stunned.
	As to what the Dutch did, and that's not only the Dutch, the French.
	When the French police rounded up 76,000 Jews who were in a stadium, the Germans were totally taken aback.
	The Nazis said, we didn't order you to take these 76,000 women and children.
	So the storylines get totally distorted.
	But let's go back to the major storylines.
	Because of this discrepancy, I began to realize that the national character of countries was still running very deep, but like the people at MIT or the CIA, you had to study the specifics.
	Oops, hold on a second, Steve, hold on.
	Sorry.
	I'm sorry, you can continue.
	Is that a conditioning?
	Yes, it's Pavlovian.
	You're doing well.
	Am I okay?
	I mean, are you going to give me a cookie?
	Or am I going to get ahead?
	Only if you sit up properly.
	Okay, thank you.
	It's fun.
	You're a good man.
	So, basically, let's move forward.
	So, you know, what I call the manifest story is usually the nonsense story or the bullshit.
	The latent story is that story which history has to really inspect.
	And it's true of America.
	I mean, you know, we say we won World War II. I don't minimize what the soldiers who fought both in Japan and in Europe.
	But it was really the Soviet Union that won World War II, losing about 20 to 30 million men by 1943.
	But we couldn't have done it without them.
	No, no, there's no way.
	I mean, even General Omar Bradley and George Marshall, who I had a great respect for, said we couldn't have done this and we couldn't have entered the war until 1943 without the Soviets.
	But again, our president, Obama, didn't show up for the 75th anniversary of Vladimir of the Soviet Union.
	And, you know, subsequently, do I have any animosity to the Soviet Union?
	No.
	And when we took down the Soviet Union, I explained to our policymakers and others in the intelligence community, remember, all I did was to change the deck chairs and make sure that the guys who were running the system were no longer there, but don't in any way think that you took over Russia.
	And that we defeated Russia.
	On the contrary.
	And what happened then, and I was not involved in this, and I, you know, I don't blame anybody.
	Yeltsin was put in power.
	Now, for the most part, most of the leaders of Russia or foreign countries, I won't say we urge them, but we certainly have a hand in it.
	And I don't blame anybody in the agency or whatever intelligence unit was involved, but Yeltsin was put in, and I wasn't there at the time, but he was a drunk.
	It was a total disaster.
	And it was clear that Russia was falling apart under his auspices.
	And so...
	We had then that revolution, and we had Gorbachev.
	And under Gorbachev, I had a clearer idea in the Reagan administration how we could approach him with Reagan and your fellow countrymen in the intelligence community.
	At that time, there was a gentleman named Fritz Ehrmeth who worked on the National Intelligence Office.
	And what I prepared for them was a strategy paper where you had an opening movement, a middle movement, an end movement between Reagan and Gorbachev.
	And I knew Reagan was very terse.
	Gorbachev was an engineer who was very loquacious.
	So we had a method by which we could deal with Gorbachev in negotiations.
	And that's what I would prepare in the Reagan administration.
	But before that, I'm going out of sequence, but I'm saying to you that the appearance of Vladimir Putin We're really sanctioned by us.
	Well, let's just stop there for a second, because what I'm just listening to you, what was unfolding was the realization by the intelligence community and military intelligence that we could pretty much do whatever we wanted.
	We could tell the American public whatever we wanted.
	They would not be the same thing.
	And it sounds like at this period in time, they were so cocky about it.
	Like, it got out of control.
	We can do anything we want.
	Well, I think you're right.
	I think I don't...
	The point where I would say it's a bit different is the fact I don't think we were cavalier about it.
	I think whoever was involved...
	They had the best intentions and they were picking whoever they thought was appropriate.
	I was not in that selection process.
	But it was clear to me subsequently that there were mistakes made.
	You know, like any situation, you don't really know what's going to happen until it happens.
	But the morality, because OSS days, I understand, you know, we're doing stuff covert, we're jumping out of airplanes, we're saving the world.
	But then you get to this point where there's just no, maybe I'm mistaken, this just seems like there's no morality of what's being done.
	I wouldn't say that.
	I think, with all due respect to those whom I worked with, both in military and intelligence and the CIA, there was always a moral cover to it.
	If anything, it was almost too moralistic because...
	You know, the notion that we're going to bring freedom and we're going to bring transparency to Russia or to any country was self-delusional.
	I mean, I would say to them, look, guys, you know, I'm in the business of people and nations, but I'm not in the business of changing their behavior, irrespective of what you think.
	They said, but you're a psychiatrist.
	I said, yeah, but I know my limits.
	And I can't do what you guys think you can do.
	And I think that was where we made mistakes.
	It wasn't the cockiness.
	It was really the fact that we wanted to bring what we were enjoying here overseas to a country that had been under repression and a czar or a Stalin or a dictator for most of their life.
	So Vladimir Putin made a lot of sense.
	I didn't know him, but ironically, when I was in Lubyanka, when I was in Jersey Square, where I personally visited the KGB headquarters before he was even there, a couple of years before, the KGB would say to me, who do you think is going to be our next leader?
	The Moscow people didn't know.
	But I had a pretty good idea.
	I said, you have a guy from East Germany who's in East German intelligence.
	He wasn't Stassi.
	He's Russian.
	But I think he's very talented.
	And his name is Putin.
	They said, who?
	And they didn't know.
	I mean, it's again, you don't have this notion that everything works perfectly.
	You know, with the push of a button.
	Right.
	So Putin was a suggestion.
	He seemed like a good idea, which inherently means we have contact with him in that regard still.
	He didn't go rogue or anything.
	No.
	And contrary to what everybody's saying now, which is nonsensical, you know, does Russia affect our elections?
	Nothing affects our election.
	The only people who can affect our elections are our own politicians and the people who work the Diebold machinery and know how to make it corrupt.
	We're very good at screwing ourselves.
	The Russians don't need to do that.
	Whether Putin talked to Jared Kushner, he talked to Trump, he talked to Mickey Mouse.
	It's not relevant here.
	We have more corruption at the local and the state and the federal level than anyone else.
	So it's irrelevant.
	And Vladimir Putin knows that.
	He makes no pretense and he kind of is enjoying that.
	And I'm absolving him of that.
	But that's not the issue that's really at hand.
	The issue at hand is that Russia has always been a strong ally to the United States, will always be an ally because our intelligence services work very closely together.
	And the Russians had been very helpful in Central Asia with the issue of counterterrorism, as we've been helpful to them, along with our military intelligence, CIA.
	But let me go a little bit backwards.
	So under the Carter administration, I was asked by Eagleburger.
	He was the only one who remained, but he was a career Foreign Service officer, an excellent man, became our ambassador to Yugoslavia.
	And then I had a very nice gentleman come in who was at that time my boss named Ben Reed, a mainline Philadelphia family who loved him.
	Lovely.
	And I really enjoyed both Ben Reed and his boss, Cyrus Vance.
	And they kind of understood what I was about.
	They were lawyers and they understood, well, a psychiatrist has some impact here.
	And what happened...
	Domestically really changed the course of my own career and the course of how I got involved in overseas issues.
	And let me tell you what happened.
	In 1977 or 78, Jimmy Carter had created a situation where three different buildings were being held by a gentleman named, by a gentleman who was part of what was called the Hanafi Muslim, black Muslims.
	And the reason he held 150 hostages in three buildings and he has shot a couple people It was the fact that he had seen his child being drowned by Farrakhan and the black Muslims.
	So it was an internal fight between the black Muslims and a sect called the Hanafi Muslim.
	Now, I was not privy to the beginning of the situation of the hostage siege.
	And a gentleman by the name of Earl Silbert, whom I knew and was friendly with, had been the prosecutor.
	He called me in, and this was after about 10 hours of...
	And where is this taking place?
	In Washington, D.C. Okay.
	Right, in three buildings, the mosque, City Hall, and B'nai B'rith.
	So it was about 100 hostages or 150 hostages in B'nai B'rith, about 100 or 50 hostages in the mosque, and another 50 or 70 at City Hall, along with Mayor Barry.
	And people were killed.
	This was a serious situation.
	But the FBI had been in charge of this, and apparently they really screwed up.
	Their profile was wrong.
	They didn't really know what they were doing.
	So Earl called me up about midnight, and I came down in my usual uniform for hostage situation, which is blue jeans and a T-shirt.
	And I saw three different ambassadors sitting there.
	One was Yahub Khan, who was the general from Pakistan, a brilliant man.
	Adashir Zahidi, also excellent, from Iran, and Ambassador Gorbal from Egypt.
	All three intelligent, very learned individuals, and they were doing nothing there.
	So immediately, thanks to my background as a fiction writer and as a play writer, I saw exactly what was missing.
	I needed to have A voice which was not an American voice, but basically had a Quranic overtone to it.
	So I started...
	You got some Egyptian guy.
	Well, not only an Egyptian, I had an Iranian, I had a Shiite Sunni, and I had a Pakistani who was really quite formidable.
	And even though I didn't know the Quran, I knew the Quran had to have some notion of generosity and compassion.
	So I sat with the three ambassadors and I said, okay, I'm going to be the terrorist Khalis.
	That was his name.
	And I understood what he did and I had empathy for it.
	I didn't agree with his killing, but that nevertheless was a secondary issue.
	So I basically talked to the three ambassadors as if I were colleagues.
	And then I trained them to talk on the phone.
	I never got on the phone.
	The person who was in charge and did a brilliant job was a policeman by the name of Cullinane of the D.C. Police Department.
	And he was the voice.
	And in turn, I would give him strategies and tactics.
	And in turn, we would send the ambassadors to seek Khalis and talk about Quranic issues.
	And you have to release the hostages.
	Well, be it as it may, 36 hours later and after I had been ordered by Jimmy Carter, the president, to stand down and leave, I refused.
	And that was my first act of insubordination, possibly treason.
	And the answer was, no, I will not leave these hostages.
	I'm a What was the plan when they said abort?
	What was the idea?
	Because the FBI had failed already after eight hours and they felt that this was really not going to go anywhere and it would be a disaster anyway.
	And he felt, you know, let it abort and there was nothing else to do.
	So I was ordered to stand down.
	Now, I was a military officer.
	I was a DAS, and I'm a physician.
	So I quickly switched to the role of saying, as a military officer, you can put me up for treason.
	As a DAS, you can fire me.
	But as an MD, I'm going to stay here.
	So I really don't care what the president has to say.
	And for the next 10 hours, we basically worked the phones and his mind to the degree he knew, Khalis knew he was being manipulated, but he could not stop it.
	And he said it on the phone.
	And that was the power of the ability to manipulate using the Koran and three different Muslim ambassadors.
	And we were successful.
	Did you have to offer him anything like you did previously in these types of negotiations?
	No, I didn't offer him anything, but I did do the reverse.
	What I did at this time, and that was the first time I began to take away things.
	So I took away air, food, and I made his situation worse.
	if he were to release 20 or 30 hostages, I would give him the air conditioning back.
	If he would release another 20 or 30 hostages, I would give him food.
	But what was not known at the time, and we were concerned, was that there was napalm on the stairwell.
	And when I went to the head of the FBI unit, I said, look, you got a lot of scopes here and you got a lot of snipers.
	You don't want to shoot.
	I don't want you to shoot, but I do want you to go on a helicopter and rappel off the helicopter on the roof so that you can get inside.
	And the gentleman, I don't remember his name, but he was quite nice.
	He said, Dr.
	I've got to tell you this.
	We can't repel.
	We don't know how to repel.
	What do you mean you don't know how to repel?
	Really?
	Well, if we repel, we get dizzy.
	I said, oh my God, now you're telling me.
	So it was a total, you know, disaster for the FBI. Needless to say, of course, two years later, the FBI had a movie on showing how well they did.
	Ah, yes, of course.
	They nailed it.
	Yes, no doubt.
	They nailed it.
	So that was the beginning of understanding that.
	And so these people were released.
	I was interviewed for the first time, and I really normally don't get interviewed.
	And I really didn't know anything more other than what I said was, this is a local event.
	Oh, what I did do and had an impact later, I forgot this one, Adam.
	I stopped the journalists from reporting on the situation, so I cut off the All communications from ABC and the television so that I could control all communications between the terrorist and the colonnade.
	And I was accused of violating the First Amendment.
	I said later on, I sat down at lunch with somebody from ABC or so and they said, you know, we have the right to do this.
	And then I said, you don't have the right to do anything.
	You have the right to publish whatever you want.
	You don't necessarily have the right to access everywhere.
	Correct.
	And that's the key, Adam.
	And I said, no, whenever I'm in charge, you will have no access to the hostages or the terrorists because I don't need to have the feedback problems that you create.
	Well, and, you know, they huff and puff, but the answer was no.
	It's not acceptable.
	From that, I went on to deal with another situation, which I don't want to get into too much detail, which was the kidnapping of Valdomarro.
	And that's where Cyrus Vance had asked me, would I help out?
	And I said, fine.
	And what I didn't know was that at that time I had to work with Francesco Cosiga, who's the undersecretary for security.
	Who was Aldemarro again?
	Aldemarro was the prime minister of Italy, and he was taken hostage by the Brigata Rosso, or the Red Brigade.
	And over a six-week period, we were negotiating for his release.
	And unfortunately, he was killed.
	And I returned back.
	But at that point in Italy, I was singled out as an individual who should be taken out by the Red Brigade.
	And so that's where I started getting into some problems.
	I came back and subsequently...
	I realized that a nation state could be very fragile once the leader of that country is removed.
	Subsequent to that, I had to go to Afghanistan because one of our ambassadors were taken hostage, Spike Duggs, and we really messed that up.
	And I don't want to get into the names of the individuals.
	And as a result, we had to bring back his body.
	And I had a stopover both in Islamabad and in Tehran.
	And at that point, in June of 78 or 79, I realized that the Russians, the Soviets, were leaving Tehran because they said, there's going to be a problem here.
	We're going to have Muslims taking over.
	So when I came back, I said to the Secretary of State, but Vance understood it, that we have to evacuate our embassy, and that in turn was reported to the White House, and at that time it was Brzezinski who was in charge, and I'm not a fan of Brzezinski.
	He basically led us into Afghanistan, didn't he?
	Correct.
	That's correct.
	And so as a result of all of this, what happened is we were taken hostage.
	Instead of withdrawing our embassy, They put in 50 or 60 new FSOs and civil servants, and I thought that was a big mistake.
	And then once they were taken, I was ordered by Carter to become a hostage negotiator with some other guy, I forgot, kind of a left-wing guy who was a political hack.
	And I said, no, I will not go to see Ayatollah Khomeini as part of the delegation.
	I will go privately, but I cannot afford to lose the opening movement.
	So I resigned.
	And then six months later, Cyrus Vance resigned.
	And then eventually we had that helicopter crash.
	It was...
	At Black Hog Down?
	Right.
	Well, that wasn't Black Hog Down.
	No, no, I'm sorry.
	Wrong country.
	Wrong country.
	Well, no.
	Ironically, the same man who's in charge of Black Hawk Down, Jerry Boykin, was a great soldier who I've worked with later on, Special Forces.
	He was involved in the helicopter problems that occurred in Iran, and I really was not involved in that anymore.
	So I was taken to the Rand Corporation where I was asked to develop the strategy and tactics for the regime change, both military, political and cultural.
	And I did that under the direction of a friend of mine, but at that time, the head of the Rand Corporation.
	Was this the time of Charlie Wilson as well?
	Oh, yes.
	As a matter of fact, you're right.
	Charlie Wilson, I had indirectly met Charlie Wilson and his wife, but it didn't make any he made no impression on me.
	I mean, I didn't realize his relevance to anything other than the fact that he was at a dinner table.
	So I was not impressed.
	And when I saw the Charlie Wilson War, I said, oh, the CIA has gone and gone again to explain how wonderful they are.
	So it's not true.
	That's another farce.
	I can't believe it.
	Well, it's not a farce.
	I mean, the CIA likes to promote what they do or don't do.
	That's their right.
	The same thing with the FBI. But one of the things I said many years later, and I saw it came true, I said, I will predict that the FBI and the CIA will have offices in Hollywood.
	And lo and behold, they had offices in Hollywood.
	So, you know, again, the manifest story is what they want you to see.
	The latent story is not what really happened.
	As a result of that, I was brought back in under the Reagan administration, and then I got involved with General Antonio Noriega, whom actually I admired.
	That was subsequent to that, and that was the Bush administration, I should say.
	And I... I like to know you.
	He and I had dinner together at night and I explained to him I was sent down to basically help him leave or make the offer like the Godfather had.
	This was like a regime change?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Right.
	And at that point I had a DIA officer who was just wonderful.
	And I said, look, you got a lot of people who don't like you up there.
	I don't know why they think you're stinky.
	You know, I don't even know whether you're stinky or not.
	And, you know, I'll never forget.
	Steve, you learn one thing.
	Never, never become an ally of the United States.
	And that stuck with me.
	Now, can I ask, how did you befriend him?
	You just happened to be in Panama?
	I was flown down to Panama by the agency.
	And the agency actually had a handle on this, as well as DIA, or MI, military intelligence.
	And I came in to talk to him.
	I was authorized by the State Department to talk to him on behalf of the ambassador in the State Department.
	I asked him, would he be willing to leave?
	And as a result, it was very friendly.
	It wasn't, you know, it was what we call a safe house.
	And he had an interpreter, but we didn't need any.
	He made chicken soup for me and my DIA officer.
	And I said, look, they want you to leave.
	Here's what we're willing to offer.
	A plane with gold, a plane with your mistress, a plane with your wife, blah, blah, blah.
	And he turned it down.
	Why did we want him to leave?
	Was he not the perfect partner for our drug trade already?
	Adam, that was the most objective question you had.
	Pretty good, huh?
	Leading the witness.
	That's exactly it.
	And so he hit it on the head.
	He was our foremost drug trafficker, and then he went into detail about the Bush family and drug traffic, and I told him, okay, Basta, enough.
	I didn't want to hear more than I had to.
	So they wanted to cut him out.
	They were done with him, or he had screwed him over.
	Something went wrong.
	Right.
	I mean, the details of this, because it wasn't exactly what Bush Sr.
	said, that we had a terrible man who killed many people.
	Right.
	That's how it always goes.
	The dictator, evil dictator, killing his own people.
	It's horrible.
	We've got to get rid of him.
	We need to save the children.
	Correct.
	But what happened subsequently, I left, and I was compromised by the CIA. I mean, that was why I could smile.
	Although I doubled one of their operatives, they compromised me in the newspaper to say that I was this and that, and they couldn't spell my name right, but I knew it was the agency, but I had a smile.
	And basically, I left.
	I mean, I was then persona non grata, and...
	By my leaving, I was called into the White House.
	And actually, I was reprimanded by your uncle.
	And that was the first time.
	And I didn't mind it.
	He said, what were you doing there?
	It was inappropriate.
	And I just nodded my head and just gave an excuse that, you know, I was told to come down.
	And I did what I thought would be best, although he knew I was doing agitation propaganda and I couldn't bullshit him.
	And I didn't.
	And Noyega knew I knew how to do that.
	But I was flown out and then I was severely reprimanded.
	They didn't hit my hand or anything.
	And then I left.
	I left to do...
	Well, but the CIA had...
	They already had their own...
	I guess the Iran-Contra deal must have been brewing at that point.
	That's correct.
	And fortunately for me, a friend of mine, Morda Bromowitz and Richard Solomon, two guys at the State Department said, stay away.
	And it was a guy by the name of Elliot Abrams, whom I had known, because we had gone to the same synagogue, I knew was involved in this chicanery and nonsense.
	And I remember when I came back from Panama, I was very much impressed by the FSOs and the CIA operatives.
	And I was up out to Debrief up on the seventh floor with a bunch of other desks, and in my usual boorish way, Elliot said some comment about the fact that these were cowards at the State Department, and I was furious, so I jacked up his neck and held him by the neck and said, you ever say that again, I'll kill you.
	And Schultz walked right in, so...
	I knew right then and there I wasn't part of the State Department, per se.
	The regime changing, but I really found it offensive that the people who worked with me, both in the CIA and the State Department...
	were deprecated by this little coward and this idiot whom I never respected.
	And eventually I got to see his chicanery again in 9-11.
	And then absurd of absurdities, he became the head of, quote, democracy and human rights, the Council on Foreign Relations under Richard Haas, another piece of work.
	So you could see how by that time already, I had already realized that this is nonsense.
	Now you were a member, as you said earlier, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
	Yes, I was proud to be a member.
	And then I realized that it was being taken over by neocons and by people who wanted to reminisce about their days in the State Department.
	And it had a cross between neocon idiocy and going to war and a nursing home.
	And I said, I don't understand really why I'm paying for this.
	And I just left.
	I was probably one of the first and only people to leave the Council on Foreign Relations, but I had no need for it.
	I understood it was basically a nursing home for those who had memories and wanted to relive their lives.
	A drinking club.
	You could say that, Adam.
	You could say that.
	I don't want to say they're alcoholics.
	No, I didn't mean it like that.
	But you're right.
	I mean, I had other things to do, and actually I went out to California to To build up the franchise under the Clancy name and then do a few TV shows.
	And as Tom and I were talking about, I worked with ABC and Walt Disney, so I got to meet a bunch of other characters, Eisner and Ovitz, who I really liked.
	I got to enjoy Michael Ovitz and Eisner, who I didn't know that well.
	But there was a guy who I really enjoyed, Mark Petowitz, who was head of ABC, and they allowed me to You know, the unit and I had about 130 people on the set and 22 unions.
	So I wanted to break the unions, but I wanted to recompense my people.
	And so I had ordered all my truck drivers.
	To go from Los Angeles to Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was a right to work state.
	But in turn, I gave him triple salary.
	So I said, just remember, you're working for an entrepreneur, not for the union.
	Now, amidst all the things you were doing, when did you find time to write?
	I was always writing.
	That's a good question, Adam.
	That was my passion.
	Even in medical school, I found time to go to the new school to write plays.
	And then when I was in charge of 4,000 screaming criminals, mentally ill and criminally insane, I would write in the evening.
	Otherwise, I would go nuts because you could hear the screams going through St.
	Elizabeth's.
	And even when I came back at home, I would write fiction.
	And one of the things, while I was at MIT, I said to Lucian Pye, whom I admired and adored, he was really a brilliant man, and I said, Lucian, I'm going to write my thesis on terrorism and counterterrorism in fiction.
	And he said, wow.
	And he said, why?
	I said, because fiction will allow me The latitude to really go into the hidden stories behind the terrorist and myself and the dynamics of what a counter-terrorist is, in many ways it's very similar to a terrorist, And it allowed me to go to those dynamics, which I don't have to footnote it.
	So we said, okay.
	And this was MIT at its finest.
	I said, that's fine.
	So I think I wrote the only PhD in fiction.
	And then I wrote another 300 pages to explain why I used fiction.
	And then I invoked, you know, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Disraeli.
	Of course, I didn't say I was their equivalent.
	I just said they wrote fiction.
	And I was, you know, part of the PhD is you get questions and you get interrogated by a board and I loved it.
	They really asked me some serious questions and I answered them and I explained why fiction was of great value.
	I subsequently used fiction to basically explain what I had done and what I would see in the future of the United States.
	And that's where I used the Tom Clancy franchise, particularly Op Center.
	And then I began to write novels about one I saw was the military coup that would eventually occur.
	I didn't say a particular presidency, but I said that eventually time would compel a certain individual to To really regress.
	Let's say the president, if he regresses in any way, will compel our military to be able to access the White House or be in the White House.
	And it wouldn't be a simple military coup.
	Did you develop this theory based upon your experiences with other countries and observing them?
	Yes.
	As well as my experiences in the United States.
	I don't want to go into detail on which ones, but I can tell you that Having studied John F. Kennedy, I didn't know him personally, but I did know him as a medical doctor at Cornell University Medical College where they had treated him several months before.
	And they gave us a case history of a man who had back problem and had surgery and went psychotic.
	And I said, wow, what happened?
	And the doctors who treated him from a clinical perspective told me that that individual had Addison's disease.
	And, of course, that was John F. Kennedy.
	And in the history and the legend making of John F. Kennedy, they don't talk about how seriously ill he was and how indecisive he was, how depressed he was, how psychotic he was at times.
	And he was on amphetamine.
	He was on vitamins.
	He was on all kinds of drugs.
	But when you listen to the manifest history that the Kennedys created, you thought this was a sweet little darling who knew exactly what he had to say.
	But in reality, he was a very poor congressman, a very poor senator.
	I checked it out with many of my other friends and was really quite an inept president.
	And the reason we had the missile crisis and other crises occurring was because he had this mental fluctuation.
	But they don't talk about it.
	So guys at Harvard like Ted Sorensen and others made up the bullshit like the 13 days and the most important days and you studied it and the answer was they really didn't want to put in the issue that he was mercurial, he was mentally sick, he should never have gone into the Navy before.
	It was his father who pushed him in.
	And of course, that was the hidden message of all of this.
	But it was covered up by, oh, John F. Kennedy said this and John F. Kennedy said that.
	Well, what John F. Kennedy did was to create a lot of wars all over Latin America and Vietnam.
	And he really alienated the CIA, Alan Dulles in particular, and many others, and really was out of control.
	And his handlers would never admit it.
	And so whatever happened, happened.
	But it was...
	It was predictable that he would have been assassinated.
	This probably also solidified your theory that the president really is not that effective after 100 days, but is very effective in being the figure for the public.
	Well, yes.
	You hit on something, Adam.
	The notion of the presidency as being a unifying symbol in the 50s, 60s and 70s was legitimate.
	In other words, you had Eisenhower, then you had Nixon.
	Nixon had a problem, but we could go on.
	And then we had Ford.
	And then from Ford, we could go on and have Jimmy Carter.
	So the sequence of events allowed the republic to maintain a certain integrity and And the reason why that was important is because, quite frankly, there was nothing behind the dollar bill.
	And the only thing behind the dollar bill is the notion that we have a system or a republic.
	It's not necessarily a democracy, but a republic that maintains its integrity from one degree.
	Time to another time.
	Now, all of that broke apart.
	And I could see that with the advent of the Internet, because the Internet eventually broke down the nation state.
	And that was what I was beginning to write in my NetForce series under the Clancy franchise when I wrote about cybernation.
	And people said and years later, the generals would ask me, well, how did you come to that idea?
	I said, what do you mean?
	If you have a nation and you have the Internet, the nation state is no longer valid.
	It really is the connections that I have between one and zero and the people I might have in Uganda or in the Soviet Union or in Russia.
	So from that point on, I was really writing in fiction what was going to happen in the future.
	And so you had already pivoted beyond what the intelligence services thought at the time, which is, hey, we control media.
	We have messaging that we can kind of make things work that way.
	But you foresaw that this would be this would remove that entire capability.
	Correct.
	It would not only be.
	Not only that, it would also undermine the credibility of our military because at that particular point, and even now, we don't really need soldiers shooting guns and aircraft carriers and all that nonsense, the hardware.
	What we really needed was the capacity to deal with cyber terrorism, cyber command, cyber warfare.
	And when I wrote about it, that was way ahead.
	But there was a general who understood that, Keith Alexander, whom I had worked with in G2, and he had several degrees in software.
	He later became the head of the NSA.
	Right.
	But he understood that.
	And unfortunately, what happened when you had Keith, and he certainly made some mistakes, but you expect to make that.
	So what happened then is you got an officer, a naval officer, I'm sure is a good man, Mark Rogers, who was a submarine commander.
	Now, that has nothing to do with cyber command or cyber terrorism.
	So what was happening in the future, what was happening in the present time was a total disconnect from what I had been writing in terms of cybernation, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare.
	And then in my other novels, I was writing about water wars because I saw water as an issue.
	And then I wrote about a little bunch of islands that nobody believed in.
	Don't tell me some Japanese island somewhere.
	Well, these were Chinese islands, correct?
	Depends on how you look at it, Japanese or Chinese.
	Right, you're right.
	And it was, again, James Lilly, who understood what I had written 20 years ago, and I said, this will be the focal point for a potential war with China.
	So that must have been frustrating that people, that you were spelling it out for them, and that they weren't seeing it, or worse, they were refusing the entire notion.
	Well, it goes back to your initial statement about me.
	They shut you off before you finish.
	You're the only one allowing me to do that.
	So I get used to it.
	You get socialized to it.
	And you basically say, okay, I mean, you know, I'm not going to spend my hours getting frustrated over it.
	You know, you can either buy the book, but you don't have to buy the book.
	It was that kind of attitude.
	But I kept on going into other areas.
	And what I began to see was that eventually, you know, the realizations of what I had seen 20 years ago would eventually come true with the water wars in California, Nevada, Montana.
	And it's happened now in Florida where we're fighting the phosphate mines coming out of Minnesota, mosaic mines or the RV parks.
	So you're beginning to understand that water is one of the crucial issues in the world that will create a war.
	And so when you have the Chinese, you're already in Bhutan now.
	That's correct.
	Also water.
	Correct.
	And that point of the conflict between the Indians and the Chinese is a major conflict point.
	And I've warned that to our military, our intelligence saying, listen, if I would look at any other place in terms of potential serious wars, it would be between Pakistan and India and India and China, because Pakistan and China are really very close.
	But you have Bhutan, as you said.
	Right.
	We have the Chinese with their one belt, one road.
	They're deep in bed with Pakistan, which India does not like at all.
	Correct.
	And you have the Chinese also who really have, they don't have enough water.
	President Xi Jinping has to deal with the fact that about 300 to 500 million people don't really have enough water.
	The Yangtze and the Yalu, they're totally contaminated.
	So they have to be able to get the water from the Himalayas, and that will be a problem for China.
	So now, Steve, at this point, you understand where the future is.
	I don't know if you've ever read Kaczynski's Industrial Society and its Future, but there's a lot of your thinking that is very similar to that, in a good way.
	That's all right.
	Not the blowing up people way.
	No, Adam, I mean, what you have to understand about me, I don't have to feel that I'm right.
	I just have to write what I feel, and then if it happens, fine.
	If it doesn't happen, fine.
	But I don't need that credit.
	I basically write it because it's internal for me.
	It's not something I want an approval of, or you don't.
	Right, but so now I think, and this is, I think, where you are greatly misunderstood.
	You see the future of psychological operations, warfare, whatever you want to call it, certainly in the United States, and you see the Internet.
	And I think around this time you may have seen Alex Jones early days, and where I believe there's probably a misconception that you're handling him or anything of the like, you're really doing what you've always done you You continue to tell the future, whether it's in a novel, whether that novel becomes a television series or a movie.
	Correct.
	You want to expose people to what I guess that's just in you.
	That's in me.
	I understand this, believe me.
	I understand this inside because that's one of the reasons I do our show at all.
	I find it fun to say, oh, what's really going on here?
	This is way different than you're being told.
	Well, that's why you and I can get along or I and Alex can get along.
	No, I don't handle Alex.
	Alex is a phenomenon which I particularly enjoy.
	I mean, when I first heard him and I said, you know, I think this is going to be the future where somebody like him who can riff, literally.
	Intellectually riff at a far greater rate than I could ever dream of.
	It's almost like a jazz riff.
	I said to myself, my God, you know, what comes out of him in any particular moment is quite amazing.
	But at the same time, he has that sense of self-deprecation and humor that I admire and I can relate to.
	And I've always liked that about Bill Hicks.
	Well, that's true.
	I don't want to say that.
	I don't want to get into that argument.
	As I said, I don't care if he was Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
	If he's Bill Hicks or not Bill Hicks, whatever talent he has, it's talent.
	That's it.
	And the same thing with you.
	And, you know, you relate, you basically relate to people who you feel comfortable with.
	You know, I can't relate to the arrogant, to the pompous.
	I mean, people used to say to me, oh, how come you're not teaching in academia?
	Are you kidding?
	I wouldn't last three minutes in academia.
	Why aren't you teaching chairman of the Department of Psychiatry?
	I wouldn't last four minutes in psychology.
	So in a way, I find my own neighborhood, which is guys like you and Bill Hicks or Alex Jones or whoever it may be.
	And I limit it to that.
	And I enjoy it because...
	It doesn't have to prove anything.
	We don't have to be correct.
	And if we are correct, we can smile about it.
	But you and I know it doesn't mean much to be correct.
	I mean, let me put it this way.
	In the worst case scenario, if I turn out to be correct and I say to people, I'm a physician, I don't want to be correct.
	If I'm saying to you, the patient's got cancer, you better listen.
	And so after a while, since I'm not in the business of being their doctors, I just walk away and say, look, they want to self-immolate or they want to self-destruct.
	That's their business, not mine.
	So that's basically how I approach it.
	So if I go back to what may have been a turning point for you and your and your certainly trust in the agency was 9-11.
	And from this stems, you know, the term false flag, which is thrown around very easily these days.
	And it's probably the biggest point of contention whenever I explain something to someone and say, well, you know, this is the possibility.
	It was a so-called false flag.
	Here's how they work.
	Here's why they're done.
	Here's historically how they take place.
	But it seems whether it's through the advent of the propagation of the Internet and how information flows.
	But it seems like there are more of them.
	Really, for less reason than ever.
	Well, that may be true, but again, what I go back to is it's easy to say that's a false flag or whatever it is, but What's not easy to do is to hold the people accountable who've done it.
	And instead, they get retread through the garbage of government.
	I mean, no Bush has been indicted.
	No Bush has gone to prison.
	None of the Cheney hasn't gone to prison.
	You know, you say anything about Cheney, you got the Secret Service suddenly standing over this holy, you know, idiot who basically coward.
	I mean, that's all he really is.
	And then you get this self-righteous attitude.
	And then you suddenly hear, you know, then you get the black baby coming out of the CIA named Obama.
	And then you wonder yourself, you know, what's going on here?
	This is not the Republic.
	I mean, the agency has failed, and the agency will continue to fail.
	So under whose leadership did that fail?
	When did this really happen?
	This really happened under the Bush administration, senior and then junior, and it began to go downhill very rapidly.
	Is that just greed?
	It's just greed on their part that they...
	It's also arrogance and stupidity.
	A far greater problem than greed is arrogance and stupidity.
	When you don't know what you're doing and you think you're right, it's deadly.
	And you had that under Clinton, who was reported to the agency.
	You had it under Obama, who was totally a baby of the agency.
	His mother was in anthropology, spoke Russian.
	She's a PhD.
	They sent her to...
	Jakarta.
	You don't send a white woman from the Midwest to Jakarta unless she's agency.
	And his maternal grandmother and grandfather worked at the East-West Center, which I was in charge of, and they were CIA bankers.
	So the whole notion that he came out, and the narrative that he came out, and he was a You know, street, whatever it was, nonsense.
	It's stupid.
	It's just nonsense.
	The American public is not going to buy it, and he's not going to be effective.
	And so we saw the problems with the Clintons, how corrupt they were.
	It wasn't anything new.
	Did Bill Clinton really, his mother was a nurse?
	No, his mother was a prostitute in Hope, Arkansas.
	Hope, Arkansas was the place where the mafia in the 1920s and 30s would go to in order to go before they go to Miami if they don't want to be caught.
	You talked about, you know, you talked basically about a whorehouse where Bill Clinton comes in there and he thinks he's smart and Stroop Talbot of the Time Magazine covers him and explains how good he really was when in fact he was a disaster.
	Then you got Hillary, who's not as bright as she thinks it is.
	And I was saying to Alex, she's going under.
	And he said, why?
	I said, well, because when you're spending $100 million and you don't know what you're doing and you got a gentleman there who's playing with her Twitter and doesn't spend anything, the problem is already solved.
	She's going to lose.
	It doesn't matter what happens.
	Stupidity is stupidity.
	So in our world where you and I and others or Tom has to be held accountable, we would be held accountable for that.
	But in the world of the republic and the people who play around there, it's it's nonsense.
	It becomes a theater of the absurd.
	But even it becomes to the point where it's just not appropriate.
	And why is it that this has gotten so far?
	Because it seems like now we are really in a state of total manipulation.
	Because nobody's been arrested.
	Nobody's been arrested.
	You see, when you put them in prison and the FBI gets their act again and stops being the extension of a cross-dresser, J. Edgar Hoover, who manipulates people and thinks that they can do things that they can't, and you have an agency and you have Homeland Security that has to be real, and you have a fictional institution which are providing jobs, then you don't get real outcomes.
	Right.
	I always remember, and it was the most bizarre thing to me, and it came up recently again with the Mueller investigation, a 10-year term limit was set on the director of FBI for a very specific reason.
	It was so we wouldn't have another J. Edgar Hoover, and so the power could transition and no one could become the kingpin again.
	And yet they extended Mueller's tenure by two years, obviously to cover something up.
	Well, look, once you commit the crimes you commit, it's just a constant series of lies and rationalizations.
	With Mueller, I mean, he was appointed a day before, two days before 9-11.
	Give me a break.
	Mueller had a great history as a war veteran in Vietnam and really did well, and then he blew it.
	And he thought that as a wasp coming out of Princeton or wherever he came out, he thought he could ride the high ground and the bushes could guarantee him that.
	Neither one was true.
	So why would he step into this arena again?
	Does he have something to prove?
	Stupidity and arrogance, but also the notion that he was invincible and that he had to correct in his mind the malfeasance he created in 9-11.
	But in fact, what he's doing is just repeating it again and again.
	And remember, in that business, once you're vulnerable, any side can manipulate you.
	So Mueller isn't beholden to himself.
	He's not a man of integrity.
	He's a man who has to prostitute himself either to the Bushes, to the Trumps, or to the Clintons.
	And in the world of the law, you know, that's basically what they think is fine.
	I mean, they can rationalize it.
	But in my world, you know, in the world of medicine, we would have fired him a long time ago for malpractice.
	When I met you, Steve, which was, we were both guests on the Alex Jones Show, and we talked for a little bit.
	You know, it's...
	What you do now is this...
	Well, let me strike that and go back.
	You spoke about being under continuity of government and how you are a part of this.
	So there does appear to be a network, and I would say there's multiple networks, but you have CIA network or intelligence services, and then you have military, intelligence, military.
	And it seems almost like a constant battle, depending on whoever's running the president since back to JFK days, You know, who's really keeping the republic on the rails, which we've already established really doesn't have that much to do with the president after 100 days?
	That's a good question.
	I don't want to promote myself and say that I'm essential to that.
	I'm not.
	Basically because I've been around.
	Here's what makes it unusual from my point of view and unusual from the intelligence community.
	As I said, the agency was very nice to me.
	MI has always been nice to me.
	I mean, literally when I say that.
	And when I was promoted to an 06 or a Navy captain or colonel, and then I was promoted at 39 years old to 07 to, let's say, a rear admiral or brigadier general, they wanted me to continue, they being the system, which was very gracious for what I had been doing in different areas.
	And I said to them in a very polite way, gentlemen, I didn't come from Cuba to the United States to wear a uniform or to wear stripes on my chest or to have a fruit salad.
	Really, I came here to screw up.
	And I really enjoy this country and I want to make mistakes.
	And I'm a physician, but I'd like to do businesses and I'd like But not only was, in a way, it was arrogant, but it wasn't arrogant.
	I was saying to them, I don't want your money.
	I don't want the pension.
	I don't really need the uniform.
	And I don't need the medals.
	And it wasn't that I was deprecating it.
	I just said, I just want to be what any American is, a chance to make mistakes.
	Not a chance to succeed, just a chance to make mistakes.
	And boy, did I make mistakes.
	And I was grateful for that.
	And I think in turn, it's again what you said in the very beginning.
	It kind of punctuated very quickly.
	They didn't quite get it until years later when they said, well, can we pay you for your advice?
	I said, no.
	Why?
	I said, well, why would you pay me?
	I'm more than happy to help you.
	And then you control me, basically.
	Well, not only do you control me, that's correct.
	But the other issue was, you know, I'm really grateful for what I received in this country or what I was able to get.
	I got an education.
	I was able to serve the country.
	I was able to do businesses.
	I was able to fail many times.
	And, you know, that to me was sufficient and necessary to just remain, you know, part or parcel or indirectly part of the republic.
	And I said, look, my loyalty is not to the presidency as much as it is to the republic because it constitutes a far greater entity than any presidency.
	And so when you when you look at a country that's as large as ours and as diversified as ours, You really begin to appreciate it, particularly having come out of France or Europe or Cuba, where it's much more narrow.
	So it was nothing noble.
	It was just simply something I said, hey, give me a chance to screw up, guys.
	Thank you.
	So you mentioned earlier, you know, a military coup is inevitable.
	Hasn't that actually kind of happened already in this presidency?
	Would you repeat that again with the right emphasis?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	around one president.
	Yeah.
	I would say that would be you wouldn't be wrong.
	OK.
	But the difference here is that the generals are placed there in order to maintain the continuity of the republic and, in fact, to terminate certain wars.
	And one of the wars that they did terminate, and nobody's ever talked about it, I'm shocked, is ISIS now.
	They've eliminated that.
	Well, I guess they just turned off the CIA spigot and it ended.
	Well, that was part of it.
	But yeah, that's part of it.
	Yes.
	The Hillary Clinton, Petraeus, and others.
	But that was one part.
	But the second part...
	The Syrian army, we were defeated, and we accepted it.
	In other words, the special forces, our generals accepted it, and we didn't make a big point about it.
	But at the same time, we didn't need to overthrow, again, the CIA, the misconception of overthrowing Bashar Assad.
	Now, in turn, they want to go into Afghanistan.
	I think that's a mistake.
	They know I know it's a mistake.
	It's a recapitulation of what happened.
	And is this, again, just stupidity and arrogance, or is this for more geopolitical reasons?
	I don't think it's geopolitical as much as it is a dereliction of duty.
	McMaster wrote about it in Vietnam, and now they want to go back in and try the very same things that didn't work in Vietnam, reform and, you know, win the hearts and minds.
	Absolute nonsense.
	I mean, Afghanistan is barely a country.
	It's totally corrupt, will always be corrupt.
	Their military is corrupt.
	Their police is corrupt.
	The only one who's ever talked about Afghanistan was another neocon who never served us, and that was Zalmay Khalazad.
	So it's a waste of time.
	It would be criminal for them to go back in.
	Literally criminal.
	But they'll do it.
	So...
	Any happy notes you want me to say?
	No, no, no, not at all.
	With your knowledge of human behavior, with your knowledge of how the sausage is really made, how everything works under the hood, where do we go from here?
	You must be very concerned about the state of the republic, not just how the system is running, but about the citizens themselves.
	Where are we going through here?
	It's not optimistic for me.
	I mean, I would like to say we're doing very well.
	Unfortunately, I spent time with some school teachers recently, and they're saying we're getting a dumbing down of the classes.
	That's very, very bad.
	We need an education system that is the equivalent to what the Chinese have.
	And when Shanghai grade students outperform 200 other countries, including us, in mathematics and in writing, it's a very bad sign.
	And right now, our academia is in trouble.
	I mean, they're so self-assured and self-congratulatory.
	We have too many professors who are in tenure, too many professors who are not relevant.
	Academia, in many ways, has become irrelevant in certain ways.
	So what they do is rationalize their existence by sending all kinds of nonsensical magazines back to me to tell me how great they are.
	But in turn, I watch China and I see President Xi Jinping assume the leadership of both the Communist Party and the nation.
	And what he's determined to do, and I think he's made two mistakes.
	One, he's tried to cut off the Internet.
	That's a major, major mistake for Gigi Pong.
	And the second one, he's tried to cut off the fast loans or the money loans that are required to the middle class to have money.
	And that's a major mistake.
	But what he has not made a mistake in, he ordered a 400-mile railroad from Djibouti to Ethiopia.
	And what do we have in Djibouti?
	We have our drone base.
	We have a drone base and 8,000 soldiers.
	So we're totally mismatched for the future.
	We're not looking at the future in the right way.
	We're not concerned about the nature of jobs in the future.
	We're not talking about the fact that many jobs will be eliminated.
	And we're really not addressing the issue of going from a digital to a quantum era, which means we're going a thousand times faster than we are right now in terms of the Internet.
	And that's mind-blowing.
	That is basically what we call a paradigm shift.
	And neither party has addressed it.
	The leadership hasn't addressed it.
	And what we're wasting is little people fighting little wars for nothing.
	I mean, and wasting our money.
	Meanwhile, Xi has gone all the way through Laos, Vietnam.
	He controls the Mekong Delta, controls a lot of the waterways, and China's not looking for war.
	Even though we have 100 bases around China, they're really not relevant.
	What is your experience with the Chinese?
	Have you ever negotiated with them?
	Do you know what drives them?
	Yes, very much.
	I have negotiated and actually created a format for negotiations with the Chinese.
	The most important element for the Chinese negotiations, what we call, they call guanxi, U-U-A-N-X-I. That's the personal relationship between the individual and the other individual.
	It occurs more often than not over meals.
	And ironically, most of our senior officials really never understood how important the Chinese meal is, which is seven, eight courses.
	And as well as the drinking that come by and all of that, that's where you develop the relationship.
	And then the Chinese at the end will say to you, oh, no, no, no, we can't agree with you.
	And then as you're just boarding the plane, they'll say, oh, one minute.
	So you have to really be knowledgeable about the Chinese national character, which hasn't changed all that much.
	Even under President Xi, he assumed what was called Article 79.
	I knew he would Take over both parties, the party and the nation state, because unlike our leaders, Xi had one characteristic, and I used to say it to the Chinese beforehand, when there was Hu Jintao and other leaders who were not in the Cultural Revolution, I said, you will need a leader who has been debased by the Cultural Revolution and at the same time be the princeling of a famous Chinese Communist leader.
	And that leader turned out to be Xi.
	Xi had suffered a major, major humiliation under the Cultural Revolution, as well as his father, who was arrested twice.
	But despite that, and you can imagine what kind of character he must have to absorb the humiliation and redirect it into a positive attitude that I'm going to climb again.
	The Chinese ladder on the Politburo and become a leader.
	You have to have an internal drive and a discipline that we don't have here.
	And that's why I can respect President Xi and what he's doing.
	He's not looking to win wars.
	He's not even looking to have confrontations with us or the Russians.
	He wants to do exactly what the Dutch did, and you know better than I, in the 16th century.
	Yeah, go out and trade with everybody.
	Correct.
	And he has effectively gone all over the world to trade with everybody.
	He has a problem.
	He has to balance out his economy, which is heavily dependent on credit and debt.
	But I think Xi will do that.
	But he has to back off from the internet.
	He has to back off from all of those things that he thinks are an internal problem to him, which they're not.
	Because the more...
	Go ahead.
	No, no, no.
	Please, please continue.
	Finish up.
	I want to hear.
	The more he represses or thinks he suppresses the Chinese student, the more problems he will have.
	He doesn't need to close Momo or any other of the other companies.
	He doesn't need to have control over the loan companies.
	That's not going to help him.
	What's going to help him is that he can mobilize the young people and send them out just as he's doing now to the United States, to Europe, and let them integrate.
	And I definitely want to come back to China because it's fascinating to me when I see their economic belt, the actual train.
	So it's one belt, one road initiative, which is kind of funny because there's pretty much three belts, no roads.
	It's all trains.
	Anyway, they've got the maritime routes.
	They have all of this.
	But you say something very important where...
	Should he not restrict the internet and send the young people out, why can't we do that here?
	It's a good question, Adam.
	You'd have to answer that and others would have to answer.
	Basically, we don't have the same culture and we don't have the same discipline.
	We are a nation that has been spoiled for probably the past 50 to 60 years.
	We believe in entrepreneurship, yet, you know, you see these startups, and then when you get these startups, you have companies that are totally blown out of proportion, that have no relationship to their real value.
	I mean, when you look at Amazon and Google, and they really don't make that kind of money, and you look at Google-type controlling what I'm doing, or saying how much I'm making, or demonetizing me, you're getting a fascist organization.
	You're getting institutions.
	That have no relevancy to the day-to-day problem, yet on the other hand, they're controlling it or think they're controlling it.
	And what they're going to do, they'll implode.
	It's easy for guys like me and others to make them implode.
	It's not hard.
	You have Amazon that's taken over the grocery stores and they want pharmacy.
	Big, big, bigger and without any relevancy to really what the basic values are and what are the inherent values.
	We're evaluating companies in the biotech area that make no money and are valued at millions of dollars or hundreds of millions or billions.
	So a billion, when you say to somebody he's making a billion dollars, it means nothing.
	It's just paper.
	So we've lost the inherent value of what our work ethic is about.
	Doesn't that just prove that capitalism has a very dark downside?
	We're not in capitalism anymore.
	We aren't in.
	No, no, I think you're right in that.
	We are really into what's called crony capitalism, which isn't the same.
	The entrepreneur spirit that we had in the 1900s and then in the beginning of the beginning and the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, that's been lost.
	What's happening now, it's becoming almost a travesty.
	A bunch of kids get together.
	They get funded.
	When I started angel investing, or it means the initial investment into companies, that was 20, 30 years ago.
	We put in a couple of thousand bucks and we put our sweat equity in it and it was a bunch of us guys sitting around in Northern Virginia.
	And, you know, we decided this company or that company.
	Right now, if you walk across the street from Google and you go to a startup, that person walking across the street is valued at $2 billion.
	So the net asset value of a company before it even makes any penny is already absurd and obscene.
	And so eventually you get companies that produce nothing, do nothing, and then become an extension of, yeah, well, we have a greater extension in penetration.
	I remember when I had my last company, which was a nutraceutical company, and Google came around to us and we're virtual in Montana and said, oh, we can't use these words.
	And if we want to use the words, other words, we have to pay more.
	And I said, who the hell?
	Now, Google, 10 years later, is telling me, oh, we're going to demonetize you.
	So when I called up the guys who were involved in Google, they said to me, it's part of an algorithm.
	I said, bullshit.
	It's part of greed, and it's part of your own self-destructiveness.
	Google was created by two Jews out of Stanford who I knew about, one who came out of the Soviet Union, but had I not worked on the Soviet Union, he wouldn't have been here.
	So what is he doing now?
	He's flying around in planes and goes to the Bahamas.
	He became exactly the spoiled baby that most of these guys are.
	Whereas you and I and others who are in the 60s, 70s, we're still hustling.
	They pretty much became what they fought against their entire life.
	Exactly.
	They became the entire spoiled brats.
	And you see that in Silicon Valley.
	You see that in Hollywood.
	You see that in a lot of places.
	That's why in the rural South and elsewhere in the Midwest and in Texas, you see a different attitude or Elan Vital.
	Basically, people here want to work.
	They want to create their own little businesses.
	We're coming to the point where...
	Let me get to this issue, if you don't mind, Adam.
	No, Steve, as long as you wish.
	You don't mind my riffing on this?
	I'm kidding.
	This is the entire reason I called you.
	Oh, you're so sweet, Adam.
	I like you.
	This whole issue of net neutrality was just busted two days ago.
	That is one of the biggest mistakes, and you're very nice...
	Engineer here, Tom and I are nodding our head because what in fact has happened is we've destroyed the net.
	I think we're good to go.
	So we have this issue coming in and the FCC incorrectly said we're not going to monitor the net.
	That's absurd.
	Well, I'm going to push back a little bit on that.
	Go ahead.
	Because having been around when the commercial internet was being shaped and how peering agreements work and how traffic flows and it was kind of a karmic democratic system Of fairness, of I give you this much traffic, I'll take this from you.
	And by the way, it's Google and it is Amazon and it's Netflix, although they've withdrawn somewhat because they've already figured it out.
	They said, oh, fuck it, we'll just put our boxes inside the networks.
	We don't have to deal with the peering and getting stuff off the internet.
	So that was already broken to a certain extent.
	But the regulations that are being, once you regulate the internet, then it's over.
	No.
	Because they're talking about illegal traffic, illegal content.
	So there will be all of these rules which will now be cemented, which I think actually gives the power to the telcos.
	It gives them the power to turn stuff off based upon...
	You know, some very ill-defined terms such as illegal network traffic, which could be peer-to-peer.
	That could be deemed illegal.
	It could be Bitcoin, blockchain traffic.
	That could be deemed illegal.
	I think that's worse.
	I think you're very articulate.
	I understand what you're saying.
	But my point is this.
	It's a...
	What basically I'm looking at is the real net neutrality was there before we had Google and Amazon and any of those companies.
	That's really what I was talking about.
	Yes.
	The reason why I was talking about net neutrality, not as it's defined now, which you're correct, Adam.
	I'm talking about net neutrality when I was trained in 1970s on the internet and social media.
	I don't remember that Facebook or Google or any one of these self-aggrandizing idiots created the internet when it was DARPA and the agency.
	Right, but now we're coming right into your field, Steve, because...
	What has happened is through, I still believe mistake, but was understood very quickly, through the Pavlovian system of rewards with views and likes and engagement, etc., etc., people have been suckered into it and don't even realize that they have the power, literally with the click of a mouse, to start something different, to be in a different realm and not participate in this so-called Internet.
	Well, they could do that, but my point is that we need a paradigm shift away from this internet and break up Google and Apple and the rest, because they really don't...
	What they're doing is changing the dynamics of what we have, but not allowing for what I would create paradigm shifts.
	I don't see the paradigm shifts right now.
	I think quantum will be a major paradigm shift.
	For example, when I was asked what is the most...
	Severe problem we have on the internet in the covert industry.
	Well, you'd have quantum encryption.
	They don't know how to do that.
	And so when you have quantum encryption, there aren't many companies that do that.
	And instead, we have all kinds of antivirus and antivirus companies.
	And all of that is nonsense.
	Because you and I saw a week ago, and no Nobody said a word.
	A hundred thousand so-called geniuses destroyed themselves.
	And that's what I had predicted.
	That eventually they would have their own destruction in there.
	And they don't know what to do.
	Yet we're spending billions of dollars to create absolutely nothing, to monitor nothing, and to be vulnerable to any hacker from God knows where.
	But nobody said a word.
	And instead they're interested about sexual harassment as opposed to the NSA. So Tell me there isn't distraction, denial, and distortion here.
	Totally.
	Totally.
	But what to do about it?
	And I'm not saying you have answers, but you do have more insight into the masses and how psyche works and what is happening.
	I'm a little bit more primitive than that.
	I believe in firing people.
	And that's what I was hired to do.
	I was brought in and you just fired them.
	Which is exactly the problem today.
	There is no firing.
	We can't make people sad or triggered or unhappy.
	No.
	Correct.
	You hit it on the head.
	And that's what I said.
	What you need is a sweeper.
	And I've said that in the Trump administration.
	I've said that in every administration.
	That's what I was brought in for.
	You clean him up.
	You leave.
	You don't say goodbye.
	And that's it.
	You don't take a position.
	He won't do that.
	And unfortunately, as a businessman, I thought he would have the capacity to clean sweep.
	He is the your fired guy, the drain the swamp guy.
	Well, you know, it's very nice to say drain the swamp.
	It's a lot harder to go up to somebody and say, okay, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired.
	I mean, right across the board.
	Same thing in the military.
	I mean, we're wasting over $100 billion just on administrative issues.
	There should be a takedown of a lot of the programs.
	We don't need more jet fighters.
	We don't need an aircraft carrier.
	I mean, I can take out an aircraft carrier when the Exocit missile.
	That was done in the Falkland Islands 30 years ago.
	What we need to do is deal with the 21st century and we're not there.
	So whether this is random number theory or however it happens, here we are.
	We're in this almost like an irons.
	We are most connected, most informed, most irrational, I think, in our behavior in the United States specifically.
	But is this coming from an overall mission to keep everybody stupid and, you know, we can go about our merry way?
	You know, that's like the big...
	There's one big conspiracy of people who want, you know, to destroy America.
	Or is it just our own doing?
	I don't believe that many...
	Well, I talked about conspiracy, but I'm not a great conspiracy theorist that way.
	I believe that we're just...
	It's our own doing, Adam.
	Just what you said.
	It's coming out to the point...
	If you have a...
	Education system, that's faltering.
	And we're funding that faltering.
	When you have an education system that works at the lowest levels, when you have a medical system that's basically reinforcing money and not care, when you have a hospital system that's reinforcing greed and not care, when you have a military that's really used all over the world without any strategy when you have a military that's really used all over the world without any strategy and the nonsensical retort from generals is, oh, we have terrorists who Bullshit.
	Nonsense.
	That's absolute nonsense.
	There aren't any terrorists that came from Afghanistan.
	There aren't any terrorists that come from Iran.
	They know it.
	I know it.
	And what you have instead is the pervasiveness of KBR and L3 and all those mercenaries who want to get out there and make money.
	But if you don't have a president who can rein it in, or you don't have a leader who can rein it in, then we will be the product of our own entitlement and our own expenditures.
	And unfortunately, I don't believe Trump can do it.
	I don't see anybody there who can do it.
	And quite frankly, most of our generals there are just trying to keep Trump in position and hand.
	But I'm not a great believer that politicians have been a great asset to our country.
	One of our greatest presidents, Eisenhower, was really not a politician.
	He did what he did.
	He didn't look for money.
	He became our president, got us out of the wars, and that was it.
	George Marshall, the same thing.
	But we've had nothing but self-aggrandizing manipulators, all of whom had some medical problem or mental problem.
	If we continue on this course, we will self-destruct, I can assure you.
	Do you see anyone who would be lined up for 2020 who could do a better first 100 days?
	Yeah, but I don't want to bring it out right now.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Let me put it this way.
	I love it.
	There's always plans on debts.
	I love that.
	That's for our next talk.
	Well, if you'll do another one with me, I would greatly appreciate that.
	Adam, you guys are amazing.
	I didn't realize this was a volunteer program.
	Adam, you should be proud of that.
	If you're asking me what is the future, then what you're doing is the future for me.
	You know, people who care, people who do things.
	You are the future, but we have to break it through.
	And in turn, what I believe is probably we're going to devolve power to the states and to the counties and to people like yourself who can create those communities that are both virtual and real.
	So I want to thank you for this opportunity.
	Wow, that is one long and interesting interview.
	I have to give you credit for that.
	Well, thank you.
	And I think we should do it more often.
	Yeah, I've got a bunch of people lined up.
	I think we should do more interviews.
	Because they're good.
	They fit in.
	Our thinking is always that nobody's really listening to the show on some of these holidays, and they'll listen maybe sometime in the future.
	Right.
	It's not needed that we do a show, probably run over some material that should be used in the future.
	Let's see it as a bonus, a Christmas present from us to you.
	Well, at least, yeah.
	At least it's worthwhile.
	That was a good interview.
	Congratulations.
	I'm glad you liked it.
	All right, everybody, we return on Thursday live.
	I'll be here in FEMA Region 6.
	John will be in northern Silicon Valley.
	Please remember us at thevorak.org slash NA, and we'll be listing all of our executive producers, producers, and thank yous for both shows.
	Until then, kind of from Austin, Texas.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And live on tape.
	I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We'll be back on Thursday right here on No Agenda.
	Until then, adios, mofos.
	The best podcast in the universe.
	I am mofo.

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