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Nov. 10, 2016 - Steve Pieczenik
09:50
The Truth About Regime Change
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Very often I'm asked this question, how could one person like myself be able to do what we in the business call regime change?
How could one person like myself be able to do what we in the business call regime change?
How could one person like myself, who was trained both in psychiatry and Harvard and had a PhD at MIT in political science, understand the dynamics of a great country like Soviet Union and be able to do what we in the business call regime change or the take down of the Soviet Union?
The answer is immodestly quite difficultly and it took a period of a long time Basically what happened is when I was drafted into the military and then I was assigned to the National Institute of Mental Health, I was sent overseas into the Soviet Union.
And there I worked with the heads of psychiatric hospitals, in particular the Kachenko Psychiatric Hospital, which was the primary hospital, where the KGB and the GRU, which is Soviet Military Intelligence, incarcerated a lot of the political dissidents in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s.
And I knew from our intelligence reports that these people who were incarcerated were really Christians.
Most of them were fundamentalist Christians or they were Baptists or Anabaptists or Protestants.
But for the most part, they were not enamored with Soviet Communism or the atheism inherent in Soviet Communism.
So what happened is the KGB and the GRU incarcerated many of these political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and then they would apply different types of torture according to what they thought was appropriate to that particular dissident.
In my experience, I was there in the late 70s and I negotiated with the head of that psychiatric hospital with a man who was head of the psychiatric division for the Soviet Union and at the same time had been a doctor for Stalin.
And he was a very serious man, a man of great integrity, quite frankly, because when we made a personal deal between myself and him, I basically said, look, I will commoditize the people who are the political dissidents without having to say they were Christians, he understood it, and I will provide you with a number of Wang computers for each one of those political dissidents, but we will take them out of the Kachenko Psychiatric Hospital and bring them back to the United States.
He eventually agreed with me because they needed Wang computers in the late 70s and early 80s, and we were able to take more than two dozen or three dozen political dissidents out of the psychiatric hospital, bring them to the United States.
That was the prelude to my understanding how the Soviet Union worked, how the KGB worked, how the GRU worked.
And I understood that, number one, with respect, you will get very much from the Soviet Union if you're true to your word.
Secondly, if you know how to work the Soviets or the Russians in this particular case, along the chessboard concept, then you would know how to apply some of what we call psychological operation methods into the Soviet Union.
So what did I do?
The first element that was important was the absence of religion in the Soviet Union.
As you know, most of the Soviet Union was atheist.
However, there was a strong underbelly of Catholicism, but more importantly, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox concerns in the peasantry and the surrounding areas around Moscow.
And what I did, and others who worked with me, the CIA, MI, and a whole bunch of Foreign Service officers, is we were able to get Pope John of Poland, who's an anti-communist, to start a mass A rally of Catholicism around the borders of the Soviet Union and he started to make a mass.
And the mass translated and went over the border of Russia and started to instigate the rise of Russian Orthodoxy.
And so religion became one factor which we stimulated in the late 70s and 80s.
The second factor was that we had taken the head of the military, Admiral Akramayev, We put him on one of our aircraft carriers and showed him how effective we were in landing and taking off on that aircraft carrier, in contrast to the Soviets, who really had a very hard time to be able to land and to take off.
And we showed him what a M1 Abrams could do in terms of the T-72.
The M1 Abrams took out about five or six T-72s within a period of five to seven minutes.
So the military component was...
A totally neutralized without having gone to war.
The third element was creating an economic hardship for the Soviet Union which they really could not comprehend.
At the same time we were starting to fund a project which never came to fruition which was SDI or Strategic Star Wars.
And the reason we funded that, and Reagan was effective in making it seem very real, was that we were forcing the Soviets, in particular their engineers and scientists, to garner a lot of money from the civilians so that they could build up their own Military force against something that really didn't exist.
So in effect, using economic warfare and techniques of economic warfare, we were able to destabilize the financial systems of the Soviet Union.
Then the fourth part, the cultural element, was something that was a great concern to me because when I was in the Soviet Union over those period of years, I understood that the basic The rock and roll music of America, believe it or not, was quite revolutionary and the KGB had a very hard time controlling those young people who belonged to the intelligentsia who loved rock and roll and they would go into all kinds of subterranean clubs and create artificial bands that mimicked
our own bands And I began to understand that if we could infiltrate the country through their sailors and through Radio Free Europe and pump in a huge amount of American music, we could really begin to create a fissure within the young people who would split away from the old line communists.
And what happened eventually was the fifth part was the eventual negotiation which I was part of between the Soviet Politburo and United States policy planning staff for the takedown of the Soviet Union where we discussed the sequence of events that would occur in quote perestroika and Gorbachev was smart enough at that time to understand that the old system could not function anymore in a new world Where financial concerns were
important, where the youth had to have new jobs and new opportunities, and where the old system of repression could no longer exist.
So through a systematic psychological warfare and then a psychological negotiation with the Soviet Politburo itself, And the members of the Soviet elite, we were able to neutralize the Soviet Union and eventually allow the Communist component to fall down.
Some of that I described in my book, The Mind Palace.
Some of it is described in the series in the Tom Clancy franchises.
And Tom Clancy, I provided him with that information in his books, The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
So I want you to understand that the Soviet Union had been changed because of efforts on behalf of the American government, not just me, but other people within the national intelligence organizations, the CIA, military intelligence.
But without the use of force, without the use of armies and kinetic structures, we were able to literally change and transform the Soviet Union into a Russian Federation with about 82 different regions.
So, Mr.
and Miss America, I want you to think that history has been made here in America, but it can repeat itself at another time.
And Putin will understand that as much as we were able to demobilize the Soviet Union, we were also able to neutralize some of his economic efforts in the past few years by creating an economic warfare where we decreased the price of the ruble We've junk bonded his bonds and in effect he had an embargo where he could not export or really import anything of value to the Russians.
In turn what happened is that Putin clearly understood that the force of the United States and the European countries was not in the military itself but in the people who were able to manipulate the variables within Russia and to use them to our advantage.
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