All Episodes
Previous Next
March 15, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
34:48
Ukraine and CIA with Whitney Webb

Whitney Webb discusses Ukraine and the CIA with RFK Jr in this episode.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's my great privilege to have one of my favorite guests on the show today, Whitney Webb, who's been a professional writer, researcher, and journalist since 2016.
I would say she's one of the last living journalists we still have.
She's written for several websites from 2017 to 2020.
She was a staff writer and senior investigator for Mint Press News.
She currently writes for The Last American, back on, and hosts an independent podcast called Unlimited Hangout.
You can support her work directly.
I wanted to ask you to come on the show because you wrote a really, I think, surprising article from many people about the Ukraine and about the CIA involvement in the Ukraine and kind of supporting and nurturing the insurgency there.
It's a very, very disturbing article to anybody who kind of understands our recent history.
And I know that you do not represent yourself as an expert on the Ukraine.
Your observations about the intelligence agencies and their role in crafting the landscapes of global conflict Are always very, very interesting.
And I think one of the things that's disturbing about the Ukraine conflict is that we seem to have adopted a single narrative that is being broadcast ubiquitously on Fox News, CNN, etc.
There's no room for dissent.
There's no room to ask questions.
There's no gray area.
And I think that's a really kind of troubling thing for democracy.
But why don't you outline your take on the Ukraine so that our listeners can at least have the advantage of hearing a different point of view.
Sure.
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me back on your program.
As you mentioned, I don't present myself as an expert on Ukraine.
I don't speak Ukrainian or Russian.
I've never been to this part of the world.
My reason for writing the article that I did write is because I have written a lot about the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA of the United States, and about intelligence operations, both historical and present.
And there seem to be indications that Coming from former CIA officials, from very well-connected political operators, about plans basically to turn Ukraine into, you know, Afghanistan or Syria 2.0, basically by funding, having the CIA fund arm and train insurgents in Ukraine with the idea of forcing out whatever happens with the assumption that if a pro-Russian president is placed in Ukraine,
if the current President Zelensky is removed or something like that, or a couple if the current President Zelensky is removed or something like that, or a couple different scenarios that were not necessarily favorable to the West, that there would be, according to Douglas London, a former CIA station chief writing in Foreign Affairs, he used language that there will be an insurgency, a former CIA station chief writing in Foreign I think.
He basically announces it's going to happen.
And that was in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is extremely influential, particularly on policymakers within the Biden administration.
Then, of course, a few days later, you have Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, oversaw the arming of the Syrian so-called moderate rebels.
By the way, her deputy chief of staff during that time is now national security advisor to Biden.
His name is Jake Sullivan.
Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC to essentially say that what people are looking towards within the Biden administration of implementing in Ukraine is the exact same thing the U.S. did with the 1980s arming of rebels, as they were called at the time, in Afghanistan and what they would do later under her tenure in Afghanistan and what they would do later under her tenure and in charge of the State Department in Syria, in coordination with the CIA, arming rebels there,
I just want to interrupt you for a second, because it's really astonishing that these high-level State Department, Hillary Clinton, Doug London, and other CIA officials are bragging about About the outcomes in Afghanistan.
The Syrian project of the CIA essentially created ISIS and then precipitated 2 million refugees, which have flooded into Europe and destabilized every democracy in Europe and resulted in Brexit, etc.
The CIA project 15 years before in Afghanistan Yielded Osama bin Laden and ultimately the 9-11 attack.
So there just doesn't seem any kind of accountability for the globe.
And it's really, really frightening that these global leaders, our foreign policy panjarams, are looking at those as success stories.
And I just wanted to put that in as a footnote.
No, I would definitely agree with you.
I think it's completely insane.
In fact, in Hillary Clinton's interview where she's talking about this, she laughs about the unintended consequences of having armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which, as you mentioned, gave rise to al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban, which the U.S. spent, I guess, the largest military occupation and war in American history, you know, in an extremely expensive war as well, that we only recently withdrew troops from there.
And I guess it seems like if you hear some people in DC, some people seem very eager to send them back out to Eastern Europe and potentially to the Ukraine.
We'll see if that actually comes to pass.
But it is really insane.
So the question is, why would they do that?
And then it turns out, from a report that was released in January...
That the CIA has been essentially training in insurgency since 2015.
So there's been, what I posit in my article is, you know, we had this weird situation over the past couple months where the CIA was telling the Biden administration, and then the Biden administration would repeat that to the American public that there was going to be an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And this was left off by the Russian governments, the Ukrainian government, and lots of analysts in the U.S. and elsewhere.
It was essentially not taken seriously.
And then those acts essentially come to pass.
But there's a few things that happen between those claims first being made by the CIA and this military operation being conducted by Russia occurring, one of which is the meeting of the president of Ukraine and some of the major and high-ranking intelligence one of which is the meeting of the president of Ukraine and some of the major and high-ranking intelligence officials in Ukraine
And then you also have various other things that took place, including the provisioning of lethal aid coming from the U.S. and I believe some other countries arriving at the beginning Since 2017, there's been Russian military officials saying that lethal aid to Ukraine would essentially be considered a declaration of war from the Russian military perspective.
And then what allegedly, at least this is coming from the Russian side, of course, so it's worth keeping that Thank you.
the president of Ukraine speaking at the Munich Security Conference, essentially saying that there was an intention to violate the, I believe it's called the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, that essentially established Ukraine as a non-nuclear state, and that they would essentially be looking at how that essentially established Ukraine as a non-nuclear state, and that they would essentially be looking at how to reacquire nuclear weapons, which was explored in a really excellent recent article published at Consortium News, because the New York Times attempted to paint the claim that Zelensky because the New York Times
It was painted by the New York Times as conspiracy theory, but the Consortium News piece really dismantles those talking points.
So, and also...
Let me interrupt.
I'm sorry, because what you're saying is fascinating.
Not at all.
The Munich Security Conference is a really odd annual event.
It essentially is a conference for spies.
The leading spy agencies from all over, particularly the Western world, but even Iran, et cetera, all come to this very weird conference in Munich.
And for Solinsky to go to that conference And announced that the Ukraine is going to reacquire nuclear weapons.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the provisos for Gorbachev to dismantle the Soviet Union was, number one, that NATO would stay out, would not move east, or would stay out of Oregon, or inviting in the former Soviet satellites.
The other was that Ukraine would give up its nuclear arsenal.
The Soviet Union kept many of its nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and they did not want a country at their door that was now independent, being a nuclear nation.
So those were the two things that, you know, that were red lines for the Soviets for Gorbachev.
And since then, we have surrounded the Soviet Union with NATO. And then Zelensky's announcement was really another red line.
And Zelensky's, the kind of hints that Zelensky was giving about bringing NATO into the Ukraine was another red line.
And then the third red line was the Ukraine's war on the separatists in eastern Ukraine who were ethnic Russians.
And maybe 30,000 ethnic Russians killed during that war in the last couple of years.
And this was clearly something of great concern to the former Soviet Union.
Right.
The NATO expansion part is definitely a part of the red lines that were crossed here.
And so before this Munich Security Conference, where Zelensky made these claims about potentially acquiring nuclear weapons, Ukraine, I believe, relatively recently, but in the last couple of years, has been sort of being integrated into NATO without formally being part of NATO. And then also after the 2014 coup,
which had a lot of involvement from people in the U.S. at the time, like Victoria Nyland, among others, the Constitution adopted after that coup included an intention to try and integrate Ukraine into the NATO bloc.
And so basically, Ukraine becoming part of NATO is considered, and it has been established for a long time as one of these red lines, but the idea that they would essentially have NATO-controlled nukes in their territory, even if they weren't formally part of NATO, is a red line that I think they would have known would have been crossed, right?
So what I posit in the article is that Zelensky didn't just go to this big-time security conference and And just say, oh, we're thinking about getting nukes and not know the ramifications of that, right?
So what I sort of posit in the piece, and I call it a possibility because I don't know exactly what happened, obviously, but if the CIA has been training in insurgency since 2015 and that insurgency has yet to fully emerge, Yeah, as emerging because of the Russian military operation in Ukraine right now and the conflict there.
It seems to me that there was an effort to get those lines crossed so that the necessary requirements were in place in order to allow this pre-planned insurgency to emerge.
And And that may sound very conspiratorial to people, but I point in the article that former and current intelligence officials telegraphed that this would happen back in 2020.
There's this bizarre article that was published in Politico by one of the directors of the Aspen Institute, which is a non-profit think tank that sort of works in this milieu of We're good to go.
Right.
Oh, which I forgot to mention earlier, talking about Hillary Clinton.
The Clintons decided to relaunch the Clinton Global Initiative as this crisis was taking off, which is interesting, given what she's been going around talking about in relation to the insurgency or the plan for an insurgency and how it's a good model.
And all of this.
Very, very odd things going on in Clinton land, I guess.
But anyway, this Politico article, there's a couple things to know about that article.
So it's essentially titled, Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming and Here's What They're Worried About Next.
Basically, it cites all these former and current intelligence officials, anonymous thought leaders, who, according to the author, this Aspen Institute guy, knew that COVID was going to come, and they're essentially saying this is what's going to happen after COVID-19 wanes.
This was written back in May 2020 at the very height of, I guess you could argue, the hysteria around COVID-19.
So a lot of people weren't really paying attention, I would argue, to articles like this one.
They were paying attention to a lot of the news instead about COVID-19 and the proposed solutions to it and things of that nature.
And this is interesting because 2020 was a very odd year for For the national security apparatus in the US in the sense that there was a major, what I would argue is a major pivot taking place that year.
So in the beginning of 2020, it's traditional for the heads of the intelligence agencies to have a rare appearance in Congress where they testify about the big threats facing the world.
And this coincides with their release of something called the Worldwide Threat Assessment.
2020 was the first year since they started doing this decades ago where they didn't issue one.
And they had some weird answer about why they didn't do one.
Like, oh, we don't want to upset Trump.
I don't think that was really why, because, you know, these are the heads of, you know, the CIA and all the intelligence agencies.
I don't think they're actually scared of someone like Donald Trump, but that's just my opinion.
So this article per the author was this Aspen Institute guy.
He was creating what he called a domestic threat assessment because there was no worldwide threat assessment this year.
So he said he was going to make his own, talking to former and current spooks and all these different individuals who knew, according to him, that COVID-19 was coming about what is going to happen next.
And then not long after this article comes out, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, which has existed for the better part of 20 years, decides that 2020 is the first year they're going to issue a Homeland Threat Assessment.
So you have a phasing out of the Worldwide Threat Assessment and a phasing in of the domestic threat assessment.
And I would argue that was, it represents a major pivot from the intelligence agencies because DHS is basically a domestically focused intelligence agency away from foreign terror in the post-9-11 era to domestic terror.
And there were some other things that went on in 2020 as well, like a high-ranking official at DHS at the time, Elizabeth Newman.
Going in front of Congress, essentially saying, we can see another 9-11 building and we can't quite stop it, and making all these declarations about an imminent 9-11.
And she was basically credited with predicting January 6th that would take place, you know, not that long afterwards, and would be used as the justification, not just to create this war on domestic terror infrastructure within the Biden administration, but it would also be immediately compared to The next 9-11 that, you know, Elizabeth Newman had supposedly predicted.
So returning to this political article, they have a couple different threats that are coming next.
Oh, sure.
Let me interrupt one more time.
The picture of painting is going back historically is that we basically created and armed and trained an Islamic radical jihadist who then became the justification, their actions and became the justification and unleashed them on the world.
Their actions then became the justification for these clamp downs and the Patriot Act, Security state totalitarianism, the constriction of civil liberties, constitutional rights, and otherwise absent the terrorism caused by those groups would have been unacceptable to Americans.
Now what you're saying...
These same agencies are now warning the world about right-wing terrorists and, meanwhile, right-wing white supremacist terrorists.
Meanwhile, since 2015, they have been training people who have been characterized as neo-nazi and insurgency in the Ukraine that is an extremely racist right-wing group.
And at the same time telling the world we're about to see this right-wing conspiracy that's going to be the new threat to inherit the mantle from Islamic terrorism.
So is that, am I getting that right?
Yes, that's essentially it.
So yes, as you touched on, these groups that have been trained by the CIA include neo-Nazi factions, the most well-known of which is known as Azov Battalion, but there's other groups as well that sort of emanate from these far-right parties that rose to prominence really after the 2014 coup.
I believe it's called the Who are openly anti-Semitic.
Yeah.
Well, they're not just anti-Semitic.
They're also very open about the need to eliminate ethnic Russians from Ukraine.
And that is part of why it's so disturbing that they've been so involved in the Donbass conflict, because those regions that declared their independence and sought support from Putin, that sort of set a lot of what we're seeing now off initially, have the largest majority of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, aside from the Crimea, which voted in a referendum to join Russia, you know, not that long after the events of 2014.
So essentially, some of these groups that are involved in fighting these separatists that are, you know, have declared their independence from greater Ukraine, I guess you could say, there's some of them, not all of them, right?
But some of them have called for essentially the genocide of ethnic Russians and said it's necessary to terminate them and all of these really genocidal language.
So there definitely is some truth to the Russian side of that.
But I do think it is a gross oversimplification to say the entire Ukrainian government is neo-Nazi and everyone in the Ukrainian army is a Nazi, but they definitely are.
Well represented and they do have influence.
So, you know, the truth often ends up somewhere in between the two sides, right?
But there definitely is this neo-Nazi element and that seems to be...
I'll just point out that for people who don't know that President Zelensky is Jewish and much of his cabinet and his advisors are also Jewish.
Right, which is odd that they would, you know, it seems odd to people that they would ally with these groups within Ukraine, but really because of the post-2014 power structure, and there's even comedy routines.
Zelensky was a comedian before becoming president, where Zelensky openly talks about, you know, the prominence of these Nazi groups there.
And it seems kind of odd to some people how someone of his background, you know, being Jewish, would be willing to ally with groups that are openly anti-Semitic.
So, you know, basically after the 2014 coup, these far-right groups within Ukraine, you know, during the coup itself, they were probably, according to their own estimates, about 10%, but they carried a lot more weight because they were the violent actors within that.
So...
Even if their numbers aren't necessarily a majority position, it's known in this political milieu that they have a way of getting what they want that other people that aren't willing to use those tactics don't necessarily have at their disposal.
So I think that may explain in part why Zelensky...
Was willing to sort of ally himself with those forces within Ukraine, but it may have also just been out of political necessity in order to be and stay president, given how things have developed in that country since the events of 2014.
But it definitely is odd, I would say, but...
Because, I mean, being someone of a Jewish background, it doesn't make a lot of sense why you would back any sort of group with these stated goals and these racist ideologies.
But that seems to be what's happening.
But anyway, that was sort of a tangent I can...
I should probably return to this Politico article now, if that's okay.
Basically, in framing these threats, in this threat assessment in this article, he divides it into short, medium, and long-term.
And so the first thing they basically, these experts...
According to Graffer saying about what's to follow COVID-19 is what they call the globalization of white supremacy or white supremacist terror.
And there's an interesting excerpt.
I might as well read a little bit from it because it helps to explain the rest of the article a little bit.
He says, As a terrorist
organization, in part because it's trying to train and seed adherents around the globe, inspiring them to carry out terror attacks.
And so in revisiting this article in the context of what's going on in Ukraine now, that designation came out in 2020, probably a month or two, just one month before this article was published in Politico.
And it's a very odd designation.
This group, we're told, the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM, They were designated a specially designated global terror entity, which is a step below a foreign terrorist organization or the FTO designation given to groups like Al-Qaeda, for example.
But they were the first white supremacist group given this designation in 2020.
But there's a lot of weirdness, for lack of a better word, around this.
So this RIM group has been connected to no deaths through acts of terror.
The acts of terror ascribed to them were actually committed by a man who was the member of another group called the Nordic Resistance Movement.
He was allegedly trained by members of RIM. The Russian Imperial Movement, but was not a member at the time of the attacks he conducted.
He conducted, I believe, three bombings, two of which he did alongside with an accomplice that had no connection to RIM at all.
He was allegedly trained by RIM. The last of these bombings took place in 2017.
And as I said, no people were killed, I believe, out of the three.
Only one person was wounded.
And so the State Department waits three years and then decides to designate them as a global terror entity, essentially, which just seems odd.
And before this designation, the estimates of their membership basically deemed this movement to be very, very small, essentially insignificant.
And then all of a sudden, this designation is made, and a month later, some institute at Middlebury decides that they number in the several thousand, but doesn't really give have any good justification for that.
They sort of say they appear to now number in the several thousand, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of publicly available evidence to make that claim.
You know, so you have this designation happen and around the same time you have members of the FBI in the State Department going around talking about how this Russian imperial movement is such a threat and saying they're training people in the U.S. But again, a lot of these same think tanks that are allied like these with the establishment, like it's one of the security institutes.
At Stanford, for example, you know, they basically talk about the U.S. ties of this group as also essentially being non-existent and linked to very allegations that even they regard as dubious.
A lot of them center around their alleged ties to this man named Matthew Heimbach, I believe is his name, that was affiliated with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
But his organization hasn't been active since 2018.
And the extent of his contacts is around allegations of funding received from RIM, but there's no proof of that funding actually having taken place.
And it's alleged there were contacts established, but no definitive proof.
And again, there's an allegation that RIM offered to train members, people that attended the Unite the Right rally, but there's no evidence for that in both RIM and the people allegedly contacted to deny that that took place.
I mean, these are all the sorts of allegations around RIM. As I mentioned earlier, their main alleged contact in the U.S. hasn't had an active group For two years before the designation was given to this RIM group, it's just very odd that they would have been designated this from my perspective.
Why not instead, if you're going to use these three bombings that took place in Sweden, by the way, as justification to label this group as a specially designated global terror entity, why would you not also, under the justification given by the State Department at the time, Why would you not also label the Nordic resistant movement of which this bomber in Sweden was actually a member of having been trained by RIM, but was a member of another group?
Why wouldn't you at least label both, especially considering this Nordic resistant movement is provably much larger and has much more political influence, particularly in Scandinavia, than this RIM movement does even within Russia?
It doesn't really make a lot of sense, at least at the time it didn't make sense.
But what's interesting, in the context of everything we've already talked about, the CIA talking about an insurgency in Ukraine and white supremacists and all of this stuff.
Yeah, so this Russian imperial movement is described as white supremacist, but it turns out, according to history's From think tanks and produced by think tanks in the US about this group's history, you know, profiles on them.
Their history began with the Ukraine conflict in the Donbass, and they allegedly were backing the separatists side.
So it's basically a way for...
It seems like this is the only group, really, that you could describe as white supremacists that supported the other side of the Donbass conflict, whereas the neo-Nazi factions within Ukraine were backing the other side.
So at some point, we would be hearing about, you know, how Russia is backing the white supremacist and not the U.S. and all of this stuff, using this Russian imperial movement as justification.
And that's actually has happened.
There's a think tank called Just Security in D.C. that's attempted to use the Russian imperial movement as justification for the claim that Putin and the Russian government are behind and really at the root of the transnational network of white supremacists.
And oddly enough, Just Security used to be advised by, until they joined the Biden administration, Avril Haines and Jake Sullivan.
So Jake Sullivan, I already mentioned, is Biden's national security advisor and former deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton.
Avril Haines is former deputy director of the CIA. She was one of the main participants at Event 201, which I'm sure your audience is quite familiar with.
And she's currently the Director of National Intelligence, making her the top spy in the entire U.S. government under the Biden administration.
So that's the people advising this think tank.
Let me wrap up.
One of the great things that you've done throughout your career, Whitney, is to try to harm Americans with the defenses against orchestrated propaganda.
And through your lens, we need to be guarded.
about what's happening in Ukraine and be guarded against the possibility that we are all being subjected to propaganda from both sides.
And one of the things that we need to understand is that there's been a pervasive involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies in Ukraine for at least since 2014.
And the other thing that we need to understand is that we need to be guarded against is perhaps the deliberate creation as a fear project by US intelligence agencies of a rising right-wing racist terrorist network globally.
Right.
So what my concern is, is that we talked about how they're citing the Afghanistan and Syria models.
Obviously, people that have studied those models, as you mentioned, are familiar with the blowback, as it's often called, from that.
It seems like to me, and what I explained in the article, is I think they want blowback.
there's an intentional desire to create this insurgency for the purpose of blowback because it gives them the justification to launch this infrastructure that's already been created and was created last year by the Biden administration for this war on domestic terror.
It was effectively launched, but it hasn't really kicked off yet.
It needs some sort of big justification.
And my concern is that someone with some sort of tie to the Ukraine conflict, or they'll say that, whether it's the Russian imperial movement, someone from Azov Battalion pretending to be the Russian imperial movement, or someone from one of these neo-Nazi factions allied with the current government of Ukraine, conducting some sort or someone from one of these neo-Nazi factions allied with the current government of Ukraine, conducting some sort of attack That's really all they would really need to kick this off.
And of course, my other work on the war on domestic terror infrastructure, it's very vaguely worded.
It's very much focused on social media.
It uses mass surveillance and pre-crime at its core, really.
It's a very Orwellian system.
And it doesn't just define people that are white supremacists as terror threats.
It defines people that essentially don't believe the government, people that are anti-tyranny or anti-authoritarian.
Things like this are all included in those documents as being perceived as domestic terror threats.
The right event gives the Biden administration basically carte blanche to go after whoever they deem as a threat.
I mean, if the CIA has been arming an insurgency in this country for seven years, I'm very sure they have an intention to use it.
And I would argue that some of the stuff that I cover in the article seems to be them telegraphing more or less what their intentions are.
But there's a...
A couple quick things I do want to say about the Ukraine conflict in general.
As far as what's going on there, it's very hard to know because there's really no reporting from within Ukraine about what's happening.
So that's why there's been this proliferation, I guess, of fake video game footage and things like this that are being attributed to as having been filmed in Ukraine during this current conflict.
Pictures of Zelensky from 2021 are being played off as if they were taken away.
Relatively recently, there's just a lot of, you know, either outright propaganda or fake news or whatever you want to call it.
So I think people need to be really vigilant in forming their opinions about what's going on and wait for actual footage to come out there.
There's not a lot of reporters on the ground.
Also, there's been a lot of calls by people for a no-fly zone in Ukraine, which even neoconservative figures like Marco Rubio say would essentially mean entering into World War III, which is totally insane.
I mean, it really speaks to the power of the media to...
We play a lot of people in the United States and beyond like a fiddle, essentially, and it's very problematic, but I think it's something that people need to be aware of.
With the conflict in Ukraine, it's, I guess you could call it outrage porn.
It's stuff that's intended to make us mad and drag us into a war with a nuclear power.
I mean, people need to sit back and rationally assess what's going on to the best of their ability, look for to the best of their ability, objective information, because we can't repeat the same errors where people were swept up by the media hysteria.
We can't let that happen again with something that could lead to a major military conflict between nuclear powers.
My last point is that a lot of this, what's going on now actually plays into the so-called Great Reset to a significant degree because it's already a lot of these outrageous responses from various governments about cutting off Russian oil and Russian imports, even going so far as to outlaw the sale of Russian what's going on now actually plays into the so-called Great Reset to a significant degree because it's already a lot of these outrageous responses But ultimately,
The stuff on the energy and the food supply that are taking place because of these sanctions really play into the Great Reset in a huge way and will likely create a massive supply chain crisis that not enough people are aware of.
Because between Russia and Ukraine, I mean, those are some of the top exporters of wheat in the world.
It's already leading to a major jump in food prices.
And of course the energy issue is going to lead to a great increase in the cost of heating your home and gas for a lot of people in Europe and also in the United States.
So, you know, that's not being talked enough about either, but it's all very convenient for different aspects of this great reset agenda.
And I would argue that's why some of these politicians so eagerly adopted it, despite the negative impacts it'll have for their domestic populations.
Whitney Webb, thank you very, very much for joining us.
Thank you for your piercing of the propaganda.
Her article is Ukraine and the new Al-Qaeda.
Follow Whitney on The Last American Magabond and on her own website, which is called Unlimited Hangout.
Thank you very much, Whitney.
▲
Export Selection