Judging Freedom - 1 Month into War - Now What. Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 24, 2022, about 1.30 in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. My guest today is Phil Giraldi, many of you know him. He's a former Army intelligence officer, longtime CIA case officer, graduate of the University of Chicago, PhD as well, I think University of Virginia. Famously left the CIA because of a firm intellectual stance in favor of the truth that the government was being sold a bill of goods and there was no justification to invade Iraq. Phil, it's a pleasure. Welcome back to Judging Freedom. Well, thank you for having me on again. A mutual friend and colleague of ours, Colonel Douglas McGregor, was recently on with me. Colonel McGregor,

also a career military, is of the view that the assistance that the United States is providing to Ukraine is extending the war and enhancing the bloodshed and compounding the destruction and that the best thing the U.S. should have done from a moral and political and military perspective was nothing. Agree or disagree? I'm not sure about the nothing, but I do believe that the current course of action is doing precisely what colonel mcgregor said it is prolonging the conflict it will not turn around

the uh the the outcome of it uh you the ukraine will not defeat russia as a result of what um uh nato and the us are doing so the point is that if you want to kill a lot more people this is a good way to do it give them weapons and let the war go on my preferences would have been some months ago for the united states to negotiate with russia in good faith because russia had some serious national security issues that it wanted to talk about and come to some arrangement over. And we absolutely refused to do that. We basically pretended we were talking, but at the same time, every time Russia made a proposal, we said no. So there is the no. And I think this thing would have been resolvable back some months ago if we had acted in good faith.

What is the least that we could expect President Putin to accept from President Zelensky in order to bring about a cessation of violence? Well, the big question is, will President Putin be satisfied with leaving Zelensky in place? I think that's the one question hanging out there now. I think apart from that, Putin has made very clear what his intentions are. He essentially wants a commitment, a firm commitment that can't be overturned by the next president of the United States, that NATO and Ukraine will not be together. And I think that's the fundamental issue. believe at least some of what Putin is saying is true, this majority has been under siege by the Ukrainian government for some time now, possibly killing as many as 15,000 civilians. So these issues are the issues that have to be addressed and resolved, and they are resolvable.

Now, the American public knows nothing, or very little. You do, McGregor does, those of us, Colonel McGregor does, those of us who follow these things do, but the American public seems to know next to nothing about the violence against the Donbass region.

Why would President Zelensky, who's pleading for his life practically, be doing to a minority in his own country the very thing he claims the Russians are doing to the rest of the country? Well, he's doing that because he's answering to an audience that is not actually his own people. He's answering to the United States and the pressure that's being put on him by some Europeans to resist Putin. And this is just part of that agenda.

It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for any of the people involved and it doesn't further anything that would be even approaching a uh a peace process so yeah it's it's it's mystifying this is a case where the united states ukraine uh and other countries involved in this britain for example are really not acting in terms of their own best interests. And of course, we've seen a lot of that in the last 30 years. Colonel McGregor also opines that if the United States could have its druthers, it would be regime change in Moscow. I mean, are Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, who are in Brussels as we speak, conspiring to bring about regime change in Moscow, even if it means more bloodshed?

I believe there are a lot of indications that that's exactly what the administration would like to see. um they may not be reading their tea leaves very well and i don't know how good their intelligence is in terms of how viable uh hoping that someone will come along and and stick a knife into vladimir putin i i don't believe they know enough to be making these kinds of projections and bear in mind when they say things like that, they say they talk about supporting killing a foreign head of state. Where's your road back from there? When are you ever going to be able to talk to these people again? And Russians are very much people given their capabilities, their nuclear capabilities. These are people we have to be talking to. What did you think of Senator Lindsey Graham's very well publicized and very well received,

at least in the audience in which he stated it, argument that Putin should be assassinated? He didn't go beyond that. He didn't say we should send a team or Zelensky should send a team or dissidents in the Russian intelligence services should send a team. He just said, almost as you just talked about, the head of state should be assassinated in order to stop this geopolitical act of violence in Ukraine? Well, the problem is, again, when you go around assassinating or threatening to assassinate heads of states, all you're doing is making the situation worse. And I believe Mitt Romney or one of the other senators also made a similar comment to the effect that Putin no longer had any right to live, which is extreme in nature. And again, if these people are leaders and are in office to represent the American people and to do what is right and good for the American people, I don't see any of that in this. This is saber rattling of the worst kind. It's possibly calibrated to make the current administration look tough with elections coming up this year. I don't know if that's true, but one has to suspect

that that's part of it. And of course, the Republicans are on their horses, too, for depicting Putin as a perpetual enemy, which he is not, and blackening him in whatever way they can. The whole thing doesn't make sense. How good is our intelligence as to the state of the Russian military and what they plan to do next? I mean, stated differently, have they suffered the losses that Zelensky says? Are they as incompetent as the New York Times and my former colleagues at Fox News would have you believe? Or is it just a question of time before Goliath defeats David? Well, I would suspect it's a matter of being a question of time. And also, it's a matter of what kind of decisions the Russian leadership makes

in terms of what kind of strategy it wants to pursue. But let me tell you, in my own experience as an intelligence officer, the hardest information to get always is intentions. How do you get inside the head of the adversary and find out what he intends to do? And the reason that's the hardest thing to do is because these decisions at that level are made in a very tight circle of people. And I would suspect that Washington has very little insight into what is actually going on inside the Kremlin and is making a lot of judgments based on people who have served in Russia before and are hypothesizing in terms of what they think might happen, but they don't know anything either. So my understanding of the relationship between the intelligence community of an adversary, let's say Russia and the United States, and the relationship of the highest ranking military in Russia and the United States is one where you can

communicate. You have opposite or had opposite numbers in Russian intel. Your bosses in the CIA had opposite numbers in Russian intel, whether they were called KGB or GDR, whatever they were at the time, but you could pick up the phone and call them. And my understanding is that General Mark Milley, who is the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has an opposite number in the Russian military with whom he could have a phone call at almost a moment's notice. The New York Times is reporting that those communications no longer exist. If that's, well, there's two ifs here. One, is my understanding correct? And two, is it true that the communications no longer exist? And three, if you can answer one and two, what does that mean?

Well, I'll answer the last one first. It means there is no good news there. It's essential for the two major nuclear powers, nuclear weapon powers in the world to be talking. And unfortunately, there has been a tendency since actually the time of Donald Trump to diminish these kinds of contacts across national lines. I would imagine that we have had no substantive contacts between senior people at CIA and the Russian Intelligence Service and likewise at the Pentagon and the Russian military command for quite some time. And this is because the relationship has been going to hell. And Putin has said repeatedly that he can't trust the United States because the United States won't even stand by its word.

And he's absolutely correct about that. Well, who is it that has cut off the communications? Is it Russian intel and military that won't answer American phone calls or vice versa? Well, I think it's a question more not of the technical lines being cut. I think they probably still exist. But the fact is that it's the signals the political signals that are being sent in terms of the discussions and uh to to jump to another function of the u.s government the presidency i mean when you have the president of the united states talking to the president

of russia and telling him he's a thug and a murderer and he's a war criminal. I mean, where do you go from there? These are signals that are sent saying, you know, we're really not interested in talking to you. I'm here because I feel I have to be, but I don't really like very much what you are and what you represent. Has Joe Biden crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, with respect to Putin? I mean, can they ever have an amicable head of state to head of state relationship again after the war criminal comment?

And I wrote a column this week demonstrating that he is absolutely not a war criminal, that there's no jurisdiction over him, that he can't be tried. But I don't think Joe, I don't know, meant that literally in the legal sense or in the political sense, you're a monster. Whatever it is, it has to have stung Putin. And my question to you is, damaged relationships permanently, or can there always be a kissing and making up? Yeah, there will always be a possible kissing or perhaps not a making up. I think that the fact is that Putin certainly is a realist. And Putin will see this in terms of what is best for Russia's national interest. Whether Biden can see that far beyond the blinkers that he has in terms of supporting what he sees as

the Democratic Party interest is perhaps a different story. But if we had an American leader to come along, say someone like a Ronald Reagan, somebody who could be persuasive and also could talk across lines, I think these relationships could be restored. What advice would you give President Zelensky if he called you on the phone tonight and said, Phil, I'm losing, excuse me, we're being destroyed, I can't admit it publicly, what should I do?

I would tell him that you're on a losing course. You should talk to Putin or his representatives in a serious way about what can be done to extract both countries from this situation, which is bad for both of them, and Putin realizes that. And I would say work out an agreement and make it stick. Aren't the Germans more interested in Russian natural gas and oil than they are in Volodymyr Zelensky staying in power? Oh, absolutely. The Germans are being dragged reluctantly into this by the United States. And they have opportunity for energy at a reasonable price as opposed to the other alternatives. And they very much want this

thing, this pipeline, Nord Stream pipeline to go through. Well, we are the ones that have been pressuring them for quite some time now, under the last two administrations, to view this as a security problem. All right, there is some balancing there. When another country has the keys to your energy, then it is a genuine issue to be considering. But at the same time, I don't see any problem with a more closely integrated Europe. A more closely integrated Europe means that we can walk away from NATO and we can walk away from these kinds of confrontations. Does Ukraine have an intelligence service that can inform President Zelensky what the Russians are up to next? I know you talked about the difficulty of intention, but do they know when, for example, 50 tanks are moving in one direction or 5,000 troops are moving in another direction, or are they just sitting back and waiting for missiles

and bullets to be fired at them? Well, no, I think you can say that their intelligence, military intelligence collection capabilities are reasonably good or were reasonably good at the beginning of the war. Obviously, they've been degraded since that time. But the fact is they have drones. They have radio tracking capabilities. They have interception capabilities of communications that the Russians are engaging in. So they have a lot of insights into what's going on. It doesn't mean they have an overview of how many losses the Russians are taking or what exactly is going on

or what the Russians' intentions are for the next round. I know you don't like to make predictions, but where do you think we'll be six months from now, say Labor Day? Predictions. I would have to say that this war has a limited shelf life, that both sides are going to get very tired of what is going on fairly soon. And I think ultimately what we're going to find is that the Ukrainians and Russians are going to have to solve this themselves. And I think the solution will be largely embracing some of the things that the Russians have been demanding. Has President Putin damaged his standing with the powers that be in Moscow, whose loyal support he needs in order to stay in power?

Well, that's another one of those big questions that intelligence agencies have a hard time answering. What do you do? You talk to men in the street. How do you get into the heads of the key players in Russia now, even if you can identify them? And what's their plan A? What's their plan B? What's their plan C? It all their plan B? What's their plan C?

It all kind of goes together or can go together. And I'm skeptical about the theory that Putin is moving towards an overthrow by disgruntled supporters. Putin was very popular with his public up until a couple months ago, like 90%. All right. Bill Giraldi, boy, it's always a pleasure. I can pick your brain all the time. I hope you'll come back just because I'm curious, the people watching us are curious, and God only knows what the events will change and will need your intel. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, my dear friend.

Well, thank you again for having me on. Of course. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.