Judging Freedom - Mike Benz: How Dangerous is the CIA?

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

My conversation with former State Department official Mike Benz, delves into the intriguing intersection of music festivals, concerts, and intelligence operations, specifically focusing on the CIA's alleged use of these cultural events to influence and facilitate regime change. Mr. Benz, drawing upon his expertise and experience, will provide insights into the covert strategies employed by intelligence agencies in leveraging the universal appeal of music to shape perceptions and catalyze political change.We'll explore the historical context of such practices, examining instances where music festivals and concerts may have served as platforms for disseminating information, fostering dissent, and fostering cultural movements that align with the geopolitical objectives of intelligence agencies. Mike Benz sheds light on the intricate balance between entertainment and political manipulation, exploring how these events become conduits for covert activities and diplomatic agendas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Oh, thank you. So before we get into the CIA and music festivals, just address for me this general question. How dangerous is the CIA to personal liberty? They're tremendously dangerous. And, you know, it's helpful to think of the CIA as being part of this diplomacy defense intelligence apparatus. You know, a lot of times you can sort of think of many of the operations of the Department of Defense and the Department of State as being inextricably woven with the Central Intelligence Agency because it sort of acts as the cloak and dagger arm of those two pillars of our defense and diplomacy subject. So it's really one conjoined apparatus. And the CIA is very unique because it has a license to lie. It was created under the 1947 National Security Act specifically

to do the sort of dark arts cloak and dagger stuff that the State Department wanted to do, but couldn't get busted doing. And so they wanted this plausibly deniable agency to do the dirty work that would be an international fiasco if the government got caught doing. Is it as bad as the old KGB? In many ways, you know, it's hard to use a word like worse there, given, you know, some of the history of the Soviet Union, but the technological prowess that's available today to the Central Intelligence Agency and the hubris, I think, that set in after the Cold War was won makes it unquestionably at least a rival in terms of the tier rankings of malevolent forces in intelligence history. Does the CIA or do agents, employees, officers, analysts,

I know there are different levels of CIA workers, do they acknowledge at least internally and within the walls of their headquarters at Langley that they kill people? Yeah, well, I mean, the CIA is formally in charge of our drone program. This happened during the Global War on Terror, when there was the apportioning of military capacities between the DOD and the CIA, and the drone program was effectively handed over to the Central Intelligence Agency. That's remote control assassination, with a bad history of targeting weddings and other type of events that cause international scandal. But even more perhaps insidious than outright killings and even assassinations. Assassinations were sort of banned after the church committee hearings in the 1970s

after the CIA killed Lumumba and killed Allende and killed a bunch of world leaders and got busted doing it essentially. Then they said, okay, all right, we're not going to assassinate world leaders again, but we're still going to kill everyone around them or leaders of insurgency groups. But even more pernicious, perhaps, than the outright killing is the authorization for, quote, organized political warfare. Right when the CIA was born in 1947, in 1948, George Kennan, who's one of the godfathers of the CIA, penned this memo called The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare, where he basically said, listen, we just rigged 12 days ago, this is in 1948, right before this memo was penned. So 12 days ago, we just rigged this election in Italy.

We worked with Sicilian mobsters. We worked with members of the church. We worked with this whole underground that was persecuted by Mussolini, who we had these partnerships with in order to establish a beachhead in Italy during World War II. We worked with them to rig the 1948 Italian election, because if the communists won in that case, then there might never be an election again in Italy. So we had to rig this one, but it turned out really well. So we're just going to keep doing it in Greece and then in France and Australia. I mean, this became a blueprint. And now we're sort of living in the shadow of total unchecked power for going on 80 years now. For whom does the CIA work? Is it the president of the United States? Is it the secretary of state? Is it the secretary of defense? Or are they rogues? Are they totally on their own?

Well, technically they operate, you know, they're the part of the executive branch under the president, but they speak, since the day the CIA was created. You had Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles serving as the CIA chief and the secretary of state, essentially brothers running both of those. That continues to this day under the Trump administration. You may recall Mike Pompeo was the director of the CIA, and then his next job was the Secretary of State. We essentially have our kind of two towers of our global empire management, one being overt diplomacy, the State Department, the other being covert diplomacy or covert action, that being the Central Intelligence Agency. And both of those overt and covert sides of our diplomacy have to be synchronized in order to have a cohesive plan of action in a country or region whose elections we want to. show have almost uniformly bemoaned the fact that Bill Burns, the current director of the CAA,

is a member of the president's cabinet. Is there some substance there or is it just symbolic? I'm not sure about that. Bill Burns, he came directly from the Carnegie Endowment. For seven years, he was the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is a seven-decade history of serving as a CIA conduit. He was obviously a major State Department official before that. It's hard for me to penetrate the cabinet role versus a knot

in terms of its significance. But certainly, one of the big knocks that the foreign policy establishment had against trump was was that he had he through his lack of promotion of the democracy promotion programs and these sort of state department dirty tricks programs uh they wanted a more fully imbued cia and state department dirty tricks programs. They wanted a more fully imbued CIA and State Department dirty tricks capacity like what had existed for many decades prior to that. Trump was obviously the first president in something like 40 years not to declare a new war. He also put the kibosh on a number of initiatives ranging from Syria to Afghanistan to operations

in Ukraine. So the elevation of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency under Biden would be no surprise to me. One of the things that you have brought to our attention when we communicated earlier this week was the role of the CIA in art and music festivals. Now, when I first heard this, I smiled and I said, look, Mike's a smart guy, but this is really off the wall. Can this actually be happening? So give us a little bit of background on what the CIA does with art and music festivals. And are we talking with art and music festivals. And are we talking about art and music festivals in the U.S. or outside the U.S.? Because you and I have both read the CIA charter,

and it pretty clearly prohibits them from doing anything in the U.S., even though we know they do. So give us a big picture, and then we'll run some clips from these music festivals. Sure. And a quick note on that, the church committee hearings in 1975 and 1976 had their basis in part on the fact that the CIA had actually gone against that charter with things like Operation Chaos and their infiltration of left-wing student groups who were anti-Vietnam War. They were essentially paying left-wing student publications on college campuses in order to sway hearts and minds against the sort of far left, which at the time was anti-war.

And when they got caught doing that, that of course led to these sort of left-wing oriented church committee hearings to say, never again will you break this charter. But returning to arts and music, what we had in 1948 with the UN Declaration on Human Rights was this idea that you could no longer conquer territory by force. It's no longer accepted by international law that you could roll into a country with tanks. You had to have some sort of democratic predicate.

The hearts and minds had to sort of ratify the support for the governance structure in a particular country. And the modality of taking over a country effectively in order to exploit its resources, you know, extract its gas or its minerals in order to have it serve as a basically proxy state for our military bases, you had to have the hearts and minds of the citizenry at least ratify that government in support of US policy. And so everything shifted to organized political warfare. Again, returning to that George Kennan concept from 1948, the year that the UN Declaration on Human Rights is ratified.

And so very quickly out the gate during the Eisenhower administration, there became this idea that organized political warfare means everything is essentially an instrument of statecraft, and very quickly arts and music became co-opted. In 1952, for example, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was constructed by the Central Intelligence Agency to serve as a cutout for dominating arts and culture at a time when the U.S. had not yet established hegemony in that respect. There were many Russian composers like Shostakovich who were sort of said to be best in class in things like classical music. And so the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was set up and funded by the CIA, flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra over to Paris

for concerts in 1952. And then they set up strings of concerts in Rome in 1954, all throughout the 1950s and 60s, actually all through the 70s as well, culminating in not just concerts in France and in Italy, but also these large outdoor music concerts in West Germany and in Berlin in 1976 to gin up protest sentiment in order to tear down the wall and reunify Germany as part of the Euro-Atlantic axis. Now, this goes all the way back even before the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In the 1940s, the State Department began working with jazz musicians. It was called jazz diplomacy at the time. And this was a way of trying to get African nations who were newly sovereign after World War

II to not see America as being this sort of white ethno-state Nazi, to sort of tamp down on accusations of colonialism and racism. And they recruited assets like Louis Armstrong and many other jazz musicians who are household names. This is all well documented. It's on the State Department's website, actually. But music as an instrument of statecraft has existed essentially since the moment World War II ended. You can make an argument it was rolled up in the Office of War Information during World War II itself, but it extends to this day. Just two months ago, Tony Blinken announced a brand new music diplomacy initiative at the State Department for the State Department to work worldwide with musicians in order to stymie authoritarianism. This is not a charity mission. In fact, just two years ago-

Let me just stop you. This is news and didn't seem that you're breaking now, didn't seem to appear anywhere. What is Tony Blinken doing and what does he hope to achieve with this? Tony Blinken being the Secretary of State. Right. So this is a brand new music diplomacy initiative. It broke about two months ago. I covered it quite extensively, but I think the news media did not quite pick up on the significance of this. Unless you enjoy reading state.gov tell-alls, you don't really get into the minutiae, I think, for a lot of folks on how these operations work. But a great example of it was just two years ago when there was the revolution in Cuba, organized by the San Ysidro movement, an arts collective in Cuba, a rap group in Cuba,

that was funded and incubated by the National Endowment for Democracy, who is perhaps to this day the world's most premier CIA cutout. Even the Washington Post in the 1990s acknowledged that the National Endowment for Democracy serves as a CIA cutout. Its founder says that we do overtly what the CIA does. Let me just stop you for a minute. So CIA gets tax dollars and gives them to a Cuban rock group through, funnels it through the National Endowment for Humanities or the National Endowment for Democracy, whatever they want to call their front group. What is the CIA trying to accomplish by putting American laundered tax dollars into

the pockets of Cuban rap musicians? So the way, there's two ways to topple a foreign government. The old style way was you bribe, you know, you get a certain quorum of the military establishment to defect. And so you essentially have a military coup. But the other way that was developed primarily early after World War II is this technique called a color revolution, which is a people-powered revolution, where you primarily rely on street muscle from young people and from student groups. And then you have trade union laborers, you have people from all across the society sort of do a collective walkout. That way the state can't marshal instruments of institutions within its own country in order to enforce the law. And then if they crack down on

these protests, they're subject to enormous international sanctions and essentially lose their sovereign wealth funds held in the Federal Reserve or held in the U.S. dollar. And so you have this technique of getting the young people, the youth and students to take to the streets in protest to shut down government buildings, to shut down the infrastructure and destabilize the country from the inside until the president is ran out of power as what was done to Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014. And so this relies, you need to get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. That's the end goal. That's what the end stage of any color revolution looks like.

And to do that, music is very powerful to that extent. So just one quick thing here on the Cuban group. They created this anthem called Patria y Vida, which was basically like blood and soil, which is this sort of nationalist anthem against the communist government there. And that song became the rallying cry for the concerts. To this day, I was just at Miami Art Week. They had exhibits on this song and its role in the protest movement. The CIA did the same thing with creating a song called Winds of Change by the Scorpions in the 1970s in an effort to try to galvanize German youths to reject the East

Germany Soviet government. So this idea of having a theme song, of having culturally significant and popular figures that essentially create the kind of soundtrack of a protest and cuts across all the differences of the different groups. So it doesn't really, they don't really care if one of the factions is pro-abortion or anti-abortion or pro-capitalist or pro-socialist. If they're all listening to the same music, they're all reviewing the same cultural figures, they all have a reason to be at the same party together. They all have a reason to take to the streets together. Got it. Got it. All right. Now, this music CIA, where it appears as though you're at an art festival, before we run this,

give us the background. What are you doing there? What is it? What are you narrating? And then we'll play the clip. Sure. So this is Miami Art Week that I was at. This is the largest arts festival in Miami. Miami is the gateway to Latin America in the Caribbean, the largest CIA station house in the entire country for the entirety of the Cold War was called JM Wave. It was the CIA station house in Miami. And so this is, it's sort of a culturally significant event in Miami with thousands of artists, both visual art and musical art. And so I like to do these sort of walk and talks wherever I go to sort of explain some of the intelligence or national security ties to a region. So I thought this was sort of a fun opportunity to explain that in Miami. Okay. Sonia, music CIA. So it automatically creates

this cultural cleavage point to draw people towards a Euro-Atlantic axis. If they're listening to Taylor Swift, or if they're listening to Moby, they're not listening to Russian music. They're not listening to Chinese music. They're not listening to Cuban music, although the CIA has made inroads to try to co-opt Cuban rap music quite profusely through the National Endowment for Democracy, incubating Cuban art collectives. So when you have these big art festivals, they're a prime opportunity to draw people into a cultural affinity that can then be mobilized later in time. These people are much more likely to attend mass protests and large events to take to the streets when they're already used to going to large concerts

and things together, especially in places that are more culturally repressed, where you don't tend to have these more often. I can't resist asking you about Taylor Swift, because as we speak, she is the hottest phenomenon in the country, maybe in the world. Does the CIA have any role in her success? Well, I don't have any direct evidence of the CIA's role, but there is a very curious oddity that came to light just months ago, which is that Taylor Swift's entire discography, the rights to it, were all purchased by the Carlyle Group in tandem with a George Soros investment fund. So the Carlyle Group, if you're not familiar, is sort of the private equity arm of the Iraq war. The Carlyle group was essentially- Frank Carlucci, right?

Yeah, yeah. And the whole Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney axis was all aligned on the Carlyle group's board. They were essentially the private equity grifters par excellence of the military industrial complex from the 90s to the present day now they they personally purchased taylor swift's uh discography she had to re-record tracks recently in order to have new rights to her own music now she's currently in the middle of something called the Aras tour. I think they just extended it, which is the largest tour, essentially,

I think in world history for a single touring artist. I think it was something like 300 cities, some crazy amount. Now, Taylor, what the heck is the Carlyle group doing involved in the affairs of Taylor Swift? You know, just on my timeline on X just earlier today, I put a tell-all by Miles Copeland III, who's the son of a major CIA figure who himself talked about a phone call that he got from Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq war. You know, Copeland was the manager for Sting in the police, one of the sort of the male Taylor Swift of the 1990s, if you will. Let me stop you, and we will play what you posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, which is Miles Copeland talking about receiving a phone call from Donald Rumsfeld. Sonia? So I get a call from Donald Rumsfeld. My secretary comes up to me and says,

Miles, it's Donald Rumsfeld on the phone. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So I pick a call from Donald Rumsfeld. My secretary comes up to me and says, Miles, it's Donald Rumsfeld on the phone. I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So I pick up the phone, thinking this is a joke. And it's the deputy secretary of defense, Tori Clark. And she says, we hear that you know about our music, and we think there might be a way to win hearts and minds in the Middle East. Would you help us come up with some programs that we might do and put forward that helps us, you know, make the Rockies not hate us? I said, well, sure.

You know, I'm a loyal American. I'm happy to help. The plan is to find 12 girls who will be the basis of a show featuring Arab dance and Arab music. What becomes of this? Well, what you have is the military acquiring modalities of culture. Now this is, we're seeing, we saw this in music and in arts throughout the entirety of the Cold War. You see it apparently in escalating fashion today. There's many other examples of this, but you know, my focus is censorship of the internet and the military's move into acquisition

over media is perhaps the most, you know, saturating of all of those. When the hybrid warfare doctrine was declared by the dod after the crimea counter coup in 2014 they essentially said you know what civilian run media isn't working out for us we need the military to have you know these disinformation structures these censorship structures to stop uh to stop people from running their own media scene and you know this this is obviously as we're discussing now, the reason they may have confidence in doing that is they did that so elegantly in music and in arts and so many other modalities. It's only natural to sort of make that a fait accompli in taking over social media. Mike Benz, always a pleasure, man. You come up with intriguing observations and

studies of government excess. The last time you talked about the government using a carrot and a stick to influence social media. Now you're telling us that Taylor Swift might be on the payroll of the CIA through a very circuitous route. Wow. Keep it up, my friend. And we hope you come back again the next time you have another one of these exposures for us. Thank you, Josh. Have a great day. Of course. All the best. Judge Napolitano, for judging freedom, just bear with me,

and I will remind you who we have on tomorrow. I should have had this for you at the ready. Ah, Tony Schaefer at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning Eastern. Professor John Mearsheimer at 9 o'clock Thursday morning Eastern. Scott Horton at 2 o'clock in the afternoon Eastern. And Friday, usually usual with a bang. Gary Barnett, one of the most insightful analysts of government that I know at 1 o'clock. Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 2.

Our CIA roundtable at 3. Scott Ritter at 4. Ask the judge at five, and then the break for Christmas. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.