Judging Freedom - U.S. Intelligence Group Think on Steroids - Larry Johnson

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 14, 2023. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Larry Johnson joins us again. Larry, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. Thanks for revisiting us on the show. Thanks, Josh. I want to start with breaking news, which just broke a few minutes ago, and that is this confrontation between two Russian fighter jets and an American drone over the Black Sea, according to the version of events put out by the Americans and repeated by mainstream media. I don't know how this could happen, but perhaps you can enlighten us. One of the jets dropped fuel on the drone,

which disabled it somehow. And then one of the jets clipped the drone's propeller, and then it either fell to the ground or the U.S. called it back. Yeah, apparently it's an MQ-9 Reaper. So it's a larger drone. It's not one of these little tiny ones that you go buy at Radio Shack and then fly around your backyard. Right. Russia sending a very clear signal. These drones, the MQ-9 has been flying in international waters in the Black Sea for the last year, collecting intelligence on Russian troop movements, upon artillery emplacements, upon a whole variety, everything that they can collect, they're drawing and sending back to headquarters up to this point russia hasn't

tried to interfere with that at all today marks a change and they're they're ratcheting it up gradually they're not because they could have just blown it out of the sky you know they've got they have uh the the technology the military technology in terms of air defense systems, they could have taken it right out. They're not doing that. They are, you know, it really takes some skilled flying of a pilot to get close enough to clip the propeller on one of those birds and bring it down. It went into international waters. So now the Pentagon has got to figure out how they're going to get into the Black Sea

to recover it. All right. How do you, what part of the Black Sea is international waters? I guess the great central part of it, far enough off the coast. I mean, it's surrounded by a half dozen countries, the largest of which is Russia itself. I think, what was it under international maritime law, outside the 10-mile limit off your shore? So anything that's 10, maybe it's 20. I'm not precise on that, but it doesn't cover 60 miles.

So there is an area there. I think what the United States is going to have to do is call upon some other friendly country, maybe Romania or somebody, to sell out to try to pick it up, but it wouldn't put it past the Russians or the Turks or somebody else to go out and push it out of the drink first. Yeah. You're not surprised that it was there, Larry. Oh no, no. There's a channel on YouTube that tracks all US aviation in that area. And they've been reporting on these drone flights over the last year. So it's been a routine.

It's part of a collection pattern. We also have other fixed wing aircraft that are with pilots doing the same thing. Is this Air Force or CIA? This is Air Force. And is the concept, I never heard of this, I'm not an Air Force person, but it's the concept of dumping fuel from the fighter jet onto the drone. Is that a professional way to minimize the drone? That I've never heard of that. I think it was clearly when you read the press release from the Pentagon, they're really upset with the unprofessional behavior of the Russian pilots.

Yes, yes. And the anti-climate control of the Russia pilots, that the fuel went into the Black Sea itself. I never heard of the military complaining about this. That's why I wanted to know if this is a standard way to degrade the drone. But when the Defense Department says we brought it back, what they mean is they brought it down. It's in the sea, right? Correct. Correct.

And you know what? I bet the Russian pilots didn't use pronouns either. Say again? The Russian pilots did not use proper pronouns with referring to the drone. How far above the sea would this have happened? And how sophisticated would the drone be? What can it see on the ground from however high up it is? Well, the drones actually have pretty remarkable capabilities.

So one, and I don't know how this particular one was outfitted, but they are capable of being outfitted both with cameras, which can take imagery up to, you know, where you can see people walking, you know, people walking on the ground. They can collect signal intelligence, including conversations. for example that in during the whole Benghazi incident we had drones over there and we were actually picking up the conversations of the people that were carrying out the attack on the U.S. uh the so-called U.S. embassy it was the CIA base so it's got a lot of capabilities anything that you could normally put on an airplane you can put on the drone and you don't have to worry about a pilot getting shot down. Should we conclude that either President Putin or someone under his control wanted to show moderation by dumping fuel on it or clipping its wing as opposed to blowing it out

of the skies? Clearly this was a decision taken at least with general garrasim off at the head and and and shork and uh they they have decided to ratchet it up and i'm sure they briefed uh putin on it because up to now they've not done any direct interference with the drone the russians also have a great electronic warfare capability. You'll see some of their soldiers on the ground with these. They look like guns out of Star Wars. And they shoot an electrical pulse that can actually bring the smaller drones down. It would not surprise me that Russia has actually some other capabilities in that regard that they haven't employed yet.

But the fact that they're now sending the U.S. a clear message, and their spokesmen have also been talking about the U.S. supplying weapons of war to Ukraine. Don't look at this strictly in terms of Ukraine, because the Chinese as well are sending very strong, unprecedented messages to the West that are threatening us now. And they're threatening us because of the threats we've been making to China. And China is just literally sending the signal that's fed up. So I would not discount the possibility of coordination between Russia and China. These are not being carried out isolated. What is the nature of the threats coming from China? The Chinese have noted, they're basically saying the United States does not get to dictate to them

how they do things in their territory. Most Americans don't understand that when Richard Nixon went to China 51 years ago and he got off the plane in Beijing, he agreed with the Chinese that Taiwan was part of China, that Taiwan was a province of China. Province in Chinese means state in the United States. That's like the Chinese coming to us and we agreeing that yes, Hawaii is a state of the United States. Well, imagine how we would react if the Chinese started sending weapons and doing military training in Hawaii. We would be outraged. It would be seen as an act of war. But that's exactly what we're doing in Taiwan. And we pretend that the Chinese ought to get over it or ought to understand that we get to do whatever we want. And the Chinese foreign minister today, I don't recall his exact words, but they were not diplomatic. The foreign minister

in the past has been very diplomatic and said things very smoothly. He just very bluntly said, you know, United States, this is going to lead to conflict. He did say this will lead to conflict. And he wasn't talking about sending, you know, angry notes back and forth to each other. He was talking about war. And he was talking about this could cause catastrophic losses for both sides. This is a head scratcher to me as to why Joe Biden wants to pick a fight over Taiwan. I mean, it's not consistent with the hard left policy of where the Democratic Party is today. There's no American interest in it.

It would be nearly impossible for us to prevail, for us to get enough human beings to Taiwan and enough military equipment past a Chinese naval and air blockade. One wonders if he and Lloyd Austin and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan even know what they're talking about when they say we're going to defend Taiwan. Is there a Victorian Newland for Taiwan in the State Department? Yeah, there is not,

but this has been sort of a long, we've seen this transition over the last 20 years. And it's a level of ignorance, I think, on the part even of our politicians, within them not realizing what Nixon and Kissinger crafted with Zhou Enlai, I believe it was back then, an agreement that the United States would recognize Taiwan as a province of China, and that there was a one China, there weren't two Chinas. And we've now reversed that. And it's not just Biden. I mean, Biden and his team, you know, they could fill a clown car in terms of their incompetence. But you've also got Republicans. I mean, Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, is talking about doing exactly what Nancy Pelosi did, going to visit Taiwan, which sends the kind of message from the Chinese perspective that the United States is intent on provoking China into a war.

And China said very clearly through both its foreign minister that it's not going to be bullied, that they were not going to back down, and the United States is crossing a red line on this. It's really alarming that we are escalating, opening really a two-front war when we can't even fight a one-front war. Let's go back to the other front. The Washington Post is reporting. I'm just going to read the headline to you.

Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses and pessimism grow. Now, the Washington Post until last night, late last night when this piece came out, was a cheerleader for the Biden administration funding Ukraine. Is this a trial balloon? Is this something the CIA let out there? Is this a test to see if the American public is sick and tired of Ukraine? Or is this just a one-off, a writer at the Washington Post coming up with data, which is probably true, but which the administration doesn't want to hear? Right. Well, there's still enormous pressure within the intelligence community to downplay the reality, to not talk about what is actually going on. However, the facts are very difficult to ignore because you're looking at this, the Russians shelling at a rate of 20,000 shells a day to what Ukraine can only do 3,000. And as I'm sure as Scott Ritter and Doug McGregor and others have made the point,

that disparity means, let's assume that each shell that falls causes a casualty. That means Ukraine is suffering seven times the casualties that the Russians are, maybe six times, but it's a horrific rate. And when you lose those personnel, you don't just go to a vending machine and put in a quarter and get a ready-trained troop. And so the catastrophic losses that Ukraine has suffered, that's coming home to roost. What is dangerous within the U.S. intelligence community right now, and I've told this very specifically, the senior generals, the two, three, and four stars are not pushing back against the happy talk about Ukraine winning. I know that there are a lot of colonels and one-star generals, the brigadier generals,

that are worried. They are trying to inject some realism into this, but the two, three, and four stars, they're measuring the drapes for their new offices at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. It is sickening what's taking place, the failure of leadership at the very top of the military. Give us a little understanding of how this works. The CIA has officers in the field that gather information from intercepting conversations or from human intelligence, and this is passed along to Langley. Does the Defense Department have its own independent people? Does the Defense Intelligence Agency have its own raw gatherers of data from the field,

or does it use what the CIA gathers? Stated differently, are Langley and the Pentagon looking at the same intel or different intel from different American sources? So basically, you've got four kinds of raw intelligence that comes in. The State Department will provide messages from its embassy, from its officers saying, here, we've talked to this Ukrainian official and we've talked to these people, these leaders. They send that back. That provides you one source of intelligence.

CIA officers are supposed to recruit Ukrainian government officials, people with access, who will spy for us and will give us information that we're supposedly not supposed to recruit Ukrainian government officials, people with access who will spy for us, who will give us information that we're supposedly not supposed to get. Also, you have defense liaison officers, defense attachés assigned to these embassies. They go out and they collect their own information and they write up their own reports. So an analyst sitting back at headquarters in McLean, Virginia is going to sit there and get the human report, if there are such reports from the Directorate of Operations at CIA,

they'll get the human report from the defensive attache, they'll get the report from State Department in terms of the cable traffic, and then you've got the National Security Agency, which is collecting conversations, emails, anything that's communicated electronically. There's also overhead imagery, but my experience would rarely use that. But the point is that information comes back in. Then you have open source information you can use. What's shocking is there are very few incentives within the intelligence community to use that open source information you can use. What's shocking is there are very few incentives

within the intelligence community to use that open source information. In fact, I've been told that things that are appearing open source usually wind up 72 hours, so two to three days later in some of the intel reports, but that's because they're waiting for it to come through an intelligence source, a classified source. So it is, we really have a broken intelligence system that is pandering to leadership, to the political leaders downtown, telling them what they want to hear, instead of telling them what they need to hear, what they need to know, that this war in Ukraine is going off track. Are all of these sources, I'll call the CIA civilian and the Pentagon military, are all these sources, civilian and military, independently getting data somehow to the White House or does it all come through the CIA and the president's daily briefing? So if the Secretary of Defense, who's a former four-star, Lloyd Austin, is in the White House and hearing the president's daily briefing with the president, is this new to him, or has

he seen it or heard it from his own sources? No, no, it's filtered. So it comes through the raw intelligence comes in because particularly if it's a clandestine source, then you need to protect the identity so that that person is not compromised and exposed. And you have to go to some lengths to maybe hide the origin of it. Or you put it in a special eyes only, what they call a SAP, special access program, where it would be hand carried by, like Ray McGovern used to do, would hand carry something down to the president

and would hand it to the president or to his national security advisor to be read and then taken back so that there would not be a copy left around. So there are, you know, they can't get briefed that way, but it is, there is always a filter of the information coming in. But what happens is the leaders of these organizations, the leaders of the CIA, the leaders of DIA, they're always very sensitive about,

well, what's the White House going to think about what we're reporting? And I've seen this in my own experience. Oh, we don't want to take bad news down. They're not going to like that. So let's, you know, let's find a way to soften the blow. And it's like, guys, that's our job. So the data that makes its way to the president is often the result of, for lack of a better phrase, political compromise by whoever signs off, the final signing off on the data. Correct. Now, the process, the only thing that can make that process work is you have somebody in charge at the CIA or at the Director of National Intelligence Office who says,

I want it clear to everyone down the chain of national intelligence office who says i want to clear to everyone down the chain of command we're going to tell the president the news regardless of whether they like it or not we're going if we have to present bad news we're going to present bad news that's not happening instead it's like no we can't you know we we need to put as positive a spin on this as possible. I mean, I had the experience back when I was an analyst, and a fellow who was the South African analyst had written a piece about Nelson Mandela. And the question that came from the White House was, is Nelson Mandela a communist? And the analyst wrote out this piece, and at the end he said, basically, Nelson Mandela is not a communist. Robert Gates i'm talking about so this is what the phenomenon we're seeing today is not new it's gone on in years past is is it probable is it probable probable meaning more likely than

not that uh joe biden's um public optimism about the war in ukraine is the result of deceptive information being fed to him by his own CIA or DIA because they think that's what he wants to hear. That is the excuse they're going to use when this thing goes sour. But he's smart enough and experienced enough enough despite his dementia to realize that things are not going well particularly that the united states does not have ample supplies of artillery shells that we don't have of an industrial base that we can turn the key and start you know pushing out that material and sending it to ukraine that he recognizes that we've got shortages and and when you're not in a

position as supposedly the most powerful military on the face of the earth, that you can't even resupply artillery shells within a month, that you're looking at a year, year and a half timeline, that should tell you something that you're not what you think you are, and the situation is not as you are presenting it. Is the ability of the United States of America to defend itself in the case of an attack or an ally that we might be contractually or treaty-wise obligated to defend being diminished by the massive amount of equipment that we're shipping to Ukraine? No, because that equipment we're shipping to Ukraine is not, you really can't protect against the attacks that will come upon us. But what it will do is to the extent that that equipment is used to attack Russia, and if it's used to attack inside Russia, and your listeners need to be very conscious of this.

Because I know that there are plans being talked about of having NATO aircraft launch attacks against Russians. If any of those attacks take place on Russian territory, Russia will strike the continental United States with conventional warheads. And this will be the first time in our history, if you ignore Pancho Villa in 1917 and the British burning the White House in 1812,

this will be the first time that the continental United States will be attacked and that we will have cities bombed and we'll have cities on fire. That's where this is headed because we are on a collision course, not just with Russia, but with China. And this is the most,

just the most dangerous time. And, you know, I'm old enough to go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis where we have never been in a more dangerous, precarious time. And the difference is now we're led by a bunch of morons. There's no other way to put it.

These people have nothing of diplomacy, and they are insistent upon provoking and challenging both Russia and China. And we don't have the strength to counter it. I agree with everything you've said. I don't have the background in military affairs to say it with the certainty with which you do, but I know the way you think and I know the types of resources that you have. Let me ask you, just take a little bit of leap into the political sphere. What is their game plan? What does Victoria Nuland, what is her goal? What is Lloyd Austin's goal? What is Tony Blinken's goal?

If they really don't know what they're talking about, if we can't fight a one-front war, and they're willing to pick fights which would necessitate a two-front war. Well, they want to destroy Russia. They want to break up Russia. They labor under the belief that if we can just get rid of Vladimir Putin, then that will force a breakup of the current Russian Federation. And there have even been studies done proposing dividing the current Russia into five different countries within its borders. And part of that is to get access to the resources. Russia is the richest nation on the face of the earth in terms of natural resources. And the West desperately wants access to them. In the past, Russia was willing to trade and make deals, but still stayed in control. The West doesn't want that. We want them out of the way. And the other aspect is recognizing that if Russia and China get together,

it's going to put us at a decided disadvantage. Well, guess what? We're already there. So that objective has failed as far as the Biden foreign policy goes. All right. So when I got up this morning, I read your dynamite piece called U.S. intelligence community is Doing Group Think on Steroids. We haven't even gotten to it yet, but I think we'll stop now and we'll do this the next time you're on because you've given us so much to think about, as you always do. Larry Johnson, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, Judge. Good to be with you. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it, for judging freedom.