Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Calder Walton: Intelligence and the Reality of Russia & the New Cold War

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

In this week's conversation, Anthony talks with Calder Walton, one of the world’s leading scholars on intelligence and national security. Calder’s new book Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West exposes the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia, the West and our more recent conflict with China.  Together, they examine Putin’s real motives, expose the show horses in our global intelligence agencies, and Calder stresses the real magnitude of China.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is open. book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know,

I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Did the Cold War ever end? The thought of that question is pretty frightening, isn't it? As far as intelligence and national security are concerned, my guest today, Calder Walton, thinks we're in a new Cold War. And if we're not careful, that Cold War could become hot. Calder has great insight on the East and West, and he's an important person to listen to if we want to understand this. Let's go to the conversation. So joining us now on Open Book is Calder Walton. He's a renowned intelligence and global security scholar. He's also a historian at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, which is obviously an alumnus of the law school there. Although when you bring that up,

it's like humble bragging, so I'm not really allowed to bring that up anymore. But you wrote this amazing book, which you're going to get into right now, called Spies, the Epic Intelligence War between the East and West. I learned so much in your book. I'm very good. grateful for you writing it, also the contribution of it. There's a lot to unpack there. But let's start with you. Why did you become so interested in intelligence and the acquisition of military and civil intelligence? Well, first and foremost, thanks for having me here, Anthony. It's great to be with you on Open Book. How did I get interested in this? Well, as an undergrad, I read a book called the Matroken Archive, which was this expose about the secret history of the KGB.

be. And it was written by the person that then became my doctoral supervisor, now friend and mentor, Christopher Andrew in Cambridge. And I went to him and he's really the most incredible scholar and mentor, very humble. And he said, look, there's more research than we can possibly do in a lifetime on all of this. So if you want to do a PhD, you know, you're pushing it in open door. So Anthony, that was just one thing that led to another. When I was doing my PhD in Cambridge in England, And he said, would you be interested in writing, helping me write on a part-time basis, doing research for MI5's official 100-year history? I said, let me think about that for a minute. So that took about a nanosecond to say, yeah, that sounds like an incredible opportunity.

All right. So that begs the following question. Okay, who does it better, right? Nobody does it better. So is it MI5, MI6? Is it the KGB or the GRU, is they're called now? Is it the CIA? Who does it the best?

I think that begs the question, what do we mean by it? If we're talking about stealing secrets, intelligence collection, the vast hoovering up of intelligence, you've got to say that's the KGB historically. And who knows about Russia today, China today, they do it, it if we mean acquisition of intelligence. Yeah, stealing of secrets, replication of military technology. Exactly. Knowing what we're doing before we know what we're doing. That's it.

Right. But if we're talking about it. about if it means not only the collection of intelligence, but then analyzing it and disseminating it and getting it to the decision makers that actually are going to listen to it, that's definitely not the autocratic regimes, Soviets in the past, Russia, China today. That's Western liberal democracies. And I'd say that Britain, I would say this, but being from the UK, but historically, the British intelligence community is punched far above its weight on the international stage.

Remember, they had the imperial system going as well, right? The British at the Commonwealth. That's right. They've been able to use that system to their advantage, right? Ian Fleming and John LaCarray explained that to all of us over the years. And they were bang on. And the thing about John LaCeree is that he was both an MI5 and an MI6 officer. He knew what he was talking about.

But in terms of today, the bulk capabilities, nothing can come close in the West to the U.S. intelligence community with his resources. Right. Plus the NSA. 18, 18 different agencies, you know? So I think we've got Space Force now. And so, yeah, nothing comes close. NSA and GCHQ in the UK literally intertwined across the Atlantic with systems codependent.

I'm assuming you have. Have you ever looked at the Presidential Daily Brief and archived one? Yep, for sure. And some of them are declassified from, and I use them in the book in the 1960s. Yeah, they'll be declassified one. So I'm going to say a couple things to you. I want you to react to these things. because you're talking to somebody that when I read the brief for the first time, I was alarmed by the brief.

I found that I found three, I'm going to say three things to you. I want you to react to all three, okay? The CIA analyst that briefed me, he said to me that there are work horses in the government and shell horses in the government. Okay. And you'll know very quickly who the workhorses are, Anthony, and who the show horses. Do you agree with him? I'm going to sort of try to put it perhaps in more diplomatic terms. You always need to have the people that are at the front of the house and then the back of the house. house. But I can see where you're going with this. I think I know who perhaps the rest of the intelligence community would probably regard the CIA as the show horse. Is that right? I think so.

I do think so, okay? Because you've got a lot of stuff going on behind. You also say that presumably a lot of, as usual, people that call others show horses, there might be a tinge of jealousy there. Let's perhaps say that. Okay. Well said. The other thing that was said to me and I want you to react to is that, man, here's what we think we know, but a lot of stuff in that Reef is proportioned, meaning it's percentages. We have a 50% chance that this is correct. We have a 70% chance that this is correct. It's not like Hollywood Calder where, okay, you know, bin Laden is in the house and here's how we know and now we're going to send a seal team to get them. I mean, there was a lot of vagary and a lot of uncertainty in the decision-making process. Is that

correct based on your research? Both historically, and I have to say, that is really good to hear in a weird way and I'll explain why. The worst thing to do would be to be presenting analysis and to give the customers, in this case you, a false sense. No, there was none of that. Exactly. If it's intelligence, if we're in the intelligence business, there aren't certainties.

This operates in an area of gray, right? And I think that the yardstick of a decent analysis is saying, being honest and saying, we just don't know. This might be a 51% chance, 49% chance, what have you. As long as the customer, you, is a, of the risk inherent within that analysis of like we are operating within the gray.

As you said, it's not like Hollywood where it's like, I mean, there have been, let's be honest, some in the recent past, some extraordinary intelligence failures on the part of the CIA and briefings, you know, George, George Tenants, slam dunk. We all remember that about WMD. That's an example of where the caveats about the reporting and the analysis are like airbrushed out and it's presented in a way that doesn't reflect the dubious, not dubious, the risks inherent. So that's reassuring to me from my perspective that you were given all those health awards. Yeah. So that's that's part of it. Can I ask follow up though? I mean, did that then lead the, I mean, I imagine as a customer might be like, well, why are you giving me this then if you don't know what the?

Well, well, that's interesting because what I would say and what was said to me is sort of the preamble of the briefing was that there's just so many things that we don't know, but these are the things that we're worried about or these are the things that are going to reach the president's desk where he's going to have to make a decision or someday she will have to make a decision. But you're going to be making this decision with some shots being fired in the dark. You won't actually know. And we don't actually know. And so all of that's accurate, right? I think this is important for our listeners and viewers because I want them to read your book. I'm going to give away some of the plot lines in your book, but I want them to read your book because your book is so compelling about the reality of the

not the fictionalized stuff that people will read or even watching the movies. You've got real-life situations going on, life-and-death situations, and what we both know is a lot of guesswork in it. Isn't that the case called? That's absolutely. You summarized it really well, Anthony. So it's two levels. The world of espionage and this wilderness of mirrors, it's been called. Nothing is 100%. So the yardstick for you on the U.S. side, the yardstick for the most confidence you can have in an assessment is, I believe the phrase is highly confident, but not even very high confidence for me. It's something like this, okay, which to the layperson doesn't actually sound that.

I mean, you're a lawyer. You remember, Anthony, I'm a recovering lawyer as well, I should say. But you remember the legal, it's not close to beyond reasonable doubt. No. That level. No, no, yeah. We're groping in there, and this is what we think seems likely to happen. That's the reality of intelligence.

The other thing is, of course, if an assessment, if a problem lands on the president's desks, as the phrase goes, it's never going to be an easy decision. It's only the tough things land on the press. Exactly. Because it would have been resolved by one of the other 5,000 people in his government. And then the last thing from the first briefing that I had was it's always a tough decision. And so it looked prima facie that the capture and the death of the Salma bin Laden and the capture of the intelligence assets from his home was a nethera.

that positive, but it also had consequential collateral damage. You know, we upset a sovereign nation, Pakistan. We probably had to give them more aid as a result of that. We also upset the region because it's a very tough neighborhood. You don't want the U.S. who's perceived to be an imperialist going into sovereign nations without their permission. And so that set alarm bells off in the Middle East and probably set us back diplomatically. So every time the president's making a decision, or she's making a decision, there's some good things that can come out of it, but there's also going to be some collateral David. Is that a fair statement based on your assessment? Absolutely. I think that time and time again we see through our history is the, particularly the US with all of its power and might,

you know, during the Cold War, does something in order to solve a particular problem. And then that sets off a cascade of no, not even known unknowns, unknown unknowns, you know, just. And again, I think that's the duty of an, of the intelligence community is to warn about what are likely future scenarios where there could be what we're talking about here, Anthony is like a thing a blowback where one thing leads to a succession of other events and then it blows back on the US in some way. Exactly. So we always have that. We always have that risk. Do you think the Wall Street journalist is going to be returned soon? I am afraid very, my study of Russia past and present makes me think not anytime soon.

Not any time soon, right, because there's so much going on. There's so much going on. I think what seems to me what they're trying to do is to set up a hostage swap. Yes. And... Well, they're saying that he's a spy. Obviously, I'm going to take the other side of that and say that he's not a spy, but they're saying that because they want to trade a spy for a spy.

I understand what they're doing. I think it's really important for listeners to note that it's actually prohibited under U.S. law for the CIA to use U.S. journalism as a cover. Yeah, well. They did it in the past a couple times. So the idea that he is, the Wall Street journalist, is a U.S. spy, it's nonsense. So I, and I obviously believe that. All right, now I'm going to test one more thing on you.

Let me talk a little bit about the book and have some more fun. This is going on. I'm in the hot seat. In the hot seat, okay. So in the 1930s, I don't remember the exact date, but Henry Luce, who was the founder of Time magazine, was in Russia. This predates the war, okay, but Stalin is now in charge. Trotsky is dead. He is talking with him at dinner.

He says he's going to smash the United States into a million pieces. And Luce says, well, how are you going to do that? He's oh, you don't understand. I'm going to use the KGB. I'm going to use our disinformation programming. I'm going to use the wave of lies. You're a mongrel nation. You're not unified by one race or one genealogy.

There's multiple bloodlines. and a result of which there's a lot of ethnic and tribal hatreds in your country, and I'm going to smash you to smithereens using this campaign of disinformation. We won't need to take over the United States. The United States will fall from within. Now, what he got wrong at the time was the love that my grandparents had for the country immigrating from Italy and others. What he got wrong is that they were all focused on their own economic, aspirational opportunity

and less on hating upon each other, although there was biases and prejudices, as there has been tribally for time immemorial. Okay, what he also got wrong was the great unification that the U.S. would have during the war and then in the post-war environment. And since we talk about stovetops in your book and chimney, you know, stovetops coming out of the houses, we were stove topped into the media where it was fairly centralized. So the information that was washing over the United States was fairly centralized, so we all had uniform or mainstream ideas. But that's no longer the case. You and I know, very well chronicled in the book by Catherine Belton, Putin's people. He's server farms and creates these core identities, uses this age-old theory from Stalin,

of him the KGB, to create tribal disinformation, ethnic hatreds, so unrest in the United States, push the Brexit agenda on the UK citizens, make them feel nationalistic, make them feel racial sympathies towards themselves and against others. He's doing the same thing in France. And because of this splintering of the media, it now seems to be working what Stalin said was going to work 100 years ago, Calder's that didn't work, but it now seems to be working. What's your reaction, all that? Well, I don't, so I agree with what you just said. I don't know the specific about Henry Luce in in the Soviet Union. But what Stalin was talking about and then it was been repeated by subsequent

Kremlin leaders, these are the so-called Soviet active measures. This is what in the US, what we would call or in the COVID action. So these are the dirty tricks, political warfare, we call it. And Russia passed going all the way back to Stalin, probably even the Tsarist regime actually, are the past and present masters of disinformation. So I had the privilege when I was writing the book, interviewing a former Czechoslovakian intelligence officer who defected to the US in 1969, just after the Prague Spring. He saw Soviet tanks rolling in and said, I need to get out of here. He specialized in the Czech intelligence service that worked for the KGB essentially as a satellite service. He specialized in disinformation.

He and I asked him, okay, so with this, you know, what you were doing in the 1960s and even before, compared to where we have, are now and he just put his hands up and he said this is the golden age for people he said what i used to do is i was a professional peddler of lies i would seize upon targets in u.s audiences like you just mentioned anthony that silence at race relations and domestic race relations in the u.s he said i would seize upon that and i would exploit it and he said this now social media environment that we're in this is would have been a godsend i couldn't have even dreamed of something like that so not only in terms of volume, it's easier and quicker, cheaper than ever before as progosian and his troll farms revealed. It's quicker than all of those things than ever before in history to spread

disinformation. But there's also this thing that's going on in, particularly here in the US, it seems to me, of just being willing to believe objectively false information. So that's change. And I don't know if that's the, if that is the social media environment of something's going on in our sort of cognition. That's something for like, behavioral scientist, psychologist to get into. It's interesting. I mean, all of that seems to be happening contemporaneously while we are trying to fight back the beast, right?

Because you and I both know that we've got to be right a thousand percent, right? We have to go, we had a bad a thousand. We have to be right every time. They only have to be right once. Exactly. Exactly. An impossible task, I would say. Okay, so let's go to your book, okay, which is a fascinating book about this war between

the East and West. I want to address Vladimir Putin for a second. Yeah. Is Putin the master spy of the narrative that he conjured up for himself? Oh, it's a great question. I would argue absolutely not. So he makes much of his KGB past that he worked for the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Department, the first chief directorate.

He was stationed in Dresden, as your listeners may be aware, and he witnessed firsthand, as the story goes, of the collapse of the Soviet Union around it. Okay. So he has made much of this in the 1990s and then when he got into power. In fact, Dresden was a side show for the KGB in East Germany. The real action was up in Berlin. Okay. That's the first thing. The second thing is I've got on very good authority from a CIA source interviewed on the condition of anonymity.

That he has good information, reliable information, that Putin wanted to become a deep cover, so-called illegal. Okay. This is the Russian, Soviet and Russian deep cover operatives. Like in the series, like the TV show, the Americans, that you may have seen a great show. By the way. Yeah. Yeah. He wanted to become one of them and failed the language test.

So since then, he's tried to peddle this image of both him as a master spy and then also as the KGB, as the sort of master intelligence service. It was second to none in the world in terms of intelligence collection, stealing secrets. bribing people, exploiting them, you know, you name it, blackmail. But in terms of analysis, the whole system never allowed for robust telling truth to power. You see that from Stalin's time through to Putin today. And I think, let me put it this way. Putin, his foreign intelligence director at the moment, the SVR, which is the successor to the KGB, his foreign intelligence director, Sergei Naryshkin, is also the head of Russia's historical society.

So that's like the director of the CIA being the head of the American Historical Society. What's going on there? Well, what's going on there is some pretty weird use of history. And making Russia's intelligence services in the past seem more successful than they were. Scratch the surface, not only is Putin not the master spy that he wants to be, but also some of the massive Soviet intelligence successes in the past, they were actually owed more to the dedication of the communist agents handing over secrets that they had. than the tradecraft of Russia's intelligence services. And we see it, Anthony, we see it closer to our own time. With Russia's intelligence services, you know, after 2016, there was a perception and Russian election meddling, not getting into the whole thing of like the actual impact

of that on the election, but it was certainly unambiguously the case that Russia was on Putin's orders trying to do that. After that, we had some narrative, particularly in the US, of sort of Putin as the master puppeteer. But actually, there's been a succession of incredible. Russian intelligence failures under his watch, deep cover spy networks being wound up. And then the most disastrous decision that he made that seems pretty clear to me is an intelligence failure is his decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. This is a colossal intelligence failure. And Putin is primarily responsible for it. Is he winning or losing that war?

Ukraine, to be determined, I'm afraid. But I still agree with what CIA director, Bill Burns, said at the outset of the war, which is, this is a war that Putin can't afford to lose. Okay, he's nailed his reputation to it. It's everything. I don't see how he's going to allow this to go badly for Russia. And I fear my, my worst fear is about the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to get a victory out of a defeat. So the better that Ukrainians do, the more encircled Putin feels now by NATO, the more the chances I think he's going to do something drastic. And I'm particularly worried about the Safarizian nuclear power plant. Yeah. Well, I know they've been calling on that now for several months because of all that. But you, let me just ask you

this, do you feel, I want to phrase this properly, is he in peril now, no matter what the outcome is, because it has not really gone well for him optically, not in the world of public opinion, not And the internal unrest been displayed in the Soviet Union for the Russians, former Soviet Union. Also the progosian situation, has he been sufficiently imperiled at this point? For his rule, I mean, he's certainly been damaged. But again, it's not going to, it's not like we're just going to see Putin go, okay, you know what, that was a mistake. No, he can't afford to do that. No, we know that.

Maker and the breaker in this whole situation will be China. So I don't think actually Putin, you mentioned in terms of the perception internationally, sure, you know, this is a catastrophe from our perspective for Putin. Why would he do this? But then first and foremost, it's the maker and the breaker of whether it's a failure or not will be Xi in China. And then look at the non-aligned, so-called non-aligned countries, the global South and their perceptions, a lot of whom are sitting on the fence. So it's not, you talk to others from other places in the world outside of, you know, Europe and North America. America. It's not as clear-cut as the conversation that you and I have just had, I think. This is a tremendously cynical thing to say, but bear with me. Success for Joe Biden?

Is it a success for Joe Biden of where the war is going? What has unfolded over the last call it a year and a half? Yeah. I think that it's been remarkable to see U.S. leadership again. I speak as a European. Yeah. And it's just like, you know, where was America for so long? We don't need to get into that, Anthony. No, no, we can get into it because, you know, here's what happened. We both know it. When Clinton left, we had still very high standing in the world.

He was producing a budget surplus. He was running the world off the George Kennan bipartisan commitment to leadership and freedom and containing autocracies around the world to the best of his capability. And Bush and Cheney, they blew it to pieces because they got the gun off the bird going into Iraq. Big intelligence failure there, but it was also designed to help President Bush win re-election. They wanted that war. They wanted that war before Labor Day of 03 because they wanted him to get reelected. Okay.

And so they knew that that would galvanize the American people. And so this is unbelievable levels of cynicism. And you and I both know this, but maybe some of our listeners need to hear it again. We went to war without a tax increase, the first time in U.S. history, that we created a war like that without a tax increase. And we blew a hole in our budget that we never recovered. covered from. You know, we're 25 trillion into that budget deficit now as a result of that bad strategic planning and allowing the Congress to lose the fiscal discipline. And unfortunately,

and this saddens me, but you and I both know people in the agency, this is right out of the writings of a bin Laden. Bin Laden said in 1998-99, he'd hit America. America would overreact, spend trillions of dollars bombing mud huts and sand pits. And he would weaken the American empire. And so right now, he's dead, but it's probably three nothing bin Laden top of the fifth inning, because everything he said that we were going to do, we did. And we have a more divided country. We have the Patriot Act, which gives us less civil liberties. We have this national security state and the NSA overseeing everything, which may or may not make us safer in some ways, but certainly less free. So here we are. What am I missing, sir? No. And then you throw in the

economic disaster of 2008 into the mix. I'd like to just also pick it a thread that the way that you've just laid it all out there, that for Putin, I mean, the damage that the decision to go to war in Iraq has caused, not just for US foreign policy and perception of the US, but also for people around the world like Putin, who saw the US involved expressly in regime change. And what to, you look at Putin's speeches from back then, you know, one. the honeymoon period of counterterrorism was over and it was over pretty quickly, by the way, with Putin's regime. What could he point to? He said, well, this is a regime that just does what it wants, the US. And if you look at Putin's Munich security speech in 2007, he's calling for an overhaul

of the post-Cold War international security system. He said that the US is an empire. It's using freedom and democracy as a way to boss other countries around. He says, that's not true democracy. Anthony, it's basically the same speech as he gave on the eve of the war in Ukraine with Xi, that joint conference. He's been saying the same thing. So we can't actually criticize, like all dictators, there's a logic there, okay? Of course. The best propaganda has a kernel of truth, right? Doesn't the best Papa Grant have a kernel of truth? There's a, there's a logic. You have to be able to understand the mindset. And for me, as you've pointed out, So much of this turns on the war in Iraq.

And it goes back to that and that decision of as the British government, the head of MI6 at the time, flew over to Washington in the spring of 03 and came back, wrote a report back. It's now all out in this public inquiry in the UK, the Chilcote report, and said they're going to go to war. They've already made the decision and they're fixing the intelligence around it. So that's a catastrophe of intelligence. failure on both sides, both decision makers, cooking the intelligence, looking for things, fruit picking it, and then the intelligence community with that, for example, as we all know, this, now this, this source that was the one source curveball. I mean, who has one source for anything and just the idea that we would like, so it was a failure across the board, failure on intelligence collection, failure on intelligence analysis, failure of dissemination, and then an abject failure on the part of decision makers that were already going to do, what they wanted to do, it seems to me. So you, you obviously, I could let you go forever because you're a brilliant guy and I'm enjoying the conversation, but these podcasts unfortunately do come to an end. I have five words. I'm going to say

the word. You can have one word reaction, a paragraph reaction. I'm going to say the word. I want to get your immediate reaction. Okay, you're ready? In the hot seat here, aren't I? You're in the hot seat. You're ready? Hit me. Russia. Russia problem. So we've got a Russia problem. We haven't got a Putin problem. Right. Okay. Yeah. That's my, that's my reaction is that we need to, understand that if Putin disappears, the chances are he's going to be replaced by somebody who thinks very similarly to him. Yeah.

And you remember Halford McKinder? Mm-hmm. Fake. Okay, so he was in Oxford Don. He was united in the mid-19th century said, you can't let any one country control the entire Eurasian continent. It'll be a disaster for the West. You can't let the Russians link up with the Chinese.

And if you read our State Department documents or your Foreign Service documents, we're all concerned about that 200 years later. Yeah. Yeah. The USA. In a terrible crisis, divided. We need to learn how to agree to disagree with each other again. China. Unprecedented intelligence challenge threat to U.S. national security.

So that was my biggest takeaway from your book is that I haven't spent enough time understance. the magnitude of what they're working on in terms of the way they're absorbing information. Frankly, the people that they put on the street here is overwhelming, including the police departments that they have in our own country, you know. But then also, Anthony, I mean, in your other field, in commerce and business, you know, the Chinese national security laws, basically Chinese business with the outside world, you have Chinese intelligence working as a silent partner. Right.

There is no such thing as a truly independent Chinese venture. And I think that this is the key to understanding the Chinese espionage threat that we face in the US. No question. It wasn't just, it's not just about spy agencies. It is cross-domain. And the thing is, I'm not actually very political. You know, this isn't a right thing or a left thing. This is just, you just look at the, and you speak to people in the FBI.

And they're like opening an investigation into China every 12 hours. I mean, this is out of control. As you point out in the book, the Cold War Stelon, two more words. Ready? Great Britain. Your alma mater, your former country. Yeah, yeah. I was actually born in this country, so I have a healthy view on both. In a not as bad a situation as the U.S., but not in a great place, struggling to find a place in the world. Yeah. There's a phrase, an English phrase called plodding along.

And I think Britain is plodding along at the moment, trying to figure out what it stands for again. after Brexit. Well, I have a love affair with your former country. I enjoyed my time there. Intelligence, Cold War, the Cold War, current Cold War. New Cold War on at the moment between the West and what we stand for and Russia and China. Intelligence undergoing a revolution. And the future of intelligence is not clandestine services, that kind of thing. It's open-source commercially available intelligence. And what intelligence agencies are trying to figure out at the moment is how to exploit that. How do they link up with, I mean, their outfits like Bellingcat, you know, that are doing fantastic open source reporting that are, and intelligence agencies are saying,

okay, it's a game changer. How do we then incorporate that and provide a margin to our customers in government? So intelligence undergoing a massive revolution at the moment. Well, you've been very generous with your time. I'm very grateful to you for coming on. Your book is spectacular. The author Calder Walton of Spies, The Epic Intelligence War between East and West. I enjoyed our time together. My producer is going to be a little bit mad at me that I didn't go that in depth into the book, but I want my viewers and listeners to read the book. And I think listening to you speak about these issues will encourage them to go out and buy the book, which I did and I loved, which is why I reached out to you. And thank you for accepting my invitation. Are you kidding? Thank you. The pleasure was all mine. It was really great and hope to carry on the conversation going forward. Well, you just heard from Calder. We covered so much ground in that book, but I think it's very, very important to understand that we have adversaries. One of the most frightening things for me to do is to read some of our intelligence briefings during my short stay in the White House. We have adversaries. We have people that want to ruin Western idealism, Western democracy.

They want to ruin the culture of the West. They're hoping that we'll ruin it ourselves. They're trying to find ways to infiltrate our culture, split us through our tribalism or our varying ethnic backgrounds. And we need people in our intelligence services. And we need people in our government and frankly not in our government to fight back against this sort of stuff. So I found Calder's book absolutely fascinating because he spells out exactly what is going on. There's a war right now, an epic intelligence war. It's a human war. Sure, we have data. We have the NSA. We have drones. We have satellite technology. We have balloons. I mean, come on. Do you think the Chinese are the only people that have balloons? Of course, we have the same balloons. And we're doing all of that. But we also have men and women on the ground risking their lives every day to uncover terrorist plots or to find out geopolitical strategies of unorthodox people, autocrats, etc. Not many Americans know this or people in the UK, but we're also fighting a war in Somalia right now.

There's tons of U.S. troops there because of the geographic location of Somalia and the piracy there and how important it is for the drug trade, money laundering, the guns trade. We've got a ton of U.S. troops and a ton of intelligence in that area as well. And so one thing I will say about caller, he is right. We have to make sure that things cool off. I spoke on Bloomberg recently about common sense. strategies in dealing with China. And I took a lot of backlash and guff on social media, people speaking about China as our evil adversary, et cetera. I'm not an equivocator. Trust me,

I'm more in the camp of Ronald Reagan. I do believe that we have to put down our competitors. I'm not saying that we don't have to defeat them, but we can defeat them in a number of different ways in the commercial marketplace, the intellectual free marketplace of ideas, and by making our own country is internally stronger because we have the best ingredients in this country, better ingredients than any other country. If we just focused on ourselves more and we're less worried about our competitors, I think we would do a lot better. But Calder is basically telling you that there are threats out there, frightening threats that you need to be aware of. And I hope you go out and buy his book and I appreciate you listening to our conversation on Open Book.

Okay, Ma, you're back on the air, Ma. You like joining Open Book? All right. This is a guy that writes about our spy system, you know, the intelligence services. His name was Calder Walton. And he basically thinks we're in a new cold war with Russia. Do you think we're in a new cold war with Russia? Not yet. Not yet. I think that the Americans still have enough initiative to make this thing end the right way. But they need someone stronger as president of the United States. States. They have to have someone that has real hutsba that's not as old and that can get in, you know, can do it the right way. And I think that we could demolish them if we had somebody stronger. Definitely. Well, yeah, no, not only that, we would be, I think they would be worried about us more because, you know, unfortunately, these guys are too old now, my, whether it's Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. I mean, you got to get younger people in there.

Mike you. Here we go again. But you know what I mean. When we go again? You would make a very good president. Yes, Ma, you've said that 100 times. Yes, Ma. And I think that Trump, I know you would vote for me to be president of Borough Washington. And you should be the president, but Trump is intimidated by you. Could you imagine Trump is the vice president?

Because he'd be better than him. All right, Ma. I know you said that before, but I'm asking a different question, okay? Go ahead. Let me ask you that. What makes a country or a person powerful? Well, I would say Truman was a very good. example because I read his book from cover to cover and I read it twice because I found him a very

interesting and a very gung-ho president and he was very good for the Second World War and he was not a showman as a diplomat. He was a real down-to-earment. It's not someone that wants to limelight but someone that's really for the country of the United States. So somebody tough, but it's also wise and also somebody that's not going to take any gump from anybody, right? Right, right. I don't think we had it. Maybe in 2024, we might have that.

I don't know yet. Okay. All right. You think Chris Christie could be it? I don't know him well enough. I have to start following him better. Okay. All right.

Well, let's see what happens, Mom. Well, he's the same ethnic background that I am. So I kind of think that there's something in the Italian blood that's tough. Okay. Yeah, he's half-iron. Remember when the Irish hang out with the Italians, it's social climbing for the Irish, Ma. Don't forget that, okay? When I say that to my Irish friends, they go crazy.

They want to choke me. All right, well, I love you, Ma. You good? I love you too, baby. All right. Thank you for joining Open Book. All right, Beth. All right, bye.

I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at Plus 1-917-909-29-996.

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